Unruly, p.15
Unruly, page 15
That may sound like a fair way to treat a blameless infant. But Henry wasn’t fair, any more than life is. He was just predictable. This was a lapse in his own policy: few would have predicted that he’d have left a male child with a better claim to be king of England and duke of Normandy than any man living toddling around the continent making friends. But he did. I wish I could say that Henry was rewarded for this unwonted kindness. But no. He bitterly regretted it.
Messing about in boats
Broadly speaking, you can divide Henry’s reign into two halves: the first half in which most things went right for him, and the second half in which most things went right for him. But it is divided into these halves by an absolute catastrophe: in 1120 his only legitimate son and heir was killed in a shipwreck.
This was, above all, very very sad. The prince, whose name was William and was known as William Adelin (a corruption of ‘atheling’) was seventeen years old and had recently been endorsed as the next duke of Normandy by King Louis VI of France. Strictly speaking this was necessary, notwithstanding the hereditary nature of the duchy and Henry’s complete military control over it, because the kings of France were the dukes’ overlords. Still, it wasn’t an act of generosity on Louis’s part but the consequence of his having just lost a small war to Henry.
The whole English court was travelling triumphantly back from Barfleur, the preferred port on the Normandy coast for making swift crossings to England, but the cool kids, led by Adelin, decided to travel in a snazzy, new, fast vessel called the White Ship. The ghostly connotations of the name are entirely appropriate because they all died. An entire young generation of Anglo-Norman aristocracy was lost. The sole survivor, when the ship sank, was a butcher from Rouen. The shipwreck had a greater impact on the English ruling class than the Somme and achieved even less.
Instinctively one feels one should separate Henry’s personal tragedy, and the hundreds of other personal tragedies for other leading families of the realm, and for the more ordinary families of the sailors and servants on board, from its colossal geopolitical impact. Then again, I’m not sure. For Henry, such a capable and successful king, so conscious of his dynasty and legacy – all the more because the justification for his own kingship was so dodgy – the personal loss and the dynastic disaster were inextricable.
His grief at the loss of a child will have been supercharged by his feeling that his legacy was in ruins, and the succession crisis made more nightmarish by the enormous personal pain that had caused it. The death of children, or teenagers, was so much more common back then that, on some level, it’s impossible to believe that the pain felt as unbearable as it does in societies where such tragedies are much rarer. Everyone lost children, so everyone had lots of children. And they coped. Henry, while he had only two legitimate children, had over twenty illegitimate ones whom he freely acknowledged and lavished with favour.
William Adelin was obviously Henry’s favourite son, but he also personified his father’s strategy for the future: a prince, named after the Conqueror, but given the old Anglo-Saxon heirs’ soubriquet to signify his descent, through his mother Queen Matilda of Scotland, from the House of Wessex. He was to unite Normandy and England, in one royal house under one rightful king, by both primogeniture and porphyrogeniture.
He gave all of Henry’s prudent brutality, his administrative reforms, his building of an aristocracy he could trust and who trusted him – in a word his struggle – a reason and point. The prince’s death was more than the tragic death of a son, it was also Henry’s death. It represented the whole horror and inevitability of death as a concept, its inescapability for kings as well as for peasants, and the lurking futility of all human endeavours.
And it was such a stupid cock-up. Everyone on the White Ship was pissed. Adelin, young, hot-headed and the star of the court, had inaugurated a party boat – bringing on board large quantities of wine and encouraging passengers and crew alike to indulge. They spent the whole evening drinking in the harbour, while the other ships, including the king’s, set sail. Then they decided it would be a laugh to beat them all home. They raced out of the harbour straight into a rock and slipped screaming into the freezing sea. Dead from youthful foolishness. It’s the pointless, heartbreaking fate of millions of beloved teenagers throughout the ages and, though Henry would never know it, it doomed his peaceful, ordered kingdom, his life’s work, to chaos.
