The Succession Debate

Henry Ts only biographer to date, the late C. Warren Hollister, has demonstrated how Anglo-Norman court politics between 1125 and 1135 Was fixated on the succession to the king. One very important event at the beginning of that period was the death of the Emperor Henry V, King Henry’s son-in-law. The emperor had been looking more and more closely at English affairs since the death of William atheling in 1120. It may be significant that when he had married Adeliza of Louvain, King Henry had married the daughter of one of the closest of the emperor’s associates, Duke Godfrey of Brabant. A child from the marriage would at least have continued imperial involvement in England. From 1122, following the settlement of his differences with the papacy. Emperor Henry V was increasingly drawn to the Low Countries and the North Sea coast, and Utrecht became something of a western base for him. In 1124 the emperor had mobilised an army to intervene in the affairs of northern France and support King Henry by distracting Louis VI. The emperor’s marriage to Mathilda of England had by 1125 proved childless, although there is a rumour that the empress had produced a stillborn son. The emperor’s succession to England seems, however, to have been accepted as a likely event on both sides of the North Sea until his death from cancer at Utrecht on 23 May 1125. Mathilda left Germany by the end of the year and joined her father in Normandy.

Until William Clito died unexpectedly, and without leaving children, near Aalst at the end of July 1128, the eyes of the Normans had always been on him, despite the return of the Empress Mathilda to add her claims to the succession debate. It was probably Clito’s continuing threat to the borders that kept King Henry in Normandy for much of the period after 1124. The king’s agents and informers followed his progress, and Henry had mobilised Count Stephen of Mortain and Boulogne, a favoured nephew, to coordinate opposition to Clito within Flanders in 1127. Stephen was an effective agent, channelling English money into the support of successive claimants, first William of Ypres, then, after his capture, Thierry of Alsace. William Clito’s death must have been a great relief to Henry, and the fact that no source mentions that he financed any commemoration for his noble and dispossessed nephew may say something about his attitude to him. King Henry was usually more generous than that, making grants for the souls of both his dead brothers. Orderic reports that the dying count had dictated a letter to King Henry, asking his pardon for the wrongs he did him - doubtless the consequence of his deathbed confession and penance - and asking the king to pardon his adherents. Henry is said to have done what his nephew required of him, but no more apparently.

Even before William Clito’s death, Henry had made his own choice as successor uncomfortably clear to his magnates. When his daughter returned to him in 1126, he seems to have come to the conclusion that he had but one legitimate child left and God was apparently denying him further children. Therefore he began moves to clear Mathilda’s way to the throne. Henry still had great faith in an Angevin alliance. He had been working towards it since arranging with Count Fulk a marriage between his son, William, and Fulk’s daughter, Mathilda, in 1119. Henry’s idea was not a bad one. By uniting Normandy and Anjou in an alliance, the power of Fouis VI to challenge the Anglo-Norman realm would have been diminished. For this reason, Henry mobilised all his resources of cunning and influence to thwart a marriage between William Clito and Sibyl of Anjou in 1124. When Henry was considering what to do about ensuring Mathilda’s succession, he had to give due consideration to the idea of a husband who could deploy sufficient military and political weight to assist her. There was no shortage of candidates presenting themselves in 1126. William of Malmesbury talks of a number of princes and magnates of the empire who followed the king from Normandy to England in September and made overtures to Henry for his daughter’s hand. But the king seems already to have decided that a marriage with the ruler of Anjou held out more prospects for his daughter and his realm. The bridegroom to be was a teenage boy, Geoffrey, son of Count Fulk. Fulk himself was on the brink of returning to Jerusalem to marry the heir to the crown of the Crusading kingdom.

The historian Warren Hollister locates the point when Henry made his decision about his daughter at the end of 1126, when he switched many of his political prisoners around in England, removing Duke Robert from the custody of Bishop Roger of Salisbury and into that of Earl Robert of Gloucester, the king’s eldest son. Since this was said to have been done on the advice of his daughter and her uncle, David of Scotland, the move might well be seen as a shift of power within the court and the appearance of a new group of supporters around Mathilda’s candidature for succession. In midwinter a protracted ceremony was staged when the magnates and bishops of England were required to take an oath to support Mathilda’s succession when her father died. The new Party at court had then to accept the king’s choice of a husband for Mathilda, and we at least know that Earl Robert of Gloucester and Brian fitz Count were asked for their advice. In May 1127 the former empress returned to Rouen and was betrothed to Geoffrey. A year later Geoffrey appeared in person at Rouen, and King Henry himself presented him with arms on his coming of age in a ceremony whose sumptuousness was still being recalled with wonder a generation later. The marriage followed on 17 June at Le Mans. If King Henry was resolved on his daughter’s succession to England and Normandy, then Count Geoffrey might well look forward in due course to the rim of a crown descending on his brows at Westminster. Henry of Huntingdon tells us that this was his expectation when his father-in-law eventually did die.

