Royal mistress, social outcast
Henry II first openly acknowledged 'Fair Rosamund' as his mistress when he was 40 and she in her early 30s. The daughter of a nobleman, Walter Clifford, and possibly the one love of Henry's life, she lived in the royal palace of Woodstock, Oxfordshire, which the king refurbished specially for her, during the two or three years before she died in 1176. Chroniclers regarded her death as the just deserts for her adultery.
The sorrowing Henry had her buried in an unusually magnificent tomb before the high altar at Godstow nunnery. Later, both he and her father made generous gifts to the house in her memory. But in 1191, after Henry's death, St Hugh, bishop of Lincoln, was horrified to find an adulteress's tomb inside the church and to see its lavish decoration. To put a stop to such profanity he ordered the removal of the shrine, and Rosamund was reinterred outside the church.
Within a century of her death, chroniclers had begun to fabricate legends about her. According to one, she had been hidden away at Woodstock in a secret chamber within a maze, to protect her from Eleanor of Aquitaine's jealousy, but the queen had found her and bled her to death in a hot bath. In later centuries Eleanor was said to have used a dagger and poison cup, and to have found her way into the maze by following a silken thread.
Legends aside, the story of Rosamund and Henry II illustrates the difficulties women encountered when they set themselves outside society -- a society orientated towards, and dominated by, men. Although royal bastards like Geoffrey Plantagenet and William Longsword, Henry II's sons by earlier liaisons, were given recognitioni and honours, their mothers, who had broken the laws of the Church and the rules of society were treated with contempt and revulsion. Even fortunate and respectable women who were heiresses in their own right -- Mélisande of Jerusalem, the Empress Matilda or Eleanor of Aquitaine -- were normally used as political pawns by their fathers, and only the most determined of them could make any real personal impact on the high politics of the 12th century.
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The Flower of the World
When as king Henry rulde this land,
The second of that name,
Besides the queene, he dearly lovde
A faire and comely dame.
Yea Rosamonde, fair Rosamonde,
Her name was called so,
To whom our queene, dame Ellinor,
Was known a deadlye foe.
Most peerlesse was her beautye founde,
Her favour, and her face;
A sweeter creature in this worlde
Could never prince embrace.
The king therefore, for her defence
Against the furious queene,
At Woodstocke builded such a bower,
The like was never seene.
Her crisped lockes like threads of golde
Appeard to each mans sight;
Her sparkling eyes, like Orient pearles,
Did cast a heavenlye light.
Most curiously that bower was built
Of stone and timber strong,
At hundered and fifty doors
Did to this bower belong.
The blood within her crystal cheekes
Did such a colour drive,
At though the lillye and the rose
For mastership did strive.
And they so cunninglye contriv'd,
With turnings round about,
That none but with a clue of thread
Could enter in or out.
The Ballad of Fair Rosamund