Stephen and Matilda
Cousins of Anarchy
By
Matthew Lewis
The Anarchy was
the first civil war in post-Conquest England, enduring throughout the reign of
King Stephen between 1135 and 1154. It ultimately brought about the end of the Norman
dynasty and the birth of the mighty Plantagenet kings. When Henry I died having
lost his only legitimate son in a shipwreck, he had caused all of his barons to
swear to recognize his daughter Matilda, widow of the Holy Roman Emperor, as
his heir and remarried her to Geoffrey, Count of Anjou. When she was slow to
move to England on her father's death, Henry's favourite nephew Stephen of
Blois rushed to have himself crowned, much as Henry himself had done on the
death of his brother William Rufus. Supported by his brother Henry, Bishop of
Winchester, Stephen made a promising start, but Matilda would not give up her
birthright and tried to hold the English barons to their oaths. The result was
more than a decade of civil war that saw England split apart. Empress Matilda
is often remembered as aloof and high-handed, Stephen as ineffective and
indecisive. By following both sides of the dispute and seeking to understand
their actions and motivations, Matthew Lewis aims to reach a more rounded
understanding of this crucial period of English history and asks to what extent
there really was anarchy.
An Author’s
Inspiration
The Anarchy. Now there’s a name to conjure
with. It’s a proper, meaty name for a civil war. The Wars of the Roses sounds a
bit flowery, and by the seventeenth century, we could do no better than The
Civil War. The anarchy leaves you in no doubt as to what kind of chaos and
barbarism was going on. Naming internal conflicts in England seems to have
peaked in the twelfth century.
My previous focus has generally been
around the Wars of the Roses in the fifteenth century and some of the key
individuals within that period. I think this interest in a period of civil war
and an appreciation that it was far from the simple, clean, Lancaster vs York
story that often makes the headlines lent The Anarchy a fascination for me. If
the Wars of the Roses isn’t what it is generally perceived to be, was The
Anarchy similarly complex and misrepresented?
I approached the book as almost a joint
biography of the two main protagonists – King Stephen and Empress Matilda. The
narrative switches focus between each side of the civil conflict in each
chapter to try and retain a balance in examining the motives and escalating
actions of the cousins. Traditionally, Stephen is seen as a nice guy who made a
rubbish king – too weak, too easily led and too ineffectual. Matilda has long
been seen through the eyes of the monkish chroniclers who wrote down their
accounts of the events – abrasive, belligerent and unwomanly.
That last charge is the most interesting
and probably the one that clings most tightly to the Empress’s reputation
still, nearly 800 years later. It is a symptom of the misogyny of the Church,
and, to be fair, the wider population, that whatever Matilda did in her efforts
to gain the inheritance she believed was rightfully hers would doom her to
criticism based on her sex. In 1141, when she came within a hair’s breadth of
the throne, she attracted intense criticism for her attitude and behaviour. If
you break down what she was accused of – being authoritarian, making decisions
herself, punishing her opponents – they are all things a new king would have
been praised for. In fact, some of them are things Stephen is criticised for
failing to be.
The problem for Matilda was that men
couldn’t fathom how they would be subservient to a woman. If she behaved like a
queen, in the sense of the consort of a king, men would lack a real leader to
make decisions, since a queen was supposed to support her husband’s role as
king. If she acted like a king, who happened to be female, she was condemned as
lacking femininity and acting in such an outrageous manner that men could not
follow her. Perhaps she might have looked for a third way, a compromise, but
she would doubtless have been criticised for that too. Being a woman was
Empress Matilda’s Catch 22.
Her problems were exacerbated by Queen
Matilda (because I’m on familiar ground here, with almost everyone sharing
three or four different names!). Stephen’s wife, Matilda of Boulogne, offered a
perfect contrast to the problems men saw in Empress Matilda. She was able to
appear, to their sensibilities, reasonable in making efforts to protect her
husband and children’s interests. She even managed to put an army in the field,
something the Empress couldn’t manage, because the queen did it in her
husband’s name.
Empress Matilda settled on Lady of the
English as the title she planned to use. It differentiated her from a queen in
the accepted sense of being a king’s wife but avoided describing her as a king
with all of the uncertainties her sex would bring to that label. Lady of the
English harked back to Æthelflæd, the tenth-century Lady of the Mercians. The
oldest daughter of Alfred the Great, she ruled the kingdom of Mercia from 911
to 918 and provided a template for the female exercise of power. The daughter
of a great king, just as Matilda was, it offered a way for men to understand
the exercise of royal authority by a female, but England bottled it at the last
moment and Matilda was driven out of London on the eve of her coronation.
The cast of supporting characters in this
dynastic drama is rich. As Queen Matilda was to King Stephen, so Robert, Earl
of Gloucester was to his half-sister Empress Matilda. He was an illegitimate
son of Henry I and provided the Empress with a mechanism to put armies on the
field, though Robert frequently found himself fending off suggestions that he
should be king himself. Henry, Bishop of Winchester was King Stephen’s brother,
but was often found in the camps of his enemies. Was he betraying his brother
to suit his own prospects, or was there much more to the apparent changes of
side, keeping his brother’s cause alive from within his enemy’s court?
One story that leaps out from the
catalogue of despair penned by William of Malmesbury is that of Robert Fitz
Hubert. Described as a ‘cruel and savage man’, Robert was known to boast that
he had once burned eighty monks alive inside their church and he threatened to
do the same to William’s home at Malmesbury Abbey. Robert was apparently well
known for torturing those he captured, and one of his favourite methods of
inflicting misery was tie his victim up outside in the sun. He would then smear
them with honey and stir up insects to bite and sting them. When Robert died,
William saw it as divine justice for an evil man, as chroniclers were fond of
doing. I read it and thought it’s the sort of thing we do to celebrities on
reality shows these days.
The Anarchy is a fascinating period
brimming with complex and captivating characters. One of the main questions I
tried to address was just how anarchic it was. The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle
famously lamented that for nineteen years, men said that Christ and His saints
slept. I wanted to try and discover just how lawless and brutal those nineteen
years really were, and what I found was surprising.
Pick
up your copy of
Stephen and Matilda
Cousins of Anarchy
Matthew Lewis
Matthew Lewis was born and grew up in the
West Midlands. Having obtained a law degree, he currently lives in Shropshire
with his wife and children. History and writing have always been a passion of
Matthew's, with particular interest in
the Wars of the Roses period. His first novel, Loyalty, was born of the joining
of those passions.
