by Lisa Hilton
Cultural patronage, as Bishop Baudri had reminded the Conqueror’s daughter, was one sphere in which a woman might hope to outdo her husband or father, and which could compensate for diminishing influence in the political realm. As has been noted, women were especially influential in the development of vernacular literature (indeed, the production of ‘Old French’ works in France is minimal during the period in comparison with the blossoming of vernacular writing in the Anglo-Norman realm). Here, at least, Adeliza did make her mark. The rededication of ‘The Voyage of St Brendan’ to her after Matilda’s death shows that she was ready to participate in this tradition; she is recognised, too, in the mention of ‘the Queen of Louvain’ in Gaimar’s Estoire des Engleis, commissioned by Constance FitzGilbert, a Lincolnshire noblewoman. Adeliza herself commissioned an account of Henry’s reign from the poet David (now lost), which was set to music, as well as receiving the dedication of Philippe de Thaon’s ‘Bestiary’, the oldest surviving French example of the genre. Adeliza’s literary interests continued into her widowhood, during which she patronised the poet Serbo of Wilton. Her facility in French evinces a certain level of education, as, given her birthplace, it was unlikely to have been her first language. It is not known, though, whether, like Matilda, she spoke English. She might have availed herself of one of the new dictionaries, such as that attributed to Alexander, archdeacon of Salisbury, with its Anglo-Norman glossary of Old English words. Bi-and trilingual texts were also appearing, of which the most famous example is the Eadwine Psalter, produced at Canterbury in the mid-twelfth century.
Another novelty associated with Adeliza is the payment of ‘queen’s gold’, which was to form an important part of the income of queens consort in the coming centuries. Queens-gold was a tax of an extra 10 per cent on any fine to the crown over the value of ten marks, as well as on tax paid by Jews. One origin of the custom is the dispute for primacy between the sees of York and Canterbury. Hugh the Chanter records that the bishop of Durham, Ralph Flambard, offered 1,000 marks of silver to Henry I and a hundred to Matilda of Scotland to favour the candidacy of York. Flambard, who had been treasurer to William Rufus, was apparently familiar with the 10 per cent balance of such payments. It has been claimed that ‘it is almost certain that Eleanor [of Aquitaine] was the first English queen granted the right to claim queens-gold’,2 and the practice was standardised during Eleanor’s queenship, but Adeliza is the first example of a queen receiving a proportion of a licence fine. She was given twenty silver marks from forty-five paid to Henry I by Lucy, Countess of Chester. (With a gold-silver ratio of 1:9, this represents a larger proportion [approximately two-fifths] of the total than was ratified under Henry II as one gold mark to the queen for every hundred silver marks received by the king.)
Henry was also generous to Adeliza in assisting her to make the best of her dower lands. As well as lands which had been part of Matilda’s holdings, such as Waltham and the Queenhithe revenues, Adeliza had estates in Essex, Hertfordshire, Bedfordshire, Middlesex, Gloucestershire and Devon, on which Henry granted her exemption from land tax for demesne (untenanted) holdings in the 1130 Pipe Roll. He also made her a gift of a portion of the royal estate at Berkeley, and the entire county of Shropshire, for which she was not obliged to return accounts at the biannual royal exchequer.
Even though Adeliza was well provided for financially, it could not compensate for the fact that her marriage failed in its primary objective. She and Henry had no children. The reason is uncertain (it was not for the want of trying), as neither of them was infertile. A letter to the Queen from Hildebert of Lavardin, archbishop of Tours, suggests that Adeliza had expressed her unhappiness to him. ‘If it has not been granted to you from Heaven that you should bear a child to the King of the English,’ wrote the archbishop consolingly, ‘in these [the poor] you will bring forth for the King of the Angels, with no damage to your modesty. Perhaps the Lord has closed up your womb, so that you might adopt immortal offspring … it is more blessed to be fertile in the spirit than the flesh.’3 Thus Hildebert encourages Adeliza to identify herself with the face of pious queenship, hinting that her lack of children might be turned into a form of holy chastity, such as that practised by her predecessor Matilda after she ‘ceased to desire offspring’. This may have been small comfort. Adeliza made no significant religious foundation of her own, though she was a witness to Henry’s 1125 charter for the foundation of Reading Abbey and also a patron of Waltham, Winchester Cathedral, Osney, Eynsham, St Sauveur in the Cotentin and the orders of the Templars and Cistercians. In later life she assisted in the foundation of the small priory of Pynham on the causeway at Arundel and of a leprosarium at Wilton, where she lived for a time in her first widowhood.
