Queens Consort by Lisa Hilton Read Free Book Online

Ranulf, Earl of Chester seized the castle of Lincoln just before Christmas 1140, Stephen’s response was to try to create a similar role for him. In return for the settlement of a land claim in the region, the earl and his brother were left in charge of the castle. But Stephen did not trust Ranulf and a month later he reneged on his promise. No chronicler offers a precise reason for his change of heart, but John of Hexham gives an account of a quarrel between Ranulf and Henry of Scotland over disputed rights in Carlisle and Cumberland. According to this story, Queen Matilda, advised that Ranulf was planning to kidnap Henry, arranged for him to travel safely back to Scotland with a strong bodyguard. There is little more to this version of events than rumour, though it is notable that it acknowledged the significance of the Queen’s intervention. However, it does hint at an awareness that Ranulf was generally belligerent. His ambitions in Lincolnshire were highly threatening to other magnates, and Stephen may have retracted the concessions he had granted him after a hostile reaction from other lords at his Christmas court.
    The battle for Lincoln was one of the most decisive events of the civil war. Orderic Vitalis notes that two women were closely involved in the original seizure of the castle by the Earl of Chester. The countesses of Chester and Lincoln, Matilda and Hawise, distracted the castellan’s wife while Ranulf entered the castle as though he planned to do no more than collect his wife from her visit. A small detail, but one that illustrates how even women not possessed of queenly authority were able to do more to support their husbands’ strategies than standing by as anxious spectators. Stephen attacked Lincoln Castle on Candlemas, 2 February. It was considered an inauspicious day for a battle, as the feast marks the change in the Church calendar from the celebrations of the Nativity to the anticipation of the sorrows and privations of Lent. In the procession to morning Mass before the King rode out on his raid, Stephen dropped his candle and it broke. Such an interruption in the carefully choreographed liturgy was seen as another bad omen, but Stephen was determined. He made a goodshow in the mêlée, fighting with first his axe and then his sword, but he was ignominiously laid low by a well-aimed rock (so much for the glamour of chivalry), and taken prisoner.
    Stephen was removed to Gloucester, where he met his cousin the Empress a week later, and then detained at Earl Robert’s fortress at Bristol. Matilda of Boulogne was campaigning in the south. She was in London in April, which suggests she had turned back in an attempt to hold the capital. There the Queen ‘made supplication to all, importuned with prayer, promises and fair words for the deliverance of her husband’. 13 The Empress held an Easter court at Oxford, then progressed to Winchester, where she received a royalist delegation from London which included Matilda’s clerk, Christian. The Londoners petitioned for the King’s release, but the Empress slyly insisted that he was not a prisoner — how could a king be held prisoner by his own vassals? Matilda countered this by claiming that the archbishop of Canterbury would never accept the Empress without the specific permission of the King. Yet Stephen’s liegemen were turning to the Empress in increasing numbers. Crucial defectors were Earl Geoffrey de Mandeville, Hugh Bigod of Essex and Aubrey de Vere, the future Earl of Oxford. Mandeville’s declaration for the Empress, in return for which he was granted substantial concessions and rewards, particularly affected the Queen, as he held custody of the Tower of London, which Matilda was forced to quit in mid-May. Her new daughter-in-law Constance, though, was obliged to stay behind. Matilda retreated to Kent, which was safer and well positioned for communication with her county of Boulogne.
    After a second conference with a party from London in