It seemed there would be three survivors of the tragedy: Berold, a butcher from Rouen; a son of the nobleman Gilbet l’Aigle; and the captain, Thomas FitzStephen. Berold and l’Aigle’s son managed to grab hold of a piece of the wreckage and stay afloat. Thomas fought his way through the freezing waters and asked them for news. When they told him William was dead, unable to face the king, he slipped down into the sea to die. And when l’Aigle’s son could hold on no longer, he too drowned. Only Berold the butcher, kept from freezing in the water by his pelisse and his sheepskin coat, lived to bear witness. In the morning, he was rescued by three fishermen.
No one dared tell the king. The screams of the drowning caught the ears of King Henry and his fellow passengers, but they were bemused by what they had heard. It was not until the following day that the king’s nephew, Theobald, persuaded a young boy to break the news.4 The king collapsed in grief.
Many of the Anglo-Norman nobility were dead too. A generation of aristocrats was obliterated, confounding the lords of England and Normandy who survived. Besides William, the king lost an illegitimate son and daughter, his niece Matilda of Blois, her husband Richard earl of Chester, Richard’s half-brother, and members of his household including his scribe Gisulf, William Bigod, Robert Mauduit, Hugh de Moulins, and Geoffrey Ridel.5 Gilbet l’Aigle lost two sons, both of whom had served in Henry I’s household. Eighteen women were among the dead. For the most part their bodies were never recovered, despite the efforts of the families who hired private divers to claw their remains from the sea.
We know so much about the shipwreck because the chroniclers could not make sense of it; so for centuries they picked over the facts. It was an example of what the historian and chronicler William of Malmesbury called ‘the mutability of human fortunes’.6 So senseless did it seem, that a later historian even speculated that the disaster had been the result of a conspiracy to murder.7
King Henry I grieved bitterly. The tragedy was both personal, and political. He was the fourth son of William the Bastard and had had no expectation of the throne. But he was ruthless and ambitious for power. When his elder brother King William Rufus was shot in the eye with an arrow and killed in the New Forest in 1100 (some believed Henry was behind his death), he raced to secure the treasury at Winchester; he was crowned within three days at Westminster by Maurice, bishop of London, before his other elder brother, Robert, honeymooning in Italy on his way back from crusade, even heard of Rufus’s death. By 1106, Henry I was master of Normandy too; he locked Robert up for nearly thirty years rather than concede power. He successfully battled Robert’s son and his own nephew William Clito for lordship of Normandy, and so ruthless was he in pursuit of supremacy that he even ordered the tips of his granddaughters’ noses be cut off to avoid appearing weak.8
William Atheling’s death negated all his efforts. He had no heir, just numerous bastard children, and one legitimate daughter, Matilda, who was married to the emperor of Germany. Even had she been free to return to England, it is doubtful that the nobility would have accepted her as queen. Although no law barred women from the throne of England, there was little precedent in an age when a ruler was expected to lead troops into battle. Matilda was older than her brother, but when William Atheling was born, no one expected her to rule.
King Henry’s heartache was such that he never sailed from Barfleur again.9 But it did not stop him from thinking of the future. The continuation of his ‘usurper’ Norman dynasty as rulers of England lay in his providing the country with an uncontested heir.
The king was a consummate politician. In August 1100, after stealing the crown from his older brother, he had immediately married Edith (Matilda) of Scotland, just days after William Rufus’s death and his own hasty coronation. She was the daughter of the Scottish king Malcolm Canmore, and Margaret, the great-granddaughter of the Saxon king Edmund Ironside. Henry was aware that their children’s claim to rule England, with their blood inheritance of both William the Conqueror and the Saxon kings of England, would be far less precarious than his own. The chroniclers noted that their new king had married ‘a kinswoman of King Edward, of the true royal family of England … descended from the stock of King Alfred’.10
She had been crowned by Anselm, archbishop of Canterbury; he had ignored objections to the marriage, that Edith had ‘taken the veil’ (become a nun) while in her aunt Christina’s care at Wilton Abbey, where Christina was abbess. Edith strongly repudiated these claims, insisting that her disciplinarian aunt had forced her to wear the veil to protect her from libidinous Normans, including Henry I’s brother William Rufus, and that she had never taken vows.11 She had, she said, ‘gone in fear of the rod of my aunt Christina, and she would often make me smart with a good slapping and the most horrible scolding’.12 The marriage, nevertheless, and therefore her and Henry’s heirs, were undisputedly legitimate. Edith’s character was unimpeachable; she was the model of queenly piety and devotion. But now William Atheling, Henry’s only son by his queen, was dead.
King Henry’s contemporaries called him licentious. He had numerous mistresses, and when the White Ship sank he was left with many capable although illegitimate sons, as well as nephews. But the king wanted his own legitimate descendant to rule after him. The dual realm of England and Normandy had only been in – albeit sporadic – existence since 1066, and the king, perhaps thinking of his own experiences of purloining the throne from his brother, needed an heir whom all his nobles would accept. Edith died in 1118. Within ten weeks of the tragedy, Henry married again. His bride was Adeliza, daughter of Godfrey, duke of Lotharingia and count of Louvain. She was seventeen, the same age as his dead son. King Henry was fifty-two or fifty-three years old. The chroniclers called the new queen puella (girl) at her wedding.13
No child arrived. During their fifteen-year marriage the chroniclers did not even hint at a miscarriage or a stillbirth for Adeliza.14 The problem may well have been the king’s. (After his death Adeliza made a love match with William d’Aubigny, the son of Henry’s butler, and they had seven children together.) The king was obviously sensitive about his queen’s childless state. During Easter 1124 he brutally punished leaders of a rebellion and meted out the same punishment – blinding – to a knight, Luc de la Barre. This castigation was universally perceived as too harsh for a mere knight. But Luc had composed offensive songs about the king, and some historians have speculated they were about Adeliza’s failure to have a child. Luc took his own life, crushing his skull against the walls of his cell, rather than face his awful punishment.15
Four years after his second wedding the old king, possibly despairing, was offered a solution to his succession problem when the husband of his only legitimate daughter, Matilda, died.
Matilda was born at the beginning of February 1102. During her early childhood, while her father was fighting for control of Normandy, she and her brother William were placed in the care of Anselm, archbishop of Canterbury. Matilda was extremely fond of him, and they would remain close for the rest of his life. Anselm had been the abbot of Bec in Normandy, and Matilda would show a lifelong devotion to this house, possibly because of her friendship with Anselm.16
When she was only eight years old, King Henry sent Matilda away to Germany and a splendid diplomatic marriage with Heinrich V. Heinrich had gained the throne of Germany only two years before his betrothal; it was his bloody prize following years of fighting his own father, Heinrich IV, for the crown. Matilda was formally betrothed to her groom at Westminster, in his absence, on 13 June 1109. Heinrich’s envoys arrived in England the following year, to escort her to Germany. He was about seventeen years older than his child bride. For King Henry the match and its association with one of Europe’s most powerful princes bolstered his position as a newly crowned king, who had still not been acknowledged duke of Normandy by his overlord, Louis the Fat, over his defeated brother, Robert. Heinrich wanted Matilda because her father was rich; he desperately needed money to pay for his wars and to aid his campaign to be crowned Holy Roman Emperor by the pope. Matilda’s dowry of 10,000 marks‡ in silver was