BIOGRAPHYCAL UNIVERSAL LIBRARY

RICHARD THE LION HEART

EARLY PLANTAGENETS

I.

STEPHEN AND MATILDA. 1135.

The English had had hard times under the Conqueror and his sons, but they had learned a great lesson; they had learned that they were one people. The Normans too, the great nobles who had the Norman divided the land, and hoped to create little monarchies of their own in every county and manor, had had hard times. Confiscation, mutilation, exile, death had come heavily upon them. They also had had a lesson to learn, to rid themselves of personal and selfish aims, to consolidate a powerful state under a king of their own race, and to content themselves as servants of the law with the substantial enjoyment of powers which they found themselves too weak to wrest out of the hands of the king, the supreme lawgiver and administrator of the law. This lesson they had not learned. They had submitted with an ill grace to the strong rule of the king’s ministers, the men whom they had taught to guard against their attempts at usurpation. Hence throughout these reigns the Norman king and the English people had been thrown together. They soon learned that they had common aims, finding themselves constantly in array against a common enemy. Hence, too, the English had already an earnest of the final victory. They grew whilst their adversaries wasted. The successive generations of the Normans found their wiser sons learning to call themselves English, while those who would not learn English ways declined in number and strength from year to year.

The Conqueror in a measure, and Henry I with more clearness, perceived this, and foresaw the result. Theywere careful not only to call themselves English kings, but nominally at least to maintain English customs, and to rule by English laws. One by one the great houses which furnished rivals to their power dropped before them, and Henry I at the close of his reign was so strong that, had it not been for the fact that he had by habit and routine made himself a law to himself, he might easily have played the part of a tyrant. But the forces which he and his father had so sturdily repressed were not ex­tinguished ; nor was the administrative system, by which they at once maintained the rights of the English and kept their own grasp of power, sufficiently consolidated to stand steadily when the hands that had reared it were taken away.

This also, it may seem probable, Henry I distinctly saw. It was to his apprehensions on this account that for years before his death he was busily employed in securing the succession by every possible means to his own children. The feeling which led him to do so is not quite capable of simple analysis. He had no great love for his daughter, the empress Matilda; what paternal affection he had to lavish had been spent on his son William, whose death was no doubt the trouble that went nearest to his heart. We cannot suppose that he cared much for the people whom, although they had delivered him more than once in the most trying times, he never scrupled, when it suited his purpose, to treat as slaves. It would almost seem as if he felt that, unless he could anticipate continuance of power in the hands of his daughter and her offspring, his own tenure of it for the present would be incomplete, and the great glory of the sons of Rollo would suffer diminution in his hands.

Three times, therefore, by the most solemn oaths, he had tried to secure the adherence of the nation to her and to her son. Vast assemblies had been held, attended by Normans and English alike. Earl Stephen and earl Robert had vied with one another as to who should take the first oath of homage; the concurrence of the Church had been promised and, so far as gratitude and a sense of interest as well as duty could go, had been secured. But all this had been insufficient to stay Henry’s mis­givings. At the time of his death he had been already four years in Normandy striving to keep peace between Matilda and her husband, Geoffrey of Anjou, between the Normans and the Angevins, and to consolidate his hold on the duchy, which had at last, since the death of his nephew and brother, become indisputably his own. His sudden death occurred in the midst of these designs. It was said and sworn to by his steward, Hugh Bigot, a man whose later career adds little to his au­thority as a witness, that just before his death, provoked by her perverseness, he had disinherited his daughter. It may have been so ; the threat of disinheritance may have been a menace which his unexpected death gave him no time to recall. But the very report was enough. He died on December 1, 1135; and from that moment the succession was treated as an open question, to be discussed by Normans and Englishmen, together or apart, as they pleased.

We may if we choose speculate on the motives that swayed the great men. No doubt the pure Norman nobles would gladly have set aside altogether the descendants of Harlotta; all the Normans together would have refused the rule of Geoffrey of Anjou. A new duke, if they must have a duke, might be chosen from the house of Champagne, from among the sons of Adela, the Conqueror’s greatest and most famous daughter; Count Theobald was the reigning count, but he was not the' eldest son, and as his elder brother had been set aside so might he. Stephen, the next brother, the Count of Mortain and Boulogne, and first baron of Normandy, had already his footing in the land. His wife too was of English descent. Her mother was sister to the good queen of Henry I, and whatever the old king had hoped to gain by his blood connection with his subjects, Stephen might gain by his wife. Stephen was a brave man, too, and he had as yet made no enemies.

