Queens Consort (9 page)

Matilda’s ability to control and manage her estates set a vital precedent for queenly power. One such estate was the abbey of Waltham, which was worth £100. The abbey remained part of the queen’s holdings well into the century — both Matilda and Eleanor of Aquitaine drew servants from among its canons, while Isabelle of Angoulême and Eleanor of Castile made use of its revenues. Matilda of Scotland was personally involved in the abbey’s dealings; indeed, the charter by which Henry granted the property to her mentions the ‘queen’s court’ held there. Charters and land exchanges were conducted in Matilda’s name and between 1108 and 1115 she gave permission for the canons to hold a fair. Another property that became associated with English queens was the convent of Barking, which was granted to Matilda of Boulogne in the next reign and provided Eleanor of Provence with five months’ worth of revenues during her widowhood. Matilda of Scotland received rents and tithes from Barking, improved the nearby roads and made the house responsible for the upkeep of a bridge she had constructed, assigning the revenues of her nearby manor of West Ham to pay for its maintenance.

Matilda was also the owner of substantial property in London. Henry’s grants to her in the capital may also have had a political motive, since some Londoners had not forgotten their allegiance to Matilda’s uncle Edgar Aetheling at the time of the Conquest and remained emotionally loyal to the Wessex line. As a representative of that line, Matilda would be better able to retain their support, and her management of her London possessions was astute in this respect. A charter of donation to Westminster Abbey explicitly states that the gift was made ‘at the prayer of Queen Matilda’, a site near Aldgate was made available in 1107—8 for a new house for the Augustinian canons, and sixty shillings per year from dock revenues were diverted to build a hospital for lepers at St Giles. These docks acquired the name of Queenshithe, which remains today. Later queens followed Matilda’s example by using their rights to the toll on disembarked goods to fund charitable projects. Adeliza of Louvain endowed Reading Abbey with one hundred shillings per year from her Queenshithe revenues, while Matilda of Boulogne contributed from them to her hospital foundation St Katherine by the Tower.

Leprosy was a particular focus for Matilda’s compassion. She was the
benefactress of a ‘leprosarium’ at Chichester and possibly the patron of the hospital of St James at Westminster (textual sources attribute the foundation to Henry II, but archaeological evidence dates the building earlier than his reign), while her leper hospital at St Giles was still caring for fourteen sufferers at the time of the dissolution of the monasteries in 1539. Matilda’s parents had publicly washed the feet of several hundred paupers as part of their Lenten devotions, and Matilda followed in their footsteps in her own humble ministrations to lepers. Her brother David described a scene in her apartments at Westminster:

The place was full of lepers and there was the Queen standing in the middle of them. And taking off a linen cloth she had wrapped around her waist, she put it into a water basin and began to wash and dry their feet and kiss them most devotedly while she was bathing them and drying them with her hands. And I said to her ‘My lady! What are you doing? Surely if the King knew about this he would never deign to kiss you with his lips after you had been polluted by the putrefied feet of lepers!’ Then she, under a smile, said ‘Who does not know that the feet of the Eternal King are to be preferred over the lips of a King who is going to die? Surely for that reason I called you, dearest brother, so that you might learn such works from my example.’
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There is something a little too didactic about this anecdote for it to be entirely authentic, perhaps, but it tells us something about both Matilda’s reputation among her contemporaries and their expectations of their queen. It illustrates the connection between piety and that other important element of queenship, the role of intercessor or ‘peace-weaver’, the Christian duties of compassion and charity mingling with the role of mediator with the earthly representative of God’s power, the king. Matilda showed that it was possible for a queen to combine a public demonstration of religious devotion with an effective political function.

