December 1, 1135: Death of Henry I, King of the English

Tags

Empress Matilda, King Henry I of England, King Malcolm III of Scotland, King of the English, Matilda of Scotland, Robert Curthose, The Anarchy, The White Ship, Westminster Abbey, William Ætheling, William Rufus, William the Conqueror

Henry I (c. 1068 – December 1, 1135), also known as Henry Beauclerc, was King of the English from 1100 to his death in 1135. He was the fourth son of William the Conqueror and was educated in Latin and the liberal arts. On William’s death in 1087, Henry’s elder brothers Robert Curthose and William Rufus inherited Normandy and England, respectively, but Henry was left landless.

He purchased the County of Cotentin in western Normandy from Robert, but his brothers deposed him in 1091. He gradually rebuilt his power base in the Cotentin and allied himself with William Rufus against Robert.

Henry was probably born in England in 1068, in either the summer or the last weeks of the year, possibly in the town of Selby in Yorkshire. His father was William the Conqueror, the Duke of Normandy who had invaded England in 1066 to become King of the English establishing lands stretching into Wales.

The invasion had created an Anglo-Norman ruling class, many with estates on both sides of the English Channel. These Anglo-Norman barons typically had close links to the Kingdom of France, which was then a loose collection of counties and smaller polities, under only the nominal control of the king. Henry’s mother, Matilda of Flanders, was the granddaughter of Robert II of France, and she probably named Henry after her uncle, King Henry I of France.

Present at the place where his brother King William II died in a hunting accident in 1100, Henry seized the English throne,

Henry was hastily crowned king in Westminster Abbey on August 5 by Maurice, the bishop of London, as Anselm, the archbishop of Canterbury, had been exiled by William Rufus, and Thomas, the archbishop of York, was in the north of England at Ripon. In accordance with English tradition and in a bid to legitimise his rule, Henry issued a coronation charter laying out various commitments.

The new king presented himself as having restored order to a trouble-torn country. He announced that he would abandon William Rufus’s policies towards the Church, which had been seen as oppressive by the clergy; he promised to prevent royal abuses of the barons’ property rights, and assured a return to the gentler customs of Edward the Confessor; he asserted that he would “establish a firm peace” across England and ordered “that this peace shall henceforth be kept”.

Daughter of King Malcolm III of Scotland and the Anglo-Saxon princess Margaret of Wessex, Matilda was educated at a convent in southern England, where her aunt Christina was abbess, and forced her to wear a veil. In 1093, Matilda was engaged to an English nobleman until her father and her brother Edward were killed in the Battle of Alnwick in 1093.

Her uncle Donald III seized the throne of Scotland, triggering a messy succession conflict. England opposed King Donald and supported first her half-brother Duncan II as king of Scotland, and after his death, her brother Edgar, who assumed the throne in 1097.

Henry I succeeded his brother William Rufus as king of the English in 1100 and quickly proposed marriage to Matilda due to her descent from the Anglo-Saxon House of Wessex, which would help legitimize his rule. After proving she had not taken religious vows, Matilda and Henry were married.

Henry and Matilda had two surviving children, Empress Matilda and William Adelin; he also had many illegitimate children by his many mistresses.

Robert, who invaded from Normandy in 1101, disputed Henry’s control of England; this military campaign ended in a negotiated settlement that confirmed Henry as king. The peace was short-lived, and Henry invaded the Duchy of Normandy in 1105 and 1106, finally defeating Robert at the Battle of Tinchebray. Henry kept Robert imprisoned for the rest of his life.

Henry’s control of Normandy was challenged by Louis VI, King of the Franks, Baldwin VII of Flanders and Fulk V of Anjou, who promoted the rival claims of Robert’s son, William Clito, and supported a major rebellion in the Duchy between 1116 and 1119.

Following Henry’s victory at the Battle of Brémule, a favourable peace settlement was agreed with Louis in 1120.

Considered by contemporaries to be a harsh but effective ruler, Henry skillfully manipulated the barons in England and Normandy. In England, he drew on the existing Anglo-Saxon system of justice, local government and taxation, but also strengthened it with additional institutions, including the royal exchequer and itinerant justices.

Normandy was also governed through a growing system of justices and an exchequer. Many of the officials who ran Henry’s system were “new men” of obscure backgrounds, rather than from families of high status, who rose through the ranks as administrators.

Henry encouraged ecclesiastical reform, but became embroiled in a serious dispute in 1101 with Archbishop Anselm of Canterbury, which was resolved through a compromise solution in 1105. He supported the Cluniac order and played a major role in the selection of the senior clergy in England and Normandy.

