Douglas Boyd - Plantagenet Princesses: The Daughters of Eleanor of Aquitaine and Henry II

Plantagenet Princesses

Also by Douglas Boyd

Histories:

April Queen, Eleanor of Aquitaine

Voices from the Dark Years

The French Foreign Legion

The Kremlin Conspiracy: 1,000 Years of Russian Expansionism

Normandy in the Time of Darkness: Life and Death in the Channel Ports 194045

Blood in the Snow, Blood on the Grass: Treachery and Massacre, France 1944

De Gaulle: The Man who Defied Six US Presidents

Lionheart: The True Story of Englands Crusader King

The Other First World War: The Blood-soaked Russian Fronts 191422

Daughters of the KGB: Moscows Cold War Spies, Sleepers and Assassins

Agente Female Spies in World Wars, Cold Wars and Civil Wars

The Solitary Spy

Red October: The Revolution that Changed the World

Lockerbie: The Truth

Moscow Rules

Normandys Nightmare War

In preparation:

The Plantagenet Princes

Novels:

The Eagle and the Snake

The Honour and the Glory

The Truth and the Lies

The Virgin and the Fool

The Fiddler and the Ferret

The Spirit and the Flesh

The Daughters of Eleanor of Aquitaine and Henry II

Douglas Boyd

First published in Great Britain in 2020 by

Pen & Sword History

An imprint of

Pen & Sword Books Ltd

Yorkshire Philadelphia

Copyright Douglas Boyd 2020

ISBN 978 1 52674 310 7

eISBN 978 1 52674 311 4

Mobi ISBN 978 1 52674 312 1

The right of Douglas Boyd to be identified as Author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

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P erhaps surprisingly to non-medievalists, the early Middle Ages saw a number of women exercise great power. In the ninth century, the Lombard queen Angilberga was given the honorific consors regni. In the tenth century the Byzantine princess Theophano, married to Holy Roman Emperor Otto II, ruled the Empire after his death as regent for her son Otto III and, in England the Lady Aethelflaed both ruled Mercia and led its army into battle. In the eleventh century, Gisela, wife of Salian Emperor Konrad II, reigned with him as consors imperii. Early in the twelfth century, Adelaide of Savona governed Sicily as regent until her son Roger II came of age. In Visigothic Spain, Petronila of Aragon and Urraca of Len-Castile were both queens regnant.

Another of these strong and powerful women was the daughter of Englands King Henry I named Matilda or Maud. After the death in May 1125 of her first husband, the Holy Roman Emperor Heinrich V, she returned to the land of her birth at the age of 23 but kept the title of Empress for the rest of her life. Her father was a son of William the Conqueror and succeeded to the throne on the allegedly accidental death of his brother William Rufus in 1100. Having lost his legitimate 18-year-old son William Adelin and several of his illegitimate sons in the disastrous sinking of the White Ship off Barfleur in 1120, he named his only surviving legitimate child Matilda as his heir to the English crown and the Duchy of Normandy, forcing the Anglo-Norman barons of the island realm to swear allegiance to her.

At the time, nobody called sons and daughters of royalty by the title prince or princess; for example, William Adelin was known as guilelmus filius regis William, the kings son or guilelmus filius Henrici with everybody knowing which Henry was being referred to. So, strictly speaking, the title of this book is a misnomer, but a convenient one for modern readers. Frustratingly, the only extant images of most of these women are the wax imprints of their seals that legitimised documents, and these give little impression of the person even in colour photographs and none in monochrome.

When Henry I died in December 1135, his nephew Stephen of Blois was among the first to hear the news in Boulogne. Breaking the oath he had sworn to recognise Matilda as the legitimate successor, he immediately took ship from there to England. He seized the treasury with the help of his brother, Bishop Henry of Winchester, bribed the citizens of London to support his claim and persuaded William de Corbeil, Archbishop of Canterbury, to officiate at a coronation ceremony before the end of the year. Speed had won him the throne, allied to the dislike of many Anglo-Norman barons for the idea of being ruled by a woman although Matilda Empress was far from a shrinking violet, being described in the eulogy later pronounced by Bishop Arnulf of Lisieux as an exceptional woman, devoid of womanliness. High praise indeed! Married for the second time to the lusty Count Geoffrey the Fair of Anjou, who was ten years her junior, the unwomanly empress nevertheless more than fulfilled her duty to give him a male heir by bearing him three sons.

The Plantagenet dynasty takes its name from Geoffrey the Fairs custom of sporting a sprig of bright yellow flowering broom (in French, gent ) in his helmet as a highly visible rallying point to his supporters during battle and in mles , those violent free-for-all skirmishes at a tournament, confronting two teams of armed and mounted knights, where prisoners could be taken and held for ransom, and wounds and deaths were common. The earliest Plantagenets were from Geoffreys county of Anjou in France, and therefore known as the Angevins, who ruled England 11541216. After the loss of the county of Anjou, came the Plantagenets proper, ruling 12161399, followed by the cadet branches, usually referred to as the houses of Lancaster and York, which ruled 13991485.

Following the difficult birth of her third son, christened Henry after his regal grandfather, Matilda Empress decided as had Henry Is queen Matilda of Scotland after two births to cease sexual relations with her husband, leaving him, as a chronicler once said, to take his pleasures elsewhere. Matildas efforts to claim her legitimate inheritance on the death of Henry I were hampered by her last pregnancy. In the castle and Norman knights and nobles, the latter wavering somewhat in their support because, if Stephen won the confrontation, they stood to lose their estates in England. For the next decade Matilda lived the precarious life of a female warlord in France and England. There was little contact with her sons until after her famous escape from Oxford castle, wrapped in a white cloak during a snowstorm in December 1140 which was thought by Stephens force besieging the castle too severe for any man, let alone a woman, to venture out of doors. Clambering down the unguarded riverbank, Matilda and a few companions walked through the blizzard on the ice of the Thames to Wallingford and made their escape.