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

numbers, though many observant men were there. So numerous were the wedding gifts which various kings and primates sent to the emperor, and the gifts which the emperor from his own store gave to the innumerable throngs of jesters and jongleurs and people of all kinds, that not one of his chamberlains who received or distributed them could count them.
     
    Matilda’s performance on this intimidatingly magnificent occasion was immaculate. She was ‘a girl of noble character’, the anonymous chronicler remarked, ‘distinguished and beautiful, who was held to bring glory and honour to both the Roman Empire and the English realm’. It was also the beginning of her public life at her imperial husband’s side. It seemed an unlikely partnership: a girl scarcely on the brink of adulthood, married to a man of twenty-eight, a monarch who was not only able and astute but ruthlessly and relentlessly hard-headed. But observers were in no doubt of how well the relationship worked. ‘The emperor loved his noble wife deeply,’ wrote Orderic Vitalis; and, even if we choose to be a little more cynical than the conventions of courtesy allowed in describing the emotional dynamics of this dynastic alliance, it remains clear that Matilda won the trust and the respect of her powerful husband.
    Her own family supplied the best of models for a royal consort. Her mother, Edith-Matilda, had been a devoted and skilfulpartner in Henry I’s regime, while her maternal grandmother, Margaret of Scotland, was so widely revered for her piety that she was later declared a saint. But Matilda, who had never known her grandmother, had not seen her mother since she was eight years old, and her success as Heinrich’s queen owed as much to the resilient intelligence of her own response to the role as it did to her genes or the training of her earliest years.
    A complex task lay ahead of her. To be the consort of a ruler was not to be a mere appendage; she was not simply a decorative ornament to his court, or the passive embodiment of a political treaty. A crowned queen shared in her husband’s majesty – she, too, had been anointed by God, her authority given divine sanction – and, if she was necessarily a satellite of his power, she nevertheless had an influential part to play in his government. She might emphasise the spiritual dimensions of his rule rather than the worldly preoccupations that took the lion’s share of a king’s attention: the saintly Margaret of Scotland, for example, was unusual only in the extent, not the fact, of her religious devotion. She might serve as his representative when he could not be physically present, as Edith-Matilda had done with distinction in England during the years King Henry spent across the Channel in Normandy. And she might temper his justice with mercy, her intercession enabling her husband to moderate the harshness of the punishments he inflicted without compromising the respect in which his judgements were held.
    This, in fact, was the first formal queenly role which the eight-year-old Matilda had been called upon to play, in ritual form, on her arrival from England in 1110, when she was asked at Liège to intercede for a disgraced nobleman, Godfrey, count of Leuven and duke of Lower Lorraine (whose daughter Adeliza would become her stepmother ten years later). And from 1114, when she left her schoolbooks behind after the extravagant spectacle of her wedding to take her place at her husband’s side, she fulfilled her duties as a sponsor of petitions and supplications with a dignity and grace that would later inspire her German subjects to remember her as ‘the good Matilda’.

    But she could not be insulated for long from the Empire’s dangerous instability. Her husband, like his father before him, faced armed rebellion in Saxony and the Rhineland, while conflict with the Church now loomed menacingly on German soil. Archbishop Friedrich of Cologne – the man who had touched holy oil to Matilda’s