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produced no new heirs.
By 1125, it was already becoming clear that the fifty-seven-year-old king could not rely solely on the dwindling likelihood that his young wife might give him another son. But Henry did have one surviving legitimate child: his daughter, Matilda. He had not seen her for fifteen years, ever since she had left England as an eight-year-old girl to travel to Germany to join the court of her future husband, the Holy Roman Emperor Heinrich V. But in May 1125 the emperor succumbed to cancer at the age of just thirty-eight, and his young and childless widow was suddenly free to rejoin her father.
Henry lost no time in taking advantage of Matilda’s abrupt liberation from her imperial duties. At Christmas 1126, he presented his newly returned daughter to his magnates at a great gathering of the court held at Windsor and Westminster. There the nobles were required to swear a solemn oath that they would uphold her right, and that of any sons she might one day have, to succeed to her father’s throne. They did so without demur, in public at least;but Henry could not rest content with this formal acceptance of his daughter’s title, and in 1131 he demanded that his leading subjects repeat their pledges, reiterating their commitment to Matilda as ruler-in-waiting.
By that time, Henry had also sought to bolster her position, as he had done that of his dead son, through an alliance with Anjou, Normandy’s southern neighbour. In 1128, Matilda therefore married Geoffroi, heir to the county of Anjou, whose sister had once been the wife of her drowned brother. And by the time Henry made his last, fateful journey to Lyons-la-Forêt, his daughter’s second marriage had given him two healthy grandsons, two-year-old Henry and one-year-old Geoffrey, in whose chubby hands lay the future of the Anglo-Norman realm.
The king had done all he could, but he could not be sure that it was enough. Earls, counts and bishops crowded at his bedside as he roused himself to insist again, with a dying man’s desperate urgency, that all of his lands, on both sides of the sea, should pass to his daughter. At last, on the night of 1 December 1135, Henry I died. ‘He was a good man, and was held in great awe,’ wrote the author of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle . ‘In his time no man dared do wrong against another; he made peace for man and beast.’ It was a mercy, perhaps, that the sightless eyes of the Lion of Justice would not see the darkness that followed his passing.
Mathilda Imperatrix
It is a measure of the peculiarity of Matilda’s position in 1135 that we know so little about her. Her contemporaries, whether friends, enemies or neutral observers, struggled to decide how to handle or to judge her, how to place her within a political narrative that expected its chief protagonists to be male. As a result, she is an insubstantial, inconsistent presence in the chronicles, rarely seen in more than two dimensions, often disconcertingly portrayed as a marginal figure in her own story.
We can only guess what she looked like. Her father Henry, William of Malmesbury tells us, was ‘more than short and less than tall’, a vigorous, thickset man with receding black hair, a steady gaze and an unfortunate tendency to snore. Her mother, Edith-Matilda of Scotland, meanwhile, was ‘a woman of exceptional holiness, and by no means negligible beauty’. Although William puts no specific features to these royal good looks, he shows us the pious queen walking barefoot in church during Lent in penitential humility, and wearing a hair-cloth shift under her elaborate gowns. But, master of the thumbnail portrait though he was, William of Malmesbury’s sketch of Matilda herself is uncharacteristically opaque, a somewhat impersonal coupling of her parents’ most striking qualities: she ‘displayed her father’s courage and her mother’s piety; holiness in her found its equal in energy, and it would be hard to say which was more
By 1125, it was already becoming clear that the fifty-seven-year-old king could not rely solely on the dwindling likelihood that his young wife might give him another son. But Henry did have one surviving legitimate child: his daughter, Matilda. He had not seen her for fifteen years, ever since she had left England as an eight-year-old girl to travel to Germany to join the court of her future husband, the Holy Roman Emperor Heinrich V. But in May 1125 the emperor succumbed to cancer at the age of just thirty-eight, and his young and childless widow was suddenly free to rejoin her father.
Henry lost no time in taking advantage of Matilda’s abrupt liberation from her imperial duties. At Christmas 1126, he presented his newly returned daughter to his magnates at a great gathering of the court held at Windsor and Westminster. There the nobles were required to swear a solemn oath that they would uphold her right, and that of any sons she might one day have, to succeed to her father’s throne. They did so without demur, in public at least;but Henry could not rest content with this formal acceptance of his daughter’s title, and in 1131 he demanded that his leading subjects repeat their pledges, reiterating their commitment to Matilda as ruler-in-waiting.
By that time, Henry had also sought to bolster her position, as he had done that of his dead son, through an alliance with Anjou, Normandy’s southern neighbour. In 1128, Matilda therefore married Geoffroi, heir to the county of Anjou, whose sister had once been the wife of her drowned brother. And by the time Henry made his last, fateful journey to Lyons-la-Forêt, his daughter’s second marriage had given him two healthy grandsons, two-year-old Henry and one-year-old Geoffrey, in whose chubby hands lay the future of the Anglo-Norman realm.
The king had done all he could, but he could not be sure that it was enough. Earls, counts and bishops crowded at his bedside as he roused himself to insist again, with a dying man’s desperate urgency, that all of his lands, on both sides of the sea, should pass to his daughter. At last, on the night of 1 December 1135, Henry I died. ‘He was a good man, and was held in great awe,’ wrote the author of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle . ‘In his time no man dared do wrong against another; he made peace for man and beast.’ It was a mercy, perhaps, that the sightless eyes of the Lion of Justice would not see the darkness that followed his passing.
Mathilda Imperatrix
It is a measure of the peculiarity of Matilda’s position in 1135 that we know so little about her. Her contemporaries, whether friends, enemies or neutral observers, struggled to decide how to handle or to judge her, how to place her within a political narrative that expected its chief protagonists to be male. As a result, she is an insubstantial, inconsistent presence in the chronicles, rarely seen in more than two dimensions, often disconcertingly portrayed as a marginal figure in her own story.
We can only guess what she looked like. Her father Henry, William of Malmesbury tells us, was ‘more than short and less than tall’, a vigorous, thickset man with receding black hair, a steady gaze and an unfortunate tendency to snore. Her mother, Edith-Matilda of Scotland, meanwhile, was ‘a woman of exceptional holiness, and by no means negligible beauty’. Although William puts no specific features to these royal good looks, he shows us the pious queen walking barefoot in church during Lent in penitential humility, and wearing a hair-cloth shift under her elaborate gowns. But, master of the thumbnail portrait though he was, William of Malmesbury’s sketch of Matilda herself is uncharacteristically opaque, a somewhat impersonal coupling of her parents’ most striking qualities: she ‘displayed her father’s courage and her mother’s piety; holiness in her found its equal in energy, and it would be hard to say which was more
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