Queens Consort (7 page)

The manor of Tewkesbury provided the setting for another legend. Before the Conquest, Tewkesbury was held by the Saxon lord Brictric, who was said to have caught Matilda’s eye at her father’s court in Flanders while on an embassy from Edward the Confessor. Apparently Brictric did not return her interest, but Matilda neither forgave nor forgot and, after
Hastings, supposedly demanded the manor from her husband and proceeded to throw Brictric into prison at Winchester, where he died in mysterious circumstances two years later. That Brictric owned the property, and that it passed to Matilda, who granted it to Roger de Busci before her death, may be ascertained from the Domesday Book, but this also confirms that Brictric (who, since he inherited the manor in 1020, might be assumed to have been rather old on his presumed ‘embassy’ in the 1050s) had died before the lands were granted to the Queen. Another story that portrays Matilda as sexually jealous and vengeful tells of William dallying with a woman, and Matilda having ‘the lady in question hamstrung and put to death’.
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Again, it is hard to imagine that Matilda might forget herself so far as to murder a mere mistress, and indeed William was reputedly faithful to her. All the same, these tales, like that of Matilda’s feisty refusal of William’s suit, suggest the perception of a certain force of character, and it is deliciously tempting to imagine the mighty Conqueror quailing before the temper of his tiny queen.

There is no doubting the strength of character revealed by Matilda’s determination to use her position as regent of Normandy to fight for justice in her homeland. In 1067, her father had died and was succeeded by his son, Baldwin VI, who successfully annexed the Hainault inheritance of his wife, Richildis. Matilda’s younger brother Robert had married Gertrude, the widowed Countess of Frisia, several years before, and on Baldwin VI’s death in 1070 he invaded Flanders, which was being held by Richildis, as regent, for her son Arnulf. Since Normandy and Flanders were both French vassal states, Matilda united with the King of France to go to her nephew’s aid, sending Anglo-Norman troops under the command of William FitzOsbern, Earl of Hereford. This was very much a Norman initiative: William did not intervene in his capacity of king of England. On 22 February 1071, Robert defeated his nephew and sister-in-law, and little Arnulf was killed on the battlefield at Cassel. Matilda was outraged by what she saw as Robert’s cruelty, and she blamed him for the loss of her commander, FitzOsbern. However, though Hainault was granted to Arnulf’s younger brother Baldwin, since Philip of France now accepted Robert as Count of Flanders, she was obliged to concede defeat. Robert the Frisian remained a thorn in William of Normandy’s side. Along with Geoffrey Martel, Count of Anjou, and Conan, Duke of Brittany, Robert ‘hatched many plots against me, but though they hoped for great gain and laid cunning traps they never secured what they desired, for God was my help’.
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William might have tried to claim Flanders for his wife, as her inheritance, but given the continued struggle to hold
Normandy and England, and the grudging support of the French for Robert the Frisian, he judged that a campaign in Flanders would overstretch his resources.

Like all contemporary rulers, Matilda lived a peripatetic life, moving constantly through her lands with her own household, hearing petitions, overseeing her accounts and convening courts. Her progresses may be followed through her charters, the number and frequency of which are evidence of her personal power. Matilda’s special place in confirming and adding her approval to William’s grants confirm her unique superiority over even the most powerful male magnate. However, business activities did not prevent her from taking considerable interest in her children’s education. Matilda and William had four sons: Robert, Richard (who died in 1075), William, known as William Rufus for his red hair, and Henry; and five daughters: Agatha, Cecily, Adela, Constance and Matilda. All were remarkable for their level of education — Matilda clearly did not believe that learning should be confined to men. Adela, who married Stephen of Blois in 1083, became a noted literary patron, displaying her skills at the transportation of the relics of the Empress Helen, the mother of the first Christian Roman Emperor, Constantine, in 1095, when she read aloud the inscription on the new reliquary for the company. William Rufus and possibly Henry were tutored by Archbishop Lanfranc, and Henry ensured that his own daughter, the Empress Matilda, was educated enough to understand government documents written in Latin.

