Was he a realistic contender? Even Henry I thought Robert’s illegitimacy a barrier to power, however far he bolstered him with his trust, a title and money. The author of the Gesta Stephani thought him capable of taking the throne, but that, burdened by the impediment of his illegitimacy, Robert chose not to assert a claim.
The more viable candidates were the king’s nephews by his sister Adela, Theobald and Stephen. Adela’s youngest and by far most impressive and able son, Henry, was not eligible as he was a Cluniac monk who had been consecrated bishop of Winchester by his uncle the king in 1129.
Robert of Torigni told how Theobald was asked by the Norman nobility to take control of the duchy. On 21 December, at Lisieux, they approached him formally, and Robert of Gloucester lent his support too. But although Theobald was the elder, it was his brother, the affable and popular Stephen who flabbergasted the Anglo-Norman world by his swift seizure of the English throne.
There is little doubt that had Matilda not quarrelled with her father, she would have been queen. The magnates surrounding the king would have been forced to recognise her. But as she was not there, and the nobility was already apprehensive at the thought of her taking the throne, the succession became a matter of speed.
Despite his oaths to honour her claim, Stephen barely waited for confirmation of his uncle’s death before he set sail for England. This must have been a premeditated act, long in the planning. The seeds were sown a decade earlier; Stephen could not forget Henry I’s brief flirtation with making him king. This dangled promise, however ephemeral or half-hearted, inculcated in Stephen a desire for the throne that would lead him to perjure himself and forsake loyalties to his family as he stampeded over the rights of his first cousin and elder brother. It was Henry I’s ‘promise’ that justified, in Stephen’s mind, the neglect of his uncle in those last days, and his race to England to steal Matilda’s crown.
It is possible too that Stephen may have felt providence was on his side: he had, after all, disembarked the White Ship before its short, fateful voyage. Had he been spared for this moment?
Stephen was not with Henry as he lay dying, but in his wife’s county of Boulogne – Stephen’s marriage to Matilda of Boulogne in 1125 gave him access to the wealth garnered from her vast estates in Flanders and south-east England. Stephen was evidently kept informed of his uncle’s illness – Lyons-la-Forêt was only two days’ hard riding away – which allowed him to plan.61
Stephen grabbed the opportunity. Most of the political elite were still with the dead king’s body in Normandy. He took advantage of the uncertainty to sail from his wife’s Channel port of Wissant to Kent on 3 or 4 December and was welcomed in London; he carried on to Winchester where he claimed the treasury, aided by his politically adept younger brother Bishop Henry of Winchester who helped mastermind the coup. Stephen was crowned at Westminster on 22 December by William de Corbeil, archbishop of Canterbury. The archbishop’s initial concern at breaking his oath to Matilda was swept aside by Hugh Bigod, who must have travelled with the furies at his back to give his solemn testimony of the old king’s deathbed change of heart.
Perhaps most importantly, Stephen had brought Roger, bishop of Salisbury, over to his side. During Henry I’s reign, the chronicler Henry of Huntingdon wrote of Roger that ‘he was second only to the king.’62 Roger may have been nursing a festering grudge that Henry I had not listened to his protests when he married Matilda to Geoffrey, preferring instead to consult his bastard son Robert, and Brian Fitz Count. The chronicler William of Malmesbury wrote: ‘I myself have often heard Roger bishop of Salisbury say that he was released from the oath he had taken to the empress because he had sworn only on condition that the king should not give his daughter in marriage to anyone outside the kingdom without consulting himself and the other chief men, and that no one had recommended that marriage or been aware that it would take place except Robert earl of Gloucester, and Brian Fitz Count, and the bishop of Lisieux.’63
No one outside Stephen’s immediate circle, least of all Matilda, guessed that Stephen would secure the throne a mere three weeks after the old king’s death. Stephen was now an anointed king. Although only a small number of the nobility had attended his crowning, such was the mystique surrounding the coronation ceremony that it would be very difficult to dislodge him. Life pivoted around religion in twelfth-century Christendom, and the commandment in Chronicles not to ‘touch my anointed ones’ was taken seriously.64
Matilda’s claims were dust; she, and by implication her eldest son Henry, had been forsaken by those magnates who had promised to uphold them.
How did Stephen do it? Despite their solemn oaths, most of the aristocracy were appalled at the idea of Matilda as queen. She was disliked, she was married to the count of Anjou who was unpopular among the Anglo-Norman nobility, and she was a woman. She was thrice damned. Conversely, her cousin Stephen had an easy and appealing manner, was rich and was a respected soldier. He had been a favourite of Henry I and bathed in the residual glory.
And there were the convincing rumours among loyalists to Stephen that Henry I had changed his mind. Those struggling with the moral implications of relinquishing their oaths to Matilda could feel reassured that, if they looked hard enough, the old king had released them from their obligations to a woman.
Stephen had been crowned. Even the pope had given his tacit support. Rather than risk the financial insecurity of civil war, the Anglo-Norman nobility flocked to the new king. ‘All the barons immediately determined, with Theobald’s consent, to serve under one lord on account of the honours which they held in both provinces.’65 For Stephen had bought his elder brother’s loyalty – or at least his silence – with money; he gave him an annual pension of 2,000 marks. In return, Theobald relinquished any claim to the throne of England or the dukedom of Normandy.
Matilda’s claim was abandoned by the nobility, even by her half-brother Robert of Gloucester, putting pragmatism above family loyalty – at least for the time being. In April 1136, he acknowledged Stephen as his king. He was the last to do so and his support for the new king remained at best lukewarm. Robert stayed in Normandy, living quietly on his estates, watching and waiting.
Matilda, as soon as she heard of her father’s death, raced to claim her dowry castles on the Normandy–Anjou borders.66 We have no way of knowing if she mourned, or regretted her argument with her father so close to his death, but she must have lamented the ramifications. For the moment, at least, there was nothing Matilda could do about her English inheritance. She seems to have remained in Normandy, probably in Argentan, holding on to her Norman border. It is probable that Henry and his younger brother Geoffrey remained with her. Her third and last child, William, was born in the summer of 1136.67
Matilda could do nothing but cling on to the tiny part of the Norman inheritance she had managed to secure, while Geoffrey gradually made inroads into the conquest of her duchy, forever watching his back against his own Angevin border lords.
By 1139 – only three years later – everything had changed. Walter Map, with a typical acidity of tongue, pronounced Stephen ‘a man distinguished for skill in arms, but in other respects almost a fool’.68 Stephen had had no success in Normandy. He made the only crossing of his reign in 1137, where he bought off his brother and paid homage for the duchy to Louis the Fat. But he recognised Geoffrey’s superior military force and negotiated a short truce with him, agreeing to an annual payment of 2,000 marks (the truce only lasted for a year). Despite his homage, Stephen had no power in Normandy and would never return again.
In England, within the same three years, he had alienated the bishops and much of his nobility who descended swiftly into factionalism. They had no respect for their king-duke, who had failed in Normandy and was now short of funds, having partially drained his uncle’s enormous treasury.
In the summer of 1139, taking advantage of Stephen’s weakness, Robert of Gloucester used the excuse of rumours that Stephen had tried to have him murdered to put his money and his influence firmly behind his sister’s cause. Matilda had been preparing for war for at least a year, keeping warriors with her such as Alexander of Bohon, a Cotentin nobleman described as ‘the foremost among the countess’s