Lady of the English - By Elizabeth Chadwick Page 0,201

to investigate her story and find out if she really was the termagant that some chroniclers and historians have made her out to be—or was there more to her than that?

The empress, as she liked to be known, seems to have been her own worst enemy at times. The Gesta Stephani reports that after Stephen’s capture, she was “headstrong in all that she did” and that she insulted and threatened men who came to submit to her. She did not rise to acknowledge men who bowed to her, and she refused to listen to their advice, “ rebuffing them by an arrogant answer and refusing to hearken to their words…

she no longer relied on their advice as she should have and had promised them, but arranged everything as she herself thought fit and according to her own arbitrary will.” From this I read that she had a strong will and did not suffer fools gladly, but I also think she was kicking against a society that had rigid conceptions about the spheres of female roles and female power. I also have a notion (that I can’t prove) that Matilda suffered from acute premenstrual tension and this LadyofEnglish.indd 499

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Elizabeth Chadwick

might account for some of her sharp behaviour. A fraught political situation and a certain time of the month may just have combined to create disaster for her.

Despite her prickly relations with her cousin Henry of Winchester, she was on excellent terms with the Church and a monk, Stephen of Rouen, praised her greatly, saying that she was much loved by the poor and the nobility alike. She was, according to him, “wise and pious, merciful to the poor, generous to monks, the refuge of the wretched, and a lover of peace.” (It is ironic how hard she had to fight and how much misery and mayhem was created before any sort of peace came about.) Marjorie Chibnall in her biography of the empress also states that the Cistercian monks of Le Valasse remembered her as “a woman of intelligence and sense.” There has been modern speculation that Matilda and the baron Brian FitzCount were lovers, but that notion comes from a misreading of a piece in the Gesta Stephani about the flight from Winchester. The text says in translation: “But she and Brien gained by this a title to boundless fame, since as their affection for each other had before been unbroken, so even in adversity, great though the obstacle that danger might be, they were in no wise divided.” There is no other reference to their closeness and this comment should be read in terms of a bond of service and friendship and not physical intimacy. Had there been even a hint of such, the chroniclers hostile to Matilda, including the Gesta Stephani, would have run with it for all it was worth. My own belief is that there was a powerful attraction between Brian and Matilda, but that it remained unspoken and was never acted upon.

No one knows for certain what happened to Brian. The most likely scenario is that he became a monk at Reading Abbey shortly after Matilda returned to Normandy. Certainly he disappears from the historical record at about this time. A 500

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suggestion that he went on crusade can be discounted as a fabrication. I have a strong feeling that Brian was not cut out for warfare and fought because he had to. Wallingford was one of the strongest fortresses on the empress’s side, but Brian was travelling with Matilda’s court for much of the time and the heroic defence of the place fell mostly to its castellan William Boterel. I suspect when Matilda left for Normandy, it was the last straw and Brian retired to a religious life. Since Reading Abbey had responsibility for the chapel on the Isle of May off the coast of Scotland in the twelfth century, I chose to send him there to end his days in peace.

In the matter of Matilda’s troubled marriage to Geoffrey of Anjou, I was interested to find out how long it took for her to become pregnant with the future Henry II, and it’s the reason I have introduced the contraceptive thread into the story. She married Geoffrey in 1128 and returned to Normandy a year later, not going back to her husband until September 1131. It was to be another nine months before Henry was conceived.

She went on to have two more sons in swift succession.