Unfortunately for Henry’s plan for his daughter’s succession, its most persuasive point was that he wished it to be so. In the winter of 1128 there was no one able to tell him face-to-face that it would not work. One of the main obstacles was Mathilda herself, and that for two reasons. First, the idea of a woman succeeding to the throne was an untried innovation in England. There was certainly no reason why it should not happen; had there been Henry himself would not have suggested it, and people such as King David of Scotland would not have been willing to support her. But the newness of the idea certainly did not help her cause. The other problem was the state of her marriage, which began unhappily and worsened rapidly. By the summer of 1129 relations between the young husband and the more mature wife were so cold that Mathilda packed up in haste and returned to Rouen. It seems that King Henry blamed his son-in-law for the differences, and he allowed Mathilda to live quietly apart from him in Normandy. It seems likely that it was not until his excursion outside Normandy to meet the new pope, Innocent II, at Chartres in January 1131 that Henry turned his mind to the problem of the separated couple. In the three-day festival at Chartres where the pope placed a royal crown on Henry’s head after he had prostrated himself - rather as Pope Stephen had crowned Charlemagne - it would have been surprising had the subject of the Angevin marriage not been discussed. In September 1131, at a council at Northampton, Mathilda was formally asked to return to Geoffrey. A significant point is that the same council was asked to swear faith to Mathilda as heir to her father; it was not asked to include Geoffrey of Anjou in that oath.

A contrite Waleran of Meulan was released from prison in order to swear the oath and so put the weight of his powerful family behind it. The precautions taken more than hint that one of Geoffrey’s complaints against Mathilda and her father was that the marriage promised him too little. Mathilda’s dower estates and castles on the southern Norman border had not been handed over to him, and - against all normal practice - King Henry clearly intended that they should stay under his control until he died.

Henry became a grandfather of a legitimate child when Geoffrey and Mathilda’s first son was born in March 1133 at Le Mans (the king’s eldest son, Robert of Gloucester, had presented him with a first grandson called Richard, also illegitimate, perhaps as early as 1105). At the baptism of the baby at the cathedral on the liturgically very appropriate eve of Easter, it was King Henry who lifted the baby from the font and gave him his own name. Mathilda’s second son, Geoffrey, was born at Rouen in June 1134. With now two legitimate male grandsons, the succession through Mathilda looked more assured. Anyone who objected to Geoffrey or his wife could fix their hopes on the succession of another King Henry in the future. As it turned out, there were to be problems with this optimistic outlook. The dower castles in Normandy which Geoffrey wanted handed over to him were still withheld, and he was in a mood to quarrel with the king about them. This time Mathilda joined with her husband and the disagreement led to a long separation between Henry and her, whether because she took her husband’s part or not. The other problem for Henry’s planned settlement of his realm was that he was mortal and he was not given the time to repair its defects.

The great huntsman of humanity caught up with Henry as he was himself starting a hunting expedition with his court at the ducal forest of Lyon where he had moved on Monday 25 November 1135, at a time when he and his daughter were still estranged. He had planned to go hunting on the Tuesday morning, but a sudden onset of severe illness woke his attendants in the night. He decided on the Tuesday that he was dying, and his chaplains were called to his chamber to hear his confession. Messengers flew to Rouen to summon the archbishop. On his arrival in company with the bishop of Evreux late on Thursday or on Friday, the king confessed to him again. He confessed and was absolved daily till he died. He also insisted that the archbishop impose An oath on his courtiers not to leave his corpse but to accompany it in proper state to its burial. In his last days, the disgraceful conduct of his father’s death and burial were clearly in Henry’s mind. For several days the king lingered on, attended by his eldest son, Robert of Gloucester, and a number of other important counts and barons. Earl Robert was given instruction to draw 60,000 pounds from the Norman treasury at Falaise to pay the king’s debts, distribute alms to the poor and pay off his retainers. Henry is said to have been lucid and alert for much of the time, and discussed the problems of his succession with those who were at his bedside. The best interpretation of the accounts that survive is that at the end he chose not to endorse his estranged daughter’s succession, but declared that he released his men from the oath he had forced on them, and left them free to decide who to support. This was the account of his last instructions on the succession which was presented to the archbishop of Canterbury the next week by two witnesses from the royal household, and their account was not contradicted later by the archbishop of Rouen, who had been present. Henry sank into unconsciousness on the Sunday, by which time he had received anointing and his last communion, and he died as the sun went down on 1 December 1135.

