PREFACE,
ADDRESSED TO ROBERT, EARL OF GLOUCESTER.
To his most loving lord, Robert, son of king Henry, and earl of Gloucester, William, librarian of Malmesbury, wishes, after completing his victorious course on earth, eternal triumph in heaven. Many of the transactions of your father, of glorious memory, I have not omitted to record, both in the fifth book of my Regal History, and in those three smaller volumes, which I have intituled Chronicles.[531] Your highness is now desirous that those events which, through the miraculous power of God, have taken place in modern time, in England, should be transmitted to posterity: truly, like all your other desires, a most noble one. For what more concerns the advancement of virtue; what more conduces to justice; than to recognize the divine favour towards good men, and his vengeance upon the wicked? What, too, can be more grateful, than to commit to the page of history, the exploits of brave men, by whose example others may shake off their indolence, and take up arms in defence of their country? As this task is committed to my pen, I think the narrative will proceed with exacter order, if, going back a little, I trace the series of years from the return of the empress into England, after the death of her husband. First, therefore, invoking the help of God, as is fitting, and purposing to write the truth, without listening to enmity, or sacrificing to favour, I shall begin as follows.
BOOK I.
[A.D. 1126.] THE EMPRESS MATILDA.
In the twenty-sixth year of Henry king of England, which was A.D. 1126, Henry, emperor of Germany, to whom Matilda the aforesaid king’s daughter had been married, died[532] in the very bloom of his life and of his conquests. Our king was at that time residing in Normandy, to quell whatever tumults might arise in those parts. As soon as he heard of the death of his son-in-law, he recalled his daughter by honourable messengers despatched for that purpose. The empress, as they say, returned with reluctance, as she had become habituated to the country which was her dowry, and had large possessions there. It is well known, that several princes of Lorraine and Lombardy came, during succeeding years, repeatedly into England, to demand her as their sovereign; but they lost the fruit of their labours, the king designing, by the marriage of his daughter, to procure peace between himself and the earl of Anjou. He was certainly, in an extraordinary degree, the greatest of all kings in the memory either of ourselves, or of our fathers: and yet nevertheless, he ever, in some measure, dreaded the power of the earls of Anjou. Hence it arose, that he broke off and annulled the espousals which William, his nephew, afterwards earl of Flanders, was said to be about to contract with the daughter of Fulco, earl of Anjou, who was afterwards king of Jerusalem. Hence, too, it arose, that he united a daughter of the same earl to his son William, while yet a stripling; and hence it was, that he married his daughter, of whom we began to speak, after her imperial match, to a son of the same Fulco, as my narrative will proceed to disclose.
In the twenty-seventh year of his reign, in the month of September, king Henry came to England, bringing his daughter with him. But, at the ensuing Christmas, convening a great number of the clergy and nobility at London, he gave the county of Salop to his wife, the daughter of the earl of Louvain, whom he had married after the death of Matilda. Distressed that this lady had no issue, and fearing lest she should be perpetually childless, with well-founded anxiety, he turned his thoughts on a successor to the kingdom. On which subject, having held much previous and long-continued deliberation, he now at this council compelled all the nobility of England, as well as the bishops and abbats, to make oath, that, if he should die without male issue, they would, without delay or hesitation, accept his daughter Matilda, the late empress, as their sovereign: observing, how prejudicially to the country fate had snatched away his son William, to whom the kingdom by right had pertained: and, that his daughter still survived, to whom alone the legitimate succession belonged, from her grandfather, uncle, and father, who were kings; as well as from her maternal descent for many ages back: inasmuch as from Egbert, king of the West Saxons, who first subdued or expelled the other kings of the island, in the year of the incarnation 800,[533] through a line of fourteen kings, down to A.D. 1043, in which king Edward, who lies at Westminster, was elevated to the throne, the line of royal blood did never fail, nor falter in the succession.[534] Moreover, Edward, the last, and at the same time the most noble, of that stock, had united[535] Margaret, his grand-niece by his brother Edmund Ironside, to Malcolm, king of Scotland, whose daughter Matilda, as was well known, was the empress’s mother. All therefore, in this council, who were considered as persons of any note, took the oath: and first of all William, archbishop of Canterbury; next the other bishops, and the abbats in like manner. The first of the laity, who swore, was David, king of Scotland, uncle of the empress; then Stephen, earl of Moreton and Boulogne, nephew of king Henry by his sister Adala; then Robert, the king’s son, who was born to him before he came to the throne, and whom he had created earl of Gloucester,[536] bestowing on him in marriage Mabil, a noble and excellent woman; a lady devoted to her husband, and blessed in a numerous and beautiful offspring. There was a singular dispute, as they relate, between Robert and Stephen, contending with rival virtue, which of them should take the oath first; one alleging the privilege of a son, the other the dignity of a nephew. Thus all being bound by fealty and by oath, they, at that time, departed to their homes; but after Pentecost, the king sent his daughter into Normandy, ordering her to be betrothed,[537] by the archbishop of Rouen, to the son of Fulco aforesaid, a youth of high nobility and noted courage. Nor did he himself delay setting sail for Normandy, for the purpose of uniting them in wedlock. Which being completed, all declared prophetically, as it were, that, after his death, they would break their plighted oath. I have frequently heard Roger, bishop of Salisbury, say, that he was freed from the oath he had taken to the empress: for that he had sworn conditionally, that the king should not marry his daughter to any one out of the kingdom without his consent, or that of the rest of the nobility: that none of them advised the match, or indeed knew of it, except Robert, earl of Gloucester, and Brian Fitzcount, and the bishop of Louviers. Nor do I relate this merely because I believe the assertion of a man who knew how to accommodate himself to every varying time, as fortune ordered it; but, as an historian of veracity, I write the general belief of the people.
[A.D. 1128.] OF THE SUCCESSION.