Mary of Blois, Reluctant Wife

by Sharon Bennett Connolly

Mary was the youngest daughter of Stephen of Blois and his wife, Matilda of Boulogne, herself the granddaughter of St Margaret, queen of Scotland. Mary was born in Blois, France around 1136. She was destined for the cloister from an early age and was placed in a convent at Stratford, Middlesex, with some nuns from St Sulpice in Rennes. So how did this nun become a reluctant wife?

Mary's father Stephen was the nephew of Henry I, one of his closest male relatives. In the confusion following Henry’s death it was Stephen who acted quickly and decisively. He took the crown from Empress Matilda, Henry I's only surviving legitimate child and designated heir – but she was a woman and England’s nobles were reluctant to be ruled by a woman.

King Stephen

What followed was a period known as the Anarchy, almost 20 years of conflict and bloodshed as Stephen and the Empress Matilda battled for supremacy. Ultimately, Stephen managed to retain control of England but Matilda’s eldest son, Henry, was eager to win back his birthright. Following several incursions by Henry – whilst still in his teens – he and Stephen came to an agreement. Though Stephen and his wife Matilda had three children, including Mary, who survived infancy, on his death, Stephen left his throne to Henry, Count of Anjou and son of Stephen’s bitter enemy, the Empress Matilda.

Of Stephen and Matilda’s three children, Eustace IV, Count of Boulogne, was the eldest to survive into adulthood, but would die before his father.

Stephen’s youngest son was William, who was born around 1134. In 1149 he married Isabel de Warenne, sole heiress to William de Warenne, third earl of Surrey, in order to bring the vast de Warenne lands within the influence of the crown. William would succeed to the County of Boulogne in 1153, on the death of Eustace. Shortly after his brother’s death, and with the help of the clergy, William made an agreement with Henry of Anjou, whereby he waived his own rights to the crown in return for assurances explicitly recognising his rights to his lands, as Count of Boulogne and Earl of Surrey.

Mary, who had been in the convent in Stratford, Middlesex was moved around 1150-52 after some discord with the nunnery. Her parents founded a new convent for her at Lillechurch (Higham) in Kent, making it a sister convent with St Sulpice. Mary does not appear to have been given the title of prioress, however, a charter of Henry II, dated around 1155-58, confirmed Lillechurch to Mary and her nuns, suggesting she held some position of authority. Before 1160 Mary had become abbess of the great abbey at Romsey, an older and more prestigious institution than her little foundation at Lillechurch.

Coat of arms,
County of Boulogne

Mary's brother William died without issue in 1159 during the Siege of Toulouse. He was succeeded in the County of Boulogne by his sister. In 1160 Mary’s life was turned upside down. She was suddenly a great heiress, countess of Boulogne in her own right and too great a marriage prize to be allowed to remain secluded in the cloisters. She was abducted from Romsey by Matthew of Alsace, second son of the Count of Flanders, and forced to marry him. This may well have been a political move; although there does not appear to be any proof that Henry II sanctioned it, most sources imply that the marriage was forced on her by the king and he certainly benefited from Mary being safely married to a loyal vassal. She was, after all, not only a great heiress but, through her father, she had a strong, rival claim to the throne of England.

There was great outrage among the clergy; marriage with a nun was a breach against canon law and opposed by the leading ecclesiastical figures of the day. One source suggested the pope had granted a dispensation for the marriage. However, given that Pope Alexander III expressed great disapproval in a letter to the archbishop of Rheims, his consent seems highly unlikely. The pope imposed an interdict on Matthew of Alsace and pressed the claims of the wife of Mary’s brother, Eustace, to the Boulogne estates; even though Constance had died some fourteen years before. The furore seems to have died down eventually, and the marriage was allowed to stand.

Unfortunately for Henry II, Matthew turned out to be a not-so-loyal vassal and rebelled at least twice. The first occasion arose when Matthew tried to press his claims to Mortain, land that should have been part of Mary’s inheritance but was now held by Henry II. The king was not too accommodating. An agreement was eventually reached whereby, in return for £1,000, Matthew would renounce all claims to those parts of his wife’s estates that were still in royal hands.

Mary seems to have had little love for Henry II, possibly due to his involvement in her abduction and marriage, or simply because of the fact their respective families had spent many years at war. With so much bad history, you wouldn’t expect them to have an affectionate relationship, but Mary appears to have actively worked against Henry. Following a meeting with the ambassadors of the emperor, Frederick Barbarossa, she wrote to King Louis of France. In the document, she describes Henry II as ‘the fraudulent king’, while informing Louis of Henry’s manoeuvring against him.

Mary and Matthew had two children, daughters Ida and Mathilde; and it was after the birth of Mathilde that the couple were divorced, in 1170. There is some suggestion that Matthew was pressured to agree to the divorce by his dying father and the emperor, Frederick Barbarossa, probably in the hope of having the interdict – placed on Matthew on his marriage to Mary – would be lifted. Matthew would continue to rule Boulogne and be succeeded by Ida on his death in 1173.

Mary's daughter
Ida, Countess of Boulogne

Ida (b. c1160) married three times; her first husband, Gerard III, count of Gueldres, died in 1183, while her short marriage to her second husband, Berthold IV, duke of Zehringen, ended in his death in 1186. Her last marriage was to Reginald de Tree, count of Dammartin, who was a childhood friend of France’s king, Philip Augustus; he died in 1227, outliving Ida, who died in 1216, by eleven years. It was Matilda, the daughter of Ida and Reginald, who inherited Boulogne from Ida, and would also become Queen of Portugal through her marriage to Alfonso III of Portugal.

Born in 1170 Ida’s younger sister, Mathilde, married Henry I, duke of Louvain and Brabant, when she was nine-years-old. She would have seven children before her death sometime in 1210 or 1211; she was buried in St Peter’s Church, Leuven.

The interdict, which had been placed on Matthew on his marriage to Mary, was finally lifted when she returned to the convent life, becoming a simple Benedictine nun at St Austrebert, Montreuil. She died there in July 1182, aged about forty-six, and was buried in the convent. A woman who obviously believed that her life should be devoted to God, she is remarkable in that she managed to fulfil her dynastic duties in a forced marriage, and yet asserted herself so that she was able to return to the secluded life she so obviously craved.

Sources
Donald Matthew, King Stephen
Robert Bartlett, England Under the Norman and Angevin Kings
David Williamson, Brewer’s British Royalty; the History Today Companion to British History 
Dan Jones, the Plantagenets; englishmonarchs.co.uk
The Oxford Companion to British History
Mike Ashley, The Mammoth Book of British Kings & Queens
Alison Weir, Britain’s Royal Families, the Complete Genealogy
S.P. Thompson, Oxforddnb.com, Mary [Mary of Blois], suo jure countess of Boulogne (d. 1182), princess and abbess of Romsey.

Image Credits
King Stephen. Public domain.

County of Boulogne Coat of Arms. By Odejea, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=4147599

Ida, Countess of Boulogne. By David Wolleber (http://dl.ub.uni-freiburg.de/diglit/hs497-2/) [CC BY-SA 4.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0)]

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Sharon Bennett Connolly has been fascinated by history for over 30 years. She has studied history at university and has also worked as a tour guide at historical sites. She has been writing a blog entitled History… the Interesting Bits (www.historytheinterestingbits.com) for two years and is currently writing a book entitled Heroines of the Medieval World which is due for release in 2017, concentrating on the lesser known – but no less significant - women and their contributions to medieval history.