The Monarchs

The Monarchs: Empress Matilda - The Queen Who Was Never Crowned

For a few months in 1141 she was the effective ruler of England, on the brink of coronation - and then lost it all through her own pride. The first woman to claim the English throne, and the mother of the king who finally won it.

The Empress Matilda has one of the strangest entries in any list of English monarchs: she was, for a few months in 1141, the effective ruler of England, the designated and rightful heir to the throne, acclaimed and on the very brink of coronation — and yet she was never crowned, and by strict reckoning she was never queen. She is the woman who won the crown and lost it in the space of a summer, brought down at the last moment not by defeat in battle but by her own pride and the fury of the Londoners. She was the first woman to claim the throne of England in her own right, and her failure to hold it delayed the rule of a queen regnant in England by four hundred years.

Her story is told, from her rival's side, in our article on King Stephen, whose usurpation of her inheritance began the long civil war called the Anarchy. But Matilda deserves her own place in the record, because she was a remarkable figure in her own right — a Holy Roman Empress, a determined and courageous claimant who fought for two decades to secure the crown, and, in the end, the mother of the king who would finally win it. If she never wore the crown herself, she is the vital link in the chain: the daughter of one great king and the mother of another, who kept alive through the darkest years the claim that would triumph in her son.

Key Facts

Claimed the throne: disputed with Stephen throughout 1135–1153; effective ruler for a few months in 1141
Born: around February 1102, probably at Sutton Courtenay or Winchester
Parents: Henry I of England and Matilda of Scotland
Married: Holy Roman Emperor Henry V, then Geoffrey of Anjou
Titled Empress from her first marriage, a title she used all her life
Never crowned Queen of England, though acclaimed Lady of the English in 1141
Died: September 10, 1167 near Rouen, Normandy; buried at Bec Abbey, later moved to Rouen Cathedral

Daughter of a King, Wife of an Emperor

Matilda was born to the highest destiny. She was the only surviving legitimate child of Henry I of England after the drowning of her brother in the White Ship, and through her mother she also carried the blood of the old Anglo-Saxon royal house. From childhood, she was a prize on the international marriage market, and at just eight years old she was betrothed to Henry V, the Holy Roman Emperor — the most powerful ruler in Europe. She was sent to Germany to be raised as a future empress, and she was married to the Emperor at the age of twelve.

She spent her formative years, from childhood into her mid-twenties, as Empress of the Holy Roman Empire, and the experience shaped her permanently. She learned the business of rule at the highest level, acting as regent in Italy on her husband's behalf and conducting herself with the gravity and authority of a great sovereign. She was proud of the imperial title and used it for the rest of her life — she was the Empress Matilda even decades after her husband's death, and even when claiming the far lesser crown of England. That imperial hauteur, so natural in the consort of the Emperor, would later cost her dearly among the more parochial and prickly barons of England, who expected a suppliant and met a sovereign.

The Empress Matilda, daughter of Henry I and the first woman to claim the throne of England in her own right

The Designated Heir

When the Emperor Henry V died in 1125, the widowed Matilda, still only in her early twenties and childless, was recalled to her father's court — and into the center of a succession crisis. Henry I's only legitimate son had drowned in the White Ship in 1120, and the old king had no other legitimate male heir. In an unprecedented decision, he named his daughter Matilda as his successor, resolving that a woman should inherit the throne of England.

It was a bold and, for the age, radical choice, and Henry did everything he could to secure it. Twice he gathered his barons and compelled them to swear solemn oaths of allegiance to Matilda as their future queen — among those who swore was her cousin Stephen of Blois. To strengthen her position and provide for the future, Henry married her to Geoffrey of Anjou, count of a powerful neighboring French territory. The marriage was not a happy one — Matilda, a proud empress, reportedly considered the teenage Geoffrey beneath her — but it served its dynastic purpose: it produced sons, including, in 1133, the boy who would become Henry II. On paper, the succession was secure. Matilda was the sworn and designated heir, and she had a son to follow her.

The Throne Stolen

Oaths, it turned out, were not enough. When Henry I died in December 1135, the reality of the age asserted itself brutally. The Anglo-Norman baronage had no wish to be ruled by a woman — there was no precedent for a female ruler of England, and the very idea was widely regarded as unnatural — and they distrusted Matilda's Angevin husband. Into this hesitation stepped her cousin Stephen, who, breaking the very oath he had sworn to uphold her claim, rushed to England, seized the treasury, and had himself crowned king before Matilda, who was in France and pregnant, could respond.

Matilda did not accept the theft of her inheritance, and in 1139 she came to England to fight for it. What followed was the long, grinding civil war remembered as the Anarchy — nineteen years in which the country was torn apart between the supporters of Stephen and those of Matilda, government collapsed, and, in the chronicler's unforgettable words, men said openly that Christ and his saints slept. Matilda found powerful backing, above all from her devoted and militarily able half-brother Robert, Earl of Gloucester, and the war swung back and forth for years without either side able to land a decisive blow.

