History of England 1-6

He was a strong sovereign, then, but not necessarily a benevolent one. He was concerned only with his own immediate interest, and the government of England became a form of estate management in which all of the available assets of the land were exploited. That was the Norman way. Throughout his reign the monks from Peterborough Abbey lamented ‘manifold oppressions and taxations’. An extraordinary series of bad harvests also undermined the ability of the people to withstand his exactions. ‘God knows’, an Anglo-Saxon chronicler wrote, ‘how unjustly this miserable people is dealt with. First they are deprived of their property, and then they are put to death. If a man possesses anything, it is taken from him. If he has nothing, he is left to perish by famine.’ The king did take care to protect his supporters. When the coinage was debased with tin, Henry’s soldiers complained that their pay was nearly worthless; he ordered that all of the coiners should be castrated and lose their right hands. He cultivated the interests of the magnates, too, by royal gifts and allowances; eulogists duly celebrated the harmony and loyalty of England. The aristocracy, in other words, could always be bribed and bought.

He of course also fostered the interests of his immediate family. He strengthened his authority by an intricate series of marital arrangements whereby his illegitimate daughters became aligned with the various ruling families of Europe. He married his legitimate daughter, Matilda, to the prince of Anjou; from this union a new race of kings would spring.

It was said that he was endlessly inquisitive about the lives of his magnates, and knew of the existence of plots against him before the plotters themselves. He was a man of great natural curiosity, too, and was nicknamed by one of his kinsmen ‘stag foot’; he could determine, from the track of a stag, how many antlers the creature had.

There was one significant event, however, that he could not foresee. It occurred on the evening of 25 November 1120. His sixteen-year-old son and heir, William Adelin, was about to sail from Normandy to England. His party went aboard the White Ship in a festive atmosphere; the presence of an heir apparent always gives rise to gaiety. The crew, as well as the passengers, were drunk. The rowers kept up a frantic pace, but the helmsman was inattentive. The ship rushed on to its fate, and crashed against a large rock hidden just below the waterline. The heir to the throne was drowned, as well as many younger members of the nobility. Only one person, a butcher from Rouen, survived.

A survivor, in another sense, was left alive. The king’s nephew, Stephen, count of Blois, was suffering from a severe bout of diarrhoea and declined to join the revelry aboard the White Ship. Since he would be crowned as king of England fifteen years later, it can plausibly be maintained that an attack of diarrhoea determined the fate of the nation. Statesmen may plot and plan. Learned men may calculate and conclude. Diplomats may debate and prevaricate. But chance rules the immediate affairs of humankind.

It was said that, after the disaster, Henry never smiled again. But that is a line from a fairy tale. More realistic consequences ensued. The problem of succession, for example, soon became acute. Henry had only one legitimate child, Matilda, and he fathered no other children in the latter years of his reign. No woman had ever sat on the throne of England before, but Henry was not deterred. He gathered the principal barons of the land in Westminster Hall, and ordered them to swear an oath that they would uphold the succession of his daughter. Henry had a voice like thunder, and they quailed before the blast. They duly swore. Yet what was unintended and unforeseen once more came to pass. The perilous consequence of the succession was a long civil war.

While hunting in one of the royal forests of Normandy, the king contracted a violent fever. It was reported that his death was hastened by ‘a surfeit of lampreys’, and indeed he had always liked marine delicacies. In one charter he allowed the bishop of London to take porpoises from the Thames ‘except the tongue which I reserve for myself’. He lay for some days in weakness and confusion; but he confessed his sins, in front of many witnesses, and was given absolution. His body was embalmed but the unfortunate and unskilful embalmer died from the infectious stench that rose from the cadaver; one chronicler, Henry of Huntingdon, remarked that ‘he was the last of many whom King Henry had put to death’. The corpse, leaking what was described as black fluid, was eventually taken to Reading Abbey. This was the abbey that Henry had established as a memorial to his son. Its ruins can still be seen.