Gone Medieval - Matilda: Empress, Queen, Warrior

Episode Date: June 4, 2022

To celebrate the Queen’s Platinum Jubilee, Matt Lewis revisits the fascinating story of Empress Matilda who came within a hair’s breadth of being crowned England’s first Queen regnant in the 12th century.Sent away aged eight to match with the Holy Roman Emperor, Matilda represented status for her father and money for her intended. However, Matilda was independent, intelligent, educated and authoritative. Join medieval historian Dr. Catherine Hanley as she takes Matt through the early life of Matilda, her ascension to Empress and her changing position in the succession to the English throne.For more Gone Medieval content, subscribe to our Medieval Mondays newsletter here. If you'd like to learn even more, we have hundreds of history documentaries, ad free podcasts and audiobooks at History Hit - subscribe today! To download, go to Android or Apple store.Join the History Hit Book Club in time for the June and July read of Charles Spencer's, The White Ship. Become part of a community of readers who are passionate about history and its thrilling lessons. Members read a new book every 2 months, and get a £5 Amazon voucher towards the cost of the book, as well as exclusive access to an online Q&A between History Hit presenters and the author in the second month. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

From long-loss Viking ships and kings buried in unexpected places to tales of murder, power, faith, and the lives of ordinary people across medieval Europe and beyond. Join me, Matt Lewis, Dr. Eleanor Jarniger, and some of the world's leading historians as we bring history's most fascinating stories to life only on history hit. With your subscription, you'll unlock hundreds of hours of exclusive documentaries with a brand-new release every week exploring everything from the ancient world,

to World War II. Just visit historyhit.com forward slash subscribe. Welcome to this episode of Gone Medieval. I'm Matt Lewis. This week, to celebrate the once-in-a-lifetime moment of the platinum jubilee of Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II, we thought we'd have a dig around in our archives and bring you an episode that relates to this moment. Now, the link might be a little bit tenuous, but it works as an excuse to revisit this amazing and fascinating episode. Empress Matilda came within a hair's breadth of being crowned, Lady of the English, and becoming the first Queen Regnant of England in 1141.

Instead, the kingdom would wait another four centuries for that moment. In this episode, originally released in May 2021, I was joined by the wonderful Kath Hanley to talk about Empress Matilda's life, her struggle for the throne, and what followed her setback in 1141. I hope you have a fantastic Jubilee weekend. Sit back and enjoy learning the story of a 12th century woman who would be a king in the company of Kath Hanley. Great to have you here with this, Kath, to give us some insights on Empress Matilda. Hello, I'm very glad to be here.

Kath has written a biography of the Empress, and no doubt will have lots and lots of fascinating stories to tell us about her. So if you could start off, Kath, Kath, with an idea of who Matilda was and where she fits into the medieval period in England. Matilda was born in the year 1102, and this was a time that was very, very interesting and also potentially unstable in English politics. So the Norman dynasty obviously has been on the throne of England for nearly 40 years by this stage and is fairly safe. There's not really much danger of an Anglo-Saxon revival by this stage. The instability comes from the fact that it wasn't quite clear which member of this Anglo-Norman dynasty should be. sitting on the throne. Matilda's father, Henry I, had only been king for about 18 months at the time of her birth, and he had come to the throne in what we might choose to call slightly

unorthodox circumstances. And he had a living elder brother, whom we know as Robert Kurt Hose. Now, in the year that Matilda was born, Robert Kurt Hose actually became much more of a threat because his son was born in the same year as Matilda, his son called William. Everyone in this story, by the way, is called either Matilda, Henry or William. We tend to call Robert's son William Clito. Matilda, obviously, was a girl. So Henry I would have been quite keen to have a son as well. And he and his wife welcomed a son who inevitably was called William

the following year in 1103.03. So we have these three children who were all kind of almost the same age. And Matilda is probably, I guess, the least important by virtue of the fact that she's a girl at this point. Yes. In dynastic terms, yes, she's very much the least important. And it did look for quite a while as though any potential struggle over the English throne was going to be an all-male affair, Henry and his son and Robert and his son. And Matilda would have little to do with it because, of course, Henry I had other plans for her. Henry, as is traditional, sees his daughter very much as a pawn in his dynastic games and his building of a dynasty for himself. And he manages to, or actually he's approached by someone incredibly important and prestigious for the English crown. Yes, this was the emperor Henry V, another Henry, who was the emperor of what we now call it the Holy Roman Empire. But at the time, it was just kind of known as the Empire.

