ABSTRACT
It was a vital duty of any medieval ruler to avoid instability after his death by providing
for an untroubled succession. But when Henry I, king of England and duke of Normandy,
died in 1135 the succession was contested, and he was succeeded not by his sole
surviving legitimate child, Empress Matilda, widow of the German emperor Henry V, but
by his nephew, Stephen of Blois. To many of the political elite, Matilda was unsuitable
because she was a woman and married to Geoffrey, count of the Angevins, long-standing
enemies of the Normans. In 1127 Henry had tried to overcome ingrained objections to the
prospect of female rule by making the leading churchmen and nobles swear to accept
Matilda as his heir if he died without a son by his second wife; but otherwise remarkably
little had been done to help her. Her unpopular marriage to Geoffrey of Anjou in 1128
was an alliance forced on Henry by the need to prevent the Angevins from supporting his
dynastic rival, William Clito, the son of Henry’s eldest brother, Robert Curthose. The
decisive factor, however, was Henry’s reluctance to reinforce his daughter’s right with
enough might. Perhaps still hoping for a male heir, he refused to give Matilda and
Geoffrey a power base within the Anglo-Norman state, thus denying them the strength
they needed to be sure of securing the throne on his death. Understandably provoked,
they waged war on Normandy in 1135, and were still estranged from Henry and his court
when he died suddenly on 1 December. Indeed, at that critical moment even Matilda’s
half-brother, Earl Robert of Gloucester, the old king’s favourite bastard, was unable to
support her succession.
