The Failure of the Empress, 1141-48

The Angevin reverse in London should not much have helped King Stephen in chains at Bristol castle, but somehow it did. The magnates who had gone over to the empress were not impressed by their reception at her court, and many would no doubt soon be ready to do as Bishop Henry had done. He did not return to her side after the disaster at Westminster. The empress and her closest allies could not but notice this defection, and late in July they assembled as large and as sumptuous a court as they could at Oxford, to try to reassert her prestige. Here she and the leaders of her council resolved to humble the legate, as a lesson to others, and an army was summoned to march on Winchester. The empress awaited it at Devizes in Wiltshire, and was pleased and delighted to find that Count Waleran of Meulan, Stephen’s former mainstay and lieutenant, had come to her as a humble suppliant. The count’s Norman lands had been seized by her husband, Count Geoffrey, in his slow campaign of conquest in the duchy. Rather than lose what he had in Normandy, Count Waleran chose to seek a peace with the Angevin party. Having been gloated over by his delightful adversary, he sailed back home. This was probably the one of the last moments of satisfaction the empress was to enjoy in England, for when, in August 1141, her army moved to confront Bishop Henry in his fortified palace of Wolvesey in Winchester, she found him intransigent. Within days, she set her troops to begin a siege of the palace, and immediately lost the Church’s support. She also opened the way to her own military disaster, for she had overreached herself and taken up an untenable military position. Queen Mathilda and William of Ypres skilfully moved their own army to cut off the empress’s force in Winchester, and on Sunday 14 September she and Earl Robert unexpectedly found themselves trapped, as her fair-weather supporters (Ranulf of Chester among them) bolted for safety.

With the city of Winchester in panic and her army disintegrating, and with the garrison of Wolvesey sallying out into the streets in pursuit, the empress and her bodyguard attempted to make a break for freedom out of the city gates before the trap closed. Although the empress made it, it was at the cost of the capture of Earl Robert, who defended the causeway over the River Test at Stockbridge to give her time to escape. He was taken prisoner by the young and gallant Earl William de Warenne of Surrey. Earl Robert was taken to Rochester castle in Kent for safe custody. The empress and her party had no other choice but to negotiate for his release, and the only bargaining lever they had was the king. Some attempt was made to revive ideas of a peace settlement: Countess Mabel of Gloucester apparently proposed to Queen Mathilda that one solution would be that the king resumed his throne, but that the government should be entrusted to her husband. If that was suggested, it was not accepted, and in the end a simple exchange was arranged, with elaborate safeguards and the delivery of hostages. On 1 November rr4i the crossover was managed at Winchester. King and earl had time for a few polite words as the hostages were handed over, and Earl Robert is recorded as explaining to Stephen that his opposition to him was nothing personal but a stand on principle.

Stephen was once more king in other than name. His brother the legate arranged a church council in London in December to reassert Stephen’s kingship in a public forum; for good measure, and to show he was back, he excommunicated the entire Angevin party, apart from the empress herself. The king then moved on to loyal Canterbury where he held his Christmas court and reappeared with his queen in state, enthroned and wearing golden crowns placed on their heads by Archbishop Theobald. But it was not quite so easy to erase the effects of the best part of a year in captivity. Devon and Cornwall, and most of Normandy, had fallen to the Angevins, and could not be easily recovered. Stephen had suffered an intolerable strain: a chained prisoner, but still a king who was obliged to appear affable and poised before others. This had its effects in what seems to have been a long period of nervous prostration which began soon after Christmas. In the new year he did Little campaigning, although he began preparations for the assembly of a powerful army in the north. But on 7 June 1142 he suffered a total collapse in health, and stayed ill and listless in Northampton till the end of August. His enemies were much in hopes of his death. At the end of summer, however, Stephen was well again, and had found some new direction. First he appeared suddenly in Dorset, where he seized the Angevin party’s chief port of Wareham, cutting a major link with France. He then swung north, coming upon the outer defences of Oxford from an unexpected direction, and on 26 September 1142 burst through the town defences and drove the garrison into the castle. His speed was such that there was no chance to hustle the empress away, and she was trapped in Oxford castle, which was closely blockaded.