Now, he had kind of almost the opposite problem to King. We'll call them Emperor Henry and King Henry, because otherwise we're going to get confused. Emperor Henry had kind of almost the opposite problem to King Henry, in that he was of a dynasty that had been on the imperial throne for some time. He was stable. That was all fine. He was very, very short of money. And money was something that Henry, King Henry, was quite flash with. So the idea of an alliance between them was useful to them both.

It was useful for King Henry because he possibly not very secure on his throne would secure an alliance with somebody who is very, very important and powerful. Emperor Henry would get not only a wife, but a big pile of cash. And both of them would be able to work together to counter the increasing threat of the king who was located geographically in the middle, which was Louis Iq, the 6th of France. So this is kind of a win-win situation for everybody, possibly except Matilda, who had no say in any of this at all. And at a very young age, is packed off away from England. Yes.

At the time when the betrothal was made, she was seven years old. Now, that's actually not all that unusual. But yes, she was then packed off in February 1110 when she had just passed her eighth birthday. So to be sent away not only from her family, but her country sent to a foreign land to a foreign speaking land, to marry a man who was 15 years older than her and whom she'd never met. You know, nowadays, we'd call that trafficking, I think. Yeah, you know, it's difficult because women like or children like Matilda don't necessarily leave an impact on the historical record. But it's not hard for us to imagine what must have been going through an eight-year-old girl's mind.

I'm sure she was brought up knowing that she was going to be used as a pawn for political alliances and things like that and maybe understood that that was her lot. But still, for an eight-year-old girl to be sent away to a place she didn't speak the language, she didn't know anybody, it's not difficult to imagine how terrifying that must have been. Yes, precisely, precisely. I mean, to a certain extent, yes, we have to look at it through this 12th century lens and that she would have been brought up being told, you know, you're going to be sent away to get married. but she might not have expected to be sent so far, and she almost certainly wouldn't have expected it to happen so soon. So betrothals, the promise of marriage, were often made between families on behalf of children,

but actual weddings. I mean, Matilda's wedding didn't actually happen straight away. She was sent to Germany at the age of eight, and by virtue of her betrothal to the emperor, she was then crowned, Queen of the Romans, but they didn't actually marry until four years later. But even then, she was still a couple of weeks short of her 12th birthday when the actual wedding happened.

And I guess all of that rush is maybe partly due to those benefits that her father and her husband to be saw in the arrangement. So Emperor Henry is keen to get his hands on the money. King Henry is keen to get his hands on the prestige, and Matilda is just pushed into it. Exactly, exactly. You know, a betrothal is, yes, it's meant to be a promise to be married, but a betrothal was relatively easy to break, whereas a marriage wasn't.

So, yes, she was forced into this marriage. And I think what this probably instilled in her was, again, it's very difficult. You know, we can't really second guess how people felt, you know, in inverted commas, that long ago. But if I had to guess, I would say that this probably instilled in her a great sense that she was sort of on her own and that the only person she could rely on was herself. I mean, she was forced to be very independent from a very young age. And actually, when she arrived in Germany, we have several records from German chroniclers,

who were at the Emperor's Court at the time. And she seems to have kind of taken to it, almost like a duck to water. She had a very, very thorough education. The Emperor was determined that he wanted a well-educated wife, a woman who was going to be a consort in the best sense of the word, okay, not just some woman who was going to be the mother of his children. Yeah, and I guess it's important to say having, you know, made out that the two Henrys were just using Matilda in the middle of all of this, that Emperor Henry, as far as we can tell, was actually nice to Matilda, he didn't mistreat her at all. He did see her very much as a consort, a help me, to companion, somebody he relied on, somebody he trusted.

and the beginning of this was to make sure that obviously because she was so young when she arrived that she had a very thorough education. She was at least trilingual in Anglo-normal French, middle high German and Latin. She had an in-depth grounding in politics, national and international relations. You know, this was a very thorough education because the emperor would expect her to act on his behalf whenever he was away. So he rolls over this massive area. It's what we would now call all of Germany, the northern half of Italy, plus bits of sort of Switzerland and Austria, and then right round and the low countries.