Matilda played a significant part in the development of the Anglo-Norman Church, which was undergoing a period of problematic evolution in relation to the papacy that was to become known as the Gregorian or investiture controversy While it centred on the issue of ecclesiastical investiture, it had far broader implications for the relative roles of spiritual and temporal powers in England and throughout Europe. The eleventh century had seen many attempts to clarify and consolidate canon law, of which the sacrament of secular marriage that influenced the subsequent reputation of William the Conqueror was one. Other disputes concerned
clerical marriage and the sin of simony, or the sale of Church offices. As early as 1059, the papal see had decided that secular leaders had no right to determine the election of popes, since the Church was founded on the authority of God alone. Traditionally, rulers had had the power to invest prelates, and to receive homage from them for their temporal powers, that is, the lands and revenues they controlled. Henry I’s involvement in this controversy was further complicated by the variance between Norman and English practices. Archbishop Anselm had gone into exile to avoid conflict with William Rufus and, although Henry had recalled him on his accession, Anselm, who had attended the Council of Rome in 1099, felt morally unable to condone the prevailing conventions of investiture in England and Normandy. In 1102, a compromise was reached whereby Henry was able to appoint bishops so long as Anselm himself was not required to consecrate them, but this soon broke down. Matilda’s own chancellor, Reinhelm, gave back his ring and staff of office rather than accept what he saw as uncanonical consecration, while William Giffard, a candidate for the see of Winchester, refused to allow the ceremony to proceed. In spring 1103 Anselm felt obliged to leave once more for Rome to seek papal advice.

During the two and a half years of Anselm’s absence, Matilda corresponded with him. Her letters are the earliest in existence known to have been written by an English queen. Though they are not in her own hand — a clerk wrote them on her behalf — they display ‘a scholarship rare among laymen and quite exceptional amongst laywomen’.
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Her efforts to mediate between the archbishop, her husband, and the Pope, Paschal II, required not only a sophisticated understanding of the theological questions at issue and their political repercussions, but also a great deal of diplomatic discretion. Matilda signalled her support for Anselm just before his departure for Rome, when she witnessed a charter at Rochester which she signed
‘Matildis reginae et filiae Anselmi archiepiscopi’
, but she was also aware that she could not afford to alienate Henry. The King had claimed the revenues of Canterbury for himself when Anselm left, on the grounds that the see was vacant, but Matilda was able to get him to set aside a personal allowance for the archbishop. However, when Henry extracted further sums of money from the clergy a few years later and they begged the Queen to intervene, she wept and insisted she could do nothing. She knew that success meant concessions, that she could not afford to overplay her hand without losing her influence over Henry.

Anselm confirmed his awareness of that influence when he wrote: ‘Counsel these things, intimate these things publicly and privately to our
Lord the King and repeat them often.’
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The perceived intimacy of husband and wife was one of the most powerful (and occasionally feared) elements of queenly power, and Matilda declared herself ready to make use of it. She encouraged Anselm: ‘Farther, frequent, though secret consultation promises the return of the father to his daughter … of the pastor to his flock.’ She claimed that she was ‘skilfully investigating’ Henry’s heart and had discovered that ‘his mind is better disposed towards you than many men think; and I favouring it, and suggesting wherever I can, he will become yet more courteous and reconciled towards you’. Matilda appeared confident of her power to persuade her husband. ‘As to what he permits now to be done, in reference to your return, he will permit more and better to be done in future, when, according to time and opportunity, you shall request it.’

Henry’s understanding of the investiture issue was that it represented a diminishing of the royal prerogative, and he was reluctant to give way. In 1104, the Pope threatened to excommunicate him. Matilda had written to Paschal, describing the ‘lugubrious mourning’ and ‘opprobrious grief’ the realm of England was suffering from the lack of its ‘dearest father’, Anselm, and pleading in high-flown classical rhetoric for the archbishop’s return. Now, as excommunication was mooted, Anselm urged Matilda to ‘beg, plead and chide’ Henry to change his position. A compromise was eventually agreed in which Henry gave up his powers to invest prelates but retained the right to receive homage for ‘temporalities’, a concession in ecclesiastical terms, but one in which the secular powers of the crown were arguably augmented.

