By September of the following year, however, father and daughter’s relationship had deteriorated. Matilda’s dowry had included the castles of Exmes, Argentan and Domfront, which lay on the border between Normandy and Anjou, but the king, anxious to retain power, refused to hand them over. Now Matilda and Geoffrey demanded them with immediate effect: Geoffrey argued that he would need them to secure Normandy after Henry I’s death and wanted to take possession as quickly as possible. It is likely that the old king’s refusal to give them up had rankled with Geoffrey for some time. He already faced intermittent threats from his own bellicose barons, and it made sound military sense to hold these castles sooner rather than later. Matilda and Geoffrey also urged Henry I to return to William Talvas, one of Geoffrey’s vassals, his father’s castles in Maine.
Talvas was the son of a notoriously barbarous and seditious Anglo-Norman lord, Robert of Bellême, who had briefly harboured William Clito. Even in an age of warfare and violence, Robert’s savagery attracted note: Orderic Vitalis called him ‘unequalled for his iniquity in the whole Christian era’. Henry I, however, had locked him away not for his cruelty, but for his continuous rebellion. The king captured him in 1112, and he remained his prisoner until Robert died nearly twenty years later, in about 1130. Urged by Geoffrey, Talvas asked the old king for his castles of Sées, Almenêches and Alençon back. Geoffrey and Matilda pushed their luck with an outrageous demand that King Henry swear an oath of fealty to them for the castles in Matilda’s dowry – Henry, furious, refused both requests.48 He exiled William Talvas from Normandy, and went to war with his daughter and son-in-law.
The chroniclers, either eyewitnesses or relying on eyewitness accounts, charged Matilda with causing the war that erupted between her husband and father. Robert of Torigni accused her of deliberately causing trouble, of artfulness, and of detaining the king ‘with various disagreements, from which arose several rounds for argument between the king and the count of Anjou’.49 The chronicler and historian Henry of Huntingdon placed the fault entirely with Matilda for stoking the argument; but Henry I and Geoffrey were hardly blameless. The old king had refused to hand over Matilda’s dowry, while Orderic Vitalis accused Geoffrey of avarice, claiming that he ‘aspired to the great riches of his father-in-law and demanded castles in Normandy, asserting that the king had covenanted with him to hand them over when he married his daughter’.50
We do not know how much pressure Geoffrey put on Matilda to side with him against her father. Nevertheless she was forced to choose, and she chose her husband. It is possible that Matilda had softened towards Geoffrey when she was so ill following the birth of her second son. Instead of giving gifts to a Norman foundation as she lay in fear for her life, she chose an Angevin one – Le Mans – and donated costly curtains and tapestries.51 She may have decided between her husband and father already. Now, she left Normandy with her baby sons to join Geoffrey in Angers.
The border war was vicious. Orderic Vitalis, giving us a human and sympathetic portrait of the old king, wrote that Henry ‘took it very hard’ when Geoffrey besieged another of Henry’s sons-in-law, Roscelin, viscount of Sainte-Suzanne, husband of Henry’s illegitimate daughter Constance.52
The war showed that this was not a normal, loving family. Personal relationships were sacrificed to territorial ambitions, and Matilda and Geoffrey were not prepared to wait until the king’s death to claim Matilda’s dowry.
By late autumn the king and his daughter were still not speaking. Perhaps to alleviate his anger and disappointment, King Henry went hunting at one of his favourite spots, Lyons-la-Forêt. On 25 November at supper he ate too many lampreys, a jawless fish and delicacy which his doctor had advised him not to touch. He became mortally ill. Although the sources differ as to what he actually said over the following days, all agree that he was lucid and aware that death was coming.
Three days later he sent for his confessor Hugh, archbishop of Rouen, and arranged for his burial in Reading Cathedral. The king also had his most powerful magnates and protégés, including William of Warenne earl of Surrey, the Beaumont twins – Robert of Leicester and Waleran of Meulan – and his eldest and beloved bastard son, Robert of Gloucester, at his bedside. He made them promise not to desert his body, but to accompany it to burial. But during his final bleak days, did he discuss the succession?
As far as we are aware, nothing was written down at this time. The historian William of Malmesbury claimed that, ‘when he was asked … about his successor he assigned all his lands on both sides of the sea to his daughter in lawful and lasting succession, being somewhat angry with her husband because he had vexed the king by not a few threats and insults’.53 Matilda’s biographer Marjorie Chibnall speculates that before their argument, perhaps the king had intended Geoffrey and Matilda to rule together. But now he reserved his bile for his son-in-law. His wishes were clear: Matilda would rule alone.54
But the anonymous author of the Gesta Stephani (‘The Deeds of Stephen’) claimed that during his final hours, the king performed a volte-face. He was so incensed with Matilda and Geoffrey for their audacious request that Henry pay them homage, and for the war, that he freed his magnates from their oaths of loyalty to his daughter, and repented ‘the forcible imposition of the oath on his barons’.55 John of Salisbury, the brilliant cleric, polymath, diplomat and writer, made a similar claim; he repeated the story told by Hugh Bigod, Henry I’s steward, of a deathbed change of heart.56 The tale appeared in other trustworthy sources.
If this is true, and the king was lucid during his final days as the sources claim, he would have been fully aware of the implications of his actions. The result, he knew, would be a perilous dash for the treasury and the throne.
A clue to the truth may lie with Orderic Vitalis, whose account in his Deeds of the Dukes of Normandy contains intricate details of the king’s illness and the heated discussion of the succession among the Norman magnates surrounding their dying lord, but says absolutely nothing about who old King Henry nominated during his final hours. It is likely that the king never withdrew support for his daughter, but was still so angry that he chose not to reiterate his wishes. Henry I died on 1 December 1135. He was about sixty-seven years old and had been king for thirty-five years.
If he did withdraw support from Matilda, either tacitly or implicitly, who were her likely rivals?
The Gesta Stephani reported that Robert of Gloucester proposed Matilda’s son, young Henry, as England’s monarch. But as he was only two, his claims were in abeyance.57
Robert himself, Matilda’s half-brother and the eldest of the king’s bastard sons, was with his father throughout his illness. It was to Robert that the king entrusted the payment of his debts on his death. Robert was born sometime before 1100 at Caen in northern France, before his father became king. The chroniclers did not name his mother, although an early source claimed she was Henry’s mistress, Nest, the grandmother of the chronicler Gerald of Wales. Gerald documented his family history so carefully that had Robert of Gloucester, the uncle of his king, been related to him, he would doubtless have used the family connection to promote his own interests, for the chronicler ‘lived every day an existence of dramatic egotism’.58 It is more likely that Robert’s mother came from Oxfordshire, although we know nothing more about her.59
When William Atheling died, their father sought to boost the power of this son who had already proved so loyal. Robert had fought both with and for his father; against Louis the Fat at the battle of Brémule in 1119, and he went on to aid him in suppressing an uprising of Norman barons in 1123. Later in the 1120s, he had custody of his uncle, Robert Curthose, at his castle at Cardiff. Henry I ensured he received an impeccable education, made him wealthy by marrying him to Mabel, the stupendously rich daughter of Robert Fitz Haimon (a very close friend and possibly lover of William Rufus), and created an earldom for him – Gloucester. Robert was an excellent soldier, clever and capable, and his father evidently loved and trusted him completely. He relied on him and sought his advice, in matters both military