And, you know, it's huge. And he can't be in all of this at once. So was the role of a consort within the empire significantly different from a consort within England, so would it have been different to what Matilda might have been growing up in the first eight years expecting? Well, actually, in England, Queen Edith Matilda, who was Henry the first wife, was renowned for her, not only her piety, but her political acumen as well. And King Henry happily left her as his regent in England whenever he was in Normandy, so similar sort of problem. So Matilda, our Matilda, would have seen that growing up. You know,

medieval women were noble women and royal women were routinely expected to be authoritative, capable, intelligent, political actors. But the crucial thing was that it was only really accepted if they were doing it on behalf of a man. They might act as regents for their husband or their son or something like that. And the male magnates, nobles around the the place would accept being told what to do by a woman because she was the representative of the authority of her male relative. And that's something that is going to be very, very important in Matilda's later career. Yeah, I was going to say it's kind of a blurred line, but it's also very definite where

female power can and can't be operated. I think people, particularly in England, seem to have a very clear idea of what they expect and don't expect from a woman. and as you said, Matilda's going to have experiences of that in the future. But in the empire, she's kind of given the feeling that she is entitled to wield all of this power, even if it's only on behalf of the emperor. Yes, exactly. And she proved that she was perfectly capable of doing so,

because as the years went by, the amount of authority that Emperor Henry invested in her grew. And I think this comes particularly to the fall when Henry is forced to head off down into Italy to obtain an inheritance that he's been left, and Matilda has a real exposure to wielding power in her own right, almost in Italy during that episode. Yes, that's correct. So they head over to Italy where Henry has inherited the lands of a woman called Matilda, unsurprisingly,

Matilda of Canossa. Now, Matilda of Canossa, the Countess of Tuscany, was an extremely well-known figure of female authority. So again, another example for our Matilda to look at how she'd run her own counties. So she journeyed over the Alps. They got this inheritance and then they went to Rome. Now, Emperor Henry had already been crowned emperor several years before. But Matilda at that stage had not because she was still being educated in Germany.

But this time Matilda was with him. So they were going to take the opportunity to have her crowned. There's kind of a degrees of being crowned in the Holy Roman Empire, isn't there? So the ultimate is to be crowned emperor or empress by the Pope in Rome. Yes, you start off being crowned as king or queen. Well, they called it king of the Romans, even though it was in Germany, which is a little bit confusing. So Matilda was already by this point a crowned queen. She had already been crowned and anointed as queen of the Romans.

So nobody could take the title queen away from her. But obviously, Empress is kind of a promotion. They intended because he was the emperor. She needed to be the Empress. And the crown of the empire, the coronation ceremony, could only officially be carried out by the Pope. So in order to be crowned emperor or empress officially, the crown has to be put on your head by the Pope.

Unfortunately for Matilda, Emperor Henry was in dispute with the Pope at this time. And as soon as he saw them coming to Rome, He kind of exited the other way. And so they arrived in Rome, and Matilda was crowned, but the person who put the crown on her head was the Archbishop of Braga rather than the Pope. So people who either didn't like her or who had a political or any other reason to dislike her would always claim that this coronation had been invalid. And indeed, in German records, for an emperor Henry's reign, she is generally still referred to as the queen of the Roman. officially. But, you know, she was the wife of the emperor. She'd been crowned in Rome. So this was enough

for the Anglo-Norman writers and indeed herself and all her family to use the title Empress, which she hung on to. It conferred authority. Although it's, you know, the female version of the title, it's Empress rather than Emperor, you were still anointed by God, you were still God's chosen, you know, that kind of thing. So it conferred this authoritative. authority. Quite soon after this happened, Emperor Henry had to go back to Germany, but he left Matilda in Italy as his regent. So here she is. She's 16 years old and she's ruling Italy on behalf of her husband. You kind of wonder at 16 whether that line of, as you say, she's the other side of the Alps in Italy, does she feel detached enough from the emperor to start to feel like

she's wielding power in her own right? Or do you think she was pretty? clear about the fact that she was only there as a husband's wife? I think at this stage she was probably quite clear that she was only there as a husband's wife, but I don't think she was overawed by this at all. I don't think she was sitting there wishing that he would come back to take charge. I think she was perfectly fine with going, off you go, Henry, and I'll sort this out. Now, this situation ran for a little while, But of course, the other really main concern for the emperor was that he needed an heir. And of course, having the emperor in Germany and the empress in Italy is not going to do much for this situation.

