The White Ship: A Crown Lost at Sea
The sinking of the White Ship, a vessel carrying the English king Henry I’s sole heir, was a disaster from which anarchy would follow.
This year marks the 900th anniversary of the worst maritime disaster suffered by the English Crown and, arguably, by England. The tragedy of the White Ship, which sank on 25 November 1120 while carrying the heir to Henry I’s realm across the Channel to England, was chronicled by men such as Orderic Vitalis, whose life story tells us much about the fusion of cultures that followed the Norman Conquest of 1066. He is also representative of the fear which most of his contemporaries had, of a God who chastised and punished in an Old Testament fashion.
Born in England to a French father and an English mother, Orderic Vitalis was ten years old when sent away from the village of Atcham, near Shrewsbury, to the Abbey of Saint-Evroult, in Normandy: ‘Like Joseph in Egypt’, he would recall of his traumatic arrival in a strange land, ‘I heard a language which I did not understand.’
Orderic had been sent overseas by his priest father, Odelerius of Orleans. Odelerius was not as hard-hearted as this banishment might suggest; Orderic remembered his father sobbing as they parted. But Odelerius was convinced of the need to place religious devotion above parental affection. He believed that if his son spent his life as a monk, the boy’s soul would be blessed for eternity. This seemed, to Odelerius, a spiritual investment worth decades of paternal heartache.
For Orderic Vitalis, the parting from his father in England was as agonising as it was baffling. ‘I never saw him again after he sent me into exile for love of his Creator, as if I had been a rejected stepson.’ Since then, he would note in old age, ‘years have passed … and during that time many changes have taken place throughout the world’. Orderic Vitalis’ legacy lies in the way in which he recorded these changes for posterity. During his 57 years at Saint-Evroult he became one of the great monk-historians of the 12th century.
Henry’s rise
As a result, Orderic Vitalis – who proudly referred to himself as ‘Orderic the Englishman’ – looked at the reign of Henry I with a keen interest. The events he recorded from late 1120 in his Ecclesiastical History combined elements that particularly entranced him: divine action and kingly pomp, intertwined with the reality of human frailty and topped off with stark tragedy. He was clearly aware that he would never chronicle anything else as shocking and catastrophic as the fate of the White Ship, when the destiny of England and Normandy was transformed in a single night.
Orderic Vitalis opened his account of this disaster with an epic sweep:
King Henry, who had now, after tremendous toil, settled affairs admirably in Normandy, decided to cross the Channel, pay generous wages to the young champions and distinguished knights who had fought hard and loyally, and raise the status of some by giving them extensive honours in England.
The fleet was to convene in Barfleur, long a preferred point of departure from Normandy to Southampton, a northward voyage that would take 10 to 12 hours in a favourable wind.
As Henry prepared to sail home to England in triumph, having spent much of the previous two decades at war with his greatest enemy, Louis VI (‘the Fat’) of France, he was at the pinnacle of his success. The youngest son of William the Conqueror, Henry had been in the fatal hunting party of early August 1100, when an arrow had killed his elder brother, William Rufus, the coarse and carousing soldier who had outraged many with his disregard for the church and his lustful behaviour. Henry had stolen the Crown while his brother’s body wended its way through the forest, slung into the back of a cart like a felled wild boar.
A year after his coronation, Henry set about making good his power. He saw off an invasion by his eldest brother, Robert Curthose, helped by the reluctance of the barons on both sides to risk their lives and estates in battle. Henry had then laid down his uncompromising brand of royal control with ruthlessness and efficiency. He upended powerful aristocrats who fatally underestimated him and built up systems of governance that still exist today. He founded the Exchequer, to ensure the fines and taxes due to the Crown were all accounted for. At the same time, he guarded the purity of his coinage, insisting that those who compromised his currency were guilty of treason. Counterfeiters paid for their crime with the removal of their hands and genitals.
Henry relied on Roger of Salisbury to manage his royal interests. Roger was a Norman priest who Henry had met during his impoverished, itinerant youth. Roger possessed the knack of despatching the Mass with a brevity that appealed to a restless prince who was always looking for more time to hunt and fight.
Henry was also impressed by Roger’s efficiency as his head of household: the priest forbade expenses that Henry, in his straitened youth, could not afford. Henry rewarded Roger for his great ability with unique powers and he was acknowledged by contemporaries as the second most powerful man in the land.
Normandy won
With England under control, Henry turned his attention to his father’s ancestral land, Normandy. The Conqueror had been persuaded on his deathbed by Norman barons eager to protect their own interests, to leave the dukedom to his eldest son, Robert Curthose, despite Curthose having been in open rebellion against William for years.
