The white ship, p.3
The White Ship, page 3
TWO
Youngest Son
The Normans are an untamed race and, unless they are held in check by a firm ruler, they are all too ready to do wrong.
Orderic Vitalis, Anglo-Norman monk and chronicler (1075–c.1142)
Henry I of England’s life story starts with unanswerable questions. He is generally believed to have been the youngest child of the Conqueror (there were four sons and five or six daughters), and he was probably born in northern England. Tradition suggests Henry’s birthplace was Selby, in Yorkshire, but there is no written record to support this. We do not know the day (or even the year) of his birth but, from references to a birthday tribute four decades later, it is likely it was in the last few weeks of the year. It seems probable, through a process of elimination and an understanding of key moments in his later life, that the year was 1068, but 1069 is possible too.
We do know for certain that Henry was much the youngest of the Conqueror’s four sons: although these royal children’s birth dates are similarly unrecorded, with Robert being born in 1052 or 1054, Richard in 1054 or 1056, and William Rufus at some point between 1056 and 1060.
As the only son of the Conqueror to appear after his triumph at Hastings, Henry was alone in being born ‘in the purple’ – that is, after his father began to rule as a king. Henry was as mindful of this differentiation as his brothers were dismissive of it. He felt it set him apart in importance from the older children, calling on a tradition with roots that extend back to the ninth century at least.
The Conqueror’s eldest son, Robert, was, according to William of Malmesbury, considered ‘a youth of proven valour’, by the year 1066. We know the names of three of his childhood tutors: Raturius, who served as ‘an adviser on children’; Tetbold, ‘a teacher of literature’; and, later, Hilgerius, ‘a master of boys’.
While being groomed to rule, Robert was teased at home. He received the nickname ‘Curthose’ from his father, on account of his short legs. We know, from examination of the single thigh bone that survived a sixteenth-century desecration of his grave, that William the Conqueror stood probably five foot ten inches tall. Robert may have inherited his more truncated form from his mother: Matilda of Flanders was five foot, which was two or three inches shorter than was average for a woman at the time. Robert Wace, a reliable chronicler from the Channel Islands, writing in the second half of the twelfth century, recorded of Curthose that: ‘He was a small man, but burly, with short legs and big bones.’[1] Others picked up on these features, calling him ‘Gambaron’, or ‘Fat Legs’.
The second son, Richard of Normandy, was good looking and popular. His father planned to give him the Norman title of count of the Cotentin when he came of age but, ‘to the great grief of many’, it was recorded, he died ‘when a youth who had not yet received the belt of knighthood’.[2]
Richard met his premature end while hunting in the New Forest, crushed between the branch of a hazel tree and the pommel of his saddle. He died a week later. While his brothers’ exploits are well known, Richard’s brief life remains an indistinct footnote to history. Born ten or twelve years before the Conquest, he died at some point in his late teens and he was buried in Winchester – a Norman princeling, committed to the soil of the ancient capital of Wessex.
William, the third-born son, was known as ‘Rufus’, probably on account of his ruddy complexion, or because, as a child, he had inherited the red hair of his father. William Rufus’s turned blond as he grew older, and he wore it with a centre parting, framing his forehead in an inverted ‘V’ above flecked eyes. Rufus was also of a robust build, which would extend to a protruding belly as he grew older and began to run to fat. Daring, energetic, loyal and fun-loving, Rufus would be his father’s favourite son.
All the boys inherited the bull-like physique of William the Conqueror, whose strength was such it was said that, in archery, he could fully draw back bows that others simply could not bend. With this muscularity went Christianity: William ensured that all his children were raised from their earliest years with piety at the centre of their existence. Daily Mass became a feature of the royal court from the Conqueror’s time onwards, and he liked to conclude his day with the evening service of Vespers.