So she was summoned and she went back to Germany. But they didn't have any children. So when Emperor Henry died, which he did in 1125, and he was only 38 at the time, we think from descriptions of the symptoms he probably had cancer. So when he died, Matilda was left as a childless widow. Which is a precarious position. So where did she see her future remaining in the empire at this point? It's obviously where she's effectively grown up and spent most of her formative years by this point.

Yes, by this stage she is a German-speaking woman. We know now if you move to a foreign-speaking country at the age of eight, you grow up fluent in that language. Now, yes, she could have stayed in the empire and in fact, she was very popular there. She was known as the good Matilda, which, you know, compared to a lot of medieval epithets, is quite a good one. But none of the options available to her were what she wanted. Okay, she could have got married to somebody else, but anyone she could have got married to in Germany is going to be a bit of a step down after emperor, isn't it? And she could have retired quietly to her dour estates and lived quietly, or she could have done what a lot of royal widows did and go to a nunnery,

either just to live there or to take holy orders. She's 23. You know, she's not ready to retire yet. Yeah, and you wonder whether she's had a taste of some of this power and high life, and she's been educated for all of this stuff and then to expect her to drop it at 23 and retire to a nunnery and never use the skills that she's learned? Exactly. Exactly. She's just not going to do that. it would be such a waste. Events were also taking their course in England all the time that Matilda was in Germany. And from our point of view, the most important event that had happened while she was away is that her brother, William, who we call William Etheling or William Adeline, had drowned in the white ship disaster. And as Matilda and William were the only two legitimate

children of Henry I. He also had a large illegitimate family, but that's a separate question. This left King Henry very much with a dilemma about the succession to the English throne. When his son died at the end of 1120, there was no reason to suppose that Matilda, who was then 18, wasn't going to have lots of children with the emperor and her future in the empire. So Henry initially took alternative measures. He married again. because he thought he might father another son of his own, but his second marriage produced no children. And so when Emperor Henry died,

leaving Matilda as a widow with no children and no particular ties to the empire, this is not only an opportunity for her, but it's an opportunity for Henry I. Now, Henry was obviously because of the unorthodox way in which he'd got hold of the throne, he was very, very keen that he should be, succeeded on it by a child of his own. The last thing he wanted to do was to see the throne in the hands of William Clito, who was the son of Robert Kurt Ho's, and he couldn't even name William

Clito as his heir. Now, William Clito, of course, is the eldest son of the eldest son of William the conqueror, and a lot of people saw the throne as his by right. But if Henry had named him heir, this would have raised the question as to why Clito was not the king already. Or indeed, Robert Kurtos, who was still alive at this time, why they were not king and Duke of Normandy already. So this is a whole can of worms that Henry really doesn't want to open, so he would do anything to avoid naming Robert Kurthoes or William Clito as the heir to the throne. Unfortunately, other relatives are quite short on the ground. None of his other brothers had had children and only one of his many sisters had had children. So the sister that

had children was a lady called Adela, who'd married the Count of Blois, so she was the Countess of Blois. And she had four sons who were in order called William, Theobald, Stephen and Henry. Now, the eldest William had, in circumstances that were a bit unclear, been put aside by his mother at quite a young age, contemporary chroniclers say she put him aside because he was deficient, and that's the word that they use. And he was in later life known as William the Simple. So one suspects that he may have been disabled in some way that was not fully understood at the time. So he's kind of out of the picture. He lives in a sort of retirement. But that leaves Theobald and Stephen and Henry. Henry is a monk and on his way to becoming abbot and bishop and all sorts of things.

So at least Theobald and Stephen. And they were both living because their mother was very ambitious. She'd sent them to King Henry I court and where they were among the king's favourites. He'd loaded them with titles and money and things like that. But they weren't his own children. He didn't want to name one of them as heir either. So he summoned Matilda back from Germany. That must have felt a little bit like the second time she's been wrenched away from everything that she knows.

