Empress Matilda
Matilda was the designated heir to England, was never crowned, and put her son on the throne instead. She was the only legitimate daughter of Henry I, married at twelve to the Holy Roman Emperor Henry V and sent to Germany, where she was crowned and governed as his consort for eleven years - the title of empress was hers for life and she never used any other. Her brother drowned in the White Ship in 1120, and her father, having no other legitimate son, made the barons swear three times to accept her as his heir. When he died in 1135 her cousin Stephen crossed to England and was crowned within three weeks, while she was in Anjou, pregnant, and married to a count the Normans despised. The war that followed lasted nineteen years and is called the Anarchy. She landed in 1139, captured Stephen at Lincoln in 1141, and was recognised as Lady of the English - and then lost London before the coronation, by a haughtiness the chroniclers describe at length and which reads, from a distance, like a woman refusing to be managed. Stephen was exchanged for her half-brother Robert of Gloucester, and she escaped from Oxford across the frozen Thames in a white cloak. She left England in 1148 and spent her last twenty years in Normandy advising her son, who became Henry II by the settlement that Stephen's son's death made possible. Her epitaph says that she was great by birth, greater by marriage, and greatest in her offspring. It does not mention the war.
- Lived: 1102 CE – 1167 CE
- Nationality: English
- Roles: royalty