Henry I and his family, from a medieval genealogical manuscript - Matilda was his only surviving legitimate child

The Summer of 1141

Matilda came within a hair's breadth of final victory in 1141, and the story of how she threw it away is the dramatic heart of her career. In February of that year, at the Battle of Lincoln, Stephen was captured by her forces. With her rival a prisoner, Matilda was suddenly triumphant. The path to the throne lay open. She advanced on London, was acclaimed Lady of the English — the title used pending coronation — and prepared to be crowned queen at Westminster. After years of struggle, the crown was finally, tantalizingly within her grasp.

And then she lost it, in a matter of days, through her own conduct. Matilda entered her moment of triumph with the imperious manner of the Empress she had been, and it proved catastrophic. She treated the citizens of London — whose wealth and goodwill she needed — with haughty arrogance, demanding a large sum of money and refusing their appeals with a coldness that turned welcome into hatred. She alienated the very people whose support she required at the crucial moment. Before she could be crowned, the Londoners rose against her and drove her out of the city, and her coronation never took place. It was an extraordinary reversal, snatched from the very brink of success by a failure of the common political touch that a less proud ruler might have managed easily.

Worse followed. Her chief supporter, Robert of Gloucester, was captured shortly afterward, and Matilda was forced to agree to exchange her royal prisoner, Stephen, for him — releasing the king she had captured and undoing her own greatest achievement. Stephen was free, resumed his reign, and the war ground on. Matilda's one clear chance at the crown had come and gone in a single summer.

The Escape from Oxford

If 1141 showed Matilda's fatal pride, a later episode showed her courage and resourcefulness, and it became the most famous story of her life. In the winter of 1142, she was besieged by Stephen's forces in Oxford Castle, trapped and running out of supplies, with capture — and the likely end of her cause — imminent. Her escape was the stuff of legend. On a bitter night, with snow on the ground and the river frozen, Matilda had herself and a few companions dressed all in white, as camouflage against the snow, and slipped out of the castle. Undetected, she crossed the frozen river and walked or rode miles through the freezing dark to safety at Wallingford.

It is one of the great escapes in English history, and it captures the other side of Matilda — not the proud empress who lost London, but the tough, brave, determined woman who would not give up, who endured years of war and privation for her claim, and who escaped near-certain capture through sheer nerve. She was, whatever her flaws, no passive figure. She fought for her inheritance with a persistence and physical courage that few of her male contemporaries surpassed.

Legacy

Matilda never won the crown. In time, exhausted and with the tide turning against her, she withdrew from England to Normandy in the late 1140s, and the leadership of her cause passed to her son, the young and brilliant Henry of Anjou. It was he who finally brought the war to its conclusion — not through Matilda's coronation, but through the compromise of 1153, by which Stephen would reign for his lifetime and Henry would succeed him. When Stephen died in 1154, Matilda's son took the throne as Henry II, founder of the Plantagenet dynasty and one of the greatest of all English kings. Matilda lived to see it, spending her final years in Normandy as a respected elder stateswoman, advising her son and devoting herself to religion, until her death in 1167.

Her true legacy, then, was won through her son rather than in her own person. Everything she had fought for — the claim of Henry I's line to the throne — triumphed in Henry II, and the fact that he ruled at all was in large part due to his mother's refusal, through nineteen years of war, to surrender the inheritance that Stephen had stolen. She kept the flame alive when it might have been extinguished, and passed it to the son who could carry it to victory.

Her failure carried a longer shadow too. Matilda's inability to hold the throne in 1141 — and the deep, reflexive hostility to a female ruler that underlay it — meant that England would not have a crowned queen regnant for another four hundred years, until Mary I in 1553. When Mary, and then Elizabeth I, finally proved that a woman could rule England in her own right, they were completing something that Matilda had begun and been denied. She was the first woman to claim the throne of England, born too soon and defeated too narrowly, and remembered less for what she achieved than for what she so nearly did — and for the son through whom, in the end, she won after all.

Places Connected to the Empress Matilda

Oxford Castle. Where she was besieged in 1142 and from which she made her famous escape across the frozen river, camouflaged in white against the snow.
Rouen Cathedral, Normandy. Her final resting place, to which her remains were eventually moved; her epitaph famously noted that she was the daughter, wife, and mother of Henry — a king, an emperor, and a king.
Wallingford Castle, Oxfordshire. The stronghold that held for her throughout the war, and the refuge she reached after her escape from Oxford.
Lincoln Castle. Site of the 1141 battle where her forces captured Stephen, her moment of greatest triumph.
Arundel Castle, West Sussex. Where she first landed in England in 1139 to press her claim, and was chivalrously allowed to go free by Stephen — a decision that prolonged the war for years.
Bristol. The great stronghold of her half-brother Robert of Gloucester, the base of her cause in the west of England.