So at eight, she's left England to go to Germany to a strange place. That's become home. So going to England, I don't imagine felt like going home to her anymore. At 23, she's suddenly wrenched away from everything that she knows in Germany, all of the people, the structures, the languages even that she knows, and shipped off again somewhere strange. And she's got to start all over again. Because even the people there that she knew when she was little, you know,

she's not seen them since she was eight. You're a very different person in your 20s, aren't you? So they must have been almost like strangers. And everything was kind of strange and everything was difficult. But King Henry and Matilda spent about a year in each other's company, which would have been enough for him to get to know her and recognise her qualities. And so at the end of 1126, at his Christmas court, he declared officially that Matilda was the heir to the English.

throne. He named her as his heir. And on New Year's Day 1127, all of the barons of his court swore that they would accept her as the heir and, you know, they would swear allegiance to her and that she would be the monarch after Henry was dead. I think it's a sign probably of where Henry's at with his lack of options because this isn't something that's normal in England at this point. This would have been something, you know, I imagine the barons looking sideways at each other thinking, well, obviously we've got to do this because the king's telling us, but I'm not sure I'm overly happy about this. This was kind of a novel situation that Henry was creating out of his own urgency and desperation. That's correct, yes. And Henry I first was a king who was not only

respected, but quite a lot of people were terrified of him. He would be obeyed. He had no hesitation in ordering executions, maimings, amputations, things like that, for people who disobeyed him. And yeah, he was obeyed through the terror of his name. So nobody was going to argue with him to his face. Nobody was going to stand up in that court on New Year's Day, 1127, going, actually, sorry, you grace, I don't, yeah, I'm not going to do it. There was certainly a bit of a groundswell of sympathy for William Clito, among some of the. Barons. Now, the next thing that King Henry needed to do in order to secure the future of his line on the throne is to make sure that Matilda got married again because she's a single woman,

she's a widow, she's got no children. If she's on the throne, then this whole situation is just going to happen again in a few years' time. She needs to get married and she needs to have children. Now, widows were quite often allowed a little bit more. say in the choice of their marriage partners than unmarried girls were. But in this case, Matilda had no choice at all because the king decided that she was going to marry Geoffrey, who was the son of Count Fork the 5th of Anjou. Count Falk held the counties of Anjou and Maine, right? They are immediately to the south of Normandy, which obviously because King Henry is also the Duke of Normandy. King Henry had already tried to allow him to ally himself with the house of Enjou once,

because his son, William Adeline, had been married to Fult's daughter. But at the time William Adeline drowned, his little wife was only nine. So she was sent back to her father and clearly they weren't going to be any children or anything from there. So the alliance with Anjou had fallen through. So here is a great opportunity, thanks King Henry, to allow ourselves again. So he arranges this marriage, and Matilda was, to say the least, not very impressed with his choice. The first reason was political, okay? She's been the empress. You might at least think if you were going to get a second marriage, you might get king, you know, or somebody like that. Yeah, and so she's going to be married. Not only is Geoffrey only from a sort of provincial family, but he's not even the Count von

Ju. He's the heir to the County of Montju. And secondly, when this marriage was arranged, Matilda was 25 and Jeffrey was 13. So, you know, she's kind of very unimpressed on a personal level as well. But what can she do? What are her other alternatives? She can't just tell her father she's not going to get married because he's going to rescind the offer of her being heir to the throne. She can't go, well, actually, I'm going to go marry whoever I like

because that's not going to go down very well with the king either. and she has to decide whether she wants to ditch all of her political ambition for personal reasons, or she has to decide whether she's going to grit her teeth and put up with this personal situation that she doesn't like in order to further her political ambitions. So she grits her teeth and gets on with the marriage. Throughout June on Not Just the Tudors, we're honouring Queen Elizabeth II platinum jubilee by focusing on queenship in the 16th and 17th centuries. I'm Professor Suzanne Lipscomb, and all this month with my guests,

I'll be exploring the coronations of Tudor queens, queens in Shakespeare, queens regnant and queen's consort. Then there's the queen who ruled over the Spanish Netherlands and the female Swedish king. You heard that right. So for a month of all things, magisterial and monarchical, look no further than not just the Tudors, wherever you get your podcasts. But there is a little bit of towing and throwing at the beginning, isn't there?