Adeliza was in Normandy with Henry until September 1126. On their return to England, they were accompanied by Henry’s newly widowed daughter, Matilda the Empress, his only surviving legitimate child. Politically, the two women had been connected even before Adeliza’s marriage, as Matilda’s husband, Henry V, had assisted her father in the recovery of his duchy of Lorraine, and Adeliza had attended the Imperial court as a young woman (the Empress was a year or so older than her stepmother). During the Christmas court at Windsor, which was attended by all the leading magnates as well as by David of Scotland, Matilda’s uncle, the Empress lived in Adeliza’s household, where she remained until she departed for her second wedding in May the following year. Henry was making plans for the succession, and though this was clearly necessary, it was a humiliating public declaration of Adeliza’s failure.
Henry left for Normandy in 1127. Adeliza was with him there in 1129, returning in July and keeping Christmas at Winchester before sailing back across the Channel in the early autumn of 1130. She witnessed her last grant with the King at Rouen before July 1131. They were in England again in August, again with the Empress, who had already quarrelled with her new husband, Geoffrey of Anjou, and Matilda stayed with the Queen until the disagreement was patched up. She was reunited with Geoffrey in September. Adeliza may be presumed to have remained with the King during his English peregrinations until his return to Normandy in August 1133, but she is not mentioned as a charter witness between this point and Henry’s death in 1135, nor as being present at his deathbed, which was attended by his illegitimate son Robert of Gloucester and the bishop of Rouen. The nineteenth-century biographer Agnes Strickland claims Henry was bitter and cruelly ill-tempered about Adeliza’s infertility, but the tax grant of 1130 and the fact that Adeliza was by his side until 1131 suggests that their relationship was civil, even hopeful, at least up to that point, and there is no evidence, other than her absence from the records, that it deteriorated afterwards. Henry’s prolongation of his stay in Normandy is attributed by Henry of Huntingdon to the continuing quarrels between the Empress Matilda and her husband. There were, apparently, at least three occasions when he wished to leave for his kingdom due to concerns about rebellions in Wales.
On I December, Henry died at Lyons-la-Forêt, of a seizure supposedly brought on by a surfeit of lampreys, his body ‘much weakened by strenuous labours and family anxieties’.4 If there is any hint of reproach towards Adeliza, it can only be these ‘anxieties’, which centred on the uncertain succession. And if Henry was eager to return to England there is nothing to indicate that it was not in part to rejoin his wife.
Henry’s body was interred at Reading, the abbey he had founded in 1125 in a conscious celebration of his dynasty ‘for the salvation of my soul and that of King William my father and King William my brother and William my son and Queen Matilda my mother and Queen Matilda my wife’. There was no place for Adeliza in this vaunting of Norman blood. After a year of mourning, some of which she spent at the convent of Wilton, Adeliza granted the monks of Reading the manor of Aston in Hertfordshire, an annual payment of one hundred shillings and lands ‘to provide for the convent and other religious persons coming to the Abbey on the occasion of the anniversary of my lord King Henry’. Perhaps in imitation of Henry�
��s tribute to Matilda of Scotland, she also ordered a perpetual light to be maintained at his tomb.
