General Notes

Name Suffix:<NSFX> Earl Of Gloucester
[Source: Who's Who in Early Medieval England, Christopher Tyerman, Shepheard-Walwyn, Ltd., London, 1996]
ROBERT, EARL OF GLOUCESTER had all the kingly attributes except one: legitimacy. The eldest of Henry I's twenty or so bastards, literate, intelligent, brave, adept at the factional politics of court, and a patron of both the church and the arts, Robert had to stand back to watch others compete for the throne, literally so in 1127 when he lost his claim to precedence over his cousin Stephen of Blois when doing homage to his half-sister the Empress Matilda. It was some measure of an increase in orderliness and legal propriety that William the Bastard could inherit a duchy and win a crown, while his grandson, Robert, whose personal crudentials were second to none, had to be content with a supporting role.
Under Henry I, Robert was prominent in a party consistently loyal to the king. In 1119, Robert fought at Brémule against the king of France and in 1123 against the Norman rebels; in 1126, he was given custody of his uncle Robert Curthose. Despite acquiescing in Matilda's succession, he still fought against the Angevins on Henry's behalf in the 1130s. Robert's reward was in lands in South Wales and the West Country and the earldom of Gloucester (1122). After Henry's death in 1135, it was not his loyalty to the Empress which swayed him so much as his own self-interest: arguably, his hesitation in deciding where that lay allowed Stephen to grab the throne.
Admired by William of Malmesbury, Robert has traditionally been seen as a noble, chivalrous defender of the hereditary rights of his half-sister. His actions between 1135 and 1139 suggest more selfish motives. His unusual conditional homage to Stephen in 1136 signalled his importance to the new king but it may also have been forced on him by his isolation among the English baronage and the threat to his lands in South-East Wales posed by a Welsh revolt, the crushing of which, it has recently been suggested, may have prompted Robert's literary protégé, Geoffrey of Monmouth, to write his 'History of the Kings of Britain.' Although Robert cooperated with Stephen at the siege of Exeter in 1136, he soon became alienated from the new regime, not least because of the favours granted to the Beaumont twins, Waleran of Meulan and Robert of Leicester, old rivals from the court of Henry I. Opposition to the Beaumonts provide a leitmotif in the rest of Robert of Gloucester's career, not least in the fighting at Wareham (1138), Worcester (1139) and Tewkesbury (1140).
It was probably the growing influence of Waleran of Meulan in particular that led to Robert distancing himself from the king in Normandy in 1137 and his fears of assassination by the royalist mercenary, William of Ypres. In 1138, the formal break with Stephen occurred, but after the failure of the Angevins to capture Normandy in 1138-9, Robert, perhaps in desperation lest his English estates would be lost, landed at Arundel with Matilda to dispute the English throne. In England, Robert provided the judicious advice, material support and personal charm that Matilda so conspicuously lacked. That she retained followers at all may in part have been the achivement of her gregarious and generous half-brother with his knack for friendship. Although playing the leading military role on the Empress's side, Robert also managed to use the civil war to build an almost impregnable power-base for himself in South-West England, centred on Bristol, a control that the vicissitudes of the wider dynastic struggle did little to challenge. 1141 saw his greatest triumph in the crushing defeat of the king at Lincoln in February, but his victory exposed the vulnerability of his position. Unless he looked after his own interests, he would have no more guarantee of security at an Angevin than at a Blois court. The former suddenly looked a forlorn prospect after the Rout of Winchester in September, where only R