Queens Consort (10 page)

The atmosphere at Henry and Matilda’s court was very different from the racy environment of the unmarried Rufus’s reign, and William of Malmesbury suggests that Matilda was blamed for the change. Although Malmesbury’s 1066 portrait sneers at the English for their extravagant appearance and behaviour, it was Matilda’s Englishness that was now perceived as dull. At their traditional crown-wearing at Westminster a few weeks after their wedding, Henry and Matilda were nicknamed Godiva and Godric, two unambiguously English names that would have had old-fashioned and stuffy connotations. The fact that Matilda’s first language was English may have been a positive advantage to Henry, whose own grasp of the tongue is uncertain, but French was the language of social status, of the elite, and the very fact that Matilda spoke English at all provided the snobbish with a reason to look down on her.

The difficulty of reconciling piety and the sophisticated behaviour expected of a courtier had formed part of the background to Matilda’s education at Wilton. ‘Courtly love’, the term used to describe the elegant,
mildly licentious literature that had such tremendous cultural influence in Europe from the twelfth century onwards, is particularly associated with the legend of a later English queen, Eleanor of Aquitaine, but long before Eleanor supposedly presided over her ‘courts of love’, the ideas, if not the form of the literature were being discussed in the Anglo-Norman kingdom. There are as many definitions of what precisely its ethos was as there are scholars to debate it, but in essence the genre is concerned with the idealisation of a married mistress by the poet, who worships his beloved and performs all manner of elaborate deeds in an attempt to win the merest mark (sometimes considerably more) of regard. The tradition later melds with the cult of chivalry and knightly honour, producing a romantic dreamworld of valiant knights and beautiful ladies that maintains a vague but potent grip on modern-day perceptions of medieval life. Muriel, the poetess who was particularly honoured by her burial next to the relics of the Venerable Bede at Wilton, was described in a pre-1095 poem addressed to her by Baudri de Bourgueil as a beautiful young noblewoman who eschewed marriage and wealth to devote herself to virginity in the convent. A monk poet, Serlo, wrote to Muriel praising her choice and explaining the conundrum that a lady in ‘society’ could not be both elegant and virtuous since, in a world where marriages of convenience ruled, a woman who did not take a lover would be looked down on as ill-bred or provincial. This was precisely the dilemma ritualised by the troubadour poets. Given the veneration of Muriel’s memory at Wilton, it is likely that Matilda encountered this conundrum during her training there. Much to the disappointment of the court, Matilda inclined to virtue, but the connection with Wilton and Muriel strengthens the association of Matilda with a prototype of the courtly lady who was to become such a significant cultural entity in the following centuries.

Her contemporaries may have considered her a failure in the glamour stakes, but Matilda’s intellectual legacy is satisfactorily enduring. One of her passions was architecture, and if her taste in clothes was conservatively ‘English’, the buildings she loved were uncompromisingly Norman in their awe-inspiring grandeur of scale. She has links with the abbey at Waltham, rebuilt by architects whose style was influenced by the designers of Durham Cathedral, Abingdon Abbey, Selby Abbey, Merton Priory and the church at St Albans, all either Norman foundations or rebuilt in the Norman style after the Conquest. Neither her Augustinian foundation of Holy Trinity Aldgate, of which the Queen’s confessor, Norman, was the first prior, nor her leper hospital survive, but contemporary accounts note their fashionable style and size. While ‘it is unquestionably true that
Matilda shared the Norman passion for erecting large buildings’,
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she also took an interest in projects of a more domestic scale, building the first arched bridge in England, over the River Lea at Stratford-le-Bow, where previously there had been only a dangerous ford. The bridge was endowed with land and a mill to keep it in repair and was still in use in the nineteenth century. At Queenhithe, Matilda added a bathhouse with piped-in water, along with a set of public lavatories — appealingly pragmatic, if not exactly the sort of undertaking normally associated with courtly ladies.

