There Were Two Matildas in England's First Civil War. The One Who Won Its Turning Point Was the Queen.

Ask who fought King Stephen for the English crown and the answer is Matilda: the Empress, Henry I's daughter, the woman every baron in England had sworn to accept and then abandoned. She is the one with the biographies. She is the one the novels are about. And in the single year when the war could have ended, she was not the Matilda who decided it.

Stephen's wife was also called Matilda. She was Countess of Boulogne in her own right, a granddaughter of the King of Scots, and the Empress's first cousin, and the chronicles call her the Queen to keep her apart from the woman they call the Empress. In 1141 the Queen had no claim to anything, no army of her own, and a husband in chains in Bristol Castle. By the end of the year the husband was free, the Empress's war was effectively lost, and the man who had made that happen was a woman.

That reversal is worth understanding on its own terms, because the twelfth century could not understand it at all.

The king in chains

The war had been going for two years when it reached its first and only pitched battle. On 2 February 1141, at Lincoln, Stephen's earls broke and fled, and the king fought on foot with a battle-axe until it shattered, then with a sword, until a knight pulled him down. He was taken to the Empress at Gloucester and then to Bristol, where he was eventually put in irons.

Everything now ran the Empress's way. Henry of Blois, Bishop of Winchester and the Pope's legate in England, was Stephen's own brother, and in March he met the Empress outside his city and came over to her. In April he presided at a council of the English Church at Winchester which chose her as Lady of the English, a title invented for the occasion because there was no word for a woman who ruled England and had not yet been crowned. In June she came to London to be made queen. Westminster was ready. The Londoners were not.

What the Queen did while her husband sat in prison

Through all of this the Queen was doing something nobody had a vocabulary for either. She had Kent, where the king's strength lay, and Boulogne across the water, which was hers by inheritance. She had the Londoners, whose trade ran through Boulogne and who had crowned her husband in the first place. And she had William of Ypres and the Flemish mercenaries, a force everyone else in England found impossible to control and whom she managed when nobody else could.

When the legatine council met at Winchester in April to transfer the kingdom to the Empress, the Queen sent a clerk named Christian with a letter, and he read it aloud to the assembled bishops: a demand that they return the king her husband to his crown. The council ignored it. When the Empress reached London in June, the Queen petitioned her for Stephen's release and was refused. Then the Queen brought her Kentish and Flemish troops up to the south bank of the Thames and sat there, within sight of the city.

The Empress, meanwhile, was asking the Londoners for money. They had asked her, in return, to confirm the laws of King Edward the Confessor, which was the standard request made of any new ruler and one Stephen had granted. She refused. On 24 June, as she sat down to dinner at Westminster, the bells of the city began to ring and the citizens came out of the gates armed. The Empress and her party rode out of the palace before the meal was finished and did not stop until Oxford. She never came that close to a crown again.

The chroniclers who tell this story blame the Empress's pride. It is worth pausing on that. Stephen had refused the Londoners nothing and was called soft for it. The Empress refused them a charter and a remission of tax and was called arrogant. One of those is a reproach and the other is an accusation, and they are about the same kind of decision made by rulers of different sexes.

Winchester

The Empress regrouped and made her mistake. Henry of Blois, sensing the wind, was slipping back toward his brother, and in August she marched on Winchester to pin him in his palace at Wolvesey. His garrison fired the city; Hyde Abbey and the nunnery of St Mary's burned on 2 August. The Empress's army settled into the siege.

The Queen's army then arrived and besieged the besiegers. With William of Ypres commanding the Flemings and the Londoners turned out in force, she closed the roads into Winchester and cut the Empress's supply lines, so that the army inside the ring began to starve. On Sunday 14 September the Empress's commanders gave up and tried to break out westward. The retreat came apart on the road. Robert, Earl of Gloucester, the Empress's half-brother and the one man in her party she could not do without, turned to hold the ford at Stockbridge so that she could get away, and was captured doing it. The Empress reached Devizes and then Gloucester. By the later story she rode the whole way astride, like a man; by another, she was carried part of it on a bier as if dead. The chroniclers could not agree on how she escaped, but they agreed on what it cost.

It cost Robert. And Robert was the one piece on the board that could be traded for a king.

The exchange

The negotiations took two months and the Queen was at the centre of them. The Empress's party wanted Robert back; the Queen wanted Stephen. Neither side would release first. The solution was a chain of hostages, beginning on 1 November: Stephen was freed first, with the Queen and her son standing surety for Robert's release, and once Robert was free other hostages took their place and the chain unwound. By early November both men were loose. In December a council at Westminster restored Stephen to his kingship, and at Christmas he wore his crown again at Canterbury. One chronicler says the Queen was crowned beside him.

In the space of nine months the Queen had kept London, held Kent, managed the Flemings, lobbied the Church, besieged and broken the Empress's army, captured the Empress's commander and bought the king back with him. The war would drag on for twelve more years and nobody would win it on the battlefield. But it was not lost for Stephen in 1141, when it should have been, and that was her doing.

Why the twelfth century could not see it

The author of the Gesta Stephani, the pro-Stephen narrative probably written by the Bishop of Bath, praised the Queen for her manly spirit. He meant it as the highest compliment available, and that is the point. Her position was one the twelfth century had a name for: a wife acting for an absent husband, which lords' wives did whenever the lord went on crusade or to prison. She was playing a game whose rules existed, and she played it better than anyone else in the war.

The Empress was trying to make the rules. She had been crowned Queen of the Germans at eight, had sat in judgement in Italy at sixteen, and was the only person in the whole story anyone had ever actually trained to be a monarch. What she lacked was a position the men around her could recognise, which is why she had to be called Lady of the English instead of queen, and why conduct that would have been ordinary firmness in a king read, in her, as pride.

So who won? The Queen won the decisive campaign and lies at Faversham, in the abbey she and Stephen founded, beside a husband whose line ended with their childless son in 1159. The Empress lost at Westminster, lost at Oxford, left England in 1148 with nothing she had come for, and then spent nineteen years at Rouen as the counsellor of a king, and the dynasty that came out of the war was hers in every sense but the name on the charter. There is no tidy way to say which of them succeeded. The one thing that is clear is that the famous Matilda was not the only one who mattered, and that the year the war turned, it turned on the other.

*Nineteen Winters: Stephen, Matilda, and the Anarchy That Made the Plantagenets* is a standalone history on the English shelf, between *The Norman Conquest* and the Angevins. It tells the whole war from both camps, from the White Ship in 1120 to Henry II's coronation in 1154, with the two Matildas as its spine, every chronicler's bias named, and the chroniclers tested against the tax rolls, coins and castles that show how anarchic the Anarchy really was.