The Man Who Walks Behind Satan: On the Trail of Henry of Blois

By Tracey Warr

The 12th century bishop, Henry of Blois, was the grandson of William the Conqueror. He attracted opprobrium from some contemporaries. Bernard of Clairvaux described him as ‘the man who walks behind Satan’ and ‘that old whore of Winchester’. For Henry of Huntingdon he was ‘a new kind of monster, composed part pure and part corrupt … part monk and part knight.’ Brian FitzCount accused him of ‘having a remarkable gift of discovering that duty pointed in the same direction as expediency’.

Henry of Blois, British Library Public Domain Image

Henry was probably the youngest of eleven children born to Count Etienne of Blois and Adela of Normandy, sister of King Henry I of England. As the youngest son Henry was superfluous to needs for the inheritance of his parents’ holdings and he was given to the monastery at Cluny as an infant.

Some elements of Henry’s history are well-documented and some may be apocryphal. Among the latter is that Henry went to Germany when he was around eleven with his eight-year-old cousin Matilda, daughter of King Henry of England, on her journey to marry Emperor Henry V. If this was Henry of Blois (rather than a different Henry), he was elected Bishop of Verdun in 1118 (aged around 20) on the recommendation of the emperor. The Pope arranged his consecration in Milan but, due to fierce controversy between the Pope and the emperor over who should appoint bishops, the emperor forbade the inhabitants of Verdun from receiving their bishop. Henry took refuge in the fortress of Hattonchatel. With military support, he was installed as bishop in 1120. If this story is true, we catch a glimpse of Henry’s willingness to switch allegiances to hang onto his power, which is repeated in later events in his life.

In 1120 the Anglo-Norman empire shuddered with the sinking of The White Ship in the English Channel. The ship was carrying the younger generation of Norman nobles including the 17 year-old heir to the English throne, Prince William Adelin. Henry of Blois’s sister Matilda, Countess of Gloucester, and her husband were also among the dead. Despite having at least twenty-four illegitimate children, King Henry was left without an heir and his new queen, Adelisa, appeared to be barren. The sinking of the ship led to a succession crisis in England.

In Germany, Verdun was stormed on the orders of Emperor Henry, the bishop was expelled, and escaped the emperor’s forces by swimming across the Meuse. If this story of Henry’s escapades is true it must have caused embarrassment to Empress Matilda since Henry arrived in Germany in her entourage and was then in defiance of her husband. The story has been questioned due to Henry’s age, however, there were other very young bishops who catapulted up the ranks through the power and wealth of their families. Furthermore, the incident seems in keeping with later events in Henry’s life when he took power and his loyalties twisted and turned as he clung onto the influence he had accrued and sought to expand it.

If Henry was in Verdun, it is possible that he was recalled to the Anglo-Norman empire in 1125 by King Henry, along with the Empress Matilda after the death of her husband. The king was contemplating his resources in the succession crisis and these included his widowed daughter and his nephews, Thibaut and Stephen of Blois, and their younger brother, Henry.

Once in England Henry rose rapidly in the Church, thanks to the patronage of his uncle. King Henry I was a youngest son who had climbed unexpectedly to power after the deaths and defeats of his older brothers and that may have been a source of inspiration to his nephew and namesake. In 1126 King Henry appointed Henry of Blois prior at Montecute in Somerset and  then abbot of Glastonbury. Glastonbury was the richest and foremost monastery in England. On 1 January 1127 Henry of Blois was very likely among the English lords who swore an oath at Westminster Palace to uphold the rights of Empress Matilda as the king’s heir.

A few years later, in 1129, the king appointed his nephew bishop of Winchester, when Henry was probably around 30 years old. Very unusually and by special papal dispensation, Henry was allowed to retain his abbot’s mitre at Glastonbury at the same time as receiving the bishopric at Winchester. The combination of these two positions gave him an income that was 37% greater than that of the Archbishop of Canterbury.