Henry’s son William drowned in the White Ship disaster of 1120, throwing the royal succession into doubt. Henry took a second wife, Adeliza of Louvain, in the hope of having another son, but their marriage was childless.

In response to this, he declared his daughter Matilda his heir and married her to Geoffrey of Anjou. The relationship between Henry and the couple became strained, and fighting broke out along the border with Anjou. King Henry I died on December 1, 1135 after a week of illness. Despite his plans for Matilda, the King was succeeded by his nephew Stephen of Blois, resulting in a period of civil war known as the Anarchy.

April 7, 1141: Empress Matilda claims the English Throne

Tags

Empress Matilda, Henry II of England, Henry V Holy Roman Emperor, Holy Roman Empire, Malcolm III of Scotland, Stephen of Blois, The Anarchy, William Ætheling

Empress Matilda (c. February 7, 1102 – September 10, 1167), also known as the Empress Maude, was one of the claimants to the English throne during the civil war known as the Anarchy. Empress Matilda was the daughter of King Henry I of England by first wife Matilda of Scotland, daughter of Malcolm III, King of Scots.

Henry I’s two eldest surviving children were William Ætheling and Matilda. William Ætheling (1103 – 1120), commonly called Adelin, sometimes Adelinus, or Adelingus or other Latinised Norman-French variants of Ætheling. William was married to Matilda of Anjou the eldest daughter of Count Fulk V of Anjou. The couple were married when William Ætheling was 16 and Matilda of Anjou was only 8. Needless to say, that when William drowned in the English channel in 1120, a year after their marriage, when his ship, The White Ship, sank, there were no children from the union. Henry I did remarry the next year. His new bride was Adeliza of Louvain, who was 18 while Henry was 53, but no children were born of this union.

The other legitimate child of Henry to survive was Matilda who had married Holy Roman Emperor Hienrich V. That union gave Matilda the title of Empress and it is as Empress Matilda she is most known by. There were no children of this union and the Emperor died in 1125. Matilda remarried in 1128, Geoffery, Count of Anjou (who had the nickname Plantaganet) a prince which the powerful barons did not trust. This union provided Matilda with three healthy sons, Henry, Geoffery & William.

With William Ætheling dead, the succession to the English throne was thrown into doubt. Rules of succession were uncertain in western Europe at the time; in some parts of France, male primogeniture was becoming more popular, in which the eldest son would inherit a title. It was also traditional for the king of France to crown his successor while he was still alive, making the intended line of succession relatively clear.

This was not the case in England, where the best a noble could do was to identify what Professor Eleanor Searle has termed a pool of legitimate heirs, leaving them to challenge and dispute the inheritance after his death. The problem was further complicated by the sequence of unstable Anglo-Norman successions over the previous sixty years.

William the Conqueror had invaded England, his sons William Rufus and Robert Curthose had fought a war between them to establish their inheritance, and Henry had only acquired control of Normandy by force. There had been no peaceful, uncontested successions.

Initially, Henry put his hopes in fathering another son. William and Matilda’s mother—Matilda of Scotland—had died in 1118, and so Henry took a new wife, Adeliza of Louvain. Henry and Adeliza did not conceive any children, and the future of the dynasty appeared at risk. Henry may have begun to look among his nephews for a possible heir.

Henry may have considered his sister Adela’s son Stephen of Blois as a possible option and, perhaps in preparation for this, he arranged a beneficial marriage for Stephen to Empress Matilda’s wealthy maternal cousin Countess Matilda I of Boulogne. Count Theobald IV of Blois, another nephew and close ally, possibly also felt that he was in favour with Henry.

William Clito, the only son of Robert Curthose, was King Louis VI of France’s preferred choice, but William was in open rebellion against Henry and was therefore unsuitable. Henry might have also considered his own illegitimate son, Robert of Gloucester, as a possible candidate, but English tradition and custom would have looked unfavourably on this. Henry’s plans shifted when Empress Matilda’s husband, Emperor Henry, died in 1125

Henry I desired that his daughter would succeed him and had the Barons of the relm swear and oath to that aim. When Henry died on December 1, 1135 Matilda was in Normandy pregnant with her third child and her cousin, Stephen of Blois usurped the throne from her. Stephen had support from the Barons and was swiftly crowned King of England.

Although Stephen held the crown Matilda did not just sit quietly. For almost the entierty of the reign of king Stephen there was civil war, which some historians call “the Anarchy,” which was settled shortly before his death in 1154.

In part II I will examine how the Empress Matilda almost became England’s first Queen Regnant on April 7, 1141.

May 18, 1152 – The future Henry II of England marries Eleanor of Aquitaine. Part I.

