This is the first in a new series chartering the lives of the Queens of England.
“She was even more distinguished for the purity of her mind and manners than for her illustrious lineage… She united beauty with gentle breeding and all the graces of Christian holiness.”
- The Anglo-Norman chronicler, Orderic Vitalis (1075 – 1142)
“The story of English queenship begins with a French princess. In the centuries after the collapse of Roman imperialism, Europe experienced a perpetually fluctuating regathering of territorial power. Put simply, such power was achieved through violence, but the role of kings was increasingly delineated and formalised by religious liturgy. While their status had yet to become institutional, much less constitutional, a similar process began to arise in the case of queens… Consecration, coronation. These are the processes which set a queen apart from other women in a mystery she shared only with her husband… An unruly twinge of reverence for such beliefs might now be dismissed as embarrassing sentimentality, but there existed no sense of the irrationality of such a contention for the period in question. Just as the Church was omnipresent for every individual, from peasant to magnate, so the idea of difference, of selection by God, coloured the concept of the medieval monarch. Though there is ample, touching, funny evidence of the humanity of medieval queens, it is essential to remember that they were isolated as well as elevated by consecration. They were unique, they were sacred, they were magical.”
- Lisa Hilton, Queens Consort: England’s Medieval Queens (2008)
Matilda of Flanders was born in a violent age and married to a violent man. She was the mother of violent sons and first lady of two nations which were controlled and subjugated by violence. Indeed, her marriage itself – much like her later elevation to the position of queen – may very well have begun in violence of the most intimate kind. Hearing that her father planned to marry her to Duke William of Normandy, who was the illegitimate son of an upstart duke and his working-class concubine, the impeccably royal Matilda snobbishly refused, telling anyone who would listen that she would rather die than marry someone as uncouth and ill-bred as William. The chronicler, Orderic Vitalis, reports that Matilda was not alone in feeling this way, since because of his birth out of wedlock William was considered “a bastard, despised by the native nobility.” In the more charming phrase of the modern historian, Lisa Hilton, the ancestry of the House of Normandy was certainly “good for a giggle.” William, however, evidently didn’t see the humour and he was determined to have the well-connected Matilda for his wife. The Chronicle of Tours decorously reports that he barged into her bedroom and beat her until she agreed to marry him. Overcome by this display of masculinity, Matilda fainted and agreed. A much more believable account, however, is that William raped her – either in her bedroom or one afternoon when she was out riding. With her all-important virginity now snatched from her, it was impossible for Matilda to marry anyone else in her social class and, as a result, she had to marry William.
As with most of her contemporaries, Matilda of Flanders’ exact date of birth is unknown. It was probably in 1032 or 1033, not long after the consummation of her parents’ marriage. She was the daughter of Baldwin V, Count of Flanders and his wife, Adèle, the King of France’s youngest daughter. As a result, the baby’s grandparents included King Robert the Pious of France and his queen, Constance of Arles. Like her father, Adèle was an exceptionally religious woman, who would later be nicknamed “Adèle the Holy” and she imparted this love of Christianity to her only daughter, Matilda, along with an excellent education, which she personally oversaw. As with most fathers of the age, it is likely that Count Baldwin was more interested in his sons than in his daughter – certainly, given the way he acted over her marriage, Matilda’s feelings did not seem to particularly factor into his equations in any meaningful way. In this case, Baldwin was lucky, for Adèle had fulfilled the primary function of a royal bride in providing her husband with four sons – Baldwin, Robert, Henri and Richard. Henri died as a baby, but the others flourished. Perhaps, however, it is unfair to be too harsh on Matilda’s father, who spent most of his life attempting to increase the wealth and security of his country, whilst having to face constant opposition from the local nobility, who were disapprovingly described as figures of “atrocious cruelty” and selfishness by religious scribes at the time. Still, by the time Matilda reached her teenage years, Baldwin’s efforts on Flanders’ behalf were clearly paying dividend. The foundations had been laid for a strong infrastructure and trading network, which would continue to grow throughout the Middle Ages until Flanders had become the economic power-house of Europe in the 15th century.
Thanks to her parents’ ancestry, Matilda was one of the more well-connected of the European princesses born in the early 11th century. In her veins, ran the blood of the famous Christian emperor, Charlemagne (d. 814), the most venerated Christian monarch apart from Constantine the Great, in an era which was obsessed with them. She was also descended from King Alfred the Great (849 – 899), the famed, brilliant and pious King of Wessex, whose reputation was already becoming legendary in his native England. Matilda was also a very good-looking young woman, described by her contemporary William of Jumièges as “a very beautiful and noble girl of royal stock”. There is a story, repeated in the Guinness Book of World Records, that Matilda was to become the shortest of English queens, but the idea that she only ever reached 4’ 2” in height is based on an inaccurate measurement of her bones, undertaken in 1819, when the restored French monarchy was attempting to undo some of the damage done on the royal tombs by the Revolution. A more scientific exhumation of Matilda’s body in 1959 established that, in fact, she grew to 5’ in height by the time she reached maturity.
Maturity for Matilda of Flanders came in a fairly brutal form, as has been discussed, at best through a coerced marriage, at worse (and most probably) through rape. As she approached her sixteenth or seventeenth birthday, her father began to seriously consider a match between his only daughter and William, the 20-something Duke of Normandy. Like Flanders, Normandy was technically an independent nation, although feudal overlordship for Normandy was held by the King of France. Flanders, which roughly equates to modern-day north Belgium, was heavily under the influence of the Holy Roman Empire (roughly equating with modern-day Germany and Bohemia), but Baldwin was anxious to remove his province from the Empire's orbit. An alliance with Normandy would help pull Flanders more closely under the protection of France, a process started a generation earlier by Baldwin’s own marriage to Adèle. Normandy, moreover, had considerable diplomatic influence in England, a wealthy country which needed to be neutralised since the English King had promised to help the Emperor in subjugating Flanders if it made any further attempt to extricate itself from the Holy Roman Empire’s sphere of influence.
Having seen Baldwin marry Adèle for much the same diplomatic reasons in the time of his late father, the current Emperor, Heinrich III, was understandably nonplussed at the idea of their daughter Matilda marrying William and thus further helping in the liberation of Flanders from its position as a vassal-state of the Empire. Luckily for the Emperor, he had been instrumental in securing the election of the current Pope, Leo IX, who, despite doing many commendable things during his time as Pontiff, was also a political realist who was prepared to appease and assist his imperial backer when necessary. As Baldwin and William hashed out the details of the marriage proposal, an edict came from Rome forbidding it; William and Matilda were fifth cousins, which technically placed them within the grounds of forbidden affinity, and, in this case, unlike in so many others, the Holy Father unhelpfully refused to dispense the impediments.