But his success, such as it was, was due to his own promptness. He had, as count of Boulogne, the command of the shortest passage to England. Whilst the Normans were discussing the merits of his brother Theobald, he took on himself to be his own messenger. He remembered how his uncle had won the crown and treasure of William Rufus; he left the Norman lords to look after the funeral of their dead lord and sailed for Kent; at Dover and at Canterbury he was received with sullen silence. The men of Kent had no love for the stranger who came, as his predecessor Eu­stace had done, to trouble the land; on he went to London, and there he learned that the same prejudice which existed in Normandy against the Angevins was in full force. “We will not have,” the Londoners said, “a stranger to rule over us;” though how Stephen of Champagne was more a stranger than Geoffrey of Anjou it is not easy to see. Anyhow, as nothing succeeds like success, nothing is so potent to secure the name of king as the wearing of the crown. So Stephen went on to Winchester, and there secured the crown and treasure. In little more than three weeks he had come again to London and claimed the crown as the elect of the nation.

The assembly which saw the coronation and did homage on St. Stephen’s day was but a poor substitute for the great councils which had attended the summons of William and Henry, and in which Stephen, as a subject, had played a leading part. There was his brother Henry of Winchester, the skilled and politic churchman, who was willing enough to be a king’s brother if he might build up ecclesiastical supremacy through him; there was Archbishop William of Corbeuil, who had undertaken by the most solemn obligations to support Matilda, and who knew that his prerogative vote might decide the contest against Stephen, although it could not restore the chances of peace; there was Roger of Salisbury, the late king’s prime minister, the master builder of the constitutional fabric, undecided between duty and the desire of retaining power. Very few of the barons were there; Hugh Bigot, indeed, with his convenient oath, and a few more whose complicity with Stephen had already thrown them on him as a sole chance of safety. The rest of the great men present were the citizens of London, Norman barons of a sort, foreign merchants, some few rich Englishmen: all of them men who were used to public business, who knew how Henry I, had held his courts, who believed confidently in force and money. They had first encouraged Stephen from fear of Geoffrey; and more or less they held to Stephen as long as he lived. These men constituted the witenagemot that chose him king, and overruled the scruples of the inconstant archbishop. They took upon them to represent the nation that should ratify the election of a new king with their applause.

Henry I was not yet in his grave; but all promises made to him were forgotten. With what seems a sort of irony, Stephen issued as his coronation charter a simple promise to observe and compel the observance of all the good laws and good customs of his uncle.

The news of the great event traveled rapidly. Count Theobald, vexed and disappointed as he was, refused to contest the crown which his brother already wore; Geoffrey and Matilda were quarrelling with their own subjects in Anjou; and Robert of Gloucester, who hated Stephen more than he loved Matilda, saw that he must bide his time. Some crisis must soon occur; he knew that Stephen would soon spend his treasure and break his promises. Meanwhile the old king must be buried like a king ; and the great lords came over with the corpse to Reading where he had built his last resting­place. There Stephen met them, within the twelve days of Christmas; and after the funeral, at Oxford or somewhere in the neighborhood, he arranged terms with them; terms by which he endeavored, amplifying the words of his charter, to catch the good-will of each class of his subjects. To the clergy he promised relief from the exactions of the late reign and freedom of election; to the barons he promised a relaxation of the forest law, the execution of which had been hardened and sharpened by Henry I; and to the people he promised the abolition of danegeld. “These things chiefly and other things besides he vowed to God,” says Henry of Huntingdon, “but he kept none of them.” The promises were perhaps not insincere at the time ; anyhow they had the desired effect, and united the nation for the moment.

The king by this means got time to hasten into the North, where King David of Scots, the uncle of the empress, had invaded the country in her name. The two kings met at Durham. David had by the Scots taken Newcastle and Carlisle; Newcastle he surrendered, Carlisle Stephen left in his hands as a bribe for neutrality. It was too much for David, who, although a good king, was a Scot. He agreed to make peace : but he had sworn fealty to his niece: he could not become Stephen’s man. His son Henry, however, might bear the burden; so Henry swore and Stephen sealed the bargain with the gift of Huntingdon, part of the inheritance of Henry’s mother, the daughter of Waltheof, the last of the English earls. Then Stephen went back to London and so to Oxford. There he published a new charter, intended to comprise the new promises of good government.

