His successor was present at the funeral. But, despite all Henry’s efforts, it was not his daughter Matilda.
Chapter 9
Civil War
Stephen and Matilda
BACK IN 1126, STEPHEN OF BLOIS had competed to be second to swear the oath to his cousin Matilda. Now he was the first to break it. As soon as he heard the news of his uncle Henry’s death, he took ship for Dover. There the townsfolk refused to admit him. As they did at Canterbury. But in London it was a different story. The citizens welcomed him with open arms, and, claiming to act as a proxy for all the English, elected him king by acclamation. It was the first direct participation by the English in the choice of a monarch since the Norman Conquest.
Then Stephen, following in Henry I’s own footsteps, made straight for Winchester, where he seized the royal treasury and was acclaimed by the people of the second capital. That done, he returned to London for his coronation on Sunday, 22 December. It was a scratch affair. According to William of Malmesbury, three bishops were present: ‘but there were no abbots and scarcely any of the nobility’. Thinly attended though it was, it was enough to put the indelible mark of kingship on Stephen.
A mere twenty-two days separated the death of Henry I and Stephen’s coronation. It was done ‘without delay, without struggle, as though in the twinkling of an eye’.
I
That much is clear. But how the coup d’état was effected is more debatable. One school of thought sees it merely as the result of Matilda’s ill-luck and ill-judgement. If her relations with her father had remained good and she had been present at his deathbed then, it is argued, she would have been recognized as queen by the large number of nobles and bishops ‘whom the report of [Henry’s] sickness … quickly gathered around him’, and that would have been that. I wonder, however, whether it were quite so simple. Had Stephen really not thought of the possibility of claiming the throne? Had he really taken no soundings? Was the well-oiled machine of the seizure of power really extemporized? It seems hard to believe.
The other view would see longer-term causes at work: simmering resentment at Matilda’s nomination and marriage on the one hand, and careful preparation by Stephen on the other. The latter is plainly hinted at by William of Malmesbury: ‘yet, not to conceal the truth from posterity,’ he writes, ‘all [Stephen’s] efforts would have been in vain, had not his brother, Henry, bishop of Winchester, granted him his entire support’. For Henry’s firm commitment and smooth tongue brought over other crucial figures: the archbishop of Canterbury, Roger of Salisbury and William de Pont de l’Arche, the treasurer. Between them, these men gave Stephen the key to three of the four power centres of the Anglo-Norman state: the Church, the administration and the royal treasures. Only the fourth, the nobility, remained uncommitted.
But not for long. Here, once again, Stephen’s remarkable and universal popularity came into play. ‘Stephen,’ William of Malmesbury concedes, ‘before he came to the throne, from his complacency of manners, and readiness to joke, to sit and make good cheer, even with low people, had gained so much on their affections as is hardly to be conceived.’ Soon, the same easy talent had the nobility eating out of his hand as well and they ‘all … willingly acknowledged him’. And where his own popularity couldn’t reach, his uncle’s treasures, estimated at £100,000 in cash besides plate and jewels, and now at his entire disposal, did.
Stephen’s swift and complete seizure of power presented Matilda and her leading supporters with a fait accompli, and even her half-brother Robert, earl of Gloucester, rendered conditional homage at the specially summoned great council. The other principal business of the council was the issuing of a major charter of liberties. There was something in it for everyone, but most for the Church. ‘I, Stephen … do grant the Holy Church to be free,’ the charter began and went on to confirm the most generous and far-reaching interpretation of the rights, privileges, property and autonomy of both Church and churchmen. Stephen also surrendered all the new forests which had been added by Henry I; ‘entirely [did] away all exactions … and injustices, whether illegally introduced by the sheriffs or anyone else’, and finally swore to ‘observe the good and ancient laws and just customs in murders, pleas and other causes’.
The charter, witnessed by the impressively large number of fourteen bishops and twenty-nine lay magnates, marked the definitive acceptance of Stephen by the realm. But, even at this high tide of his support, there were disturbing signs of weakness. Immediately on hearing of the death of Henry, David I of Scotland had invaded England and captured several important towns, including Carlisle and Newcastle, which were the key to the west and east borders respectively.
