by Alison Weir
Adeliza did not come to England immediately. Possibly she was not old enough to cohabit with her future husband, who was now fifty-two. Her date of birth is not recorded, but she was described as a young girl or maiden (puella) at the time of her betrothal. Possibly she was under twelve, and therefore below the permitted canonical age for cohabitation, which might account for the delay in the marriage taking place, and place Adeliza’s date of birth around 1109.
In 1119, Henry had celebrated the marriage of his heir, William, to Mahaut of Anjou, and in 1120 he created him duke of Normandy. The young Duke was no unifier of peoples like his father; he was heard to boast, “When I am king, I will yoke the English like oxen to the plow.” His future subjects were spared such a fate. On 25 November 1120, the King and his court were preparing to return from Normandy to England. Two ships awaited them at Barfleur. Henry boarded one, with his daughter-in-law and many courtiers; his seventeen-year-old son embarked on the other, which was called the Blanche-Nef—the White Ship—with “almost all the young nobility flocking around him.” The White Ship’s master was the son of the man who had captained the Mora. Also with William were his tutor, two of the King’s bastard children—Richard of Lincoln and Matilda, Countess of Perche—and Stephen of Blois. Seeing that the crew were “immoderately filled with wine”12 lavishly provided by the young Duke, and that the ship was “overloaded with foolish, headstrong young people,” Stephen—pleading an attack of diarrhea—and several others disembarked and boarded the King’s ship, which sailed away just before twilight with about three hundred on board.
When it was “dark night,”13 the White Ship shot out of the harbor, urged on by its inebriated company to overtake the King’s vessel, but in the attempt she “struck violently against a huge rock” and “capsized without warning. Everyone cried out at once in their great peril, but the water pouring into the boat soon drowned their cries and all alike perished.”14
William had managed to clamber into a small boat, but as it was pulling away, he heard his half sister Matilda crying for help. Being especially fond of her, he ordered the boat to be turned around, but desperate survivors swamped it, and it sank, dragging him down to his death. Three hundred people had drowned; only one man, a butcher of Rouen, survived the wreck. The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle states that Queen Matilda’s son Richard was also lost, but the chronicler was almost certainly referring to Richard of Lincoln, who drowned with Matilda of Perche.
“No ship was ever productive of so much misery. None was ever so notorious in the history of the world.”15
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Henry reached England safely, and for two days was unaware of the disaster. When the news came, no one had the courage to break it to the King, so a young boy was sent to throw himself, weeping, at Henry’s feet and tell him that his son was dead. “Immediately Henry fell to the ground, overcome with anguish, and after being helped to his feet by friends and led into a private room, gave way to bitter laments.”16 It was said that he never smiled again. Not only had he lost two sons and a daughter, but he now had no male heir to succeed him. His only surviving heir was his daughter by the late Queen, the Empress Maud.
2
“A Fortunate Beauty”
In the depths of his grief, Henry spent a miserable Christmas at Brampton,1 then, knowing that his most urgent priority now was to father more sons, he crossed the Channel to bring his young bride to England.2 What Adeliza made of her bridegroom is unrecorded, but Henry roused himself and chivalrously expressed the view that he “knew of no woman as fair as she was seen on Earth.”3
The chroniclers lauded Adeliza’s “good morals and modest countenance.”4 She must have been remarkably beautiful, given their ecstatic praise. One called her “a lovely woman,” another “a young woman of great beauty and modesty.”5 Henry of Huntingdon was moved to write “in elegaics” of Adeliza’s beauty: “O Queen of the English, Adeliza, the very muse who prepares to call to mind your graces is frozen in wonder. What, to you, most beautiful one, is a crown? What, to you, are jewels? A jewel grows pale on you and a crown does not shine. Put adornment aside, for Nature provides your adornment, and a fortunate beauty cannot be improved. Beware ornaments, for you take no light from them; they shine brightly only through your light. I was not ashamed to give my modest praise to great qualities, so be not ashamed, I pray, to be my lady.”
