Conquest, the Anarchy, Guest Post by Tracey Warr

Unhappily married to Stephen de Marais, the Welsh princess, Nest, becomes increasingly embroiled in her countrymen’s resistance to the Norman occupation of her family lands. She plans to visit King Henry in the hope of securing a life away from her unwanted husband, but grieving for the loss of his son, the King is obsessed with relics and prophecies.

Meanwhile, Haith tries to avoid the reality that Nest is married to another man by distracting himself with the mystery of the shipwreck in which the King’s heir drowned. As Haith pieces together fragments of the tragedy, he discovers a chest full of secrets, but will the revelations bring a culprit to light and aid the grieving King?

Will the two lovers be united as Nest fights for independence and Haith struggles to protect King Henry?

The White Ship

Some of the events referred to in my novel, The Anarchy, are based on real historical prompts. My character, Sheriff Haith, investigates the sinking of The White Ship off the coast at Barfleur in the English Channel on 25 November 1120. Three hundred young Norman nobles were drowned in the shipwreck, including King Henry I’s heir, Prince William Adelin. Historians have been circumspect concerning the possibility of foul play in the wreck, as they must be, but I have taken fictional license and my story employs the suspicious circumstances surrounding the sinking.

The main contemporaneous accounts of the wreck of The White Ship were written by Orderic Vitalis and William of Malmesbury. It is recorded that Stephen de Blois, who later became king of England, disembarked from the ship at the harbour just before it sailed, in the company of William de Roumare. Stephen claimed to have disembarked because of a sudden illness or because of the rowdiness of the other passengers. Two Tironian monks also disembarked. A butcher named Bertold of Rouen was the only recorded survivor. William de Pirou was listed on the list of victims of the wreck but, subsequently, appeared twice at court before disappearing under mysterious circumstances. Beyond that, the ‘evidence’ discovered by Haith in my novel is my invention.

Haith is based on Hait who is documented as the real sheriff of Pembroke in the 1130 pipe roll, the court records (Green, 1986). Hait is presumed, from his name, to have been Flemish. It is my invention to make him a close friend of King Henry. According to Gerald of Wales, Hait was the father of one of Nest ferch Rhys’s sons. Nest is the heroine of my novel. I created the physical characteristics of Haith after meeting a lovely Dutchman at lunch one day at my neighbour’s house. Haith’s sister, Ida, a runaway nun from Fontevraud, is my invention.

Henry I and The White Ship. By Unknown Medieval artist, date 1307-1327 – British Library, Royal MS 20 A.ii, fol. 6v.

Haith’s investigations in the novel lead him to track down the butcher Bertold and to interrogate William de Pirou. Haith suspects the Norman noblemen Stephen de Blois, Waleran de Meulan, and Ranulf de Gernon, who each had their reasons for hating King Henry and wanting to see his heir removed. King Henry also lost two of his illegitimate children in the wreck, Countess Mathilde of Perche and Richard, Earl of Chester, and his niece and daughter-in-law, Matilda, Countess of Chester. When the courtiers eventually found the courage to give the king the news, he collapsed with grief.

After the devasting losses in the shipwreck, King Henry’s initial solution for the problem of the succession was that he and his new young queen Adelisa would have a son and, probably, that his oldest illegitimate son Earl Robert of Gloucester would act as regent. When the hope of a legitimate male heir faded, Henry focused on the aspiration that his daughter Maud would give him a grandson. When Henry died, Maud was pregnant in Normandy and her cousin, Stephen de Blois, rushed to England and usurped the throne.

Although Stephen de Blois had extensive holdings in England and was married to a descendent of the English kings, there is no evidence that King Henry ever considered his nephew as a potential heir. Instead, iconoclastically, King Henry I attempted to put a woman, his daughter Maud, on the English throne. He did not require his barons in England, Wales, and Normandy to swear to support her as regent, but rather to support her as his heir. If Maud’s protracted bid to contest her cousin Stephen’s usurpation of the throne had been successful, she would have been the first woman to rule England, Wales, and Normandy in her own right.

There was constant warfare in England, Wales, and Normandy during the reign of King Stephen as he struggled against Empress Maud, and her supporters. Some historians have dubbed Stephen’s reign ‘The Anarchy’, whilst others have argued that it was not as anarchic as other commentators claimed. Certainly, Stephen lost significant parts of the kingdom that King Henry I had ruled including Normandy and large parts of Wales. The civil war between Stephen and Maud went on for nine years. Stephen’s brother, Bishop Henry of Blois, played a fascinating double game, frequently switching sides between the two contenders. (See my blogpost https://englishhistoryauthors.blogspot.com/2020/06/the-man-who-walks-behind-satan-on-trail.html.) It was very tempting to write about Empress Maud herself, but, in my novel I am focusing on Nest ferch Rhys and events in Wales. There are a number of good fictional accounts of the extraordinary empress (see, for example, Elizabeth Chadwick’s Lady of the English). In 1148 Maud gave up the struggle for England to her son, Henry FitzEmpress, and returned to Normandy permanently.