Was David being merely opportunistic? Or was he also registering his disapproval of Stephen’s overriding of Matilda’s claim, of which (the Anglo-Saxon chronicler implies) the Scottish king had been a prime mover? At any event, Stephen moved north with an intimidatingly large army. But, instead of crushing David, he came to terms. David kept Carlisle.
Similarly, Earl Robert of Gloucester, in return for rendering a reluctant homage, ‘received everything that he wanted’ from the king. But most notorious was the case of Baldwin de Revières, who held Exeter Castle against Stephen. Stephen took personal charge of the siege, which dragged on through three swelteringly hot summer months. Like the siege of Bridgnorth, thirty years previously at the beginning of Henry I’s reign, it was a high-profile military action, conducted ‘before the eyes of all the barons’. Also as at Bridgnorth and no doubt for the same reasons, the barons were reluctant for the king to press things to a conclusion and counselled leniency. But there the parallel ends. For Stephen, unlike Henry, listened to the siren voices and allowed the garrison and Baldwin de Revières himself to go free on their surrender.
Stephen, men were learning fast, might be a good soldier. But he was a poor negotiator, with the knack of snatching defeat from the jaws of victory.
The lesson was driven home, on the largest and most damaging scale, by Stephen’s expedition in 1137 to Normandy to take possession of his other, ducal realm. The Norman barons had been no keener on the succession of Matilda than the English and their first thought after Henry’s death was to offer the duchy to Stephen’s elder brother, Theobald, count of Blois. Theobald accepted, and it was only with a bad grace that he was subsequently persuaded to renounce his claim in favour of Stephen. Stephen, for his part and with his now customary generosity, sweetened the pill with a pension of 2000 marks (£1333 6s 8d) a year for his brother.
A much more severe challenge to Stephen’s possession of Normandy came from Geoffrey of Anjou. Geoffrey, acting in right of his wife Matilda, was able to exploit the ever-fractious Norman baronage and invaded in June. Stephen determined to meet him head-on. But once again the barons demurred. Faced with this division in his own ranks, Stephen had no choice but to come to terms, and Geoffrey too was bought off with an annual pension of 2000 marks. Stephen even paid the first year’s instalment on the spot.
Stephen never returned to Normandy, which was left – increasingly unhappily – to fend for itself.
The outcome of this disastrous Norman expedition was a turning point. It made clear that Stephen was squandering his political capital almost as quickly as his uncle’s cash mountain. It emboldened his enemies everywhere. The Scots invaded in the new year and, after Easter, there were risings against Stephen throughout the West Country.
In response, Stephen laid about him in all directions: rushing, in the space of a few months, from Scotland to Bristol to Castle Cary and finally to Shrewsbury. Here, for the first time, he showed his teeth by having ‘five men of rank … hanged’ after the surrender of the garrison. And a much greater victory was won in Stephen’s absence in the north. There, on 22 August, the northerners, led by Archbishop Thurstan of York and fighting under the banners of the northern Anglo-Saxon saints, defeated King David of Scots. The victory entered into legend as the Battle of the Standard. But, despite the scale of the Scottish
military defeat, it was David who triumphed in the peace negotiations by gaining Newcastle and the earldom of Northumbria. With these gains, the Scots now ruled the northern counties from coast to coast.
The effective dismemberment of England had begun.
II
The key defector from Stephen was Earl Robert of Gloucester. Robert’s motives have been much debated by modern historians. Had he been covertly committed to Matilda all along? Or was he a Johnny-come-lately to her cause and motivated more by pique at Stephen than by loyalty to his half-sister? In fact, there seems little reason to doubt the explanation of Robert’s behaviour offered by his contemporary and apologist, William of Malmesbury. For it is based, above all, on Robert’s caution. This was a quality which Robert displayed – often to excess – throughout his career. Robert, William of Malmesbury explains, found himself on the horns of a dilemma: ‘if he became subject to Stephen, it seemed contrary to the oath he had sworn to his sister; if he opposed him, he saw that such conduct [in view of Stephen’s apparently impregnable position] could nothing benefit her or his nephews, but would certainly most grievously injure himself ’.