Historiated initial letter from the beginning of the Song of Songs
from the Winchester Bible. Public Domain Image

Henry was a generous patron of the arts. He commissioned the Winchester Bible and the Winchester Psalter and is depicted on the Henry of Blois plaque (image at end of article). Matthew of Paris described a magnificent sapphire pontifical ring that Henry gave to Saint Albans Cathedral. His extensive building works included renovations to Winchester Cathedral, Farnham Castle and Wolvesey Castle.

The Annunciation to the Shepherds (top) and
the Magi before Herod (bottom), Winchester Psalter
British Library, Public Domain Image

Many of the English lords were not happy at the idea of a woman on the throne, and they were even less happy with this solution to the succession crisis when the king married Matilda to Geoffrey, Count of Anjou. It is likely that Henry conspired with his brother Stephen and made plans for how they would act in the event of King Henry’s death. When King Henry died in Normandy in December 1135, Matilda was pregnant and unwell. She was unable to immediately claim the throne. The Anglo-Norman lords elected Thibaut of Blois as king of England, but his younger brother Stephen took swift action and usurped the throne from both Matilda and Thibaut. Stephen sailed from Boulogne in rough December seas. At Winchester the keys to the royal treasury were handed over by Bishop Roger, supported by Bishop Henry.

Henry of Blois attended the funeral of King Henry at Reading Abbey in early 1136, where he saw the hand of Saint James, which Matilda had brought back with her from Germany. Despite requests from the German court to return the relic, the empress had given it to her father, who had given it to Reading, his designated burial place. Henry of Blois ‘borrowed’ the hand of Saint James and took it back to Winchester where it doubtless attracted considerable revenue from avid pilgrims seeking cures. The reliquary was not returned to Reading Abbey until 1155, under the orders of Henry II.

With his brother as king of England, Henry could reasonably expect to rise further. When the archbishop’s throne in Canterbury became vacant in 1136 Henry coveted it. Orderic Vitalis claimed that Henry was elected archbishop. However, his expectations were thwarted since his candidacy was not supported by King Stephen and Henry did not receive papal confirmation. Stephen was probably pressured by other factions at court, including the queen and the twin earls of Beaumont and Worcester, who feared that Henry might exert too much influence on the king. Henry overcame this setback by getting himself appointed as papal legate to England in March 1139, which effectively gave him ascendancy over the Archbishop of Canterbury and the King.

Motivated, perhaps, by resentment, Henry called a church council in August 1139 to oppose Stephen’s dealings with Bishop Roger. Henry’s apparent championing of Roger on this occasion did not inhibit him from taking Roger’s role as Dean of St-Martin-Le-Grand, London and acquiring some of the disgraced bishop’s properties.

Henry of Blois had his fingers in the water at every turn of the tide during The Anarchy. The empress landed at Arundel in September 1139 with her half-brother Earl Robert of Gloucester ready to begin her long-awaited contestation for the throne. Stephen allowed her to leave Arundel and Bishop Henry escorted her towards Bristol. He may have written to his cousin urging her to come to England and claim her throne. In 1140 Henry went to France to discuss the civil war with King Louis VII and Thibaut of Blois and organised an inconclusive peace conference attended by Stephen’s queen, Matilda and Earl Robert of Gloucester.

After Stephen was captured by the empress’s forces at the battle of Lincoln in 1141, Henry switched sides. He met the empress near Wherwell and she agreed to make him her chancellor and defer to him on church matters. Henry received the empress at Winchester Cathedral as Lady of the English, the prelude to crowning her queen and ending the civil war. However, the accord between bishop and empress was short-lived. She flouted her agreement with Henry to defer to him by appointing William Cumin as bishop of Durham. When the empress’s highhanded actions in London caused another downturn in her fortunes, Henry had to flee the city with her. Henry argued with the empress over his nephew Eustace’s inheritance and they parted ways. She went to Oxford and Henry went to Winchester.

Henry next arranged a meeting with Stephen’s wife, Queen Matilda and switched sides again. The empress marched on Winchester and besieged Henry. He appealed to Queen Matilda for aid. The siege went on for six weeks, during which Henry’s forces burnt large parts of the city. The siege ended with a rout, the capture of Earl Robert and the escape of the empress.