Civil war between the forces of King Stephen and Henry FitzEmpress continued in a desultory fashion. In 1152 the archbishop of Canterbury refused Stephen’s request to anoint his son Eustace as junior king. His queen, Matilda of Boulougne, died in that year. 1153 was a bad year for King Stephen. He was fifty-seven years old and was wounded three times; his son Eustace died suddenly and his other son, William, broke his thigh in a riding accident. Many parts of England had been devasted by years of civil war and even the hyper-aggressive Norman barons wearied of the conflict. In November 1153, at Winchester, King Stephen and Henry FitzEmpress agreed that Henry would become king on Stephen’s death, and this was ratified in a charter that Stephen issued at Westminster in December. Henry II and Eleanor of Aquitaine were crowned king and queen of England on 19 December 1154. Henry’s mother, Empress Maud, continued to give him advice throughout her long life and died in Normandy in 1167.

King Henry I may well hold the record for the highest number of illegitimate children (24) including at least nine sons (one of them with my heroine, Nest ferch Rhys) so it was a horrible irony that the untimely death of his only legitimate son led to civil war in this period known as The Anarchy.

Amazon UK: https://www.amazon.co.uk/Conquest-Anarchy-Trilogy-3/dp/1911293109
Amazon US: https://www.amazon.com/Conquest-Anarchy-Tracey-Warr-ebook/dp/B087NFP6WD/
Amazon CA: https://www.amazon.ca/Conquest-Anarchy-Tracey-Warr-ebook/dp/B087NFP6WD/
Amazon AU: https://www.amazon.com.au/Conquest-Anarchy-Tracey-Warr-ebook/dp/B087NFP6WD/
Barnes and Noble: https://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/conquest-iii-the-anarchy-tracey-warr/1137022979
Waterstones: https://www.waterstones.com/book/the-anarchy-conquest-3/tracey-warr/9781911293439
Kobo: https://www.kobo.com/gb/en/ebook/conquest-iii-the-anarchy
BookShop.org: https://uk.bookshop.org/books/the-anarchy-conquest-3/9781911293439

Universal Links:
The Daughter of the Last King (Book 1) – https://geni.us/LPF1
The Drowned Court (Book 2) – https://geni.us/ddAFsas
The Anarchy (Book 3) – https://geni.us/274ZX

Meet Tracey Warr

Tracey Warr (1958- ) was born in London and lives in the UK and France. Her first historical novel, Almodis the Peaceweaver (Impress, 2011) is set in 11th century France and Spain and is a fictionalised account of the true story of the Occitan female lord, Almodis de la Marche, who was Countess of Toulouse and Barcelona. It was shortlisted for the Impress Prize for New Fiction and the Rome Film Festival Books Initiative and won a Santander Research Award. Her second novel, The Viking Hostage, set in 10th century France and Wales, was published by Impress Books in 2014 and topped the Amazon Australia charts. Her Conquest trilogy, Daughter of the Last King, The Drowned Court, and The Anarchy recount the story of a Welsh noblewoman caught up in the struggle between the Welsh and the Normans in the 12th century. She was awarded a Literature Wales Writers Bursary. Her writing is a weave of researched history and imagined stories in the gaps in history.

Tracey Warr studied English at University of Hull and Oxford University, gaining a BA (Hons) and MPhil. She worked at the Arts Council, Institute of Contemporary Arts, Chatto & Windus Publishers, and edited Poetry Review magazine with Mick Imlah. She also publishes art writing on contemporary artists, and in 2016 she published a future fiction novella, Meanda, in English and French, as part of the art project, Exoplanet Lot. She recently published a series of three books, The Water Age, which are future fiction and art and writing workshop books – one for adults and one for children – on the topic of water in the future. She gained a PhD in Art History in 2007 and was Guest Professor at Bauhaus University and Senior Lecturer at Oxford Brookes University and Dartington College of Arts. Her published books on contemporary art include The Artist’s Body (Phaidon, 2000), Remote Performances in Nature and Architecture (Routledge, 2015) and The Midden (Garret, 2018). She gained an MA in Creative Writing at University of Wales Trinity St David in 2011. She is Head of Research at Dartington Trust and teaches on MA Poetics of Imagination for Dartington Arts School.