She-Wolves: The Women Who Ruled England Before Elizabeth by Helen Castor Page A

political stage when her father died, at Lyons-la-Forêt or Rouen, Westminster or Winchester, she would have been poised to assert her claim to his throne as his only legitimate child, born in the purple (that is, born to a reigning king just as her father had been, a circumstance of which Henry himself had made much in pressing his own right to the throne thirty-five years earlier), her title validated by Henry’s designation and the barons’ oaths of loyalty. As it was, she was barely even in the wings. At her dying father’s side, she might have made a credible figurehead for unity, taking on Henry’s weighty mantle as bringer of peace to his people. Instead, in her absence, the nobles had more than enough reason to look elsewhere for leadership.
    For all Henry’s attempts to bind the future to his will, the only precedents so far established for the succession of the Norman kings of England favoured might over right. William Rufus in 1087 and Henry himself in 1100 had won the throne by acting swiftly to seize the crown, and then fighting to retain it. The legitimacy of their rule was born of their hold on power, not the other way round. In theory, Matilda’s claim to be her father’s heir was unanswerable, but in practice she was hampered by multiple disadvantages: she was female; her husband, whose status in relation to her claim to the crown remained deeply ambiguous, was a distrusted outsider among the powerful men she now sought to rule; and she was not there in person to counter escalating doubts and uncertainties. Meanwhile, the barons who had accompanied Henry’s corpse from Rouen to Caen went into conclave during the uncertain weeks while they waited for the wind to change for the long Channel crossing, and emerged with a proposal that the crown should go to an alternative candidate: Thibaud, count of Blois, son of Henry’s formidably able sister Adela.
    Plausible though Thibaud might have been as a ruler – at forty-five, he was a seasoned soldier and experienced politician as well as a royal nephew – the magnates had overlooked the fact thatthe precedents of the half-century since the Conquest offered no more convincing support to the idea of a king chosen by election than they did to the prospect of the hereditary principle handing the crown to a king’s daughter. Someone else, however, had been paying much closer attention to the lessons of recent history. While the Norman barons debated and Matilda settled into her stronghold at Argentan, Thibaud’s younger brother Stephen, count of Mortain, left his wife’s county of Boulogne at speed with the smallest of retinues and took ship across the shortest stretch of the Channel from Wissant, Boulogne’s main port, to Dover. Without pausing to gather support or supplies, he rode the eighty miles to London as hard as he could. He was welcomed into the city before turning seventy miles south-west to Winchester, the historic capital of Anglo-Saxon England, where his youngest brother Henry was bishop. There Stephen took control of the heaped silver and gold in the royal treasury; and on 22 December, just three weeks after King Henry’s death, he was crowned king of England in the vast Romanesque cathedral by the hastily summoned archbishop of Canterbury.
    It was 1100 all over again. The blueprint of Henry’s own coup d’état after his brother Rufus’s death in the New Forest could scarcely have been followed more assiduously. Speed and implacable resolve had won Henry the throne; and now Stephen had taken the crown for himself before the nobles at Caen or Matilda at Argentan had an inkling of what was happening.
    In principle, Stephen’s credentials as a potential king were questionable. He was not even the senior male heir within his own family – his elder brother Thibaud had inherited their father’s lands and title as count of Blois – and his royal blood came in the female line from his mother Adela, which suggested no hereditary grounds on