Scottish princess of the old English royal line, baptised Edith, who married Henry I of England in 1100, took the name Matilda, headed his government during his absences, and through Empress Matilda became an ancestor of all later English kings.
Matilda of Scotland was born Edith, the daughter of Malcolm III, king of Scots, and Margaret, the English princess later venerated as Saint Margaret of Scotland. Through her mother she was a great-granddaughter of Edmund Ironside and a descendant of the kings of the House of Wessex, so her marriage to Henry I of England in November 1100 joined the Norman dynasty to the line of English kings it had replaced.
As queen she took the Norman name Matilda, bore Henry a daughter and a son, and headed the king's government in England while he fought in Normandy. She mediated in Henry's long dispute with Archbishop Anselm and paid for a priory, a leper hospital, a bridge and public latrines in and around London. English writers remembered her as the good queen, and her daughter's claim to the throne became the cause of the civil war after Henry's death.
Edith was born around 1080, probably at Dunfermline, where her mother had founded a church. Robert Curthose, eldest son of William the Conqueror, was her godfather, and a later story tells that when her godmother, Matilda of Flanders, held her at the font, the baby pulled the queen's headdress down over her own head, an omen that she too would wear a crown. At about six she and her sister Mary were sent south to Romsey Abbey, where their mother's sister Cristina was a nun, and later to Wilton Abbey, where she learned to read Latin as well as speaking English and French.
In 1093 her world fell apart. She had been sought in marriage by Alan Rufus, lord of Richmond, and possibly by William II of England, but that November her father and eldest brother Edward were killed in an ambush near Alnwick, and her mother died a few days later. Her uncle Donald Bán seized the Scottish throne and her younger brothers fled to England. In the same year Archbishop Anselm ordered that the daughter of the king of Scots be sent back to the nunnery she had left, a sign that she had already walked out of Wilton.
Matilda is better documented than most queens of her age because several of her letters survive, among them letters to Anselm and to Pope Paschal II, written in polished Latin. They show a well-read woman who could flatter, cajole and argue, pressing the exiled archbishop to return while defending her husband. William of Malmesbury, who said she had encouraged his history of the English kings, praised her holiness, describing her walking barefoot to church in Lent and washing and kissing the feet of the sick, but he also complained that she rewarded foreign singers and scholars so lavishly that her officials squeezed her tenants to pay for it.
Her own account of her youth survives through Eadmer, Anselm's biographer, who reports her evidence to the bishops in 1100: her aunt had veiled her to protect her from the lust of the Normans, but she had torn the veil off and trampled on it whenever she could, and had been beaten and scolded for it. Eadmer wrote to justify Anselm's decision, yet the story matches the determination her letters show. Norman courtiers mocked the royal couple as Godric and Godgifu for their English connections, a jibe William of Malmesbury recorded, and according to John of Salisbury the claim that she had been a nun was revived at the papal court in 1139 by advocates of King Stephen, to attack her daughter's right to the throne.
When William II of England was killed in the New Forest on 2 August 1100, his brother Henry seized the treasury at Winchester and was crowned three days later. He moved quickly to marry Edith. Her ancestry pleased the English, and the match bound Scotland, where England had helped her brother Edgar to the throne in 1097, to his side. Because she had worn a veil for years, Anselm would not decide the case alone. He sent archdeacons to Wilton to investigate and called a council of bishops at Lambeth, which heard her testimony and ruled that she had never been a nun.
Anselm married the couple at Westminster Abbey on 11 November 1100 and crowned her queen the same day, when she took the name Matilda, perhaps in honour of her godmother. Their daughter, the future Empress Matilda, was born in February 1102 and their son William Adelin in August 1103.
Matilda headed Henry's government in England during his long absences in Normandy, especially after he won the duchy in 1106. Writs issued in her name show her presiding over the royal court with the king's chief ministers. She also performed the queen's traditional work of intercession. During the investiture dispute, which kept Anselm in exile from 1103 to 1106, she wrote to both men and to the pope, and she is credited with helping to bring about the compromise completed in 1107, by which Henry gave up investing bishops with ring and staff but kept their homage for their lands.
Her household spent freely on religion and public works. She founded Holy Trinity Priory at Aldgate for Augustinian canons in 1107 or 1108 and the leper hospital of Saint Giles outside London, and after her party was nearly swept away fording the River Lea she had a bridge built at Bow, with a causeway over the marshes. She also asked for a Life of her mother, usually attributed to Turgot, prior of Durham. In 1110 she saw her eight-year-old daughter sent to Germany to marry the king of the Germans.
Matilda died at Westminster on 1 May 1118, while Henry was in Normandy fighting rebels and Louis VI of France. She had wished to be buried at her priory at Aldgate, but she was laid in Westminster Abbey near the tomb of Edward the Confessor. Their son drowned in the wreck of the White Ship in November 1120, leaving her daughter as Henry's only legitimate heir, and his second marriage, in 1121, produced no children.