“Always superior to feminine softness, with a mind steeled and unbroken in adversity.”
— Empress Matilda
This description comes from a twelfth-century chronicler writing about Matilda during the Anarchy, the English civil war of 1135 to 1153. It captures how even her contemporaries recognized her extraordinary resilience in a world that denied her the throne solely because of her gender.
They told me a woman could not hold the English throne. My own father's barons swore oaths to my face and broke them the day he died. I captured a king in battle, marched on London, and had the crown within reach before it was torn away. I escaped across a frozen river because surrender was not something I understood. I lost and kept fighting until I found a way to win through my son. They called me arrogant. What they meant was that I refused to act like someone who had already lost. I never wore the crown. But my blood wore it for three hundred years.