Remarks:
Matilda (Maud the Empress) of England (1102-1167), was left the sole legitimate child of Henry I. by the loss of his son in the White Ship (1120). She married (1) Emperor Henry V, Emperor of Rome, and was crowned at Mainz (1114), but was widowed in 1125 and married (2) Geoffrey IV. le Bel, Plantaganet, 10th Count of Anjou and Maine, Duke of Normandy, having won the Duchy from Stephen, son of Fulk V. the Younger, 9th Count of Anjou, King of Jerusalem, and his wife, Ermengarde. Her first husband was thirty years older, her second husband, ten years younger than herself.
Henry made the barons recognize the Empress as his heir (1126, 1131, and 1133), but when he died Stephen ignored her claim to rule England by hereditary right. The Normans preferred his chivalrous geniality to her haughtiness and they disliked the House of Anjou as much as they did the House of Blois, into which Stephen's mother, the Conqueror's daughter Adela, had married. The Empress appealed to the Pope in vain (1136) and Archbishop Thurstan of York defeated her uncle and champion, David I., King of Scotland (1084-1153) at the Battle of the Standard (1138); but at last she landed in England.
It is through Geoffrey that the Plantaganet line from France was brought into the British royalty. He died in 1151. After Geoffrey's death Matilda lived in Normandy, charitable and respected. Matilda died in 1167. Geoffrey was succeeded by his eldest son, Henry.
("The Genealogy of Homer Beers James", V1, JANDA Consultants, © 1993 Homer James)
Matilda, or Maud, was born in 1103, and was married at age eleven, 1114, to Henry V, Emperor of Germany (Roman Emperor), and married second on 3 April 1127 to Geoffrey, Count of Anjou, called Plantagenet (Broom Plant). Geoffrey was the son of Fulco V, Count of Anjou (1106), King of Jerusalem (1131), and his first wife, Ermengarde, daughter and heiress of Helias, Count of Maine. Geoffrey was a man of great justice and charity. Upon the death of his father-in-law, King Henry I, of England, he essayed to advance his wife's title against her cousin Stephen of Blois, but was forced to pecuniary composition; and after the death of Geoffrey, Matilda managed her own affairs and took Stephen prisoner at the battle of Lincoln.
Through Geoffrey, she was ancestress of the Plantagenet Dynesty together with their successors as rulers of England the Houses of Tudor, Stuart, Hanover, Saxe-Coburg and Gotha, and Windsor.
Daughter of Henry I and Matilda of Scotland, she was nominated by her father as his successor. However, on the death of Henry I, the council considering a woman unfit to rule offered the throne to Stephen. Matilda invaded England and fought (1139 - 1148) to wrest rule from the usurping Stephen. She won much of the west, and after Stephen's capture in April 1141 a clerical council proclaimed Matilda "Lady of the English". She entered London but made cash demands that provoked Londoners to expel her before a coronation. On Stephen's release, she suffered defeats (fled from Oxford Castle Dec 1142), and eventually left England for Normandy, now controlled by her husband. The cause of her death is obscure.
Although Matilda failed to secure the English throne, she laid a basis for successful claims by descendants of her husband Geoffrey of Anjou.
Also called Maud, German Mathilde consort of the Holy Roman emperor Henry V and afterward claimant to the English throne in the reign of King Stephen.
She was the only daughter of Henry I of England by Queen Matilda and was sister of William the Aetheling, heir to the English and Norman thrones. Both her marriages were in furtherance of Henry I's policy of strengthening Normandy against France. In 1114 she was married to Henry V; he died in 1125, leaving her childless, and three years later she was married to Geoffrey Plantagenet, effectively count of Anjou.
Her brother's death in 1120 made her Henry I's sole legitimate heir, and in 1127 he compelled the baronage to accept her as his successor, though a woman ruler was equally unprecedented for the kingdom of England and the duchy of Normandy. The Angevin marriage was unpopular and flouted the barons' stipulation that she should not be married out of England without their consent. The birth of her eldest son, Henry, in 1133 gave hope of silencing this opposition, but he was only two when Henry I died (1135), and a rapid coup brought to the English throne Stephen of Blois, son of William I the Conqueror's daughter Adela. Though the church and the majority of the baronage supported Stephen, Matilda's claims were powerfully upheld in England by her half brother Robert of Gloucester and her uncle King David I of Scotland. Matilda and Robert landed at Arundel in September 1139, and she was for a short while besieged in the castle. But Stephen soon allowed her to join her brother, who had gone to the west country, where she had much support; after a stay at Bristol, she settled at Gloucester.
She came nearest to success in the summer of 1141, after Stephen had been captured at Lincoln in February. Elected Lady of the English by a clerical council at Winchester in April, she entered London in June; but her arrogance and tactless demands for money provoked the citizens to chase her away to Oxford before she could be crowned queen. Her forces were routed at Winchester in September 1141, and thereafter she maintained a steadily weakening resistance in the west country. Her well-known escape from Oxford Castle over the frozen River Thames took place in December 1142.
Normandy had been in her husband's possession since 1144, and she retired there in 1148, remaining near Rouen to watch over the interests to her eldest son, who became duke of Normandy in 1150 and King Henry II of England in 1154. She spent the remainder of her life in Normandy exercising a steadying influence over Henry II's continental dominions.
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Empress Maud. She was the childess widow of Henry V, Emperor of Germany, who died on May 22, 1125. She was long at war over the throne of England with her cousin, King Stephan of England. Although she never gained the English throne, the civil war was ended with the agreement that her son by her second husband, Geoffrey d'Anjou, Heny "Curtmantle," later Henry II, would inherit after Stephen's death.