Adeliza’s native language was Flemish, but she understood, and perhaps could read, French, which suggests that she had received some formal education.6 She was also skilled with the needle. She had embroidered a beautiful standard in silk and gold for her father to bear in his campaigns to recover all his patrimony in Lower Lotharingia. It became famous throughout Christendom, but in 1129 it was captured by his enemies in a battle near Duras, which became known as the Field of the Standard, and placed as a trophy in the cathedral of St. Lambert at Liège. For centuries, it was carried through the streets on Rogation days, until the church was destroyed in the French Revolution.7
In January 1121,8 Henry arrived in England with Adeliza, disembarking at Dover. He took her to Windsor, and there they were married, probably on 24 January 1121, in the castle chapel.9 William of Malmesbury and the chronicler John of Worcester claim that the ailing Ralph d’Escures, Archbishop of Canterbury, deputed William Giffard, Bishop of Winchester, to marry them, but in fact there was a row between the Archbishop and Bishop Roger of Salisbury over who should officiate. Bishop Roger claimed that it was his right, since Windsor fell in his diocese, but the Archbishop disagreed, insisting that it was his right as primate of England. An ecclesiastical council was promptly convened, which decreed that, wherever they might be in England, the King and Queen were parishioners of the Archbishop of Canterbury, whereupon Ralph d’Escures performed the marriage ceremony.
On marriage, Henry dowered Adeliza with Queenhithe and lands in the counties of Oxford, Essex (including Waltham Abbey), Hertford, Buckingham, Bedford, Lincoln, Berkshire, Gloucester, London, Surrey, Middlesex and Devon.10 He also exempted her from paying land tax on untenanted properties. Later he granted her part of his estate at Berkeley, Gloucestershire.11
It was arranged that Adeliza would be crowned at Westminster Abbey on Sunday 30 January.12 All the members of the Great Council were present. To compensate Bishop Roger, the King had invited him to perform the ceremony, and the wily Bishop began the service early in the morning, hoping to preempt the Archbishop. But the avenging Primate tottered in halfway through the proceedings, just as the Queen had been crowned and Bishop Roger had placed the king’s crown on Henry’s head. The Archbishop promptly snatched it off, and put it on again with his own hands before re-crowning Adeliza, but then collapsed with exhaustion and had to ask Bishop Roger to complete the service after all.13 Adeliza maintained her dignity, her “beauty dazzling her diadem.”
From Windsor, Henry took Adeliza to Winchester, and thence to Westminster, where he left her while he led what proved to be a lackluster military expedition to Wales. He was back at Westminster by Whitsun (29 May), when he and his new Queen wore their crowns together.14 On 23 June, Adeliza witnessed the foundation charter of the Cluniac abbey of Reading, which the King had established for the salvation of the souls of himself, his parents, his brother Rufus, and his late wife and son. The earliest known English carving of the coronation of the Virgin Mary was found at Reading Abbey, suggesting that the King and his family were devotees of the spreading cult of Mary.15 Adeliza became a benefactress of Reading Abbey, and in 1125 witnessed a further charter granting lands to the community.16 In December, she witnessed a grant Henry made to Merton Priory. Christmas was spent at Norwich.17
Adeliza would be remembered as “the May withouten vice.”18 She was young and untried, and was to play virtually no public role in politics. She witnessed few charters in England and Normandy, and issued only one short writ in her own name.19 She attended some meetings of the Great Council, the first in May 1121. In 1129, she received the first recorded payment of queengold, twent
y marks out of the forty-five paid by the elderly widowed Lucy of Bolingbroke, Countess of Chester, to the King, in return for his allowing her to remain unmarried for five years;20 this was a higher percentage than the share granted to Matilda of Flanders.
Initially Adeliza’s lack of political activity may have been down to her youth, but there would be little opportunity as she grew older for her to gain experience or exercise as regent any political acumen she might have had, for in the first decade of their marriage, Henry kept her with him whenever he traveled to Normandy. Moreover, the late Queen Matilda’s political role had been capably filled by Bishop Roger of Salisbury,21 and the increasing centralization of the royal administration now left little room for a queen to exercise power. Yet in private this “good and beauteous” girl may have come to exercise a gentle influence on the King.