Although Curthose showed great qualities as a fighting man during the First Crusade, his extravagance and lack of focus made him a wretched ruler at home: while Henry laid down order in England, Curthose’s weakness resulted in bloody discord in Normandy.
Encouraged by those Normans who recognised that he might end their torment and supported by others who were seduced by his bulging war chests, Henry crossed the Channel with ever larger armies until, in 1106, he brought Curthose to battle at Tinchebrai. It proved to be a crushing victory for Henry: he captured his brother and confined him to prison for the rest of his life.
Possession of both England and Normandy provoked jealousy and fear among Henry’s neighbours across the Channel. The most powerful of these was Louis VI, who forged alliances with the counts of Flanders and Anjou in an attempt to bring Henry down.
But Henry proved to be an intelligent diplomat and an able general. His great mistake as a statesman, though, was to leave Curthose’s son, William Clito, free when he had him in his grasp as a small boy. Clito became the lightning rod for Henry’s many opponents, who claimed that Clito was the rightful ruler of Normandy. In contrast, Henry’s only legitimate son (he sired 22 children out of wedlock), William Ætheling, represented the king’s dynastic hopes. Henry’s efforts in both his realms were undertaken with William front and centre in his plans.
In 1116 Henry crossed the Channel once more to fight for his son’s right to succeed him as Duke of Normandy and to counter the competing claims of his nephew, Clito. With him went his English army, free to leave home because of Henry’s peace with the Scots and his control of the aristocracy.
The future of Normandy seemed settled on the battlefield of Brémule, in August 1119. The king fought on foot and in his ranks served William Ætheling and two of Henry’s other sons, Richard of Lincoln and Robert FitzRoy. Defeated, Louis was forced to recognise William Ætheling as the next Duke of Normandy.
The ship sails
With William Ætheling already established as ‘designated king’ of England, Henry’s main paternal and dynastic duties were done. As he embarked on his ship in the port of Barfleur for the triumphant voyage to Southampton, Henry left William to follow on board a magnificent vessel, the White Ship, skippered by the son of the captain of the Conqueror’s flagship during the invasion of 1066.
William Ætheling was joined on the White Ship by major figures in the Anglo-Norman aristocracy, including his half-brother and half-sister, first cousins and 18 of the highest ranking ladies in the land. He was also joined by the powerful bureaucrats, who saw that Henry’s strong rule was adhered to, and by celebrated knights, who knew they were soon to be rewarded for their battlefield heroics.
They saw no reason to set off in the early evening and enjoyed several hours of drunken revelry, during which monks sent to bless the voyage across the dangerous Channel were chased away by inebriated passengers. This oafish behaviour would later be seen as dangerously insulting to God. Meanwhile, the king’s nephew, Stephen of Blois, perhaps because he had overindulged, suffered from diarrhoea and insisted on being set ashore.
The others aboard the White Ship set off after nightfall, shouting at the 50 oarsmen to bend their backs so they might arrive in Southampton before the king, despite his head start. The helmsman – presumably as drunk as the rest of the crew – fatally misjudged the ship’s course. The White Ship rammed hard into the Quillebœuf Rock, a mile north-east of Barfleur harbour, and water poured through the ruptured timber. When the crew tried to prise the vessel from the rock, the passengers fell into the icy waters of the Channel.
All is lost
Orderic Vitalis took up the tale, drawing on the testimony of the sole survivor of the shipwreck, Berold the Butcher. Berold, from Rouen, had pursued wealthy debtors aboard the ship, eager for payment. Scrambling onto the broken mast with one of Henry’s greatest knights, the unlikely pair watched as the prince, William Ætheling, was rescued by bodyguards who threw him into the ship’s sole rowing boat. Hearing his half-sister screaming, William ordered the rowing boat turn to save her, but it was swamped by drowning passengers scrambling aboard. The prince died with them.
When Henry was told of the disaster he fell to the ground, screaming in agonised disbelief. It was said he never smiled again during the remaining 15 years of his reign. Henry quickly married again, hoping to produce another male heir, but none came.
Henry forced his leading men to swear allegiance to his sole remaining legitimate child, Matilda, the widowed empress of Germany. But when Henry fatally succumbed to the effect of eating ‘a surfeit of lampreys’ in 1135, he had failed to make good the damage of the White Ship. Stephen of Blois, who had stepped off the vessel before its final voyage, seized the Crown. This sparked a civil war between him and Matilda that descended into brutality that became known as ‘the Anarchy’. As William of Malmesbury, a contemporary of Orderic Vitalis, wrote: ‘No ship that ever sailed brought England such disaster.’
Charles Spencer is the author of The White Ship: Conquest, Anarchy and the Wrecking of Henry I’s Dream (William Collins, 2020).
