Imagine living in an age of warriors and war lords where staggeringly rich landed families with distinguished names run vast baronies under the king’s patronage. Imagine that your honour, your duty, your public name and reputation is to keep all the wealth and prestige that your ancestors had acquired and then add to it. Imagine, then, that you utterly and abjectly fail in this signal duty.
It seems to me that the figure of William de Mandeville might be a shining example of such failure.
Even at this distance, through all the dust of time and written record, of archives, writs, learned commentaries, chronicles and great histories we can peer right into the heart of this failure and almost feel the embarrassment. In fact we can peel time back to one particular day, one particular place, almost to one exact moment, certainly one particular morning, when William de Mandeville’s failure became known to himself with a most terrible pang of realisation, soon to become known to everyone who mattered. It would erupt in scandal followed by derision, opprobrium, suspicion, punishment and the most painful public shame.
Poor old William de Mandeville. What did he do? What happened?
Strange as it may seem, it was, rather, what he did not do that was going to wreck his reputation for many years to come.
To understand the story, we must go back and look at the career of his father, Geoffrey de Mandeville.
Geoffrey was one of those magnates who supported William the Conqueror in seizing the crown of England in 1066. These men, belonging to the great families of Normandy, were the chief investors in the enterprise of conquest, the kind of men who put up the money to build and supply ships for the invasion, who put up their own vassals to fight the battles, men who saw the main chance and took it. Most of them were paid off handsomely in the years following 1066, gaining huge swathes of English lands. Geoffrey de Mandeville became an important tenant-in-chief, recorded in the Domesday book as one of the ten richest magnates in the reign of the Conqueror. The king granted him large estates in Essex and ten other shires. He was the first Sheriff of London and Middlesex and his successors became the first Earls of Essex. But more importantly, for our story, he was appointed Constable of the Tower, the first to hold the post. William the Conqueror’s gleaming white stronghold on the Thames was a major statement of policy and intent. As Constable, Geoffrey discharged his duties honourably. He died (probably) around 1100.1
The Tower of London, at this time, was a new prestige building, innocent of any associations with beheadings, death, disappearances, ravens or any paraphernalia of popular history. At that time it was part fortress, part armoury, part royal palace, part storeroom and archive. There were no locks and chains on doors. It was not yet regularly used for keeping state prisoners behind bars.
This brings us to William de Mandeville. After the death of his father he was appointed to succeed him as Constable of the Tower. It was a prestige appointment which brought the holder close to the king and the king’s secrets. Absolute loyalty, discretion, and vigilance were expected.
Unfortunately, within a short time of his appointment, William de Mandeville encountered his nemesis when he was charged with accepting into the Tower the first state prisoner to be held there. Unfortunately again, the prisoner whom he was required to guard was one of the shrewdest, trickiest, most daring men in Anglo-Norman politics.
Well-known in the highest circles, Ranulf Flambard had been the right-hand man of King William Rufus for thirteen years, and was privy to many secrets. But when the king was killed in a hunting accident on August 2nd 1100, Ranulf Flambard became the enemy of the new king, Henry Ist. Within the course of one day he fell from a place of power, patronage and safety, to a place of danger. Within a fortnight, on August 15th 1100, he was arrested and conveyed to the Tower. During his thirteen years at the top Flambard had made many powerful enemies, particularly men of the church. There were serious charges against him: malfeasance, abuse of church funds and selling ecclesiastical offices. Yet Flambard also had friends and his private wealth ensured his capacity for making trouble was undiminished. He posed a threat to the shaky early days of Henry’s reign. He was a prize prisoner.
All Mandeville had to do was keep Flambard safely locked up until King Henry decided what to do with him.
But what Mandeville actually did was to preside over the first ever escape from the Tower of London.
The notoriously tricky Flambard made his exit sometime in the night of February 1st 1101, escaping from a window on a rope smuggled into the tower. Stories abound as to the exact details but there is no doubt that, upon the following morning, William de Mandeville would have woken up to a terrible embarrassment.
Flambard was dangerously clever, after thirteen years at the top he had powerful allies and connections, he was friendly with Robert Curthose, the king’s brother, who was about to make war in order to seize the English throne. And now he was on the loose and heading straight for Normandy and safety.
We do not know how Mandeville spent the morning of February 2nd. Surely it must have been one of the worst of his life.
Later he was suspected by many of collusion. At the very least he had shown himself incapable and incompetent. He had brought ignomy to the name of Mandeville. He had brought embarrassment on himself, shame on his family and inevitable punishment from the king.
On the morning of February 2nd 1101, William de Mandeville’s world crumbled.
Find out more about this story in After the Arrow.
- Warren C Hollister Henry Ist, Yale University Press, 2001 ↩︎