Henry was amenable to the promotion of the Lotharingians whom Adeliza had brought in her train. Among them were Godfrey of Louvain, who was to serve as her chancellor until 1123, when he was made bishop of Bath; Rothardus, who became chamberlain to Bishop Godfrey that year; and her chaplains, Herman, Franco of Brussels, and Simon,22 who succeeded Godfrey as her chancellor and was consecrated bishop of Worcester in May 1125 in Canterbury Cathedral.23 He remained close to Adeliza until his death in 1150, and witnessed some of her charters.24
Adeliza also brought with her several ladies, including her second cousin, Melisende (or Millicent) de Rethel,25 who would marry twice in England. Her first husband was Robert, Lord Marmion of Tamworth, “a warlike man, hardly equalled in his time for his ferocity, cleverness and boldness.”26 Before 1141, Adeliza gave Melisende land worth £40 from the manors of Stanton Harcourt and South Leigh in Oxfordshire, which King Henry granted her before 1130. Marmion died violently in 1144 in Coventry, whereupon Melisende married Richard de Camville, to whom her lands passed.27 She shared Adeliza’s devotion to Reading Abbey, to which, at her behest, Richard de Camville gave the chapel of South Leigh.28
Another countrywoman was Juliana, daughter of Godeschalch, a “wise and beautiful girl who had come to England with Queen Adeliza from the region of Louvain.”29 Juliana became the wife of a young Norman courtier, Jordan d’Auffay, to whom the King gave the manor of Norton Ferris at Kilmington, Somerset.30
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In her years as queen, Adeliza failed to emulate the example of her predecessors in her patronage of religious houses. Examples of her pious deeds are few. The annalist of Waltham Abbey owed his appointment as a canon to her influence in placing him in the abbey in 1124, when he was a boy, and she also gave gifts to the abbey.31 Like her predecessor, she corresponded with Hildebert of Lavardin, Bishop of Le Mans, and gained his permission to become a lay daughter of the ancient royal abbey of Saint-Vincent at Le Mans. She won his praise for her dedication to “sacred studies” and her devotion to the brothers there, whom she visited whenever she could. In one of his letters he urged her to favor the poor,32 possibly because he felt that she was not doing enough to succor them.
There is no doubt that she was pious, though, and she did forge friendships with other churchmen. William de Vere, Bishop of Hereford from 1186 to 1198, would one day donate land in memory of Henry I and Adeliza, recalling how she had “nurtured” him when he had been brought up in their court.33 She granted a charter to Bishop Roger’s nephew, Alexander, Bishop of Lincoln, calling him her “dearest friend.”34
Among the thirteen charters she did witness, the first was to the monks of the abbey of Tiron,35 near Chartres, in September 1121, the abbey being the motherhouse of the eremitical Tironensian Order founded in 1106. She witnessed other charters to the abbeys of Bec-Hellouin and Savigny in Normandy, St. Mary of Kemeys, Newport, and her predecessor’s foundation, Holy Trinity, Aldgate.36 The first charter she granted in her own name, in 1126, at Woodstock, was to Holy Trinity.37 Her seal survives in the British Library; it was based on the same matrix that had been used for the seal of Matilda of Scotland.
Like Matilda of Scotland before her, Adeliza was a patron of poets and men of letters. She commissioned a troubadour or trouvère called David the Scot to write an account in French of the King’s deeds, and set it to music as a metrical chanson. It was the first history written in a language other than Latin. Adeliza herself provided David the Scot with material for it. The Anglo-Norman chronicler and philosopher Geoffrey Gaimar was laughing up his sleeve at how dull the chanson was, and at Adeliza’s ignorance: “If I had chosen to have written of King Henry, I had a thousand things to say, which the troubadour knew nought about; neither had he written, nor was the Louvain Queen herself in possession of them.” Nevertheless he was willing to oblige his patroness, Constance FitzGilbert, to whom Adeliza had given a manuscript of David the Scot’s work, and who wanted a copy made of it. Sadly, neither Constance’s text nor Gaimar’s copy survives.
It is often stated that it was Adeliza, rather than Matilda of Scotland, who commissioned “The Voyage of St. Brendan,” but while it is true that three of the four surviving manuscript texts call the Queen in question “Aaliz” (Adeliza), the other calls her Mahaut (another version of Matilda); and in his dedication, Benedeit clearly refers to the charter that Matilda persuaded Henry to grant his subjects in 1100, whereas no such charters are associated with Adeliza. Therefore the Queen who commissioned the translation was probably Matilda, and possibly it was rededicated to Adeliza in due course.38
Around 1125, Philippe de Thaon wrote Li Bestiare (Bestiary), or Physiologus, “an elementary book of animals, in plain French”—the first of its kind—for Adeliza. Its dedication reads: “He, Philippe de Thaon, into the French language has translated the Bestiary, a book of science, for the honour of a jewel, who is a very handsome woman. Aliz is she named, a queen she is crowned, Queen she is of England, may her soul never have trouble! In Hebrew, in truth, Aliz means praise of God. I will compose a book, may God be with its commencement.”39 Henry I had an interest in exotic animals, and by 1120 had made Woodstock “the celebrated place for the habitation of man and beasts”40 by establishing a menagerie there—the first zoo in England, which he stocked with wild beasts from other lands, among them lions, leopards, lynxes, camels and a porcupine.41 This may well have inspired Adeliza’s interest in animals.
