Free She-Wolves: The Women Who Ruled England Before Elizabeth by Helen Castor

large, as well as too heavy, for a child) on her young head.
    The ritual was designed to impress all those present, the eight-year-old girl at its centre as well as the assembled onlookers, with its potent blend of the sacred and the majestic. It was therefore with a powerful sense of her royal duty and dignity that Matilda left Mainz for Trier, a little less than a hundred miles westward, to learn what it was to be a German queen. Her education there was overseen by the prelate who had held her during her coronation, Archbishop Bruno, one of her future husband’s closest and most trusted counsellors, a man described by the French statesman and chronicler Abbot Suger of Saint-Denis as ‘elegant and agreeable, full of eloquence and wisdom’. Trier was a Roman city, the oldest in Germany, lying in the valley of the Moselle river between low wooded hills, and its cosmopolitan Franco-German culture provided the ideal setting for this Norman princess to learn the language, laws and customs of her newly adopted home.
    While Matilda studied under Archbishop Bruno’s careful guardianship, Heinrich put the treasure she had brought as her dowry to immediate and productive use. The royal couple’s betrothal at Utrecht in April had doubled as an opportunity for the king to begin the process of assembling forces for his planned expedition to Rome, and in August he crossed the Alps at the head of a vast following – Abbot Suger and Orderic Vitalis suggest a figure of thirty thousand knights, which, even allowing for evocative exaggeration, implies an exceptionally intimidating host – that was equipped and provisioned by Matilda’s silver.
    Relations between Heinrich and Pope Paschal II had deteriorated badly since the king’s accession, over the bitterly contested question of investiture – the competition between Church and state for control of the creation of bishops, a running battle that was the focal point of a broader war over the relative powers of spiritual and temporal authority. Despite Paschal’s initial hopes, Heinrich had proved no more willing to yield to claims of a papal monopoly on investiture than his excommunicated father, and the pope therefore refused to crown him emperor unless he changed his mind. Heinrich had a ready answer: his soldiers seized Paschal and sixteen of his cardinals and held them all in close confinement for two months until they capitulated. Under this peculiarly irresistible form of persuasion, Paschal confirmed his royal enemy’s right to invest bishops with the ring and crozier of episcopal office; and on 13 April 1111, in the echoing basilica of St Peter in Rome, the pope’s unwilling hands placed the imperial crown – an octagonal diadem of gold studded with jewels and cloisonné enamelwork, enclosed by a golden arch and surmounted by a jewelled cross – on the new emperor’s head.
    The conflict was far from over. Once Heinrich and his army had returned to Germany, the papal council lost no time in repudiating the concessions he had extorted by force. The imperial coronation was a sacred rite that could not be undone, but, while hostilities continued, it was abundantly clear that the emperor’s bride could not hope to be crowned in her turn as his empress.

    She could, however, expect to become his wife. In January 1114, just before her twelfth birthday – twelve being the canonical age at which girls were permitted to enter into the sacrament of marriage – Matilda and Heinrich finally took their vows in the towering cathedral at Worms on the western bank of the Rhine. The sheer grandeur of the celebrations, the most opulent gathering of the German court in a generation, defied the descriptive powers of the chroniclers. Five archbishops, thirty bishops and five dukes witnessed the ceremony, each attended by an ostentatious entourage; ‘as for the counts and abbots and provosts’, one well-informed but anonymous commentator continued,
    no one present could tell their