Smile though your heart is aching
Henry reputedly didn’t. They said that he never smiled again after he heard the news of the White Ship. I don’t know how they kept such a close eye on him – they must have worked in shifts. Another thing they said was that he died of a surfeit of lampreys – a lamprey is a weird jawless eel-like fish which was considered a delicacy. You never see it on a menu any more, even at those places that make it their mission to concoct dishes out of nostril and ball and bladder, so perhaps, in any society that has access to chips, asserting the lamprey to be delicious is no longer credible. Whatever its objective tastiness, it was a dish quite susceptible to accidental food poisoning, so it may have been the quality rather than the quantity of the lampreys that did for Henry.
That was fifteen unsmiling years later. In the meantime, he worked hard to deal with the catastrophe. He must have been kicking himself at his failure to father more than one legitimate son, and his wife had died in 1118, two years before the shipwreck. He got married again, in 1121, to a very attractive young woman called Adeliza of Louvain whom he spent the rest of his life failing to impregnate. She subsequently had children with a second husband, and Henry had had kids with loads of different women, so it’s odd they remained childless. Somehow the urgent necessity of an heir militated against the likelihood of begetting one. The whole ‘Okay, quick, let’s get a son fathered ASAP and then I can buckle down to the arduous task of living until he’s old enough to be king’ vibe didn’t maximize fertility. Plus a smile might’ve helped.
Henry also had to deal with William Clito, who had grown up into an impressive and capable young man and increasingly looked like the undeniable heir to all of Henry’s dominions (if you don’t count Robert Curthose, who was still kicking his heels in Cardiff, dreaming of Deliveroo). The Norman barons, more truculent than the English ones, were keen to make Clito the official heir. This struck Henry’s enemy the King of France as a delightful idea now that Adelin was dead and, in 1127, he made Clito count of Flanders.
Henry seemed to feel nothing but enmity for his nephew and was determined that his direct descendants would inherit the kingdom and, in the end, he got his way: King Charles III is his (twenty-seven greats) grandson and not a direct descendant of Clito. To screw things up for Clito, Henry supported a rival claimant to the county of Flanders, called Thierry. Clito defeated Thierry in battle in June 1028 but then, out of the blue, died as a result of wounds incurred in a different battle the following month. The premature-death luck had started to go Henry’s way again.
The question of what was going to happen when Henry himself died remained. Unlike his elder brother William, Henry was obsessed by this question. He had one legitimate heir remaining, his daughter Matilda. I should warn you that, as a name, Matilda was very much the Aelfgifu of the twelfth century. Henry’s mother, first wife and daughter were all called Matilda. Henry’s daughter Matilda is going to spend much of her life fighting to be queen of England but I’m not risking any spoilers when I say that one person or another called Matilda was queen of England most of the time from 1066 until the middle of the following century.
So the best way of distinguishing Henry’s daughter Matilda from the others is to call her the Empress Matilda, and that’s what she liked to be called. It wasn’t just a mad whim – she was married to the Holy Roman Emperor Henry V until he died in 1125. The couple were childless and Matilda then headed back to her father, whom she hadn’t seen since she was packed off to Germany at the age of eight as the emperor’s intended bride. (Obviously she didn’t marry him when she was eight. That would have been barbaric. They waited until she was twelve.)
Not long after Matilda’s return, Henry took, for the time, a rather eccentric decision. He decided to make her heir to England and Normandy. For a woman to take on this role was unprecedented for the House of Normandy. The examples of women ruling anywhere at all were few and far between, and usually it had occurred when they were acting on behalf of a husband. There was a widespread feeling among all the powerful men of the time not necessarily that women couldn’t rule but that they wouldn’t be accepted as rulers.
But Henry, more out of an obsession with his own bloodline than any glimmer of proto-feminism, decided to name his daughter as his successor. This was in preference to several illegitimate sons, notably Robert Earl of Gloucester. Henry may have seen qualities in Matilda that made him think she’d be a more capable ruler. Despite only being twenty-three when she was widowed, she was politically experienced and had acted as her husband’s regent in northern Italy.
