Queens Consort (11 page)

Henry was abroad again the next year, when Matilda presided at the
exchequer court and was also present at St Peter’s, Gloucester to witness a gift of lands to the house. In 1114 the Queen took her son William to visit the new foundation of Merton Priory. There is very little evidence of Matilda’s day-to-day involvement with her children, though it is possible that young Matilda was raised in her mother’s household, but the visit to Merton gives a sense of Matilda trying to inculcate piety in her son with the same sweetness and understanding of children’s nature that her own mother had displayed. She hoped that the happy memory of the visit, of playing with her at Merton, would encourage William to regard the house favourably when he became king. Matilda also succeeded in persuading Henry to agree to the marriage of her brother David to the King’s ward, Matilda of Senlis. David became King of Scotland in 1124 and was to play an important role in the life of his niece the Empress, but at the time his prospects of succeeding to the crown seemed slight, and the marriage meant he could take the title of Earl of Huntingdon in right of his wife. The wedding was celebrated before Christmas 1113, while the King was in England. Matilda was regent again in 1114—15 and 1116—18. The latter period shows her involving her son William in her activities, obviously in preparation for his own succession. Together they issued three writs on the business of a ship belonging to the abbot of St Augustine’s, Canterbury.

Matilda may have fallen ill in 1114, as her correspondent the bishop of Le Mans wrote to her asking after her condition and enclosing a prayer to St John the Evangelist for her recovery. She did recover, as her activities in the following four years demonstrate, but her family had a sad reputation for dying young. Matilda’s last act as regent of England was made in Oxford, for the protection of a chapter of hermit monks, and on 1 May 1118 she died at Westminster. The Church had questioned her right to marry, and now there was a quarrel over the right to bury her. The monks of Trinity Aldgate claimed it, and when Henry returned from Normandy they lodged a complaint, via the canons of St Paul’s, against the monks of Westminster, who had taken the body. Henry confirmed all Matilda’s donations to Trinity and compensated the order with a gift of relics from the Byzantine emperor, and Matilda was laid to rest at Westminster. The King gave money to maintain a perpetual light by her tomb, which was still being paid in the reign of Matilda’s great-great grandson Henry III, while her brother David organised an annual memorial Mass.

Despite the controversy over her marriage and the criticism she had attracted in the management of her lands, Matilda died a beloved queen. Soon after her death reports of miraculous signs occurring at her tomb began to circulate, and a cult to her quickly grew up at Westminster. Over
the next decade her grave attracted as many papal indulgences for pilgrims to Westminster on St Peter’s Day as did that of Edward the Confessor. Her official epitaph was inscribed on her tomb during the reign of her grandson Henry II, but the
Hyde
chronicler summed up the popular mood: ‘From the time England first became subject to kings, out of all the queens none was found to be comparable to her, and none will be found in time to come, whose memory will be praised and name will be blessed throughout the ages.’
²⁴

CHAPTER 3

ADELIZA OF LOUVAIN

‘The Fair Maid of Brabant’

M
atilda of Scotland did not live to experience the disaster of the
White Ship
in 1120, a tragedy for the Norman dynasty which had massive repercussions not only on the life of her daughter Matilda but on the future of England. After his mother’s death, William continued to act as regent in England for a year before joining his father in Normandy for his marriage to yet another Matilda, this one the daughter of Fulk of Anjou. King Henry had been threatened in the duchy since IIII by an alliance between the French, Angevins and Flemings, but William’s marriage and Henry’s significant defeat of Louis VI of France at Bremule in 1119 secured his rule for the time being, and the following year William paid homage to Louis as his father’s nominal overlord for Normandy The royal party sailed for England in November, but the ship in which William was a passenger — along with his illegitimate half-brother Richard, half-sister Matilda, Countess of Perche, and many of the heirs to the great estates of England and Normandy — was wrecked on a rock at the harbour of Barfleur. According to Orderic Vitalis, the captain, Thomas Fitzstephen, struggled to the surface, but when he heard that the heir to the throne had drowned he allowed the waves to claim him rather than face the King. None of the young nobles in William’s party was saved — indeed, the only survivor was a butcher from Rouen. Even for a man with as many children as Henry, the loss of three at once was personally shattering; the implications for the succession, moreover, were disastrous.