Despite their rigidly Christian code, the men in the royal family formed a dysfunctional unit. We see an example of the Conqueror’s three surviving sons falling out in the Norman town of L’Aigle, in the autumn of 1077. The teenaged William Rufus and the child Henry were up in a gallery, rolling dice with soldiers, when they saw the adult Robert with some of his friends below. As a prank they tipped a chamberpot full of urine over them, and Robert stormed upstairs to sort out his infuriating younger brothers.
The ensuing rough and tumble was broken up only when the Conqueror appeared and tried to calm things down. But Curthose felt far from appeased. The following night he left his father and rode to Rouen, intent on taking control of the ducal castle there. In this he failed, but it was the start of open hostility between the Conqueror and Curthose, after years of simmering resentment.
William had long had a difficult relationship with his eldest son. Robert Curthose attracted an entourage of ‘factious young knights, who incited him to rash undertakings’,[3] according to Orderic Vitalis, and who expected to profit from his generous handouts: these ‘jongleurs and parasites and courtesans’[4] had already consumed what resources Curthose had, and were living off a diet of promises from their highborn benefactor.
Eager to satisfy his followers’ greed, Curthose demanded his father give him control of Normandy. He had long been recognised as the duke-in-waiting, a charter of 1063 declaring him his father’s heir there, and he had been appointed co-regent of the dukedom – alongside his mother – in 1067.
But with that official status had come no increase in authority or wealth. William was outraged by Curthose’s cheek. ‘My son,’ Orderic Vitalis reports him as having said, ‘your demands are premature. Do not try to snatch recklessly from your father the power which you ought to receive from him in due time, with the acclamation of the people and the blessing of God, if you continue to deserve it.’[5]
Curthose stormed out. His Norman hangers-on began to be joined by powerful supporters from abroad, who were only too happy to sow some discord in overmighty Normandy. Disaffected members of the nobility from Anjou, Brittany and Maine came to him first. Robert then approached his uncle, Robert I, Count of Flanders, who was known to contemporaries as ‘an active man and a very daring knight’.[6]
Crucially Curthose also persuaded his mother’s cousin, Philip I of France, to take his side against his father. In 1078 the French king gave Curthose the important castle of Gerberoy as a base for his military operations. This impregnable fort, thirty-five miles east of Rouen, stood menacingly on the frontier between France and Normandy. Curthose garrisoned Gerberoy with unruly knights who used it as a platform from which to launch wild forays into his father’s lands.
During the winter of 1078–9 William arrived at Gerberoy to deal with the son whose men were damaging his interests and undermining his authority. In the ensuing siege the Conqueror found it impossible to force a victory. A battle followed. William received a wound in an arm and was toppled from his dying warhorse by Curthose who, on recognising his father’s distinctive guttural voice from behind the helmet, gave him a fresh mount on which to ride away. William of Malmesbury would later rank Gerberoy as the worst humiliation of the duke’s military career.
The conflict between father and son became a serious contest for control of Normandy. The Conqueror was understandably appalled and infuriated to learn that his wife, Matilda of Flanders, had been sending large sums of money to Curthose secretly, as her son battled the continuing poverty caused by his financial incontinence. In vengeance William ordered one of his wife’s messengers, a man from Brittany called Samson, to suffer blinding – the same fate that had befallen his biblical namesake. Warned of the duke’s intentions, Samson escaped the Conqueror’s reach by becoming a monk, a move that gave him immunity.
Matilda of Flanders had not aimed to meddle in politics and warfare, but to establish peace in her family. She helped to engineer a partial reconciliation between her husband and eldest son in 1080. But three years later Matilda died, leaving nobody in her place capable of patching up the differences between the generations. The Conqueror and Curthose remained bitterly at odds, despite the Norman barons’ attempts to appease the pair.
The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle and Orderic Vitalis record that Henry was knighted at Westminster at Whitsun (which fell on 24 May) in 1086. He was perhaps seventeen years old. In a society that needed military excellence as its cornerstone, knighthood took on grave importance, and its exponents were glamorised.