Matilda’s daughters were educated at her Holy Trinity foundation at Caen and received instruction from a monk who was a well-known orator. Cecily entered Holy Trinity as a novice in 1075, eventually becoming abbess in 1113. Holy Trinity’s brother house, William’s foundation of St Stephen’s of Caen, provided a link with the reforming tendencies in Church practices championed by Lanfranc, first as abbot of St Stephen’s and then as archbishop of Canterbury. Lanfranc’s ardent faith was spiritually inspiring to William and his queen. Matilda’s household, like her husband’s, was strict in its observances, and Matilda heard Mass every day. She and William were enthusiastic supporters of Lanfranc’s mission to revitalise the Church, which William recognised as a potentially significant means of uniting his new realm. Between 1072 and 1076, Lanfranc organised a series of reforming councils to regulate the English Church according to Norman practices, forbidding simony (the sale of church offices), ruling against clerical marriage and determining episcopal sees. William’s martial persona is so overwhelming that his spiritual side is often neglected, but it
was relevant in his marriage to Matilda in that ‘this ever devout and eager worshipper’
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believed in the Church teachings on marriage propagated by Lanfranc, and broke with four generations of family tradition by never producing a bastard.

Sharing her husband’s piety, assisting in his government and managing his Norman lands, Matilda was in many ways an exemplary queen and the sense of her marriage is of a strong and successful partnership. However, she was also prepared to defy her husband and set her own political judgements against his. In 1077, Matilda’s eldest son, Robert ‘Curthose’, rebelled against his father, and Matilda secretly supported him. Robert’s discontent stemmed from what he saw as unfair treatment following the Conquest. In 1063, Matilda and William had witnessed the charter for ‘Robert, their son, whom they had chosen to govern the regnum after their deaths’,
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a strategy for affirming the loyalty of William’s magnates to his heir of which his own father had made use in 1034. In 1067, Robert effectively became ‘acting’ duke of Normandy, but when, in 1071, William began to make annual visits to the duchy after a four-year absence, Robert resented his father’s resumption of his ducal powers. Orderic described Robert as a ‘proud and foolish fellow’, but his mother loved him enough to involve herself in the quarrel. In 1077, Robert took his grievance to the King of France, who granted him the castle of Gerberoy as a base to fight a campaign against his father. William besieged him there for three weeks in 1079, but returned unsuccessfully to Rouen, the two were reconciled and Normandy was regranted to Robert. Matilda sent money from her own revenues to help Robert, and a Breton monk, Samson, later told Orderic Vitalis that he had been dispatched to William by Matilda to try to persuade him of Robert’s case. The family were reunited at Breteuil in 1080 for the betrothal of Matilda’s daughter Adela to Stephen of Blois, an event which marked not only the alliance between Blois and Normandy against the threat of the Angevins, but the end of the rebellion, the castellan of Breteuil having been one of Robert’s backers.

William does not appear to have held Matilda’s support for Robert against her; indeed, such maternal loyalty was laudable, if unwise. Orderic Vitalis recounts her speech to her husband in words that, though unlikely to have been recorded verbatim, convey a sense of the devotion expected of royal mothers: ‘O my lord, do not wonder that I love my first-born with such tender affection. By the power of the most high, if my son Robert were dead and buried seven feet in the earth and I could bring him back to life with my own blood, i would shed my lifeblood for him!’

In 1082, Matilda accompanied her husband to meet his half-brother,
Odo of Bayeux, at Grestain, where their mother Herleva was buried, to make arrangements for an abbey there. Odo had been a longstanding ally since his appointment to the bishopric in 1052 and had played an essential role in the Conquest. He was a swashbuckling churchman of the prereform era, enormously rich, a father and a mace-wielding warrior. William relied on him greatly, and had given him the earldom of Kent and the vice-regency of England in the 1060s and 1070s, but by 1082, Odo was becoming a threat. Having built up a strong personal faction in England, he came up with a plan to get himself elected pope and began spending huge amounts of money to achieve his ambition. After the meeting at Grestain, Odo left for England to embark for Rome, a journey William had expressly forbidden. The King himself arrested his brother as he was about to sail from the Isle of Wight, and Odo spent the rest of his life in the Tower of Rouen. William was quite prepared to be ruthless with members of his own family, and Odo had been a far more loyal servant to him than his son Robert. So was his reconciliation with Robert, who had gone as far as to take up arms against him, perhaps an indication of Matilda’s pacifying influence?