Matilda’s involvement in the investiture controversy demonstrates a degree of confidence between King and Queen that is reinforced by the political responsibilities Henry assigned to her. The first six years of his reign were dominated by his ambition to retain control of Normandy. In 1101, he had made peace with his brother Robert in the treaty of Alton, but in 1105 he began the conquest of the duchy in earnest. After the battle of Tinchebrai in 1106, where Robert was taken prisoner, Normandy was his. It has been estimated that Henry spent 60 per cent of his time in Normandy,
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and Matilda, the designated head of his curia, or council, frequently acted as regent of England during his absence. That a woman should fulfil such a role was not perceived as odd by contemporaries: ‘The sources reveal the Queen intimately and actively involved in the public affairs of the kingdom, and none of the writers of these sources exhibit any surprise or dismay that this should be the case.’
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Charter evidence is particularly important in ascertaining Matilda’s
status. Her earliest public attestation took place in
1101
, at the same time as Henry granted her the abbey of Waltham. Matilda pardoned the canons of Waltham the sum they had previously paid to the see of Durham for work on the cathedral there. In the sixty-five charters she witnessed during the first eighteen years of Henry’s reign, her name is placed above that of the bishops, second only in status to the King himself (the only exception being a charter to the Conqueror’s foundation of St Stephen’s Caen, where Matilda appears after two kings, Henry and her brother Edgar King of Scots). Many charters feature clauses concluding with the words
‘per reginae Matildis’
, which has been interpreted as an indication that the Queen supervised the document between the council and the clerks’ office to ensure that its contents accorded with what had been decided.
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Matilda also issued at least thirty-three charters of her own, and a smaller group ‘clearly shows the Queen acting with what amounts to vice-regal authority’, sending out writs in her own name. The second-ever mention of the English exchequer, in the
Abingdon Chronicle
, describes a sitting of the exchequer court at Winchester in IIII, presided over by Matilda while Henry was in Normandy. As in the case of Matilda of Flanders, the cross-Channel division of property in the Anglo-Norman realm made shared rule both necessary and natural, and Matilda of Scotland’s career represents a high point in the opportunities for medieval women to exercise public power.

Cultural patronage was a vital element of such powers, and one of Matilda’s first demonstrations of this was the commissioning of the
Life
of her mother, St Margaret of Scotland, which may have had a didactic as well as a hagiographic purpose, serving as a ‘mirror’ (in the sense of model or guide) of the virtues of the perfect princess for the young queen to emulate. Matilda certainly succeeded in imitating Margaret in her piety and her desire to regulate the Church, but she seems to have been less successful at reconciling her own inclinations towards simplicity and humility with the grandeur that was both expected of her and indeed obligatory as a manifestation of royal authority. In a pre-literate, highly visual culture, opulence and magnificence were essential badges of power, and as such were considered necessary virtues. St Margaret herself had recognised this in her attempts to spruce up the Scottish court, and Matilda may have been aware of the example of her erstwhile namesake, St Edith of Wilton, a holy Kentish princess who dressed splendidly even as a nun. When St Aethelwold reprimanded her for her worldliness, Edith replied that spiritual purity could sit just as well under silks as rags and continued to show off her beautiful gowns. Matilda, though, was ‘possibly somewhat
uninspired in matters of style’.
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In fact, her Norman courtiers thought her rather a bore.

The glamour and sophistication associated with royal courts naturally led to their condemnation by moralists as places of licentious behaviour. Margaret of Scotland had been aware of their potential for scandal and kept it in check: ‘None of her women were ever morally degraded by familiarity with men and none ever by the wantonness of levity.’
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The showiness and self-indulgence of the Anglo-Saxon court, it was implied, constituted one of the ‘sins’ for which the English had paid at the Conquest. William of Malmesbury draws an unflattering comparison between the clean-shaven, ‘delicate’ and economical Normans and the ‘fantastically appointed English’, who adorned themselves with masses of gold jewellery, drank to excess and sported tattoos. Forty years later, though, the contrast was less apparent: long hair was in, absurdly pointed shoes were fashionable for men and women’s gowns required extravagant amounts of fabric, their sleeves trailing on the ground. Elegant ladies painted their faces and bound their breasts to achieve a slimmer figure. In the midst of this finery the Queen seemed dowdy. Marbod of Rennes ventured tactfully: ‘You, o Queen, because you are, fear to seem, beautiful,’ but the outfit Matilda wears on her seal had been out of style for a generation before she was crowned. (The dress shown on the seal is probably a copy of one belonging to Matilda of Flanders, and it is similar, too, to a gown in which Henry’s sister Cecily, the abbess at Caen, is depicted elsewhere.)