The upshot was that Robert played a waiting game. But the moment the cracks in Stephen’s position made it safe and sensible to do so, he had renounced the homage he had reluctantly given.
That was in May 1138. But it took almost another eighteen months before Robert felt it safe to land in England. Meanwhile, Stephen’s position had undergone a further, abrupt deterioration. And this time it touched, not the fringes, but the heart – or rather, the soul – of his power. From the beginnings of English kingship, the relationship of Church and state had been of the most intimate. But Stephen, more even than most kings, had begun his reign as a creature of the Church. As we have seen, the support of his brother Henry, bishop of Winchester, had been crucial in his seizure of the crown. And thereafter the Church had continued to be exceptionally supportive.
But now Stephen risked throwing all this away by engineering a confrontation with Bishop Roger of Salisbury and his clan at the summer court of 1139. The court was convoked to meet at Oxford on 24 June and Bishop Roger was summoned with the rest. But he went reluctantly and with foreboding. ‘I shall be of much the same service at court as a foal in battle.’
Roger’s premonitions were fulfilled when a fracas took place between his servants and those of Stephen’s favourite, Alan, count of Brittany. The king leapt at the opportunity. He had disgraced the king’s court and broken his peace, Roger was told. To make amends, he was required to reaffirm his allegiance and surrender his castles of Salisbury, Malmesbury, Sherborne and Devizes. Roger’s nephew Alexander, bishop of Lincoln, was likewise required to surrender his castles of Newark and Sleaford.
The shock of his fall proved too much for Bishop Roger, who, Wolsey-like to the last, died before the end of the year.
Stephen’s professed motive was to deprive Earl Robert and Matilda, who were expected to arrive at any moment in England, of allies and strongholds. But his actions had more or less the opposite effect. Bishop Henry, appointed papal legate earlier in 1139, donned the mantle of affronted ecclesiastical power and summoned a council of the Church to condemn Stephen’s actions.
A month later, on 30 September, Earl Robert and the Empress Matilda landed in England, accompanied by only 140 knights. This was more of an escort than an army and would have been quite inadequate to force a landing at any of the main ports. Instead, they had done a deal with the queen dowager, Adeliza, who resided in her castle at the river port of Arundel in Sussex. The party was allowed to land there and Matilda was received into her stepmother’s protection. Robert slipped away almost immediately and, with only a dozen knights, made his way through hostile country to his stronghold of Bristol. Halfway there he was joined by Brian Fitzcount, also one of the original supporters of Matilda’s marriage, and henceforward her unshakeable partisan.
Meanwhile, Stephen moved in force against Arundel and forced Adeliza to withdraw her protection. Matilda was saved by two things: by chivalry, which made it unthinkable that Stephen would use violence against a woman, and by Bishop Henry’s advice to his brother that, to contain the Angevin threat in one place, Matilda should be allowed safe-conduct to Bristol as well. Was Henry being too clever by half ? Or downright treacherous? And why did Stephen, who had had one confrontation with him already over the fate of Bishop Roger, accept his brother’s advice? Contemporaries were equally puzzled: Matilda’s escape was ‘quite incredible’, one well-informed chronicler thought.
Robert met his half-sister at what was already called ‘the frontier’ and escorted her to Bristol. Soon, Gloucester submitted as well, followed in the course of the year by most of the Welsh marches, as ‘partly by force and partly by favour, [the whole region] espoused the side of the empress’. Matilda even managed to make her half-brother Reginald earl of Cornwall.
Stephen had already lost the north; now he had lost the West Country as well and his writ would never run there again. The result was the effective partition of England: the north and west belonged to the empress, while the south and east remained loyal to Stephen. And neither side was able to make much headway into the territory of the other.
In 1140, there were attempts at resolving the stalemate by negotiation. A peace conference was held at Bath, at which the empress was represented by Earl Robert, and Stephen by Bishop Henry, Archbishop Theobald of Canterbury and by Stephen’s wife, Queen Matilda.