Orderic Vitalis noted the accoutrements handed over during the ceremony: ‘The future King Henry I of England received investiture with hauberk,[fn1] helmet and sword-belt on coming of age from Lanfranc, archbishop of Canterbury.’[7] He will have had a fine horse as well: in the Similitudo Militis, written in the early twelfth century, the author records the horse as the knight’s ‘most faithful friend’. It was also one of his more valuable possessions.
Despite his official entry into the adult world of knighthood, Henry’s status remained humble when compared to that of his older brothers: they were referred to as ‘counts’ during the Conqueror’s life, while he was not. It seems possible that Henry was being prepared for high office in the Church rather than in the lay world: his education appears to have been overseen by Osmund who, in the easy medieval crossover between state and Church power, had been the Conqueror’s chancellor before, in 1078, becoming bishop of Salisbury. Henry is recorded as being in Osmund’s company on many occasions between 1080 (when the extremely wealthy Osmund built Devizes Castle) and 1086. There are other hints of religious intent in Henry’s upbringing. In 1084, while the Conqueror took Robert Curthose and William Rufus on campaign with him, Henry was ordered to spend time at the ancient Benedictine monastery of St Mary’s in Abingdon.
It may well have been during these years with the bishop of Salisbury that Henry received an education in the classics, which gave him the ability to read. This level of literacy, being a rarity among his family – or the upper reaches of the aristocracy as a whole at that time – contributed to his being regarded as something of an intellectual. There was some truth in this verdict: certainly, during his later life, Henry showed enthusiasm for mixing with learned men, challenging and enjoying their new ideas. Nicknamed ‘clerc’ by some during his lifetime, three centuries after his death Henry was being referred to as ‘Beauclerc’. His reputation for scholarliness had grown through the Middle Ages, but it should be kept in perspective: while he was able to read, there is no evidence that Henry could write.
Henry found his father’s rugged, soldierly illiteracy embarrassing. He once said, within the Conqueror’s hearing, that an illiterate king was no better than a crowned ass. William remained uncompromisingly Norman till his dying day. He tried to learn Old English, but his efforts fell away when confronted by its endless intricacies and irregularities, as well as by the other demands on his time. Henry, meanwhile, understood the language of the country of his birth, even if Franco-Norman was his first tongue.
In 1087 William – by now unrecognisable from the vigorous figure of his youth, after gaining significant weight throughout middle age – crossed the Channel for the seventeenth time in his twenty-one-year rule and prepared to fight once more. The Vexin was a strategically important county on the eastern flank of Normandy, which lay between Rouen and Paris. It was in dispute, Philip of France having swooped on it a decade before when its ruler retired to a monastery. Philip had declared half of it to be naturally French territory. From this ‘French Vexin’ he had launched raids into Normandy. The Conqueror led his army in a revenge expedition, defying his obesity to ride into action during an assault on Mantes, thirty miles west of Paris. But in the turmoil of sacking the town his horse faltered and William was struck hard in his stomach by the pommel of its saddle, causing a serious internal wound.
Clearly gravely injured, William was taken to be treated in the priory of St Gervais, on the outskirts of Rouen, the city that was the administrative, legal and trade fulcrum of Normandy. There was no hope of recovery. It was obvious that the man who had won a kingdom overseas was going to die in this, the hub of his Anglo-Norman realm. Less easy to discern was how his great inheritance would be divided.
Orderic Vitalis noted how, in contrast to their elder brother, ‘William Rufus and Henry … were obedient to their father [and so] earned his blessing, and for many years enjoyed the highest power in the kingdom and duchy.’[8] Henry may well have had expectations of a sizeable inheritance, as a result of his father’s favour and his mother’s legacy: it was common for the property of a royal or aristocratic mother to be passed on her death to younger sons. Matilda of Flanders had owned estates in Buckinghamshire and Gloucestershire, which would have provided Henry with a substantial income of around £300 per year.[fn2]
Robert Curthose was still at war with his father as William lay dying. The Conqueror wanted to disinherit him, but he was persuaded by his lords to leave Normandy to his eldest son, in common with the dynasty’s custom since the death of William Longsword. Besides, in happier times, the Conqueror had twice insisted that his leading men swear to acknowledge Curthose as the legitimate heir to the dukedom.