This was done soon after Easter, and, as the name of earl Robert of Gloucester is found among the witnesses, it is clear that he had submitted; but the oath which he took to Stephen was a conditional one, more like that of a rival potentate than of a dependent; he would be faithful to the king so long as the king should preserve to him his rights and dignities. This was no slight concession, made by Robert, doubtless because he saw that his sister’s cause was hopeless; but it was no slight obligation for Stephen to undertake. Robert had great feudal domains in England, and all the personal friends of his father and sister were at his beck. Stephen might have been safer with him as a declared enemy. But for the moment there was peace.

The charter, published at Oxford, promised good government very circumstantially; the abuses of the Church, of the forests, and of the sheriffs, were all to be remedied. But the enactments made were not nearly so clear or circumstantial as the promises made at the late king’s funeral.

The first cloud, and it was a very little one, arose soon after. Before Whitsuntide Stephen was taken ill, and a rumor went forth that he was dead. The Norman rage for treason began to ferment. Hugh Bigot, the lord of Norwich, was the first to take up arms ; Baldwin of Redvers, the greatest lord in Devonshire, followed. But the king recovered as quickly as he had sickened. He took Norwich and Exeter, but—deserting thus the uniform policy of his predecessors—spared the traitors. Cheered by this measure of success, he immediately broke the second of his constitutional promises, holding a great court of inquiry into the forests, and impleading and punishing at his pleasure.

The year 1136 affords little more of interest; the year 1137 was spent in securing Normandy, which Geoffrey and Matilda were unable to hold against him, and in forming a close alliance with France. When he returned, just before Christmas, he had spent nearly all his money, and the evil day was not far off. Rebellion was again threatening, and a mighty dark cloud had for the second time arisen in the North. We are not told by the historians exactly whether the king’s misrule made the opening for the revolt, or the revolt forced him into misrule. Possibly the two evils waxed worse and worse togeter; for neither party trusted the other, and under the circum stances every precaution wore the look of aggression. Stephen was to the last degree impolitic; and to say that is to allow that he was more invasion by than half dishonest. Still he had the great majority of the people on his side. A pre­mature but general rebellion in the early months of 1138 was crushed in detail. Castle after castle was taken; but Robert of Gloucester had now declared himself, and King David, seeing Stephen busily employed in the South, invaded Yorkshire. It was a great struggle, but the Yorkshiremen were equal to the trial. Whether or no they loved Stephen they hated the Scots. The great barons who were on the king’s side did their part; the ancient standards of the northern churches, of St. Peter of York, St. Wilfrid of Ripon, and St. John of Beverley, were hoisted, and all men flew to them. The old archbishop Thurstan, who had struggled-victoriously twenty years before against King Henry and the archbishop of Canterbury to boot, sent his suffragan to preach the national cause Not only the knights with their men-at-arms, but the husbandmen, with their sons and servants, the old Anglo-Saxon militia, the parish priests at the head of their parishioners, streamed forth over hill and plain, and in the Battle of the Standard, as it was called, they beat the Scots at Cowton Moor with such completeness that the rebellion came to nothing in consequence.

Stephen felt no small addition of strength from this victory, but he was nearer the end of his treasure and the days of peace were over. Without money it is hard to act like a statesman; the difficulties were too strong for Stephen’s gratitude and good faith. Yet he began his misrule not without some method. The power of Robert of Gloucester lay chiefly in his influence with the great earls who represented the families of the Conquest. Stephen also would have a court of great earls, but in trying to make himself friends he raised up persistent enemies. He raised new men to new earldoms, but as he had no spare domains to bestow, he endowed them with pensions charged on the Exchequer: thus impairing the crown revenue at the moment that his personal authority was becoming endangered. To refill the treasury he next debased the coinage. To recruit his military power, diminished by the rebellion, and by the fact that the weakness of his administration was letting the county organization fall into decay, he called in Fleming imported. mercenaries. The very means that he took to strengthen his position ruined him. The mercenaries alienated the people: the debased coinage destroyed the confidence of the merchants and the towns: the new and unsubstantial earldoms provoked the real earls to further hostility; and the newly created lords demanded of the king new privileges as the reward and security for their continued services.

Still the clergy were faithful; and the clergy were very powerful; they conducted the mechanism of government, they filled the national councils ; they were rich too, and earnest in the preservation of peace. With Henry of Winchester his brother, Roger of Salisbury his chief minister, Theobald of Canterbury his nominee, he might still flourish. The Church at all events was sure to outlive the barons. With almost incredible imprudence Stephen contrived to throw the clergy into opposition, and by one fell stroke to break up all the administrative machinery of the realm. It may be that he was growing suspicious, or jealous: it is more probable that he acted under foolish advice. Anyhow he did it.