Matilda spends a bit of time with Geoffrey and very quickly ends up back at Henry's door. Yeah, they didn't, well, from all we can gather, they didn't get on very well at all. I mean, there are probably many mitigating circumstances, which we haven't got the chance to go into now. But yeah, it was very, very difficult. Crushingly, almost, it was only a few weeks after Matilda had sort of lowered herself to marry, Jeffrey, that she received the very unexpected news that her main rival for the English throne, William Clito, had unexpectedly died at the age of 28. But by the time that, you know, the wedding has actually happened, it's too late. So yes, there's towing and froing and they split up,

and she went back to Normandy, still pointedly calling herself the empress, not the Countess of Anjou. A fulke had resigned the county in favour of his son by this stage, so she would at least have been Countess and not Countess in waiting. but the king basically made it clear that he was not having this and that she would have to go back and she did. When she went back to Geoffrey the second time, it was, I mean, I don't know how much of a success it was in terms of them actually liking each other, but it was a success in medieval dynastic terms in that they very quickly had two sons. Henry in 1133, followed by Geoffrey in 1134. Now, this change is the whole political situation because she's now not just a woman.

She's a woman with sons. They are Henry I, the first, legitimate grandsons. You know, this is a big, big thing. And Henry I was very pleased. He travelled over to Normandy. And one of the chroniclers even tells us he rejoiced in the company of his grandsons, which is not a verb generally used about Henry the first. I can't really imagine him, you know, playing TIG or something. But it's, you know, and so his ambition would have been perhaps that he could live, you know, maybe another 15 years and then skip the whole question of female authority and just pass the throne directly to his grandson. Yeah, I was just going to say, do you think he saw that as a real opportunity?

That was maybe the reason for marrying Matilda off so quickly. And yes, there was an alliance with Anjou, but to a, you know, a son of a count, was that Henry unable to have any more legitimate sons of his own by this point, realized that. that perhaps his best hope of getting a descendant on the throne was to skip Matilda and all of the problems that that would bring and live long enough to see a grandson take the throne. But I also wonder how Matilda might have felt about realizing that that might have been her dad's plan and that she was obviously going to be hopped over when she would have felt that she was incredibly capable

and perfectly able to do this. Well, the fact that she felt her claims on her own behalf was illustrated when Henry I died. So Henry I, if he had Hannity, had any, ambitions to live, you know, another 15 years. He didn't. I mean, he was already in his 60s by the stage, so he'd had a, you know, a fair innings by the standard of medieval kings. So he died in December 1135. Now, according to all the oaths and, you know, that everyone had been swearing, supposedly the crown should have passed directly to Matilda. But there was a lot of,

and then the barons all meeting together in little groups and, you know, what should we do? And, and all the rest of it. And there was some thought, the barons of Normandy, offered the duchy to Theobald of Blois. We don't quite know whether that also implied that he should be the King of England as well, but it was certainly a step in the right direction because he was the elder of King Henry's two favourite nephews. But by the time this had kind of even happened, somebody else, as we know, had taken advantage of the situation. Now, the whole thing about the Crown of England since 1066 was that as soon as it falls vacant, it can pretty much be seized. by anyone who's in the right place at the right time,

as long as he's got some semblance of acclaim. It's like a rugby ball loose on the field sometimes, isn't it? You just see this mad scramble for whoever can get to it first. Fortune very much favoured Stephen of Blois. So at the time King Henry died, he was in Boulogne, which just happens to be, you know, the place for the shortest crossing of the channel. He crossed the channel. He happened to get a very fair wind despite the time of year.

he rode for the Royal Treasury at Winchester because, you know, Cherchet la, big pile of cash is what you need to do if you want to be the king, where his brother Henry just happened to be the bishop to talk, you know, on his behalf. And he rode to London where he happened to be very popular with the Londoners because they needed the trade routes through Boulogne. And it was just everything went through. And he had himself crowned.

And once he's got the crown on his head, he is the king. That coronation ceremony is completely transformative, isn't it? So however good or bad your claim is, once you're crowned, you are the king, end of. Because he'd done pretty much the same thing when his own brother had died. Now, Stephen had done all of this so quickly that if you work through the dates really, really carefully, and where Matilda was and how long a messenger would have taken to get to her, it is probable that Stephen had already been crowned before Matilda even knew that her father was dead. She had been very, very ill with her previous pregnancy and birth, and in fact had nearly died giving birth to Geoffrey to the point where she and her father had had a very public conversation about where she was going to be buried.