When the prisoners, Robert of Gloucester and King Stephen were exchanged, Bishop Henry was obliged to patch things up with his brother. He called a council in London to declare Stephen the rightful king. In 1143, Pope Innocent II died and Henry lost his position as papal legate. He visited Rome in an effort to regain his position but was unsuccessful. In a further bid to secure ascendancy he proposed that Winchester be created a new archbishopric but was again unsuccessful. In 1149 Henry was King Stephen’s envoy in a mission to persuade King Louis of France to support Stephen against the advances of the empress’s son, Henry FitzEmpress, in Normandy. In 1154 King Stephen died and Henry FitzEmpress became Henry II, King of England.

William of Malmesbury, a friend and beneficiary of Henry of Blois’s patronage, described the bishop’s actions during the civil war in a favourable light, claiming that he was trying to do the best by the kingdom. Nevertheless, even allowing for the biases one way or another of the various commentators, a picture emerges of Henry of Blois as a man who might define the word tergiversator. He appears intent on wielding power by any means possible, hoping perhaps that first his brother King Stephen and then the Empress Matilda might be his puppets, or at least that he would have the foremost position in either court, depending on who emerged as the victor. Brian Fitzcount complained against Henry that ‘[my] main offence consisted in refusing to change sides as often as himself’.

Henry of Blois plaque, showing kneeling, tonsured figure. Inscription reads:
'Art comes before gold and gems, the author before everything. Henry, alive in bronze, gives
gifts to God. Henry, whose fame commends him to men, whose character commends
him to the heavens, a man equal in mind to the Muses and in eloquence higher than
Marcus [that is, Cicero]' Image Credit

Bishop Henry assisted at the coronation of Henry II as king of England, but perhaps trepidatious about how the new king might view his equivocations and his wealth, he left England without the king’s permission and retired to Cluny for a few years, sending his treasure on before him. King Henry promptly ordered the destruction of Bishop Henry’s castles. After his cautious return to England, Henry of Blois had a part to play in one more significant episode in English history. He was amongst the bishops forced to sign the Constitutions of Clarendon by King Henry II against Thomas of Becket and presided over Thomas’s trial at the same time as secretly supporting the archbishop’s family.

Another of the possibly apocryphal stories associated with Henry is Francis Lot’s controversial theory that Henry was the author of the Gesta Stephani (an account of the life of King Stephen) and that Geoffrey of Monmouth, the author of The History of the Kings of Britain, was his nom de plume.

Bishop Henry died in his seventies in 1171. King Henry II visited him as he lay dying. When Henry’s body was discovered in 1761 in a sepulchre in Winchester Cathedral it was ‘wrapt in a brown and gold mantle, with traces of gold round the temples’. Henry of Blois emerges from the traces of history as a man who lived sumptuously and who was impressively presumptuous.

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Tracey Warr’s novels are set in early medieval Europe. Almodis was shortlisted for the Impress Prize and the Rome Film Festival Book Initiative. It is based on the life of Almodis de La Marche, who was described by William of Malmesbury as being ‘afflicted with a Godless female itch’. The Viking Hostage recounts the true story of a French noblewoman kidnapped by Vikings. Warr’s trilogy Conquest follows the tumultuous life of the medieval Welsh princess, Nest ferch Rhys. It was supported by a Literature Wales Writer’s Bursary. Warr’s next project, Three Female Lords, has received an Author’s Foundation Award and is a biography of three sisters who lived in 11th century southern France and Catalonia. She is Head of Research at The Dartington Trust and teaches on MA Poetics of Imagination at Dartington Arts School. Her latest novel Conquest III: The Anarchy is published by Impress Books on 2 June.

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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.

