The Plantagenets

The Kings Who Made England

Dan Jones

• Publisher: HarperPress
• Year: 2012
• ISBN:
  9780007457496
• Topic: Geschichte
• Subtopic: Europäische Geschichte des Mittelalters

PART I

Age of Shipwreck

(1120–1154)

It was as if Christ and his saints were asleep

– THE ANGLO-SAXON CHRONICLE

The White Ship

The prince was drunk. So too were the crew and passengers of the ship he had borrowed. On 25 November 1120, nearly two hundred young and beautiful members of England and Normandy’s elite families were enjoying themselves aboard a magnificent white-painted longship. She had been loaned by a wealthy shipowner for a crossing from Normandy to England, and now bobbed gently to the hum of laughter in a crowded harbour at Barfleur. A 70-mile voyage lay ahead across the choppy late-autumn waters of the Channel, but with the ship moored at the edge of the busy port town, barrels of wine were rolled aboard and all were invited to indulge.

The prince was William the Aetheling. He was the only legitimate son of Henry I, king of England and duke of Normandy, and Matilda of Scotland, the literate, capable queen descended from the Cerdic line of Wessex kings who had ruled England before the Norman Conquest. His first name, William, was in honour of his grandfather, William the Conqueror. His sobriquet, ‘Aetheling’, was a traditional Anglo-Saxon title for the heir to the throne. William was a privileged, sociable young man, who exuded a sense of his dual royalty and conformed to the time-honoured stereotype of the adored, spoiled, eldest son. One Norman chronicler observed William ‘dressed in silken garments stitched with gold, surrounded by a crowd of household attendants and guards, and gleaming in an almost heavenly glory’; a youth who was pandered to on all sides with ‘excessive reverence’, and was therefore prone to fits of ‘immoderate arrogance’.

William was surrounded by a large group of other noble youths. They included his half-brother and half-sister Richard of Lincoln and Matilda, countess of Perche, both bastard children from a brood of twenty-four fathered by the remarkably virile King Henry; William’s cousin Stephen of Blois, who was also a grandson of William the Conqueror; Richard, the 26-year-old earl of Chester, and his wife Maud; Geoffrey Ridel, an English judge; the prince’s tutor Othver; and numerous other cousins, friends and royal officials. Together they made up a golden generation of the Anglo-Norman nobility. It was only right that they travelled in style.

The owner of the White Ship was Thomas Fitzstephen. His grandfather, Airard, had contributed a longship to the Conqueror’s invasion fleet and Fitzstephen judged that carrying future kings to England was therefore in his blood. He had petitioned the king for the honour of carrying the royal party safely back from Barfleur to the south coast of England. Henry had honoured him with the passage of the prince’s party, but with duty came a warning: ‘I entrust to you my sons William and Richard, whom I love as my own life.’

William was a precious charge indeed. He was seventeen years old and already a rich and successful young man. He had been married in 1119 to Matilda, daughter of Fulk V, count of Anjou and future king of Jerusalem. It was a union designed to overturn generations of animosity between the Normans and Angevins (as the natives of Anjon were known). Following the wedding, William had accompanied King Henry around Normandy for a year, learning the art of kingship as Henry thrashed out what the chronicler William of Malmesbury described as ‘a brilliant and carefully concerted peace’ with Louis VI ‘The Fat’, the sly, porcine king of France. It was intended as an education in the highest arts of kingship, and it had been deemed effective. William had lately been described as rex designatus – king designate – in official documents, marking his graduation towards the position as co-king alongside his father.

The highest point of William’s young life had come just weeks before the White Ship prepared to sail, when he had knelt before the corpulent Louis to do homage as the new duke of Normandy. This semi-sacred ceremony acknowledged the fact that Henry had turned over the dukedom to his son. It recognized William as one of Europe’s leading political figures, and marked, in a sense, the end of his journey to manhood.

A new wife, a new duchy, and the unstoppable ascent to kingship before him: these were good reasons to celebrate – which was precisely what the Aetheling was doing. As the thin November afternoon gave way to a clear, chilly night, the White Ship stayed moored in Barfleur and the wine flowed freely.

The White Ship was a large vessel – apparently capable of carrying several hundred passengers, along with a crew of fifty and a cargo of treasure. This must have been a considerable vessel, and the Norman historian Orderic Vitalis called it ‘excellently fitted out and ready for royal service’. It was long and deep, raised and decorated with ornate carvings at prow and stern, and driven by a large central mast and square sail, with oarholes along both sides. The rudder, or ‘steer-board’, was on the right-hand side of the vessel rather than in the centre, so the onus on the captain was to be well aware of local maritime geography: steering was blind to the port side.

A fair wind was blowing up from the south, and it promised a rapid crossing to England. The crew and passengers on William’s ship bade the king’s vessel farewell some time in the evening. They were expected to follow shortly behind, but the drinking on board the White Ship was entertaining enough to keep them anchored long past dark. When priests arrived to bless the vessel with holy water before its departure, they were waved away with jeers and spirited laughter.