So Henry had a plan. His daughter, the dowager empress, would rule after him. She would secure his legacy and the immortality of his bloodline. At the Christmas court in Westminster in 1026, Henry made all of his leading barons swear an oath to support Matilda as his heir in England and Normandy. They obediently queued up and did so. In 1131 he made them do it again just to confirm that they meant it. After his fishy-breathed death in 1135, it turned out that they didn’t.
17. King Stephen
The next reign began exactly like the previous one: an opportunistic usurper raced to get himself crowned and became king as a fait accompli. The opportunist in question was called Stephen of Blois. He was the fourth son of one of William the Conqueror’s daughters, so wasn’t a legitimate king by primogeniture, porphyrogeniture or people-whose-names-begin-with-H-ogeniture.
Stephen had been knocking around Henry’s court all his life and was a charming and popular figure. He was lucky as well: he had been on board the White Ship in Barfleur before it set sail but a violent case of the shits forced him to disembark. Whatever fetid privy he settled on to once he’d hurried ashore turned out to be a far more auspicious enthronement than his subsequent one in Westminster, and made much less of a mess.
The old king liked Stephen and five years after the White Ship disaster, by which point he was pooing normally, Henry had arranged for him to marry the rich heiress to the county of Boulogne, who, like Henry’s first queen, was a descendant of the kings of Wessex. Her name was Matilda too, I’m afraid.
Matilda may be a common name for a queen at this time, but Stephen is an unusual one for a king and, to a great extent, that’s thanks to this Stephen. He’s so badly thought of that no one would touch that regnal name with a sterilized sceptre thereafter. For a king’s name to catch on, you need one or two successful ones to get it going. There are quite a few Williams and Henries, but only one Stephen and one John.
The main reason people don’t like Stephen is his rivalry with the Empress Matilda. She was clearly the person her father had wanted to succeed him. Very clearly. However, Stephen and a few others wouldn’t have admitted as much, and would have cited the schism that existed between Henry I and his daughter at the time of his death.
It was a row about some castles in Normandy that Henry was refusing to hand over to Matilda and her second husband Geoffrey, Count of Anjou – they’d been part of her dowry. Henry was probably concerned that Geoffrey would use them to try and take over Normandy. It was a classic case of an old man refusing to loosen his grip on power as much in defiance of approaching death as anything else. It seems vanishingly unlikely that this spat, coming as it did in the wake of Matilda giving birth to his first two legitimate male grandchildren, an event which delighted Henry (not that he can have smiled – maybe he gave a sombre-faced thumbs up), would have led the old king to rethink his succession plans.
There’s little doubt that Stephen was defying his uncle and mentor’s wishes when he took the throne. And no doubt that Stephen had sworn an oath, twice, to support Matilda as the next sovereign. This behaviour has gone down badly with posterity because Empress Matilda is a sympathetic figure.
A woman in a man’s world – robbed of her rights, accused by contemporaries both of lacking the traditionally male strengths to rule and of being unnatural and unfeminine whenever she displayed those strengths – but refusing to give in and let Stephen be king. All in all she’s a Crufts-winning underdog. While Stephen, a man who stole the throne and then held on to it ineffectually, is hard to like.
Except, I suspect, if you met him. He’s talked of as a very nice guy in person. Having myself once met and warmed to Boris Johnson, I’m aware of the limitations and fickleness of this attribute – but it’s interesting. Stephen’s life was defined by one opportunistic moment of colossal self-interest. But it seems likely that, had he not stolen the title of king, Stephen might have qualified for that of ‘nice man’.
Meanwhile Matilda gets called haughty. Contemporary descriptions of her personality are less reliable than those of Stephen, though. Her alleged haughtiness was probably more about the attitudes of the age: the very thing she was trying to do – be the ruler of a kingdom – was deemed by most to be unbearably haughty behaviour before she’d even opened her mouth, and the fact that she called herself empress is unlikely to have defused that impression.
The most frustrating thing about Stephen was that, despite following Henry I’s example closely in the manner of his seizing power and the promises he issued to powerful people in the realm, he then completely departed from his predecessor’s strategy of kingship. He couldn’t stick to being firm but predictable. He lacked ruthlessness and he displayed favouritism. He needed to be clear and unwavering in his conduct, vicious to those who opposed him and even-handedly generous to supporters. But he wasn’t and this created bad feeling, uncertainty, rebellion – it stoked the fires of guilt for those who’d sworn to support Matilda and sparked opportunism in those who reckoned they’d do better if the regime changed. All of this was succour to Matilda’s cause.
