The Succession Crisis That Tore England Apart

Following the death of Henry I, medieval England was plunged into a civil war that reduced the country to a charred ruin. With the barons split between rival claimants, the people suffered. Stephen (left) and Henry II, from Les Roys de Engeltere, Anglo-Norman manuscript, late 13th century. © British Library Board. All Rights Reserved / Bridgeman Images In the summer of 1153 a broken man agreed to disinherit his son, in order to end a war that had splintered England into pieces for 19 years. The English reign of King Stephen (1135-54) was a disaster from start to finish, a time of such chaos that it was later dubbed ‘the Anarchy’. The background to the conflict is well known: Henry I, having lost his only legitimate son in the wreck of the White Ship in 1120, named his daughter Matilda as his heir. She was at the time residing in Germany as the wife and consort of Emperor Henry V, but his early death in 1125, leaving Matilda childless, allowed her to return to Normandy and then England in order to position herself as heir to the English throne in her own right. Designating a woman as his successor was such an unprecedented action that Henry felt obliged to compel his nobles, barons and churchmen to swear an oath of allegiance to Matilda. All of them did so, although some complied with greater reluctance than others. Henry’s death in December 1135 cannot really be classed as unexpected, given that he was in his late sixties at the time, but it was sudden enough that Matilda was not at his bedside and did not even know of it for at least a couple of weeks, by which time her cousin Stephen (a younger son of Henry’s sister Adela, dowager countess of Blois) had rushed to England, seized the royal treasury and had himself crowned. There was barely a murmur from any of those who had sworn to uphold Matilda’s hereditary rights, which was entirely due to her being female: had Henry left the crown to a 33-year-old, intelligent, well-educated, politically experienced son, such a situation would not have arisen. Hampered by pregnancy – her third by her second husband, Count Geoffrey of Anjou – and a lack of means, Matilda could at first do nothing about Stephen usurping the throne. However, after a couple of years she was able to marshal her resources, aided by the defection to her cause in 1138 of her illegitimate but rich and powerful half-brother Robert, the earl of Gloucester. She sailed for England in September 1139, and the first active phase of the war began. No king – or queen regnant – could rule without the support of the nobles and barons, and to begin with there was a stark divide. On Matilda’s side were those magnates who had been Henry I’s loyal men and who wished, however belatedly, to carry out his wishes by installing her on the throne as his only surviving legitimate child. Against them were those who preferred Stephen as a known (and, crucially, male) quantity. The nobles on both sides were also, of course, motivated by the prospect of personal gain: as and when their candidate was successful, they could expect to be rewarded for their loyal service. And stuck in the middle of all this was the population of England, the families who tilled the land, manufactured and traded, and who also paid taxes and were liable to be called up to fight for their local lords whether they liked it or not. The sinking of the White Ship from Peter Langtoft’s Chronicle of England, early 14th century. Pictorial Press Ltd / Alamy Stock Photo. King or queen? The first hint of a swing away from Stephen was caused by the king himself. In the four years he had been on the throne, Stephen had proven himself ineffective, spending much of his time rushing up and down the kingdom quelling small-scale revolts, and then showing such undue leniency that it simply encouraged further dissent and gave his supporters less confidence in him. The most pro-Stephen of the contemporary chroniclers put this down to the king’s desire ‘to settle all things in the love of peace and concord rather than encourage the schism of discord in any wise’, but another noted baldly that ‘he did not execute punishment on those who had betrayed him’, and that this undue clemency would come back to haunt him. Matilda, in contrast, proved herself more tenacious than anyone expected. Her campaign did not fizzle out almost immediately, as some f her opponents had hoped or expected; rather she gained ground, consolidated and prompted a number of defections. Some of this at least was due to her personal qualities – her original supporters might have been Henry I’s loyal men, but they would not have stayed with her, and others would not have joined her cause, if they did not admire her character. There was also a shift in political momentum. The longer Matilda’s campaign went on, and the more she destabilised Stephen’s kingship, the greater was her chance of winning the crown, which in turn meant that it was advantageous for the barons to be on her side and to be seen to be there. The pivotal moment came in February 1141, when Stephen’s army was defeated at the Battle of Lincoln and the king was captured and imprisoned. It was at this point that the most high-profile defection of all occurred: Stephen’s own brother Henry of Blois, the bishop of Winchester, switched sides and declared Matilda ‘Lady of the English’ before her expected coronation as queen. With Stephen seemingly permanently out of the picture, his supporters were forced to reconsider their priorities. However, even such a decisive military victory was not enough to overturn a genuinely deep-seated prejudice against a female monarch. Matilda now became the subject of even more unfavourable attention, particularly from the hostile author of the Gesta Stephani (Deeds of Stephen), who offered some explicitly gendered criticism. He tells us that Matilda: at once put on an extremely arrogant demeanour instead of the modest gait and bearing proper to the gentle sex, began to walk and speak and do all things more stiffly and haughtily than she had been wont … she arranged everything as she herself thought fit and according to her own arbitrary will. The double standards are evident when we consider that all of this would sound ludicrous if aimed at a man who had been proclaimed king, but in the context of the time the criticism did its job: Matilda was chased out of London and her chance of coronation had gone. King Stephen on his throne, from Peter Langtoft’s Lament of Edward II, c.1315. © British Library Board. All Rights Reserved / Bridgeman Images. Battle of the spouses The person doing the chasing was Queen Matilda, Stephen’s wife, and this illustrates the important point that the English monarchy in the 12th century was hereditary and dynastic: the king did not stand entirely alone but was supported by family and (in theory at least) everyone knew in advance who was going to be wearing the crown next. In this familial respect both major protagonists had advantages and disadvantages. Each had a spouse, and Stephen’s wife, Matilda of Boulogne, was his greatest asset. She was a queen in the traditional mould: supportive of, and subordinate to, her husband, capable of emerging from the shadows to act decisively when necessary – as she did now in taking up arms and pursuing Matilda out of London – but happy to fade back into them afterwards. This is why the same author who criticised Empress Matilda for her lack of feminine behaviour could, without apparent irony, praise Queen Matilda as ‘a woman of man’s resolution’: she was acting purely to support her husband, even though she was being so ostensibly unfeminine as to give orders that her troops ‘should rage most furiously around the city with plunder and arson, violence and the sword’. Matilda’s husband, Geoffrey Plantagenet, in contrast, was unpopular. As count of Anjou he had always been seen as an antagonist by the barons of Normandy, who were in large part also the barons of England. Moreover, there was great uncertainty over what his role would be if Matilda were to be crowned – would he be the king of England jure uxoris, in right of his wife, in the same way that a nobleman could marry an heiress and become an earl in her name? Or was he merely a military commander acting on her behalf, in which case his subordinate status to his wife was against the natural order? As it happened, Geoffrey appeared to show very little interest in Matilda’s claims in England, preferring instead to wage a dogged and effective campaign to conquer Normandy – a long-held ambition of his own but one he could now attempt with a clear conscience as he was married to the hereditary duchess of Normandy. Perhaps inadvertently, this proved useful: it kept Geoffrey well away from England and any potential complications there, and it also weakened Stephen’s position in the duchy, making him less popular with magnates who held lands on both sides of the Channel. It would make their lives easier if they had only one overlord in England and in Normandy, so Geoffrey’s successes in the latter, during the mid-1140s, made Matilda a more attractive prospect in the former.