As the party ran on, a certain amount of bragging began. The White Ship and her crew contained little luggage, and was equipped with fifty oarsmen. The inebriated captain boasted that his ship, with square sail billowing and oars pulling hard, was so fast that even with the disadvantage of having conceded a head start to King Henry’s ship, they could still be in England before the king.

A few on board started to worry that sailing at high speed with a well-lubricated crew was not the safest way to travel to England, and it was with the excuse of a stomach upset that the Aetheling’s cousin Stephen of Blois excused himself from the party. He left the White Ship to find another vessel to take him home. A couple of others joined him, dismayed at the wild and headstrong behaviour of the royal party and crew. But despite the queasy defectors, the drunken sailors eventually saw their way to preparing the ship for departure. Around midnight on a clear night lit by a new moon, the White Ship weighed anchor and set off for England. ‘She [flew] swifter than the winged arrow, sweeping the rippling surface of the deep,’ wrote William of Malmesbury. But she did not fly far enough. In fact, the White Ship did not even make it out of Barfleur harbour.

Whether it was the effects of the celebrations on board, a simple navigational error, or the wrath of the Almighty at seeing his holy water declined, within minutes of leaving shore the White Ship crashed into a sharp rocky outcrop, now known as Quillebeuf, which stands, and is still visible today, at the mouth of the harbour. The collision punched a fatal hole in the wooden prow of the ship. The impact threw splintered timber into the sea. Freezing water began to pour in.

The immediate priority of all on board was to save William. As the crew attempted to bail water out of the White Ship, a lifeboat was put over the side. The Aetheling clambered aboard, together with a few companions and oarsmen to return him to the safety of Barfleur.

It must have been a terrifying scene: the roars of a drunken crew thrashing to bail out the stricken vessel combining with the screams of passengers hurled into the water by the violence of the impact. The fine clothes of many of the noble men and women who fell into the ocean would have grown unmanageably heavy when soaked with seawater, making it impossible to swim for safety or even to tread water. The waves would have echoed with the cries of the drowning.

As his tiny boat turned for harbour, William picked out among the panicked voices the screams of his elder half-sister Matilda. She was crying for her life – certain to drown in the cold and the blackness. The thought of it was more than the Aetheling could bear. He commanded the men on his skiff to turn back and rescue her.

It was a fatal decision. The countess was not drowning alone. As the lifeboat approached her, it was spotted by other passengers who were floundering in the icy waters. There was a mass scramble to clamber to safety aboard; the result was that the skiff, too, capsized and sank. Matilda was not saved, and neither now was William the Aetheling, duke of Normandy and king-designate of England. He disappeared beneath the waves. As the chronicler Henry of Huntingdon put it: ‘instead of wearing a crown of gold, his head was broken open by the rocks of the sea.’

Only one man survived the wreck of the White Ship. He was a butcher from Rouen, who had boarded the ship at Barfleur to collect payment for debts and was carried off to sea by the revellers. When the ship went down, he wrapped himself in ram-skins for warmth, and clung to wrecked timber during the night. He staggered, drenched, back to shore in the morning to tell his story. Later on, the few bodies that were ever recovered began to wash up with the tide.

The news was slow to reach England. King Henry’s ship, captained by sober men and sailed with care and attention, reached his kingdom unscathed, and the king and his household busied themselves preparing for the Christmas celebrations. When the awful word of the catastrophe in Barfleur reached the court, it was greeted with dumbstruck horror. Henry was kept in ignorance at first. Magnates and officials alike were terrified at the thought of telling the king that three of his children, including his beloved heir, were what William of Malmesbury called ‘food for the monsters of the deep’.

Eventually a small boy was sent to Henry to deliver the news, throwing himself before the king’s feet and weeping as he recounted the tragic news. According to Orderic Vitalis, Henry I ‘fell to the ground, overcome with anguish’. It was said that he never smiled again.

The wreck of the White Ship wiped out in one evening a whole swathe of the Anglo-Norman elite’s younger generation. The death of the Aetheling – and the fortuitous survival of his cousin, Stephen of Blois – would come to throw the whole of western European politics into disarray for three decades.

The sinking of the White Ship was not just a personal tragedy for Henry I. It was a political catastrophe for the Norman dynasty. In the words of Henry of Huntingdon, William’s ‘certain hope of reigning in the future was greater than his father’s actual possession of the kingdom’. Through William the Aetheling’s marriage, Normandy had been brought to peace with Anjou. Through his homage to Louis VI, the whole Anglo-Norman realm was at peace with France. All of Henry’s plans and efforts to secure his lands and legacy had rested on the survival of his son.

Without him, everything was in vain.

Hunt for an Heir

Henry I was ‘the man against whom no one could prevail except God himself’. So wrote the author of the Brut chronicle. And indeed, almost every aspect of Henry’s rule was a success. The fourth son of William the Conqueror enjoyed an exceptionally long, peaceful and prosperous reign of thirty-five years, in which royal authority in England reached new heights. After his father’s death in 1087, England and Normandy had been split apart. Henry ruthlessly reunited them. After snatching the English Crown in 1100, he defeated his elder brother Robert Curthose at the battle of Tinchebrai in 1106 to seize control of Normandy, and thereafter kept Robert imprisoned for nearly three decades until he died at Cardiff castle in 1134. Henry encouraged the intermingling of a truly Anglo-Norman aristocracy, whose culture and landholdings straddled the Channel. Meanwhile, in Queen Matilda he chose a wife who would bring the Norman and Saxon bloodlines together, to heal the wounds of the Conquest.