King Stephen could hardly believe his luck; the symmetry of events could not be bettered. There was no possibility of relief for Oxford castle, and the king had no longer any compunction about taking the empress prisoner. Earl Robert of Gloucester was abroad in Normandy, and no other sympathetic magnate had the authority (or apparently the inclination) to break the blockade. Meanwhile the king and his forces camped safely within the heavily fortified borough to the east of the castle, and drew a tight cordon around it. The siege lasted for over three months. Even when Earl Robert reappeared on the south coast at the end of October, he was unable to find the resources to break it. Yet the empress escaped - with the aid of sympathisers in the royal army, some said. She slipped out of Oxford castle on a night in mid December when snow was heavy on the ground and the river courses west of the castle were frozen solid. With an escort of a few knights, all wrapped in white cloaks, they found the Abingdon road and refuge in the abbey, from which they headed south to friendly Wallingford castle the next day. When King Stephen heard that his chance to capture his rival was gone, he philosophically allowed the castle to surrender on easy terms. He was a man of real nobility, as even the twenty-first century understands it.

The civil war limped on. If the king ended 1142 on a height of prestige, the next year saw him plunged back into the depths. Having secured Oxford, and thrown back the Angevin cause across the Cotwolds once again, the king planned to restore his control over Dorset and Wiltshire and link up with his surviving supporters in Somerset. He was busy setting up a campaign headquarters at the nunnery of Wilton in the early summer before unleashing a major assault on Salisbury. As the sun was setting on i July 1143 and the royal household troops were settling into their bivouacs, the king’s men were surprised by a preemptive assault. King Stephen and Bishop Henry were hustled away by their guards and escaped in the dusk, but the king’s friend, William Martel, was captured as he covered his master’s flight. The royal army was scattered and its supplies seized. It was a more serious blow to Stephen than might appear at first sight. To secure his friend’s release, the king had to surrender his principal fortress west of the River Test, Sherborne. His barons refused to support a further campaign west of Hampshire, and so the whole region was perforce conceded to the earl of Gloucester. Surviving royalists in the south west sought a truce, and the king did not return to the region until the last years of his reign, after the war was over.

Wilton was not the sum of Stephen’s problems in 1143; he compounded it with a serious political misjudgement. At the end of September at St Albans, he bowed to pressure from an envious court faction and arrested the earl of Essex, Geoffrey de Mandeville. Earl Geoffrey was an unexceptionable royal servant, with a wide network of political and family connections, who had been Stephen’s principal agent in the government of Essex, Middlesex and Hertfordshire since the beginning of the reign. He had been well rewarded with an earldom and many privileges. Although he had temporised with the empress when she finally reached Westminster in 1141, he had abandoned her before Winchester and joined Queen Mathilda’s army. The charges against him were that he was plotting with the king’s enemies, and he was seized on these specious grounds and not released till he handed over his castles. As soon as he was free again, he gathered his friends and allies and began a private war on the king. He did not - and this is noticeable - declare for the empress; he dearly saw no point in that. Until August 1144, Geoffrey excluded the king from the fenland areas of Huntingdonshire and Cambridgeshire. He used this debatable land as a secure base for raising funds on surrounding villages and monasteries, and for attacking the possessions of his enemies at court, until he was struck down by an arrow while blockading a castle near Newmarket. He died a month later, on 26 September 1144.

King Stephen was by 1144 in a situation of political and military stalemate. Many of his greatest earls were alienated from him, and from relying too much on the support of a single noble faction (Count Waleran and his allies till ri4i) he had veered towards relying too much on the support and advice of a clique of greedy household servants. He was unable to raise sufficient support for major campaigns, and for several years after rr43 he was forced to scale down his military activity to annual initiatives intended to force a route into the vale of Gloucester, and so threaten the central Angevin fortress of Gloucester itself Securing Gloucester would force a wedge between the two principal Angevin-inclined earls of Gloucester and Hereford (Miles of Gloucester had secured the earldom in rr4r). Earl Robert, for his part, was even shorter of support and resources, and was forced back gradually on the defensive. In ir45 even his family turned against him, when his son Philip defected to the king. The civil war was now being fought in a narrow cockpit of the upper Thames valley. Elsewhere, local concordats had begun to eliminate military activity and brigandage. However, constant and dogged pressure brought the king some advantage. By ri46 he had edged forward to within striking distance of Gloucester, which was a significant accomplishment given his circumstances. As a result, the Angevin party agreed to a peace conference, at which the empress was represented by another of her half-brothers, Earl Reginald of Cornwall. Nothing came of it, but it is significant that it happened.

