EMPRESS MATILDA!
Granddaughter of the famed William the Conqueror, this was no weak-willed lady sitting in her castle waiting to be rescued by her knight!
It's the winter of 1141/42. The walls of Oxford Castle are holding fast, but no food or drink is coming in. The besieging army is well placed in both position and supplies. And there's no one to come to your aid. Desperate times call for desperate measures - and a great deal of nerve and the heart of a gambler. And the Empress Matilda was just such a person. She was besieged in Oxford Castle in the winter of 1141 and had no army to come to her aid and her cousin Stephen's army was well entrenched and prepared to wait for her to finally surrender and end the civil war that had wracked England for the past few years. But Matilda was not going to give up - she was not just fighting for her claim to the English throne but for the future of her eldest son Henry. And her solution to the Siege of Oxford more than earns her a place in the list of Medieval Badasses.
Badass Act 1 : Escaping the Siege of Oxford! It was a winter cold enough the have frozen the Thames where it passed through Oxford, allowing one to walk across (or slide!) safely. Waiting one snowy night, the Empress Matilda and a few loyal followers were lowered over the castle walls and onto the ground below. Clothed in white they picked their first across the ice-covered Castle Mill Stream, a backwater of the Thames that passed near the castle and just outside the city walls. They then crossed enemy lines, disguised not only by their white clothes but the flurries of snow and the darkness of night. They then made their way to Wallingford Castle, then held by her supporter Brien FitzCount, roughly thirteen miles away. One very daring solution to be sure!
Of course this was by no means this lady's only badass act. She was the elder of the two children of Henry I ('Beauclerc' or 'The Lion of Justice'), King of England and his wife Matilda of Scotland (who brought the ancient blood of the Saxon kings back to the English throne) and his only daughter. She was sent to live in Germany at the age of nine, intended to be the eventual bride of Henry V, the Holy Roman Emperor and King of Germany, who was roughly 16 years older than Matilda. They married shortly before her twelth birthday. It was by all accounts a rather successful marriage, despite Henry's tendency toward isolation and mood-swings. Matilda often acted as regent for her husband and was well-respected by his people. She was left a widow at age twenty-three and returned to England, now the only surviving child of her father - her brother having drowned in the White Ship catastrophe - and her father, King Henry I (Beauclerc or the Lion of Justice), named her his successor and had his barons swear repeatedly to uphold this, including her cousin, Stephen of Blois.
But while King Henry wanted his daughter to succeed, she was by no means a liberated lady. Her father needed her for other political gains, particularly to gain peace between his duchy of Normandy and the neighbouring county of Anjou. Marriages were a time-honored method of buying "peace" in the middle ages, so the the twenty-six year old Empress Matilda was promptly married to the fifteen-year old Count Geoffrey of Anjou. Political matches are hardly expected to be love matches, but Matilda and Geoffrey seemed to have taken an instant dislike to each other that reached epic proportions. The proud and refined Empress could hardly have liked being married to a mere count, and worse yet, a young lad, and even worse yet, from a line of counts that proudly claimed to be descended from the devil! And the wayward Geoffrey, who by all counts lived up to his name "le Bel" (the Handsome) seemed to be quite the womanizer, and being married to a proud, prickly older woman who wanted nothing to do with him had to rankle his manly pride more than a bit! More than once King Henry had to placate one or both married parties when the fighting got too bitter and one or the other left. Somehow though, the Empress would give birth to three sons : her pride and joy and eldest, Henry, and Geoffrey and William.
King Henry would finally die in 1135, hopeful that his wishes and the repeated oaths would pave the way for his daughter Matilda to succeed him on the English throne. Instead and somewhat surprisingly, her cousin, Stephen of Blois, assumed the throne, using his presence in England to literally beat her to the throne (she was in Anjou at the time).
It would have been easy for Matilda to just give up at this point - the odds looked pretty stacked against her. Even her illegitimate half-brother, Robert, the Earl of Gloucester, declared for Stephen. But Matilda was never one to give up - not only was she fighting for her rights, but for her son Henry's rights. She started her campaign in Normandy, and would fight there for four long years ...
Badass Act 2 : Bolstered by the support of her half-brother Robert of Gloucester (who had decided for unknown reasons to remove his support of Stephen and aide his half-sister), Matilda finally boldly set sail to challenge Stephen in England itself. She landed and took up a place in Arundel Castle, the home of her stepmother and new husband. It didn't take long for Stephen to catch wind of this and he besieged Arundel Castle and captured Matilda - and then let her go!! Pretty badass to land with few supporters and then somehow manage to get away!
A long period of civil war would now be sparked off, known as a period "when Christ and his Saints slept ...". Empress Matilda managed to finally capture Stephen, whose own queen, another Matilda, would wage a campaign that was ultimately successful to free her husband. The Empress's pride mixed with a bit of a desire for some payback ultimately resulted in the people of London running her out of town before she could be crowned. But Matilda was down, not out!
Badass Act 3 : Siege of Winchester. Stephen's queen arrived with her forces, led by the Flemish mercernary, William de Ypres, to lay siege to Winchester where the Empress had fled after the rowdy Londoners sent her packing. The Bishop of Winchester, Stephen's own brother, who had earlier thrown in his lot with the Empress, turned coat again and decided to support his brother and left the city with his forces. The Empress's forces had no choice but to make a run for it. The Empress was noted to have rode astride like a man - a daring and probably quite painful decision (imagine the chafing in a time of no undergarments!) - and made it out of the siege.
Ultimately the Empress would be forced to return to Anjou, but as her son Henry gew to manhood, support for him swelled, especially as Stephen's heir Eustace was hard for even his most loyal followers to stomach. After Eustace's untimely (or timely!) death, Stephen finally acknowledged young Henry of Anjou as his heir ... a son who would very much take after his mother and marry a woman not unlike her, the famous Eleanor of Aquitaine!
