April Queen by Douglas Boyd

Author:Douglas Boyd
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
ISBN: 9780752473048
Publisher: The History Press
Published: 2012-02-22T00:00:00+00:00

Was this Henry’s grand design? 1. Young Henry and Marguerite. 2. Princess Matilda and Henry of Saxony. 3. Re-attachment of Toulouse/Prince John and Alix de Maurienne/the Crown of Lombardy. 4. Princess Joanna and William II of Sicily. 5. Princess Eleanor and Alfonso of Castile. 6. The winning move: Becket to Pope.

And why stop there? There were vast territories inide Germany controlled by bishops who did not support Frederik Barbarossa. With the pope on his side, Henry could have been the master of all Europe. From a less advantageous beginning, Charlemagne had done it. While such a plan to dominate the whole of Europe cannot be proven, it explains a great deal that is otherwise inexplicable.

Henry had spent the formative years of his childhood in an intense relationship with the powerful, intelligent and scheming Empress Matilda in the west of England during the civil war. He had been raised to reclaim at all costs what she regarded as her birthright north of the Channel, in addition to inheriting the duchy of Normandy she had kept for him and his father’s cluster of territory in Anjou, Maine and Touraine.

Given her behaviour in the on-again, off-again marriage to Geoffrey the Fair, Matilda must have had a powerful reason to bear the three sons she gave him. Was it to ensure that one of them would eventually rule the empire and give her back her place in history as the mother of an emperor – there was no greater destiny for a noblewoman – out of which she had been cheated by her first husband’s early death? Germany, where she had as consort shared power with the Emperor Henry V and Italy, where she had commanded Henry V’s armies in her early twenties. It was there that she had wielded her greatest power, and it was there that Henry’s manoeuvrings are otherwise hard to fathom.

The only way Charlemagne had worked out of ruling the vast empire he had conquered had been by using his sons as viceroys. William the Conqueror had had the same idea. A paranoid ruler like Henry might well have thought that, if he could rely on no one else, at least the sons of his own blood could be counted on, each to rule a share in the greatest empire the world had known since the Roman Empire split into two parts in the late fifth century.

If Matilda did implant such a grand design in Henry’s youthful head – and plans like this are unlikely to be put in writing between two conspirators who trusted no one else – it would go a long way to explain all those sons and Eleanor’s bitterness at being discarded now. It would also explain why she was to support her sons against him after Becket’s obstinacy had aborted the grand design, and made it unlikely ever to be primed again.

The Christmas court in Argentan was a frigid affair. Just over a month later, on 1 February 1168, Princess Matilda was married in faraway Brunswick to Henry the Lion of Saxony.

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