In our democratic world, wealth is corporate and anonymous and political power fleeting. Our historians, whatever their own hue, reflect that reality and deprecate earlier historians who dwelt too long in the minutiae of the births, deaths and marriages of monarchs.
This is good, I suppose, but it is well to remember that these births, deaths and marriages were very often not mere incidents of a person’s life. The livelihoods of nobles, merchants, soldiers and serfs turned on the episode. An inability to produce an heir, an unpopular marriage, an early death, any of these things could explode into civil war. Nor, of course, are these births, deaths and marriages without relevance to our wider cultural and spiritual lives.
The time of William the Conqueror’s reign was the time of Baldwin II, King of Jerusalem and of Malcom III, King of Scotland.
As to matters cultural and a generation before, on 25 November 1034 Malcolm’s father Duncan was born. We know him as the King Duncan of a play still played today. As to matters spiritual and a century later, on 25 November 1177 Baldwin’s great grandson Baldwin IV defeated Saladin at the Battle of Montgisard in what we call central Israel. It was a notable engagement between Christian and Muslim forces in a war which continues today.
Half way between these events there was another, on 25 November 1120. It is little remembered today but it was cataclysmic. The White Ship sank with three hundred souls including William Adelin, the only legitimate son and heir of King Henry I and therefore grandson of William the Conqueror. There were many many other deaths including illegitimate siblings and a host of aristocrats.
It is not possible to set out the complexity of the new competitors for the prize of kingdom. Limiting ourselves to William, Baldwin and Malcolm, we can manage this:
- King Henry was William the Conqueror’s fourth son. The first got Normandy, the second died before William in a hunting accident in the New Forest, the third got England and died in a hunting accident in the New Forest. While the last two appear no more than coincidence, Henry was literally last man standing.
- Henry had married Matilda of Scotland, Malcolm’s daughter.
- Henry’s son William, now drowned, had married one granddaughter of Baldwin, Matilda of Anjou.
- Henry’s daughter, another Matilda, married Geoffrey Plantagenet, Matilda of Anjou’s half-brother. Along the way she had married and outlived a Holy Roman Empire and she got to be called Empress Matilda aka Empress Maude.
- Another granddaughter of Baldwin, Sibylla of Anjou, had married the son of William the Conqueror’s eldest son, to whom William had left Normandy but not England.
- Last but by no means least, there was Stephen, the son of William the Conqueror’s daughter. Stephen had deboarded the White Ship because he thought everyone was too drunk. He was right.
The short point is that when Henry died without a male heir, the main contenders were Stephen, male descendant of William the Conqueror through a female, and Empress Maude, female descendant of William the Conqueror through a male. This gender imbalance led to a 15-year civil war known to history as the Anarchy which ended in a draw. King Stephen died childless with Empress Matilda’s son Henry Plantagenet his agreed heir.
Henry succeeded as Henry II in 1154 and the House of Plantagenet held the throne until the death of Richard III at the Battle of Bosworth Field in 1485.
As is well known, that house too descended into a disastrous dynastic squabble called the War of the Roses of which Bosworth was the last gasp.
One way that the victor Henry Tudor imposed his stamp on the throne was by marrying a surviving white rose Elizabeth of York. She was crowned queen on 25 November 1487.