The conflict that this led to, when Matilda finally came over to England to pursue her claim in 1139, has been referred to by historians, since Victorian times, as the Anarchy. It won’t surprise you to hear that this term has since fallen out of favour. Apparently it’s a simplistic label. I’m sure it is, but that’s pretty much the deal with names. I’d say ‘Brian’ is a simplistic label for the guy who came to fix our washing machine, but it’s still his name. I don’t reckon we’d get to the root of the man any better by calling him Adrian.
It wasn’t nice, the Anarchy. It was a big and brutal civil war and my main feeling about it, throughout – and this must have been the sentiment of the overwhelming majority of people in England at the time – is a desperation for one side or the other to win. It really didn’t matter which, except to two people.
If Stephen had a quarter of the usurper-competence of his predecessor, Matilda wouldn’t have had a look-in and millions of people, men and women alike, would have had a much nicer time in the 1140s. It would have been so much better all round if he’d managed to secure the throne properly and there hadn’t been a civil war. It wouldn’t have been fair on Matilda, but nothing had ever been fair on Robert Curthose and, if he’d been king of England, he’d have ended up mortgaging the rivers. Justice for people who are already beneficiaries of a massively unjust system becomes difficult to give much of a damn about.
The snow empress
Oxford Castle, I felt when visiting it in the late 1980s, gives a powerful sense of incarceration. I grew up in Oxford and, as a fan of castles, it had always seemed weird to me that this otherwise extremely historical city didn’t seem to have a proper one. It had tea rooms and museums and the country’s first ever branch of Past Times. But, instead of a castle, there was just a small artificial green hill with nothing on it, that you could glimpse over the top of a tall stone wall, just down the road from Marks & Spencer’s. ‘That’s Oxford Castle,’ my parents would say. No one was allowed to go there.
The reason for this inaccessibility was, ironically, continuity of use. At that point, Oxford Castle, unlike almost every other Norman fortress, had not yet been abandoned to the elements and then tourism. When it fell out of military use in the late middle ages and its fortifications started to fall into disrepair, it nevertheless continued as an administrative centre for what became Oxfordshire county council, and as a courthouse and jail. The site had been redeveloped piecemeal over the centuries to accommodate these continuing functions.
This is what it was like by the 1980s: next to the hill, which was a Norman motte from which the stone keep had been removed in the early eighteenth century, was a building that looked very castly indeed – it was covered in arrow slits and crenellations and mini-turrets. It was protesting far too much and clearly wasn’t actually a castle. The stonework was too even and there was parking in front. It was merely castle-themed, like a Vegas casino. It was in fact the County Hall, built in 1841 in the Gothic Revival style.
Next to this, constructed in 1973, was New County Hall. This was built not in the Gothic Revival style but in a style that I pray will never be revived. I no longer have the energy to think that buildings like this are anything but ugly. Wilfully ugly: 50 per cent concrete and 50 per cent tinted glass. The sort of thing that features in the title sequence of The Office or would be the headquarters for the secret police in a cash-poor totalitarian state. It feels like the architect either wanted it to look horrible or was worse at his job than King Stephen. It’s almost penitential, the architecture of that era – a deliberate rejection of aesthetic convention which I’m now resigned to being too bourgeois to enjoy.
Speaking of the penitential, behind them all, incorporating the only bits of medieval stonework that remained above ground into a part-eighteenth-century and part-Victorian structure, was HM Prison Oxford. Brimming, I imagined at the time, with the nemeses of Inspector Morse. This was why the castle mound wasn’t open to the public – it directly overlooked the prison. Allowing people on to that hillock was deemed a security risk. My visit in the 1980s was a one-off, part of a scheme, I seem to remember, to open just for one day of the year places that were usually closed. I took the opportunity to help a couple of fraudsters to freedom.