More conventionally, Matilda was a keen patron of music and literature, the former being among her main enthusiasms, according to William of Malmesbury. The musician William LeHarpur was given tax relief on lands granted to him by the King, and the Norman minstrel Rahere, who had performed for William Rufus, continued to work under Henry Henry himself has preserved an historical reputation for learning, his nickname, Beauclerc, attesting to his literacy, but ‘it has long been recognised that the epithet … is something of an exaggeration, and that the credit for court sponsored literary and artistic activity in the first quarter of the twelfth century belongs to Henry’s wives rather than the King himself.
¹⁸

The context of Matilda’s own literary interests is that of the ‘Twelfthcentury renaissance’, ‘the first age since classical antiquity when the intellectual emerges as a driving force’.
¹⁹
As with the later, best-known Renaissance, there is a good deal of dispute about when this new intellectual current began to flow, of what exactly it consisted and the degree to which contemporaries were aware that they were part of it, but essentially, as the cohesive concept of ‘Christendom’ emerged after the Gregorian reforms, both Church scholars and the secular elite had a ‘lively awareness of doing something new, of being new men’.
²⁰
The authority of the Church fathers was being challenged by a modern sensibility to the possibilities of analysing rationally the natural world and man’s place in it as the link between the created universe and the divine power. Christian humanism was beginning to take form. This exciting intellectual energy manifested itself in systematised administrative and canon law, a rapidly expanding interest in books and libraries, developments in vernacular literature such as the courtly romance, a sense of historical writing as a discrete genre (this particularly strongly in the new Anglo-Norman kingdom with the works of Malmesbury, Orderic Vitalis and Geoffrey of Monmouth), the development of the famous ‘schools’ at Laon, Chartres and Paris and increasing opportunities for exposure to Jewish, Arabic and Greek science after the reconquest of Toledo from the Moors in 1085.
Man’s relationship with Christ was also reconfigured, with the Saviour considered for his human as well as divine qualities, and hence a greater emphasis was placed on His suffering and sacrifice. Such radical ideas often led to accusations of heresy, but the figure of Christ as Redeemer contributed to the development of the cult of Marianism, which became a particularly dominant motif in the representation and understanding of English queenship. Anselm was one of the innovative churchmen who popularised such thinking and Matilda was also close to his pupil, Gundulph of Rochester. Gundulph revered Mary Magdalene and promoted Marianism, celebrating the Feast of the Immaculate Conception before it was universally recognised. The celebration of the women in Christ’s life highlighted a gentler, more compassionate Christianity, but Marianism also elevated the simple village girl of the New Testament to a Queen of Heaven, frequently depicted in the glorious raiments of her earthly counterparts.

While patronage and religion were closely linked, the world of international scholarship was closed to women. Latin was the official language of scholarship as well as of government and the Church, and though Matilda and her sister-in-law Adela of Blois did have some knowledge of Latin, the everyday language of the ruling class was French. So the area in which noblewomen were best able to participate in the new sensibility was that of vernacular culture. Matilda commissioned a French translation of a Latin poem, ‘The Voyage of St Brendan’, which has been described as a ‘Celtic version of the classical odyssey poem’
²¹
and is the earliest surviving example of literary Anglo-Norman. ‘St Brendan’ was performed in a cycle of three episodes at the Easter court of 1107—8. Matilda’s desire to celebrate the memory of her mother’s achievements is reflected in the eight poems written for the Queen which mention Margaret, demonstrating that contemporary writers were alert to Matilda’s interests and how best to attract her attention. Matilda was the first patron of Philippe de Thaon, who went on to work for her successors Adeliza of Louvain and Eleanor of Aquitaine, but her most famous literary association, in addition to the
Life of St Margaret
, is with William of Malmesbury, who wrote
The Deeds of the Kings of England
at her request.