Henry’s second marriage, to Adeliza of Louvain, has conventionally been seen as a response to the urgent need for a legitimate heir in the aftermath of the shipwreck, but negotiations for his new wife may have begun as early as 1119. Adeliza’s father Godfrey ‘The Great’, landgrave of Brabant, Count of Louvain and Duke of Lower Lorraine, was a vassal of Henry’s son-in-law, the Holy Roman Emperor, and if the supposition
that Henry met his daughter Matilda on the Continent in 1119
¹
is correct, she may have been involved in arranging the match, which accords with the marriage contract having been agreed in April 1120, before the loss of the
White Ship
. Godfrey’s second wife, Clemence, whom he married after the death of Adeliza’s mother, Ida of Chiny, was the mother of the Flemish Count Baldwin VII, who had fought for the French as part of the anti-Norman alliance in 1118. When Baldwin died, Clemence and Godfrey, whose lands bordered with Flanders, strongly opposed the succession to the state of his cousin Charles. Henry I had come to terms with Charles after Bremule but, as part of a policy of containment, a union with the daughter of Charles’s enemy was an intelligent precaution.

Henry announced the marriage in council on 6 January 1121, and sent a party to Dover to meet Adeliza, who had already embarked for England. The wedding took place at Windsor on 29 January, barely two months after William’s death. Given the time needed for Adeliza’s preparations and the journey itself, it is clear that Henry intended to marry her even before he lost his son. William’s new bride, Matilda of Anjou, remained in England for some months after the disaster, presumably waiting to see if she was pregnant, but was retrieved by her father the same year. While she took the veil at Fontevrault, Henry kept her dower, much to Fulk’s indignation.

Eighteen-year-old Adeliza, known as the ‘Fair Maid of Brabant’, was reportedly quite beautiful. Considering her fifty-three-year-old bridegroom’s reputation as a womaniser, lust, as well as politics, and of course the distinction of her descent from Charlemagne, may have played a part in his choice. She was crowned on 30 January 1121, but from the beginning it was plain that Henry wanted her queenship to follow a very different model from that of Matilda of Scotland. Adeliza has often been viewed as a rather passive, ineffectual queen, since there is little evidence of her undertaking independent projects or embracing any political role, but this was less to do with her personal capacities, whatever they may have been, than with the fact that, as far as Henry was concerned, her purpose was to bear him sons. To this end, he kept his wife with him on his travels, leaving her scant opportunity to participate in government.

Many of Adeliza’s charters were witnessed as a co-signatory to the King, including her first, a grant to the monks of Tiron in September 1121. As we have seen, witnessing was in itself a politically charged act, as it emphasised the queen’s elevated status not only in relation to other women (who appear rarely as co-signatories in royal charters) but also to men, as the queen’s name would come after the king’s and before those
of the other witnesses. Queenly witnessing was thus an expression of power rooted in office. Adeliza’s frequent appearances as a witness to Henry’s charters also enable us to track her movements with her husband. After their marriage they went to Winchester, then to Westminster, for a crown-wearing ceremony at the Whitsuntide court. Adeliza surfaces again in a grant to Merton Priory in December, but witnesses no more documents with Henry until the confirmation of a grant to St Peter Exeter at Easter 1123, while the court was at Winchester. Henry travelled energetically in England throughout 1122. He was at Northampton at Easter, then Hertford, Waltham, Oxford, a two-day pause at Windsor, Westminster for Whit Sunday. After a visit to Kent, it was back to Westminster, then north to York, Durham and Carlisle, York again for the Feast of St Nicholas, Nottingham and Dunstable for Christmas. He kept up this pace for another six months before he and Adeliza sailed from Portsmouth for Normandy in June 1123. In the light of such a timetable, the Queen’s lack of independent charter activity becomes more understandable. It was not until 1126 that she issued her first as principal signatory, a grant to the canons of Holy Trinity at Christchurch London, which was drawn up while she was in residence at Woodstock.