Her chief role, however, was to bear the King a son, and she must have felt under tremendous pressure to do so. To achieve this end, Henry kept her at his side as much as possible, and this is probably the reason why he took her with him when he visited Normandy, as he had rarely taken his first wife. Thus Adeliza was never appointed regent of England. When Henry took her abroad, he left his trusted Chancellor, Bishop Roger of Salisbury, in charge, at least until 1128, when he lost confidence in the Bishop’s management of the administration.
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Henry probably took Adeliza with him when he traveled around his realm in 1122, visiting Northampton at Easter (26 March), then Hertford, Waltham, Oxford and Windsor, where, on 14 May, he kept his Whitsun court.42 That month, the Empress Maud was planning to visit him in England, possibly to discuss the worsening situation in Normandy, where William Clito was doing his best to draw baronial support away from the King. Henry traveled down from London to Kent to receive her, but he waited in vain at Canterbury, for Charles I “the Good,” Count of Flanders (cousin of Baldwin VII), had refused Maud permission to travel through his domains.43 Charles was at war with Henry’s son-in-law, Heinrich V, whose ally was Godfrey of Louvain, the father of Queen Adeliza, which accounts for Charles’s hostility.
On 23 September that year, Maud was probably present at the Concordat of Worms, where the Emperor and the Pope finally agreed a solution to the investiture controversy, on much the same terms as Henry I had made with the Church years earlier. Heinrich and Maud spent Christmas at Strasbourg, before visiting Mainz, Liège, Duisberg and Utrecht.
Meanwhile, Henry had continued his progress through England, spending time at Westminster before taking Adeliza north to York, Durham and Carlisle, then returni
ng to York on 6 December to celebrate St. Nicholas’s Day, before coming south via Nottingham to Dunstable, where they kept Christmas at Kingsbury, a stone palace that Henry had built some years earlier, which stood in nine acres of land.44
After Christmas, the court moved on to Berkhamsted and Woodstock,45 where, on 25 March 1123, Henry gave the bishopric of Bath to Adeliza’s chancellor and countryman, Godfrey of Louvain.46 The King and Queen spent Easter (15 April) at Winchester, where Adeliza attended a meeting of the Great Council, and witnessed a charter to Exeter Cathedral. Around this time, she made the acquaintance of Wulfric of Haselbury, a Somerset priest who was falsely accused by Drogo de Munci, one of Henry’s courtiers, of secreting away some of the King’s treasure. When Drogo suggested that Wulfric’s possessions be searched, he was struck down with fits, which only abated when the King and Queen begged Wulfric to heal him.47
On 11 June 1123, Henry went alone to Normandy, where a revolt had broken out, but in March 1124, having successfully quelled it and defeated the rebels at the Battle of Bourgtheroulde, he sent for Adeliza to join him at Rouen. Together they viewed the relics of St. Romanus, which were displayed that year in Rouen Cathedral, in the presence of the Papal legate. The royal couple may have stayed in the new palace Henry was building at Quevilly, adjacent to the priory of Notre-Dame de Pré. This complex was built in a similar arrangement to the palace and abbey at Westminster.48
In Rouen, Adeliza witnessed just how savage Henry could be. She may not have heard of what had happened when, in 1119, his bastard daughter Juliana’s husband, Eustace de Pacy, had rebelled against him and unlawfully occupied the château of Ivry. To ensure his submission, the King demanded that hostages be exchanged, himself taking into custody the two daughters of Eustace and Juliana, with Eustace holding as pledge the son of the constable of Ivry. But Eustace, on malevolent advice, put out the boy’s eyes and sent him, blinded, back to his father, who demanded vengeance of the horrified King. Much moved by the constable’s distress, Henry turned his granddaughters over to him and allowed him to put out their eyes and cut off the tips of their noses. “Thus innocent childhood, alas, suffered for the sins of the fathers.”49 An incandescent Juliana took her husband’s part, which led Henry to lay siege to her castle at Breteuil. She asked to meet with him, but attempted to shoot a crossbow bolt into his heart. In the end she had to surrender and seek forgiveness, before disappearing into the abbey of Fontevrault.