On the morning after Henry’s death, his body was borne on the shoulders of his magnates to Rouen, attended by the knights of his household and great crowds. The corpse was taken directly to the cathedral and, in a corner of the building, embalmers were put to work to try their skill at staving off decay, for the king had requested burial in England at the Cluniac abbey he had founded in 1121 at Reading. The king’s internal organs were boxed and sent for burial across the Seine at the priory of Notre-Dame-du-Pre, a dependency of Bec-Hellouin, which he had patronised in his lifetime. The rest of the body was appropriately wrapped and attended, and escorted by a company of his household by road to Caen, to rest in the choir of the abbey of St Stephen until the weather permitted its carriage across the Channel. This took four weeks. After Christmas the monks of Caen attended the bier to the quay and a party of them accompanied it across the Channel. His successor, Stephen, and the new court met the body on the coast as it landed, and the new king himself was one of those who put his shoulder to the bier as it was taken to Reading, where it arrived probably in the evening of Sunday 4 January 1136. The funeral and the burial of the body before the high altar occurred on the next day. As well as King Stephen, Henry’s widow Adeliza was present too. How many more of the king’s extensive family was present is unknown. Robert of Gloucester was certainly still in Normandy, but at least one of the king’s several sons is noted as present at the funeral by the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle. Queen Adeliza travelled up from Arundel to Reading abbey the next year too, in order to inaugurate the perpetual anniversary mass for Henry’s soul appropriately. In 1151 she made her final journey to the abbey when her body was laid beside King Henry in the abbey choir. Their bodies lay there together until the Reformation carried away Reading abbey. Henry’s descendant and seventh namesake on the throne of England signally failed to honour his memory by taking measures to preserve his ancestor’s burial place.

Such was the end of one of England’s more remarkable kings. The many chroniclers of his reign generally speak well of him, although it has been suggested that they dared not do otherwise. But there is no doubt that the peace he maintained in England and brought to Normandy was deeply appreciated, even though the cost was the imposition of a new administrative elite. He was certainly less heedlessly rapacious than his elder brother, Rufus. Condemnation of his extramarital peccadilloes was the concern of a few radical clergy and a matter of indifference to lay society, which recognised as yet no exclusive sexual union in marriage. Henry, for all his exceptional administrative and military talents, was in some ways a conventional enough medieval man. He was obliging and generous to his friends and remorseless and, on occasion, singularly cruel to those he identified as his enemies. The tenants of Waleran of Meulan captured at Bourgtheroulde in 1124 were mutilated, although the mores of the time excused them as simply following their lord’s orders. Henry made out that some of them were also royal tenants and had them blinded and castrated anyway. As a young soldier he was willing to carry out his own death sentences: he had personally hurled a man to his death at Rouen in 1090. As with the rest of his contemporaries, his preferred form of warfare was economic - which was hard on the peasants and townsfolk of the borderlands he devastated. But the abiding impressions of Henry are not of an unrestrained and hypocritical sadist. He invested heavily in the emotional Life of his official and unofficial families, and extravagantly furthered the fortunes of his children, nephews and grandchildren, who clearly loved him. His generosity even extended to his enemies; the fate of his captive brother was not in the end an unhappy one, unless enforced boredom is unhappiness. He went out of his way to discharge his pious obligations to his father, brothers and nephew. Moreover, King Henry was — unlike either of his brothers — a subscriber to the new twelfth-century culture of moral self-examination through regular sacramental confession. Although this was his first wife’s obsession, Henry came to share in it and maintained the discipline after her death, until his own. Such a man could be no monster, just a human as flawed as any other; his flaws the more noticeable because of the huge canvas on which his life was painted and the outstanding proportions of his talents.