And she was also in the fairly early stages of pregnancy. She stayed where she was and she gave birth to a third son in 1136. So now, I mean, the succession's pretty secure as far as she's got three sons. The problem is while time has been passing, Stephen has been getting more secure on his throne and people have been getting more used to the idea of him being king and she's an irrelevant. She's in the south of Normandy. Yeah, Stephen's feet are under the table and I think contrary to what people's general view of Stephen is, in his early months and years, he's reasonably successful in restoring a bit of peace to England,

dealing with the Scots threat and all of that kind of thing. So he starts to look like perhaps it was the right choice. and obviously that's going to impact Matilda's ability to then come in and say, but what about me? She's on the periphery right down in southern Normandy, both physically and politically. But, you know, it might have been really, really easy for her at that point to just kind of give up and go, well, Countess of Anjou isn't too bad. And I've got three sons, you know, we could just sort of retire here and deal with, you know,

living here, but she didn't. In 1138, she got what was pretty much the one and only stroke of luck that ever came her way, which was when her half-brother, Robert the Earl of Gloucester, defected from Stephen's cause to his. Now, just a little bit of background. We mentioned earlier that King Henry had a large illegitimate family. Robert was the eldest of these, so he was about 10 years older than Matilda. And he had always been one of Henry the first most loyal men. I mean, obviously, his position depends on it. He's a king's son, but he's illegitimate. So, you know, what else is he going to do, apart from serve the king? And he was one of the people who had taken the oath to support Matilda's rights. And it was probably because Stephen, who was,

you know, obviously having come to the throne in unorthodox circumstances, was just ever so slightly paranoid about anyone else who might have a claim. And he was very much starting to sideline. Robert of Gloucester out of things. So my own view is that, yeah, there might have been some actual loyalty to his oath, but I think Robert's decision to defect was probably more self-serving than anything else. But in any case, it really helped Matilda because he was immensely rich, and he owned lands in Normandy and in England. And this actually gave her sort of geographically a safe passage all the way from where she was to the sea and across the channel. So she left Geoffrey and her three sons behind and she got on a ship and she sailed for England.

Then obviously we move into this period of English history known as the anarchy. So effectively, it's normally referred to as a 19-year civil war, that 19-years is the whole of Stephen's reign. So if we've seen for the first few years, it wasn't necessarily civil war. and I guess there's a whole other podcast in the anarchy, but in Matilda's terms, 1141 is kind of her big year during all of that. So we have the Battle of Lincoln at the start of the year when Stephen is captured by Matilda's army, but that she gets very close to being crowned in London,

and yet it all seems to fall apart. And what do you think were the main reasons that she was unable to make her advantages stick? Well, I'm not going to be about the bush here. There was only one reason why none of this worked, and that was entirely due to her sex. It was entirely due to the fact that she was female. And this continued to dog her, if you like, when she had this great victory at Lincoln and she had Stephen in her custody and she'd been declared Lady of the English, she went to Westminster and she was, the coronation was arranged.

It was going to be, you know, the next day. but then a new player entered the game, a lady called Matilda, who was King Stephen's wife. So we'll call her Queen Matilda. Now, she went and did a load of the stuff that Empress Matilda was being criticised for. She got on a horse, she gathered an army, you know, she raised troops, she threatened violence. But because she was doing it on behalf of her captive husband, this was all fine. whereas Empress Matilda was being criticised for, you know, acting like a man and so on and so on, because she was trying to claim power on her own behalf, right?

It was she who was going to be crowned. She hadn't summoned Geoffrey, she hadn't summoned her children, the coronation was for her. And this is what, you know, kind of freaked people out, you know. A lot of, it turns out that a number of the people who'd sort of fought for her were not really for Matilda. they were simply against Stephen, and that's something different. You know, while Matilda was just like the leader of the opposition, they would say, yes, yes, we're fighting for Matilda. But once it became, you know, clear that she was actually going to become the monarch,

they sort of panicked a bit. The forces of Queen Matilda advanced on Westminster and Empress Matilda, and everyone with her were forced to flee. So she never did get the crown put on her head, which is why she's not in that official role of English monarchs. you know, that you see on tea towels and rulers and things like that. And later that year, she had another disaster when her forces were defeated at Winchester, known as the route of Winchester.