Tags

Eleanor of Aquitaine, Empress Matilda, Henry I of England, Henry II of England, Holy Roman Emperor Henry V, Matilda of England, royal wedding, William Ætheling, William the Conqueror

From the Emperor’s Desk: Much leads up to this historical marriage. Over the next few days I will cover what lead up to the marriage of Henry II and Eleanor of Aquitaine.

1152 – The future Henry II of England marries Eleanor of Aquitaine. He would become king two years later, after the death of his cousin once removed King Stephen of England.

Henry II (March 5, 1133 – July 6, 1189), also known as Henry Curtmantle Henry FitzEmpress or Henry Plantagenet, was King of the English from 1154 to his death. He was the first king of the House of Plantagenet. King Louis VII of the Franks made him Duke of Normandy in 1150. Henry became Count of Anjou and Maine upon the death of his father, Geoffrey of Anjou.

Background

Henry was born in France at Le Mans the eldest child of the Empress Matilda and her second husband, Geoffrey Plantagenet, Count of Anjou. The Empress Matilda Matilda was born to Henry I, King of the English and Duke of Normandy, and his first wife, Matilda of Scotland, possibly around February 7, 1102 at Sutton Courtenay, in Berkshire. King Henry I was the youngest son of King William I the Conqueror, who had invaded England in 1066, creating an empire stretching into Wales.

Matilda had a younger, legitimate brother, William Ætheling, and her father’s relationships with numerous mistresses resulted in around 22 illegitimate siblings. In late 1108 or early 1109, Heinrich V, Holy Roman Emperor, sent envoys to Normandy proposing that Matilda marry him, and wrote separately to her mother on the same matter. The match was attractive to the English king: his daughter would be marrying into one of the most prestigious dynasties in Europe, reaffirming his own, slightly questionable, status as the youngest son of a new royal house, and gaining him an ally in dealing with France.

The couple met at Liège before travelling to Utrecht where, on 10 April, they became officially betrothed. On July 25, Matilda was crowned Queen of the Romans in a ceremony at Mainz. There was a considerable age gap between the couple, as Matilda was only eight years old while Henry was 24.

Matilda and Heinrich remained childless, but neither party was considered to be infertile and contemporary chroniclers blamed their situation on the Emperor and his sins against the Church.

In early 1122, the couple travelled down the Rhine together as Henry continued to suppress the ongoing political unrest, but by now he was suffering from cancer. Heinrich V died on May 23, 1125 in Utrecht.

Now aged 23, Matilda had only limited options as to how she might spend the rest of her life. Being childless, she could not exercise a role as an imperial regent, which left her with the choice of either becoming a nun or remarrying. Some offers of marriage started to arrive from German princes, but she chose to return to Normandy.

Matilda’s brother, William Ætheling, heir to the English throne, died in the White Ship tragedy of November 25, 1120. William Ætheling and his companions had been crossing the English Channel from Barfleur in the Blanche-Nef, the swiftest and most modern ship in the royal fleet. William drowned when trying to rescue his illegitimate half-sister, Matilda FitzRoy, Countess of Perche; when they and several others threw themselves into the small dinghy, it, “overcharged by the multitude that leapt into her, capsized and sank and buried all indiscriminately in the deep.” His death created a succession crisis.

Matilda returned to Normandy in 1125 and spent about a year at the royal court, where her father was still hoping that his second marriage would generate a son. In the event that this failed to happen, Matilda was now Henry’s preferred choice, and he declared that she was to be his rightful successor if he should not have another legitimate son.

Henry began to formally look for a new husband for Matilda in early 1127 and received various offers from princes within the Empire. His preference was to use Matilda’s marriage to secure the southern borders of Normandy by marrying her to Geoffrey of Anjou, the eldest son of Fulk, the Count of Anjou, and Countess Ermengarde of Maine, (died 1126), the daughter of Elias I, Count of Maine, and Mathilda of Château-du-Loire.

Matilda appears to have been unimpressed by the prospect of marrying Geoffrey of Anjou. She felt that marrying the son of a count diminished her imperial status and was probably also unhappy about marrying someone so much younger than she was; Matilda was 25 and Geoffrey was 13.

Hildebert, the Archbishop of Tours, eventually intervened to persuade her to go along with the engagement. Matilda finally agreed, and she travelled to Rouen in May 1127 with Robert of Gloucester and Brian Fitz Count where she was formally betrothed to Geoffrey. King Henry I knighted his future son-in-law, and Matilda and Geoffrey were married a week later on June 17, 1128 in Le Mans by the bishops of Le Mans and Séez. Fulk finally left Anjou for Jerusalem in 1129, declaring Geoffrey the Count of Anjou and Maine.