The court in Adeliza’s time was structured along the lines Henry had been establishing for the first twenty years of his reign, which stood in a marked contrast to the roistering, undisciplined culture that had prevailed under William Rufus. The new, more sober tone had led to Henry and Matilda of Scotland being mocked for their stuffiness, but since, according to Eadmer, William Rufus’s courtiers had rampaged about the countryside boozing stolen wine, destroying crops and making improper advances to respectable women, the people, at least, appreciated Henry’s reforms. He prohibited the requisitioning of goods, set fixed prices for local purveyance and stipulated allowances for the members of his household, including forty domestic staff. As well as her constant proximity to the King, another obstacle to any meaningful political activity on Adeliza’s part may have been the regulated system of ‘administrative kingship’ that was one of the main achievements of Henry’s rule. This system, outlined in the Constitution Domus Regis, which lays down the hierarchy of offices, from chancellor through to stewards, butlers, chamberlain and constables, functioned on both sides of the Channel, with a limited entourage of officials accompanying the King and a larger group remaining permanently in either England or Normandy. In England the most important of these officials was Roger, bishop of Salisbury, who acted as regent when the King was in Normandy. As well as vice-regency, Henry introduced a body
of travelling agents, inaugurated the exchequer (although in this period it was essentially an accounting procedure rather than a separate office), and insisted on more thorough record-keeping, all of which contributed to the stabilisation of government as England adjusted to the new patterns of landholding imposed by the Norman Conquest. As regent and collaborator with the king’s officers, Matilda of Scotland had played an important role in the implementation of Henry’s reforms, but their very efficiency left less room for Adeliza.

Cultural patronage, as Bishop Baudri had reminded the Conqueror’s daughter, was one sphere in which a woman might hope to outdo her husband or father, and which could compensate for diminishing influence in the political realm. As has been noted, women were especially influential in the development of vernacular literature (indeed, the production of ‘Old French’ works in France is minimal during the period in comparison with the blossoming of vernacular writing in the Anglo-Norman realm). Here, at least, Adeliza did make her mark. The rededication of ‘The Voyage of St Brendan’ to her after Matilda’s death shows that she was ready to participate in this tradition; she is recognised, too, in the mention of ‘the Queen of Louvain’ in Gaimar’s
Estoire des Engleis
, commissioned by Constance FitzGilbert, a Lincolnshire noblewoman. Adeliza herself commissioned an account of Henry’s reign from the poet David (now lost), which was set to music, as well as receiving the dedication of Philippe de Thaon’s ‘Bestiary’, the oldest surviving French example of the genre. Adeliza’s literary interests continued into her widowhood, during which she patronised the poet Serbo of Wilton. Her facility in French evinces a certain level of education, as, given her birthplace, it was unlikely to have been her first language. It is not known, though, whether, like Matilda, she spoke English. She might have availed herself of one of the new dictionaries, such as that attributed to Alexander, archdeacon of Salisbury, with its Anglo-Norman glossary of Old English words. Bi- and trilingual texts were also appearing, of which the most famous example is the Eadwine Psalter, produced at Canterbury in the mid-twelfth century.

Another novelty associated with Adeliza is the payment of ‘queen’s gold’, which was to form an important part of the income of queens consort in the coming centuries. Queens-gold was a tax of an extra 10 per cent on any fine to the crown over the value of ten marks, as well as on tax paid by Jews. One origin of the custom is the dispute for primacy between the sees of York and Canterbury. Hugh the Chanter records that the bishop of Durham, Ralph Flambard, offered 1,000 marks of silver to Henry I and a hundred to Matilda of Scotland to favour the candidacy of
York. Flambard, who had been treasurer to William Rufus, was apparently familiar with the 10 per cent balance of such payments. It has been claimed that ‘it is almost certain that Eleanor [of Aquitaine] was the first English queen granted the right to claim queens-gold’,
²
and the practice was standardised during Eleanor’s queenship, but Adeliza is the first example of a queen receiving a proportion of a licence fine. She was given twenty silver marks from forty-five paid to Henry I by Lucy, Countess of Chester. (With a gold-silver ratio of 1:9, this represents a larger proportion [approximately two-fifths] of the total than was ratified under Henry II as one gold mark to the queen for every hundred silver marks received by the king.)