Five Minute History: One of the Most Dramatic Times in English History, and the Woman Who Lived Through All of It
A kingdom in turmoil
When I started researching the world of Lady of Lincoln, covering the early life of Nicola de la Haye, and the other books in the series, I knew she would become a woman who helped stop a French invasion in its tracks, but what I didn’t expect was how much she and her husbands and family were right at the heart of the events of one of the most turbulent, violent, and colourful periods in English history.
The late twelfth and early thirteenth centuries had everything: a murdered archbishop, the Great Rebellion where a king's sons went to war with their own father, the Third Crusade, the imprisonment of Richard the Lionheart and his brother John’s attempt to seize the throne, the loss of Normandy and most of the other French territories, Magna Carta, the Baron’s War, and the French invasion.
And running through it all, a woman who kept her nerve, kept her castle and her people, and changed the course of a war.
The shadow of the Anarchy
Nicola grew up in the reign of Henry II, but Henry reign was defined by what came before it.
The Anarchy was the civil war between King Stephen and Empress Matilda (Henry II’s mother) that tore England apart for almost twenty years. Towns burned, castles changed hands, and ordinary people suffered the consequences of this lengthy civil war and the ambitions of powerful lords. It ended only when Stephen agreed that Matilda's son Henry would succeed him, which he did in 1154.
The memory of the Anarchy shaped everything, and was the reason Henry II worked so hard to centralise royal power, to bring the barons to heel, and insist the king's law was supreme. And it was why, for people like Nicola's father, a man who had lived through that chaos, loyalty to the Crown was a vital survival tactic.
Lincoln, sitting at the heart of England on the old Roman road north, had been one of the great prizes of the Anarchy, and the lessons were not forgotten.
The king who changed everything
Henry II is one of the most fascinating rulers England has ever had. Brilliant, restless, furious, and visionary, he reformed the law courts, expanded royal authority, and held together a realm that stretched from the Scottish border to the Pyrenees; what historians now call the Angevin Empire. He was a man who never seemed to sleep, who thought faster than anyone around him, and whose temper was both explosive and terrifying.
But he was also, ultimately, a man who destroyed the thing he loved most: his own family.
His relationship with Thomas Becket, his Archbishop of Canterbury, ended in murder. Four of Henry's knights, inflamed by the king's famous outburst of rage, rode to Canterbury Cathedral in December 1170 and killed Becket at the altar. My research suggests that one of Nicola’s husband’s friends may well have been one of those knights. Whether he was or not, the shock of this sacrilege was felt across Christendom and Becket was canonised within three years, forcing Henry to walk barefoot through Canterbury and then be flogged in a very public penance.
Nicola and her husband and family would have been heavily affected by this. Politics in the twelfth century was highly dangerous and difficult to avoid.
The Great Rebellion
If the Becket affair was dramatic, what followed was more shocking.
In 1173, Henry II's own teenage sons: the ‘Young King’ Henry, Richard (later the Lionheart), and Geoffrey, rose in rebellion against him. Their mother, Eleanor of Aquitaine, one of the most remarkable women of the medieval world, supported them. (Her motivations were never recorded, but there are, of course, countless theories.) The King of France backed the rebellious sons, and barons across England and Normandy seized the chance to settle old scores.
The Great Rebellion of 1173-4 nearly brought Henry down.
And for Nicola, it was not some distant war, but what appears to have been a personal catastrophe. Her first husband, William FitzErneis, was among the very first barons to rebel, and her uncle Ralph de la Haye served as a rebel general.
But, oddly, her castle, Lincoln, appears to have stayed loyal. She was more than likely married to FitzErneis at the time and based at Lincoln. This raises a question – if he was rebelling, what was she doing, and why was her castle loyal?
The rebellion split families apart. It may well have tested her marriage.
Her inheritance, titles, and people were in real peril, and from what we can ascertain about Nicola’s personality, she was unlikely to have been a passive observer.
Henry crushed the rebellion with a combination of military force and political dexterity, and the rebel lords were eventually brought back to the fold. The sons who had risen against him would never fully reconcile with their father, and he would die whilst at war with Richard.
But things were set to become even more dramatic: the turbulent rules of the next generation – the Lionheart and the Crusade, King John, Magna Carta, and the French invasion - were on their way.
Why Nicola’s story matters
Nicola de la Haye spent her life navigating these events - trying to hold her castle, protect her people, and keep the Haye banner flying above Lincoln's walls, while kings raged, archbishops died, and the men around her chose different sides.
History often treats these great crises as the stories of kings and battles. Lady of Lincoln shows what it may have been like to live through all of this as a woman in a man’s world, trying to hold everything together, learning lessons she would be able to draw from later in life.
Those lessons would be vital, because the time would come when the very future of England depended on her being able to hold her nerve.
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