The Stephen-Mathilda wars

 Twelfth-century English royal history usually goes from the sons of William the Conqueror, to Henry II with Eleanor of Aquitaine and Becket, to Richard the Lionheart (who is good) and King John (who is bad).  Rarely do history buffs focus on the Stephen-Mathilda wars of 1135-1154, almost twenty years of upheaval, civil war, and betrayal, dense with family politics and strong women.

Never heard of it, you say?  Well, you're about to.

The issue was whether the son of a daughter or the daughter of a son was the most appropriate heir.  Stephen and Mathilda were first cousins, grandchildren of William the Conqueror.  The Conqueror's second and third sons, William Rufus and Henry I, had succeeded him as kings of England (the oldest son, Robert, was duke of Normandy until Henry I defeated his older brother in battle and took Normandy).  Meanwhile the Conqueror's daughter Adela married Stephen, Count of Blois (Blois is on the Loire, in France).  So far so good?

The problem arose when Henry I died without legitimate sons in 1135.  He had had a son, named William like Henry's father and brother, but Young William had died in 1120 in the White Ship debacle, when he and his friends were sailing between France and England, probably DUI, and crashed and sank.  So Henry ended up naming his daughter Mathilda as future King of England and got all his barons to agree to it.

They may have had their fingers crossed behind their backs, because they all hated Mathilda (also sometimes known as Maud in England).  She had earlier been married to the German emperor, Heinrich V, and continued to call herself Empress even after he died and she returned to England.  This was bad enough, but then she married Geoffrey Plantagenet, count of Anjou, the county right next to Normandy.  The Anglo-Norman barons who had promised to support Mathilda as King of England had serious reservations about Geoffrey Plantagenet.

So they turned instead to her cousin Stephen, son of Adela and Stephen of Blois (see above, I hope you're taking notes).  Young Stephen thought becoming King of England was a swell plan, and the wars were on.  The barons loved the Stephen-Mathilda wars.  They changed sides multiple times, getting rewards and grants and promises every time they did.  But even they thought things were getting a little too chaotic after a while.

(Interestingly, in official lists of Kings of England, Stephen is always listed rather than Mathilda.  Personally I disagree, but I'm not making official lists.)

As both Stephen and Mathilda got older, the question arose as to who would succeed either one.  Stephen thought his oldest son, Eustace, ought to be king after him.  But no one liked this plan (which is why you've heard even less about King Eustace than about the Stephen-Mathilda wars, as Eustace was never crowned).  Stephen had married Mathilda, countess of Boulogne, in France (another Mathilda! it seems like about half the women at the time were named Mathilda), and the French did not want Boulogne, an important port, attached to the English crown.  For that matter, neither did the pope.

As it turned out, Eustace died before his father, and when King Stephen was dying in 1154 he decided to make amends with his cousins.  At this point both Empress Mathilda and Geoffrey Plantagenet had died, leaving a son, Henry, count of Anjou.  Stephen officially named Henry his heir as King of England, and young Henry Plantagenet succeeded as Henry II (1154-1189).  He was father of both Richard the Lionheart and King John.

Interestingly, although we tend to assume that a king's oldest son will succeed as king, Richard the Lionheart, sixth of the Anglo-Norman kings, is the first example of the oldest surviving son succeeding (and he'd actually had a couple of older brothers who predeceased their father).  Starting with the Conqueror, who succeeded by conquest, the succession went next to a second son, then to a younger brother, then to a nephew (Stephen), then to a first cousin once removed (Henry II), and finally to the oldest surviving son.

© C. Dale Brittain 2023
For more on medieval political history, see my ebook Positively Medieval, available on Amazon and other platforms.  Also available in paperback.

Medieval Monarchs

Medieval kings and queens are often assumed to have been absolute, "divine right" monarchs.  But this is not true--such monarchs instead are found only in the early modern period, the Ancient Régime (sixteenth through eighteenth centuries).  Medieval monarchs were elected.

Elected? you say.  You don't mean peasants had access to the ballot box?  No, of course not.  When the US was founded, only propertied men could vote, and women got the vote only after World War I, after many decades of effort by people like Susan B. Anthony, who didn't live to see it.  The ability of southern blacks to vote was tenuous at best until the 1960s.  So we shouldn't expect medieval voting rights to match the twenty-first century.

If one wanted to be a king in medieval Europe, one needed both to be part of a family considered royal and to be elected by a council of the powerful.  In the Merovingian dynasty in early medieval France (fifth-eighth centuries), any male descended in the male line from Clovis, the first king, seemed to imagine he had the right to be king, regardless of details like illegitimacy or a plethora of brothers and cousins.  This led to some extremely nasty family feuds.  A would-be king needed at least some of the powerful to support, follow, and elect him.

The Carolingian dynasty, Charlemagne's family, started with his father Pippin, who deposed the last Merovingian king, had himself formally elected by his followers, and persuaded a bishop to anoint him.  To add to this, he got the pope to bless him and his children as indubitably royal.

In the next centuries, a number of people challenged Carolingian rule, in all cases assembling nobles and bishops who were supposed to "represent" the will of the people, in order to be elected by them.  (Our form of representative democracy derives from medieval forms.)  Once kings, of course, they wanted to make the position hereditary, but it was hard to do so.  And it was not automatic that the oldest son inherit.

In England, the duly elected Anglo-Saxon king was defeated in 1066 by William, duke of Normandy, now known as "the Conqueror."  William was succeeded as king by his second, not first son, William II; the oldest son got Normandy.  William II was succeeded by his younger brother Henry I.  Henry, whose only legitimate son died by drowning (legitimacy had become more important than it had been during the early Middle Ages), was succeeded by his nephew Stephen (son of a daughter of William the Conqueror).  Stephen in turn was succeeded by Henry II, whose mother was a daughter of Henry I.  Henry II had five sons, but three of them died before he did, and the fourth, Richard "the Lionheart," died childless and was succeeded by his younger brother John.

(Interestingly, one of the sons of Henry II who predeceased him, Geoffrey, had had a son named Arthur.  Young Arthur went to visit his Uncle Richard one day and was never seen again.)

For all of these successions, none of which match our vision of inheritance by oldest son, the great lords of England had to give their consent.  We are now up to the early thirteenth century, and, for the first time, both French and English kings started asserting that their oldest son would inherit, even if not formally elected.  But it took a long time to get there.

The castle in the image is Château Gailliard in Normandy, built by Richard the Lionheart.

© C. Dale Brittain 2014