The queen, indeed, was emerging as her husband’s most effective and dogged advocate – so much so that at times the civil war appears as a women’s war of the two Matildas: empress against queen. Moreover, though Queen Matilda yielded nothing to her cousin the empress in courage or strength or determination, she was able to express these qualities in a way which did not overtly challenge the conventions of the period. This enabled her to play both gender roles and plead as a woman and command as a man. In the Empress Matilda, on the other hand, the female was too often swallowed up in the male. ‘She was’, her panegyrist wrote, ‘a woman who had nothing of the woman in her.’ That was intended as praise. But it meant that her behaviour tended to grate and that she had only to see toes to tread on them.
The Bath peace conference came to nothing. Instead, in the new year, both sides tried to settle the issue by a single, bold throw of the dice. For Stephen, with his manic warrior energy, which repeatedly took him from one end of the country to the other, this was thoroughly in character. But for Earl Robert, whose motto, according to William of Malmesbury, was ‘to do what he could, when he could not do what he would’, it was a novel departure. Nevertheless, at first it seemed to pay off handsomely.
III
The background, once again, lay in the effective partition of England. One of the principal beneficiaries was Earl Ranulf of Chester, who was the dominant magnate in the north Midlands. This was now a debatable land between the rival spheres of influence of Stephen and Matilda, and both sides were eager to win the earl’s support. In late 1140 Stephen seemed to have outbid the opposition by conceding Earl Ranulf ’s claims (through his mother) to Lincoln and giving him as well a great swathe of territories across the Midlands.
These joined together Ranulf ’s original centre of influence in Chester and his new one in Lincoln. But they also trespassed on the power bases of many of Stephen’s other loyal supporters, who made their feeling plain at the Christmas court, which was also held at Lincoln. The result was a characteristic volte-face by Stephen: having come to terms with Ranulf before Christmas, in the new year he turned against him.
This was the moment that Robert, with all his caution, had been waiting for. With an ally as powerful (and as powerfully motivated) as Earl Ranulf, he could strike a decisive blow against Stephen. Calling up his full strength, he marched his army through the Midlands; joined forces with Ranulf at Derby and arrived before Lincoln on 2 February with a formidable force.
Stephen, too, was spoiling for a fight. That day
, 2 February, is the Feast of the Purification of the Blessed Virgin Mary or Candlemas and, early in the morning, the king had carried the customary candle in procession to mass in the cathedral. But, as it was being lit, the candle broke in two. Stephen, however, brushed the ill-omen aside. He also ignored the advice of his council of war that, since the army of the earls was bigger and stronger, he should stage a tactical retreat. Instead, as Orderic observes, ‘the wilful prince turned a deaf ear to the advice of prudent men’ and ordered his men to prepare for battle.
The armies met on the water meadows which lie between the River Witham (which the earls had to cross) and the city on its steep hill, which, then as now, is crowned by the cathedral and castle. The odds were heavily stacked against the royalists. In accordance with the latest tactics, both Earl Ranulf and King Stephen dismounted to lead the resistance to the cavalry charges of the enemy. But the royalist charge broke almost immediately on the earls’ lines. At this point, much of Stephen’s army, including the flower of the English nobility, decided that their cause was hopeless and fled the field.
Stephen, in contrast, stood his ground, and though quickly surrounded on three sides, fought bravely on. First he laid about him with his sword; then, when that was broken, with an old-fashioned two-headed battleaxe handed to him by one of the Lincoln militia. But finally, when the battle-axe too was broken, he was overcome and knocked out with a blow to his helmet from a heavy stone. ‘Here everybody! Here! I’ve got the king!’ cried his captor, who was one of Earl Robert’s household knights.
Robert, according to William of Malmesbury, treated his royal captive with every respect. He was first taken to Gloucester, where he was presented to the Empress Matilda, and then sent to Bristol Castle, where he was imprisoned. At first his captivity was honourable. But then, after trying to escape or bribe his gaolers, he was kept in chains.
Crown & Country: A History of England Through the Monarchy Page 19