And crucially, her half-brother Robert Earl of Gloucester, who was her military commander, because she couldn't ride into battle herself, was captured. So, you know, what's she going to do? And eventually what happened was they had to organise a swap. Robert for Stephen. Stephen is freed. Robert's freed. everyone goes back to the way they were before

and the whole war's just going to go on there's going to be nothing left of England it's going to be smoking ruin and so Matilda realizes that she has to do something different and this is the point where she makes the decision to stop claiming the throne in her own name

and start claiming it in the name of her eldest son and I wonder whether you think that change it's easy I guess to see that change as a weakness admitting defeat giving up that kind of thing but is it really just an astute acceptance of political reality and realizing that her best hope to get what she really wants in the long run is to step aside herself and champion her son's claim?

Yes, I think that's entirely the best way to put it. She's, you know, following her non-coronation, she's reflected on her position. You know, if her forces have won a battle, she had her enemy in custody, she'd been acclaimed queen. If she can't get the crown put on her head in those circumstances, then it's never going to happen. Now, if she had really been this kind of haughty virago, you know, that people were going on about,

she might have just kept on stubbornly until there was nothing left of England, but she was genuinely self-aware enough to realise that this was not going to work. And so she needed to press her son's claims, because this brings us right back to what we were saying earlier about female authority and action being fine, as long as it's done on behalf of male relative. And there was just this massive sea change. I mean, it must have actually been a bit galling. You know, all those barons who couldn't stomach the rule of a woman now falling over themselves to submit to a nine-year-old boy. But, you know, she had the long game in view. She started to press Henry's claims rather than her own. As he got older and obviously became

more of a viable candidate, the barons who were absolutely sick of the war by this stage. were more and more keen to go, look, this is the right way to go, this is the acceptable compromise. Young Henry is the lawful heir, as the chronicles started to call him of Henry I. This is the way to go. Eventually there was this sort of standoff in terrible weather between Stephen's army and Henry's and the bannes. Look, look, will you both just sit down and talk about this? And the agreement was reached that Stephen would remain king for the rest of his life. but that when he died he would be succeeded not by his own son Eustace,

which is at least a different name, but by Henry. Nearly everyone was very happy with this, the obvious exception being Eustace, who went off and started to ravage East Anglia, and then in a colossal stroke of luck for Henry II, Eustace dropped dead. Suddenly, no evidence of foul play or anything, he just appears to have had some kind of seizure.

Terrible for Stephen and Eustace, but in terms of the story, and for England, a stroke of luck. Yes, and Stephen by this time was, I mean, he wasn't particularly elderly, but he was kind of a broken man. He'd lost his son, his beloved wife had already died, he spent the entirety of his reign fighting and being in dispute with people. And kind of he was just ready to give up. So although he wasn't particularly elderly, he died within the year as well.

And then we've got Henry II on the throne at the age of 21. which is ultimately the victory that Matilda would have wanted or at least the victory that she got in all of this and she's able to then, I almost wanted to say retire then as the king's mother but she's still quite active on his behalf at least at the start of his reign. Henry is also the Duke of Normandy as well as being the King of England and obviously can't be both places at once so Matilda rules Normandy for him so he can concentrate at the beginning of his reign on events in England. again, galling all this time people making a fuss about her ruling,

but now because she's doing it on behalf of her son, nobody bats an eyelid. And she goes back to being the good Matilda again, negotiating with France and the empire and everybody. But yeah, I mean, she did, you know, in one way you could say she did have the last laugh. But in other ways, I think, would she have swapped what happened? You know, her dynasty, every single monarch of England.

since that time and later Great Britain has been a direct descendant of Matilda and so she had really the last laugh but I sometimes wonder whether she would have swapped that but yes certainly we should remember her for what she actually did not just for being the daughter of Henry the wife of Henry and the mother of Henry

as is written on her tombstone it takes away from just how competent Matilda might well have been but I'm afraid we're out of time for today so Kath's biography of Empress Matilda is an absolutely fabulous read, as is her book on Prince Louis' invasion of England at the start of the 13th century around the time of Magna Carta, also a fascinating story.

So thank you very much for joining me. Kath, that's been absolutely fascinating. Thank you for having me. And thank you for listening to. If you found this interesting and like to hear more on Gone Medieval, then subscribe wherever you get your podcast from and tell all your friends and family that you've gone medieval too. While I've got you here, I would suggest giving a quick list.

to an episode of Dan Snow's history hit with Catherine Pangonis on the Queens of Jerusalem. It was absolutely fascinating discussion of female power in what was then the centre of the medieval world and Empress Matilda even gets a mention during that episode too. So I've been Matt Lewis and we've just gone medieval with history hit.