Mrs Gaskell's Tower Part II - Illegitimacy in History

By Annie Whitehead

A few weeks ago, I was at the enchanting village of Silverdale in Lancashire, situated on the northern tip of Morecambe Bay and nestled in an AONB (Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty). I envisaged another photo tour, as I've done before on these pages, but, whilst along with some stunning scenery and some rather large houses with Maseratis parked on the drives, there's plenty here of historical note, there is not much else to connect Mrs Gaskell with the place.

However, it was while staying here that she wrote her novel Ruth and this book is noted for its subject matter - that of illegitimacy. A discussion of this theme in literature would probably be enlightening, but is not for the pages of this blog. Instead I began to think about 'bastards' in history generally; how they fared, whether their illegitimacy hindered them and whether in fact we would know of them today had their parents been married.

Henry I's bastards were many in number and have not remained, to be a bit 1066 and All That, "memorable", but the fact that his only legitimate son drowned had a long-lasting impact on the country, resulting in the civil war between Henry's daughter, Matilda, and his nephew, Stephen, which ultimately saw the Plantagenets ruling until there was a bit of a skirmish in a field near Bosworth in 1485. And speaking of Plantagenets, it's still a matter of fevered speculation that Edward IV might have been a bastard - his mother Cecily seems almost to have confessed as much - but at the time it didn't seem to harm his career. No, what made folks a bit po-faced about him was his marriage to the 'commoner' Elizabeth Woodville. Still, she had the last laugh, as there was more of her blood in subsequent kings and queens than Edward's, if rumours about his mother are true (Elizabeth's daughter married Henry Tudor).

Chucking a bastard son or two into the mix is always bound to muddy the waters - there are those who argue vociferously that Richard I, he with the Lionheart, was homosexual. And yet, Phillip of Cognac was his illegitimate son and may not have been the only one.
While we're on the subject of homosexuality, James I seemed happy to flaunt his preference for men but managed to sire two sons, so perhaps that argument against Richard I's generally accepted proclivities doesn't hold much water.

Conjecture also surrounds the legitimacy of Charles II's most famous 'bastard', James, Duke of Monmouth. Charles was not above acknowledging his offspring and handsomely endowing his children and mistresses with lands and titles. But, like Henry I, he had no legitimate male heir, he was getting old, and trouble was brewing. The problem hinged upon the details of Charles' relationship with Monmouth's mother, Lucy Walter, and the existence, or not, of a piece of paper that would prove the couple was officially married - a marriage certificate kept in a secret Black Box, the existence of which was denied by Charles. Whether or not he believed himself to be illegitimate, (he claimed he wasn't), it didn't stop Monmouth making a bid for the throne upon the death of Charles II. Religion being another 'slight' problem, many people preferred the 'bastard protestant' Monmouth to any legitimate but Catholic offspring of Charles' legal heir, his brother James II.

So, the history of the English monarchy is fairly well sprinkled with bastards, some of whom - like Henry VII's 'natural' son - gained no more notoriety than to be awarded the constable-ship of Beaumaris on the island of Anglesey and some of whom attempted, unsuccessfully, to change the line of succession in their favour.

Of course, a few weeks ago in October, we 'celebrated' the anniversary of one of the most famous battles in English history, and we can say without doubt that illegitimacy was no hindrance to William the Conqueror, or William the Bastard, to give him his proper name. A couple of days ago it was Christmas Day, a significant date for William, for that was when he was crowned in Westminster.

Say what you like about William (and I frequently do), a nice little footnote is that unlike most of his successors, he seems to have remained completely faithful to his wife. Was he a loving husband, or was he simply anxious that no child of his should be taunted by the tilt-yard bullies?

Annie Whitehead is an historian and author of To Be a Queen. She also writes articles for various magazines.
Find her at her blog: Casting Light upon the Shadow
and find details of her novel HERE









illustrations: Mrs Gaskell's tower - author's own photograph
all others licensed under Public Domain via 'commons':
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Henry1.jpg#/media/File:Henry1.jpg
Richard I - author Adam Bishop
Monmouth - portrait by Messing
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Bayeuxtapestrywilliamliftshishelm.jpg#/media/File:Bayeuxtapestrywilliamliftshishelm.jpg