Adeliza, too, chose to be buried at Reading, but if she was keen to maintain her royal associations in the next life, she was not yet ready to spend the rest of her earthly existence as a mourning queen dowager, and in 1138, she married for love. Her romance with William d’Aubigne was played out against the dramatic backdrop of the seizure (or usurpation, depending on one’s party) of the crown by Henry I’s nephew, Stephen of Blois. D’Aubigné’s father had been butler to Henry I — this was a court office rather than a domestic post and hence not such a disparagement as it might appear — and William himself held the lordship of Buckenham in Norfolk. He was from the first a loyal adherent of King Stephen, who granted him the earldom of Lincoln just after his marriage to Adeliza. William built the aptly named Castle Rising in newly fashionable stone, though during his marriage to Adeliza they lived mainly at her dower castle of Arundel on the Norfolk coast, where she had installed her half-brother Joscelin as castellan in 1136 (she also assisted him in making a good marriage, to the northern heiress Agnes de Percy). William and Adeliza had at least seven children (Adeliza is the ancestress of two other queens, Anne Boleyn and Catherine Howard) and together they founded two Augustinian houses.
Some years before her death, Adeliza decided to leave her husband, with his consent, and devote herself to prayer. She spent five years in the Benedictine abbey of Afflighem, of which her Louvain family had been patrons since 1085. Upon her death there, however, she requested that she be buried next to Henry at Reading.
Despite the success of her second marriage, it was as a queen that Adeliza chose to identify herself in death. Given the civil war through which she lived, and in which her second husband played a significant role, it would have been surprising if she had not reflected on the consequences of her barren royal union. That she achieved a degree of contentment, and left her mark on the literary and pious tradition of Anglo-Norman queenship, demonstrates that while though she obviously suffered as a consequence of her failure to provide Henry with an heir, there was more to Adeliza than that failure. Her legacy is less regal than that of Matilda of Scotland, but it is royal nonetheless.
CHAPTER 4
MATILDA OF BOULOGNE
‘Ennobled by her virtues as by her titles’
The queenship of Matilda of Boulogne has been largely overshadowed by the career of her more celebrated cousin, the Empress Matilda. The story of the Empress has made her a champion to many modern writers: hers is a dramatic tale of a woman bravely fighting for her rights after her throne was usurped by Stephen, Count of Mortain. Yet the two Matildas had more in common than their name. They were both descended through their mothers from the royal Anglo-Saxon line, both heiresses in their own right, both married to power-hungry men and both determined to defend the patrimony of their sons. Events gave the victory to the Empress’s cause, but it is arguable that Matilda of Boulogne was the greater queen. Interpreted in the light of representations of ideal feminine behaviour, a comparison of their activities emphasises the importance of conduct for royal women, whose power to command was tempered by the manner in which they elected to present their deeds. Matilda of Boulogne thought and fought like a man, but she never made the mistake of acting like one, in contrast to the Empress, whose demanding, dictatorial behaviour cost her her chance of the throne.
Matilda of Boulogne was selected by Henry to be the bride of his nephew Stephen as part of his dynastic policy following the disaster of the White Ship. Stephen was born around 1096, the third child of Adela, daughter of William I and Matilda of Flanders, and her husband Stephen, Count of Blois, whose lands lay between the troubled borders of France, Normandy and Anjou. Stephen’s elder brothers were provided with lands and lordships, and when their father died on crusade in 1102, it made sense for Countess Adela to look to her brother’s court to secure her third boy’s fortune. Stephen became Count of Mortain after Henry’s success at the battle of Tinchebrai in 1106, and the King continued to grant him large endowments in England and Normandy over the next decade, making him one of the most significant landholders in the realm.