Henry was a great lawgiver and administrator. He created a sophisticated system of Anglo-Norman government which was a vast improvement on anything that had been known under the rule of his father William the Conqueror or brother William Rufus. He granted the English barons a charter of liberties, which celebrated the laws of Edward the Confessor, guaranteed baronial rights and set out some limits to royal power. He sent royal judges into the English shires on large judicial circuits, investigating crimes, abuses and corruption and strengthening the Crown’s role in local government. He reformed the royal treasury, setting up an exchequer to make accounts twice a year and drawing together the accounting systems of England and Normandy under a single treasurer. And he did much to secure Normandy’s position on the Continent. Taken together, Henry’s government was one of the most sophisticated bureaucratic machines to have been seen in Europe since the Roman era. ‘In his time,’ said the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, ‘no man dared do wrong against another; he made peace for man and beast.’

Yet for all King Henry I’s great triumphs, he failed in one vital task. He never managed to secure the future.

After William the Aetheling’s death in the White Ship disaster, Henry I tried hard to father another legitimate son on whom he could settle his lands and titles. Queen Matilda had died in 1118, so in 1121 Henry married the nubile teenager Adeliza of Louvain. Surprisingly for a man who had sired twenty-two bastard children, he was unable to impregnate his new wife.

That left Henry with one, rather desperate, option. Given that he could not groom as king any of his bastard sons (such as the extremely capable eldest, Robert earl of Gloucester), Henry decided that he would appoint as his heir his only other legitimate child: the Empress Matilda.

When her younger brother died on the White Ship, Matilda was eighteen years old. She had been living in Germany for a decade, having been sent at the age of eight to marry Henry V, king of the Germans and Holy Roman Emperor. She had grown up in utmost splendour in the cities and palaces of central Europe, where she tasted the very heights of political power. The Emperor’s power reached from Germany to Tuscany. Since he was stretched constantly between his large domains, Matilda served as regent when her husband was absent. She had twice worn her imperial crown in great ceremonial occasions at Rome, and as one of the most important women in Europe she kept the company of the most famous and influential figures of her age.

In 1125, however, Matilda was widowed. She had no children with the emperor, so her political role in Germany was cut short. Henry I brought her straight back to England for a new role. She arrived with her title of Empress and her favourite precious relic: the preserved hand of St James, a souvenir from the imperial chapel. As soon as she returned, she was thrust to the centre of politics. At the Christmas court of 1126 Matilda sat beside her father as the Anglo-Norman barons came to swear an oath of allegiance to her as heir to the kingdom and duchy.

This was an extraordinary measure, and both Henry and his barons realized it. The precedents for female rule in the twelfth century were very weak. A king asked a lot when he extracted from his people a promise that they would consent to be ruled by his daughter. Unfortunately, Henry had little other choice.

It was clear that Matilda would need a new husband to bolster her claim to succession. As he had with William the Aetheling, Henry now sought an alliance with the counts of Anjou. He contacted Fulk V and negotiated a marriage alliance between Matilda and Fulk’s eldest son, Geoffrey. On 17 June 1128 the couple were married in the Norman–Angevin border town of Le Mans. The Empress Matilda was twenty-six years old. Her groom was fifteen. John of Marmoutier recorded that the marriage was celebrated ‘for three weeks without a break, and when it was over no one left without a gift’.

On his wedding day, Geoffrey of Anjou was a tall, bumptious teenager with ginger hair, a seemingly inexhaustible natural energy and a flair for showmanship. His fair-skinned good looks earned him the sobriquet Le Bel. Tradition also has it that he liked to wear a sprig of bright yellow broom blossom (planta genista in Latin) in his hair, which earned him another nickname: Geoffrey Plantagenet. John of Marmoutier would later describe him as ‘admirable and likeable … he excelled at arguing … [and was] unusually skilled at warfare’. A week before he married Matilda he had been knighted by Henry I in Rouen, dressed in linen and purple, wearing double-mail armour with gold spurs, a shield covered in gold motifs of lions, and a sword reputedly forged by the mythical Norse blacksmith Wayland the Smith. As soon as the marriage was completed, Geoffrey became count of Anjou in his own right, as Fulk V resigned the title and left for the East, to become king of Jerusalem.

Despite all this, Matilda was underwhelmed. Not only was Geoffrey eleven years her junior; he was also an accursed son of Anjou. Normans saw Angevins as barbarians who murdered priests, desecrated churches and had appalling table manners. A legend held that they were descended from Satan’s daughter Melusine, who had married an Angevin count of old. She had revealed herself as a devil when forced to witness the mass, flew out of a church window and disappeared for ever, but her fiendish blood still bubbled in the veins of her descend...