The Succession Crisis That Tore England Apart

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. 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. 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. 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. 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. Both Stephen and Matilda had children, and this was another important factor in the struggle for the crown. Had either of them been childless it would have weakened their position considerably, because even if they were victorious now they would have no clear successor, and the current situation would only be replicated a few years down the line – something all parties were keen to avoid. Stephen had one daughter, who was a professed nun, and two sons. Eustace, his heir, was the antithesis of his affable father: erratic, violent and not much liked. Matilda had three sons, the eldest of whom, Henry, was ambitious and showed a great deal of initiative from a young age. He launched his own invasion of England in 1147, when he was only 14; it had little military success, but his audacity impressed the English barons and reminded them that Henry I did have a male heir in his direct line. Despite his ill-advised actions, young Henry suddenly became Matilda’s principal asset, and the cogs of the greatest political shift of all began to ease into motion. Wasteland By the late 1140s the war had been going on for so long that virtually everyone in England just wanted a swift end to it, regardless of the actual outcome. The common people who made up the majority of the population had seen their lands devastated, their livelihoods ruined and even their lives endangered. Their sufferings were so acute that they were remarked upon numerous times by contemporary chroniclers, who normally had little attention to spare for the lower classes. One wrote that ‘in all parts of the kingdom and country [there was] pillage of the poor, slaughter of men and violation of churches’, while another made the famous observation that ‘never before was there more wretchedness in the land … wherever men tilled, the earth bore no corn because the land was all done for by such doings; and they said openly that Christ and His saints slept’. The commoners, of course, could do little about this, but the knock-on effects soon reached higher up, with nobles unable to collect rents and consequently suffering financial losses that meant they struggled to keep troops in the field. Overall, tax revenues in England fell by a quarter during the period of the Anarchy, with the loss being put down simply to ‘waste’, and the kingdom was indeed in danger of becoming a wasteland, a charred ruin hardly worth ruling over. Ravaging the estates of one’s opponents was an accepted part of war, but in this case there was no real ‘enemy territory’: both sides were devastating the lands and the livelihoods of the people over whom they sought to rule. But as long as the barons remained split almost exactly in half, there could be no resolution; neither side was strong enough to prevail. What was needed was a decisive swing in the political momentum, and now the dynastic nature of 12th-century kingship came to the rescue. Battle of the heirs At the beginning of the war the question had been who should wear the crown now, but as the years went by an increasing concern was who would wear it next. The basic answer was the obvious one: if Stephen prevailed he would be followed by Eustace, whereas Matilda would be succeeded by Henry. Thus in pledging their allegiance to one principal or the other, the barons were also promising to support the relevant heir. The problem with this was – to simplify a little – that the popular choices for now and later were from different sides: Stephen and Henry. The initial drift of public opinion on this point soon began to solidify. Eustace was unstable and unpopular; he and his cronies seemed to enjoy the violence they had licence to create, and they ‘took and plundered everything they came upon, set fire to houses and churches, and, what was a more cruel and brutal sight, fired the crops that had been reaped and stacked all over the fields’. This did not help the livelihoods of the commoners, which in turn disadvanaged the finances of the nobles. It was a short step from there to the idea that Eustace’s royal claim was spurious, as Stephen had usurped the throne from the direct line of Henry I, and that this mistake needed to be corrected in the next generation. The younger Henry, meanwhile, was proving himself adept at gaining and retaining supporters, and this made it easier for him to be depicted as the real heir, a direct descendant of Henry I, the old king whose reign was by now being looked back on with a good deal of nostalgia. The way the wind was blowing in the late 1140s is illustrated by the hitherto pro-Stephen Gesta Stephani. Up until this point the author had always referred to Empress Matilda and Henry as ‘the countess of Anjou and her son’; now he begins to call Henry ‘the lawful heir’ to England and ceases to mention Matilda at all. This new but prevailing attitude gave the barons the get-out clause they were looking for. Henry was surely the rightful king, or at least the rightful heir, and he had the notable advantage of being male, so his claim did not carry all the attendant baggage of Matilda’s. But if hereditary principle were to hold true then he could not be the king now, because he derived his right from his mother and she was still alive. Matilda did, in fact, help her son’s cause by being self-aware enough to quit England permanently in 1148 and leave him to it, but still she existed and so technically a vote for Henry would mean ousting Stephen in Matilda’s favour. A way around this needed to be found: Henry was popular, youthful and energetic, a great contrast to the increasingly tired and ineffective Stephen, and certainly a better future prospect than Eustace. As the 1150s dawned, Henry’s cause needed just one more push. A loss of heart The end, when it came, was not the result of a great battle but rather of a loss of heart all round. Stephen’s greatest supporter was not his son but his wife, and he was devastated when she died in 1152. Then, in the summer of 1153, there was a stand-off at Wallingford – the site of much conflict over the many years of the war – at which the barons on both sides simply refused to fight. Stephen and Henry were forced to negotiate, and the outcome was one that satisfied almost everyone: Stephen would remain king for the rest of his life, but he would be succeeded on the throne by Henry, rather than by Eustace. In order to square the hereditary circle, Stephen announced at Christmas 1153 that he was adopting Henry as his son – something of an insult to Empress Matilda, but one she could live with if it meant Henry wearing the English crown. Following this agreement made at Wallingford, and the resultant Treaty of Winchester, the story of the drawn-out Anarchy ended with an almost shocking rapidity. This was principally due to Henry benefiting from two incredible strokes of luck (or, as his supporters preferred to think of it, signs of God’s favour). First, Eustace died in August 1153: suddenly and unexpectedly, only in his early twenties, but nevertheless apparently of natural causes. This removed the one major remaining obstacle in Henry’s path, for Eustace had been enraged by the agreement that disinherited him and looked set to continue the war in his own name even if his father had backed down. Nobody was even vaguely interested in raising banners in the name of Stephen’s second son, William of Blois, who had never expected to inherit the crown in any case, and who was bought off with the promise of lands and riches. Henry, who was already duke of Normandy in his own right and duke of Aquitaine by marriage, now only had to wait – and his second piece of good fortune was that he did not have to wait very long, because Stephen himself died in October 1154. Peace For the first time since 1066, the death of an English king did not result in an undignified scramble for the throne: Henry was in Normandy when the news reached him, but he took his time and did not sail until 7 December. In the intervening period there was not even a hint of dissent in England, which was ‘perfectly tranquil, out of the love and fear which it bore towards Duke Henry, whose accession to the throne no one called in question’. The 21-year-old Henry was crowned on 19 December 1154, alongside his pregnant wife, Eleanor of Aquitaine, and with a son already safely in the royal nursery. Dynastic rule in the direct line of Henry I had returned to England. Catherine Hanley is the author of Matilda: Empress, Queen, Warrior (Yale University Press, 2019).