She was eleven years old when they sent her to Saxony to marry a thirty-eight-year-old duke. Her father was Henry II of England. She was just a daughter, nobody asked her.
Matilda had been born into the Angevin world, where children were bargaining counters and marriages were instruments of policy. Her father used his daughters to strengthen alliances across Europe, and Matilda's marriage to Henry the Lion was one of the most ambitious of those arrangements. Henry was one of the most powerful princes in the Holy Roman Empire, Duke of Saxony and Bavaria, a man whose lands and ambitions mattered to emperors. She left England in the autumn of 1167, escorted by earls and barons, a child being carried into a political marriage she could neither shape nor refuse.
By the time she was sixteen, she was already governing. In 1172, while Henry went on pilgrimage to the Holy Land, Matilda served as regent of Saxony. She ruled one of the most powerful territories in the Empire while still a teenager. Bertran de Born would later compare her beauty to Helen of Troy, but the more revealing fact is not that men admired her. It is that they had to account for her.
That became impossible to ignore in 1181, when Brunswick was besieged and Henry was declared an outlaw by Frederick Barbarossa. Matilda addressed the Emperor directly and appealed to his chivalry. The siege was lifted. She had no army of her own, but she still had a voice, and in the politics of the Empire that could matter almost as much. In the same world, she co-founded Brunswick Cathedral with Henry, and part of it was dedicated to Thomas Becket. The daughter of the king who ordered Becket's murder helped raise a cathedral to him in Saxony. That is the kind of irony dynastic marriage produced.
When the family was eventually forced into exile, her son William was born in Winchester and became the direct male-line ancestor of the House of Hanover. Every British monarch from George I onward descends from the eleven-year-old girl sent to Saxony in 1167. What began as a child being dispatched to a duke became a dynasty.
She died on June 28 1189 in Brunswick aged thirty-three, defending her exiled husband's interests while he was in England. Her father Henry II died eight days later, probably without ever knowing she was gone.