Malmesbury, however, leaves a curiously unflattering depiction of the cultural ambitions of his patroness, suggesting that her desire for intellectual distinction — and the recognition that embracing new artistic developments would add to her reputation, and thus that of England — resulted in harsh management of her estates:

Her generosity becoming universally known, crowds of scholars, equally famed for verse and singing, came over, and happy was he who could soothe the Queen’s ears with his song. Nor on these only did she lavish money, but on all sorts of men, especially foreigners, that through their presents they might proclaim her dignity abroad … Thus it was justly observed that the Queen wanted to reward as many foreigners as possible, while others were kept in suspense, sometimes with effectual but more often with empty promises. So it arose that she fell into the error of prodigal givers; bringing many claims to her tenantry, exposing them to injuries and taking away their property, but since she became known as a liberal benefactress, she scarcely regarded their outrage.
²²

This is a long way from the benign image of ‘Good Queen Maud’ which pertained after Matilda’s death. Matilda was reprimanded by Anselm for her punitive taxation of her lands, which did not exempt Church properties, and her promotion of ‘foreigners’ also attracted criticism among Norman churchmen. Yet promotion of the arts was a means of remaining directly involved in the liturgy, placing as it did the tangible evidence of a patron’s generosity within the Church itself. Matilda’s presentation of a pair of bells to Chartres, or the ornate candlesticks, ‘trees of brass fashioned with wondrous skill, glittering with jewels as much as with candlelight’
²³
she gave to Le Mans, engaged her in a triple cycle of patronage between the artisans she encouraged, whose productions were the marks of her favour, the churchmen who sought that favour and the capacity of the latter to spiritualise the physical objects bestowed on them in acknowledgement of the Queen’s regard. Writing to Adela of Blois, Bishop Baudri of Dol requested an elegant cope (complete with fringe), as his return for publicising her literary discernment. In a letter to Matilda, Hildebart of Lavardin, bishop of Le Mans, declared that in offering Christ those jewelled candlesticks she was associating herself with the women who witnessed the crucifixion and brought precious spices to His tomb.

Such opportunities for patronage were especially attractive to women at a time when overt political action was a receding possibility. If the ascendance of the formalised, Latinised and thus masculinised administrative kingship for which the reign of Henry I is noted was in part responsible for this diminution in political potential for noblewomen in general, it served to emphasise the significance of a particular woman, the Queen, in her traditional role as intercessor. As new structures of government made direct, informal approaches to the King more difficult, the intimacy of his relationship with his wife made her a target for those
who wished their petitions to be heard. Once again, Matilda was able to link this form of patronage with her support for the Church, as with Henry’s charter for Westminster, which states that his donation is made ‘at the prayer of Queen Matilda’, or in the case of the nuns at Malling, who received the right to a weekly market for the love of and at the request of my wife Queen Matilda’.

Henry may have loved his wife, but he was certainly not faithful to her. He was a walking baby boom, producing over two dozen extramarital children. Matilda appears to have accepted this with equanimity, ‘enduring with complacency, when the King was elsewhere employed’, as Malmesbury discreetly put it, and it may have been that it suited her pious leanings to stop having sexual relations with her husband after she had done her duty of providing him with children — Malmesbury adds that she ‘ceased either to have offspring or desire them’. After Henry’s visit to Normandy in 1104, Matilda spent much of her time at Westminster, where eight of her twenty-two charters whose place of issue is identifiable were drawn up. Henry apparently conducted his goings-on at Wooodstock, a town there is no evidence she ever visited, which suggests a certain care for her dignity. It seems that they achieved an arrangement that was satisfactory to them both, and if Henry was sexually estranged from his wife, he continued to involve her in government. Nor did her ‘retirement’ at Westminster mean that Matilda had ceased to be publicly active. The lively, scholarly atmosphere of her London court has been noted, and when Henry departed once more for Normandy in 1106, he left the realm under her regency. Matilda herself crossed to Normandy that year, issuing a charter at Lillebonne and witnessing another at Rouen, and she may have enjoyed a private concert by Adelard of Bath, who played the cithera for her.

In 1109, Matilda participated in the Whitsun court described by Henry of Huntingdon as the most magnificent of the reign, where the contracts for the marriage of Henry and Matilda’s daughter were drawn up. In 1110, eight-year-old Princess Matilda left for Germany, to be educated at the court of her betrothed, Henry V of Germany and Holy Roman Emperor. It was a momentous marriage, validating the importance of England’s new ruling dynasty and giving young Matilda the title of Empress by which she was known for much of her life. A letter to Queen Matilda from the Emperor attests to how her influence with her husband ensured the matter went smoothly: ‘We have from experience come to know of your zeal in all those things that we ask from your lord.’