The King and Queen were back in Normandy early in 1083 for Adela’s wedding. Matilda did not live to see the marriage of another daughter, Constance, to Alan of Brittany in 1086. By the summer of 1083 she was ill, and that November she died. William was with her as she dictated her will and made her confession. Matilda left the contents of her chamber, including her crown and sceptre, to Holy Trinity, where she wished to be buried. She also gave generously to the poor from her deathbed, an example William followed in 1087. He had not married Matilda with the expectation of making her a queen, and it has been suggested that had he not taken a wife until after 1066 he might have sought a more illustrious match, yet their marriage had in some ways been instrumental to the Conquest. Without Matilda’s alliances and, more importantly, her blood, William may not have been able to retain Normandy so effectively, or to prosecute so vigorously his claim, and that of his legitimate sons, to England. And without her capable regency, he might not have been able to hold both his realms post-Conquest.

William was reportedly wretched at her death. Despite the bride’s early objections, the marriage of William the Bastard and Matilda of Flanders was undoubtedly a success, both emotionally and practically. It also permitted Matilda to establish a model of active queenship so influential on her immediate successors that the consorts of the Anglo-Norman kings are seen to this day as representing the zenith of English queenly power.

*
Aetheling was the Anglo-Saxon usage for ‘hereditary prince’.

CHAPTER 2

MATILDA OF SCOTLAND

‘Enduring with complacency’

E
dith of Scotland was a true Anglo-Saxon princess. Her mother, Margaret, was the daughter of Edward ‘the Exile’, son of Edmund Ironside, and his wife Agatha. Edith’s grandparents had left their Hungarian refuge for Edward the Confessor’s court in 1057, and though Agatha had been widowed shortly afterwards, she remained in England with her children, Edgar, Margaret and Christina, through the events of 1066.
The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle
implies that they were present for the coronation of Matilda of Flanders at Pentecost in 1068, as it was not until the summer that the family departed the uncertain atmosphere of Westminster for the protection of King Malcolm of Scotland. Malcolm persuaded Margaret to become his wife. She resisted at first, declaring she preferred to remain a virgin, the better to serve God, but eventually overcame her reluctance and, in spite of sacrificing her virginity and producing eight children, still achieved sainthood after her death. Edith, the fifth child and her first daughter, was born in 1080. Queen Matilda of Flanders and her son Robert Curthose were her godparents. Like William of Normandy, Edith supposedly asserted her regal ambition early: during her baptism she grabbed at Queen Matilda’s veil and tried to pull it towards her own head, a gesture which, with hindsight, was naturally considered to have been an omen.

Edith’s childhood can be glimpsed through the
Life of St Margaret of Scotland
, a biography of her mother which she commissioned as queen. Evidently Margaret was an extremely pious woman, but she and her siblings were also sophisticated, bilingual and educated, and she had a great influence on the somewhat rustic Scottish court. Margaret loved books and studied the Bible diligently, and though her husband was illiterate, there is a touching image in the
Life of St Margaret
of King Malcolm holding his wife’s book as she reads. He surprised her with gifts of rich
bindings for her books, and while she ‘delighted more in good works than the possession of riches’
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she was mindful of the show of magnificence required by her station. She encouraged foreign merchants to visit Scotland with previously unheard-of luxury goods, decorated the royal halls with hangings and rich gold and silver plate and smartened up both the appearance and the manners of the King and his retinue, forbidding his men to go plundering when they rode out with her husband.

The picture of Margaret as a mother is sketchy, but unusually intimate for a royal woman of the time, suggesting that her daughter contributed her own recollections to the memoir. Margaret admonished her children and had her steward beat them if necessary, but as a result they reputedly had very good manners, and were brought to their mother ‘very often’ for religious instruction in simple language that they could understand. The
Life
also shows Queen Margaret sitting the children of the poor on her knee and feeding them mashed-up food. Edith’s tremendous regard for her mother creates a strong image of a warm and happy early childhood.