The beginning of the end of the civil war occurred in 1147. It was a curious year. Henry, the son of the empress, now aged fourteen, arrived unannounced in England in March with a small force of mercenaries which he had duped into following him. After an incompetent few weeks of campaigning in the north of Wiltshire, the young man found his men mutinous and his mother and uncle unwilling to lend him money to pay them. So Henry asked the king, his cousin and his enemy, for the cash, and (it is said) King Stephen sent him funds to pay off his men and go back home. Other than that, the desultory campaigning in the Thames valley continued. It was in building up yet another offensive in October 1147 that Earl Robert fell ill and, on the last day of the month, died at Bristol in his late fifties. The empress did not stay in England for longer than four months after Earl Robert’s death. There was no one of sufficient authority and commitment to fill his place of leadership.

In mid February 1148, the Empress Mathilda gave up her ambition to be queen, and it seems informed all her former partisans that they should instead support her eldest son, Henry. It is the measure of her failure that her departure was not noticed by any contemporary chronicler. When she went, the civil war effectively ended.

The empress did not disappear into obscurity. She retired to Normandy to be reunited with her husband after nearly a decade of separation; medieval political marriages were punctuated by such absences. By 1149 she had made her permanent home outside Rouen on the left bank of the Seine, at the palace-priory her father had constructed at Notre-Dame-du-Pre. It was a residence comparable to King Henry’s other palace-priory at Dunstable, a royal place of retreat from London. Like her mother at Westminster and the other Mathilda, Stephen’s queen, at Canterbury, the empress lived in gracious and respectable seclusion. She was withdrawn from court life, yet at the same time in close contact with it. Messengers and suppliants passed to and from the city and her own establishment. She assisted them by sponsoring the building of the first stone bridge across the Seine at Rouen, the ‘Pont Mathilde’. From Notre-Dame-du-Pre she monitored the great events of her day: her son’s succession to Normandy; his acquisition of Aquitaine by marriage; the settlement of the succession of England; and the first years of a new royal dynasty. She was perfectly capable of asserting herself in the new Angevin world, and her son is said to have consulted her regularly. She issued a writ from Normandy to the sheriff of Hereford to protect the lands of her father’s abbey of Reading, for instance. She was particularly active in Norman affairs, where her son seems to have conceded her the right to oversee the duchy’s administration. She sat as justice in a number of known cases. She maintained her own court with clerks and knights, and the outer court of her palace at Notre-Dame-du-Pre must have been as busy a place as that of any prince.

The empress remained active politically to the end, but took care to prepare her own memorial and departure from the world, so it is likely she developed a long-term illness that turned her mind to her mortality. She died on 10 September 1167, and was buried with sumptuous ceremony before the high altar of the Benedictine abbey church of Le Bec-Hellouin, in its gentle and wooded valley south of Rouen. Bee was the mother house of the priory of Notre-Dame-du-Pre, and she had Made her intention to be buried there know as early as 1134. Her tomb received the famous, if toadying, epitaph:

Great by birth, greater by marriage, greatest in her offspring,

Here lies the daughter, wife and mother of Henry.

Her tomb was damaged by a fire which swept through the abbey in 1263, and smashed (ironically) by English soldiers invading Normandy in 1421. Her body was rediscovered in 1684, then lost when Bee’s abbey church was levelled by the Revolution. It was rediscovered again in 1846. Her remains now lie in the cathedral of Rouen, which was the place her father had selected for her burial when she was apparently near to death in 1134. The final resting place of the last of the Norman line is therefore where the first of the Normans was also laid. The symmetry of this was not lost on the nineteenth-century Norman historians who lobbied for her to lie there, rather than amongst the French kings at St-Denis.