When Henry’s heir William was drowned in 1120, Stephen’s status was heightened. If the King’s new marriage to Adeliza of Louvain produced no heirs, and his daughter Matilda and her husband, the Emperor Henry, remained childless, then Stephen and his brothers would have a strong claim to the English crown. Five years later, when neither Adeliza nor Empress Matilda had provided a child, Henry came to an agreement with Matilda’s father, Eustace of Boulogne. Eustace, Henry’s vassal for the lands he held in England, was also his brother-in-law: Mary, the Countess of Boulogne, was the younger sister of Matilda of Scotland. Eustace was a pious man, drawn to the spiritual life, and he wished to retire from the world and spend the rest of his days as a monk at Cluny. Since he had no son (the Gesta Stephani meanly describes the Countess of Boulogne as ‘barren’, even though she was a mother), Eustace consented to invest Stephen with his English lands and his county of Boulogne. After the wedding, Count Eustace said a private goodbye to his daughter at Romilly, took his vows and disappeared into the cloister. The marriage took place early in 1125 — the lack of an exact date is a tantalising omission, given how closely it bound the lives and ambitions of the two Matildas.
Henry I had numerous reasons for choosing Matilda for his favourite nephew. Stephen’s elder brother Thibault had just succeeded to the lands of Champagne, adding them to his county of Blois, which made him an increasingly significant player in Continental politics, and a man Henry needed to cultivate in order to keep the northern border of Normandy secure. The King may also have wished to compensate Stephen for the loss of the Montgomery holdings in Normandy, originally confiscated from the family and given to Stephen, but which he had been obliged to return during a period of military unrest. The Boulogne inheritance was a rich one, incorporating the county of Lens as well as the city itself, a staging post on the trade routes that led to Paris.
However, neither of these reasons is as powerful as that of the future of the crown, and this is where the date of the marriage becomes so significant. On 23 May, the Emperor Henry died at Utrecht, leaving his widow, the Empress Matilda, in a position to take up her claim as her father’s direct heir. Matilda of Boulogne was, like her cousin, descended through their grandmother, Margaret of Scotland, from the ancient kings of England. She had a further dose of royal blood through her father Eustace, also a descendant of Aethelred II. Her marriage with Stephen would therefore associate another potential claimant to the crown with Henry’s house, and in this respect the marriage may be seen as part of ‘the dynastic chess game designed to make the Empress her father’s successor’.1 However, as the marriage took place before Emperor Henry’s death, it is highly possible that Matilda’s royal connections were being deployed to strengthen Stephen’s claim.2 The latter argument gives some insight not only into Stephen’s perception of his uncle’s intentions, which wavered confusingly at the end of the King’s life, but also into Matilda’s. In arranging her marriage early in 1125, Henry, on some level, gave her to understand that he had designated her the next queen of England. So, while the perseverance shown by Matilda of Boulogne in the defence of her husband’s rights was no more than would have been expected of a loyal wife, her tenacity and courage might also have been motivated by the sense that she was fighting for her own position as a rightfully anointed queen.
How, though, could Matilda of Boulogne have believed this when the claim of the Empress Matilda seemed so clear-cut? In 1127, The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle describes Henry’s Christmas court at Windsor, where ‘He caused archbishops and bishops and abbots and earls and all the thegns that were there to swear to give England and Normandy after his death into the hand of his daughter.’ King David of Scotland swore first, followed, after an undignified scuffle over precedence, by Stephen, then the King’s illegitimate son Robert, Earl of Gloucester. It would be wrong, ho
wever, to attribute Henry’s insistence that his magnates swear fealty to Matilda to a desire to circumvent Stephen’s claim. In 1127, the King’s anxiety was focused on William Clito, the son of his disgraced and dispossessed brother, Robert Curthose, who had been his prisoner since Tinchebrai. Clito’s claim was strong, and arguably, on the grounds of his sex, weightier than the Empress Matilda’s. He had the support of many Norman barons and, worse, for Henry, that of Louis VI of France. In March 1127 Clito, with Louis’s support, succeeded to the title of Count of Flanders, to which he had some rights through his grandmother Matilda of Flanders. With this move, the French King hoped to destroy the traditional alliance between England and Flanders, and to worry Henry’s ever-harassed Norman borders. The threat from Clito was short-lived. After he attacked Boulogne that summer, Henry and Stephen bullied and bribed the Flemings to rebel, and Clito was caught up in a war with another candidate for the Flanders title, Thierry of Alsace, in which he conveniently died the following July.