Primogeniture would not be recognised in England until the end of the twelfth century, though, and the Conqueror felt free to leave his English throne to William Rufus. This was reward for his favourite son’s unfailing loyalty, but the Conqueror appreciated too that Rufus was a brave and charismatic soldier, capable of keeping control of this hard-won prize that attracted covetous looks from across its various seas, and which had Scottish and Welsh enemies on its northern and west fronts.
‘And what, Father, do you give to me?’ Orderic Vitalis quoted Henry as asking William on his deathbed: ‘The king answered to him, “I give you five thousand pounds of silver from my treasure.” To which Henry said, “What shall I do with treasure, if I have no place to make my home?”’[9]
After encouraging Henry to accept his two elder brothers’ seniority to him in the line of succession, the Conqueror said: ‘You in your own time will have all the dominions that I have acquired, and be greater than your brothers in wealth and power.’[10] Ever practical, and aware that the limited inheritance left him by his father was vulnerable to his brothers’ whims, Henry had his silver carefully weighed to see it was all there, then took it away for safe storage.
Henry was by his father’s side on his final day, 9 September 1087. As soon as the Conqueror died and the grandees had left the room, his attendants fell upon his belongings in an orgy of self-enrichment. Even his robes were despoiled, and his hulking carcass was left all but naked on its deathbed. His remains were taken by boat to Caen. But the stately progress of the dead ruler, designed to give all a chance to bid farewell to their great duke, was undone when a fire broke out in the city, prompting onlookers to flee for safety.
Of the three surviving sons only Henry attended the Conqueror’s funeral, at the Abbey of Saint-Étienne, in Caen. With the service underway a man in the congregation stood up and launched into an astonishing tirade, claiming the church had been built illegally on land that rightly belonged to him. An even greater commotion blew up when the time came to lay William to rest in his stone sarcophagus. It had been carved when the duke was younger and slimmer, and it proved too small for his immense body. After much effort by the monks to squeeze him into the tomb, his guts burst open in a putrid cascade. The stench surged through the abbey, assaulting the nostrils of the congregation, causing widespread nausea. The abbey was quickly vacated, and the burial of one of the greatest men of the eleventh century was attended only by those clergy prepared to brave the foul smell of his rotten flesh.
This was the start, for Henry, of more than a decade of insecurity that would often tip over into real personal danger. During this time, he would be seen as an accoutrement of the royal and ducal family, but not as a central figure in it. His status stemmed from his royal parentage, but he had neither the title nor the lands required for real power and wealth.
On his deathbed the Conqueror had committed his English crown, sword and sceptre to Rufus, together with a letter to Archbishop Lanfranc confirming his wish that his second son succeed him in England. The coronation was performed by the archbishop of Canterbury in Westminster, on 26 September – ‘Michaelmas Day’ – 1087, just seventeen days after the Conqueror’s death. ‘William Rufus crossed the sea, was crowned and reigned for thirteen years,’ recorded Robert Wace succinctly.[11]
But Wace’s description fails to point out what a difficult time Rufus often had during those thirteen years. His succession was contested, despite his father’s unambiguous directions. Within months of being crowned, Rufus faced a serious rebellion in England in favour of Robert Curthose. It was led by two of the Conqueror’s half-brothers, Odo, Bishop of Bayeux, and Robert, Count de Mortain, and supported by a clutch of leading bishops and noblemen.
After decisive military action Rufus pulled out the roots of the revolt by promising to be a strong and fair ruler, uphold the laws of his predecessors as kings of England, stamp out unjust taxation and respect the people’s rights in the forests. But Curthose remained determined to displace his younger brother from the English throne that he was convinced was his by right.