Roger of Salisbury, the great justiciar of Henry I, was now an old man. He had contributed more perhaps than any other to set Stephen on the throne, and had not only first placed in his hands the sinews of war, but had maintained the revenue of the crown by maintaining the administration of justice and finance. He had not served for naught. He had got his son made chancellor; two of his nephews were bishops, one of them treasurer of the king as well. He had no humble idea of his own position : he had built castles the like of which for strength and beauty were not found north of the Alps. He had perhaps some intention of holding back when the struggle came and of turning the scale at the last moment as seemed him best, an intention which he shared with the chief of his brethren; for Henry of Winchester, although the king’s brother, was before all things a churchman; and Theobald of Canterbury, although he owed his place either to the good-will or to the connivance of Stephen, was consistently and more or less actively a faithful adherent to Matilda and her son.

How much Stephen knew of the designs of the bishops we know not, what he suspected we can only suspect: but the result was unmistakable. He tried a surprise that turned to his own discomfiture. He arrested bishop Roger and his nephew, Alexander, bishop of Lincoln, and compelled them to resign the castles which he pretended to think they were fortifying against him. At once the church was in arms: sacrilege and impiety determined even Henry of Winchester, who in 1139 became legate of the see of Rome, against his brother.

This would have been hard enough to bear, as many far stronger kings than Stephen had learnt and were to learn to their cost. But the very men on whom his vio­lence had fallen were his own ministers, justiciar, chan­cellor, and treasurer. The Church was in danger, the ministers were in prison: justice, taxation, police, everything else was in abeyance; and just at the right time the empress landed. At Christmas 1139 the whole game was up : the land was divided, the empress had the west, Stephen the east; the Church was in secession from the State. Roger died broken-hearted. Henry was negotiating with the empress. The administration had come to naught, there were no courts of law, no revenue, no councils of the realm. There was not even strength for an honest open civil war. The year 1140 is filled with a mere record of anarchy. At the court at Whitsuntide only one bishop attended and he was a foreigner. Stephen we see now obdurate, now penitent; now energetic, now despondent; the barons selling their services for new promises from each side.

It is now that the period begins which William of Newburgh likens to the days when there was no king in Israel, but every man did what was right in his own eyes, nay, not what was right, but what was wrong also, for every lord was tyrant in his own house. Castles innumerable sprang up, and as fast as they were built they were filled with devils; each lord judged and taxed and coined The feudal spirit of disintegration had for once its full play. Even party union was at an end, and every baron fought on his own behalf. Feudalism had its day, and the completeness of its triumph ensured its fall.

All this was not realized at once. The new year 1141 found Stephen besieging Lincoln, which was defended by Ranulf, earl of Chester, and Robert of Gloucester. Stephen had not yet been defeated in the field, and he had still by his side a considerable body of barons, though none so great as the almost independent earl whom he was attacking. Now, however, he was outmatched or out-generaled. After a struggle marked chiefly by his own valiant exploits he was taken prisoner, and sent to the empress by her brother as a great prize. The battle of Lincoln was fought on February 2, and a week after Easter, in a great council of bishops, barons, and abbots, Matilda, the empress of the Romans, was elected Lady of England at Winchester. This assembly was, it must be allowed, mainly clerical; but there is no doubt that it represented the wishes of a great part of the barons, who, so far as they were willing to have a king or queen at all, preferred Matilda to Stephen. Henry of Winchester, however, took advantage of the opportunity to make somewhat extravagant claims on behalf of his order, declaring that the clergy had the right to elect the sovereign, and actually carrying out the ceremony of election. The citi­zens of London pleaded hard for the release of Stephen, whom they, six years before, had elected with scarcely less audacious assumption, but in vain. Henry was now at the crest of the wave, and he saw the triumph of the Church in the humiliation of his brother. War was the great trial by combat ordained between kings. Stephen had failed in that ordeal; judgment of God was declared against him; like Saul he was found wanting.

So Matilda became the Lady of the English; she was not crowned, because perhaps the solemn consecration which she had received as empress sufficed, or perhaps Stephen’s royalty was so far forth indefeasible; but she acted as full sovereign nevertheless, executed charters, bestowed lands and titles, and exerted power sufficient to show that she had all the pride and tyrannical intolerance of her father, without his prudence or self-control. She, too, was on the crest of her wave and had her little day. But the barons looked coolly on the triumph; it was their policy that neither competitor should destroy the other, but that both should grow weaker and weaker, and so leave room for each several feudatory to grow stronger and stronger. Neither king nor empress had anything like command of his or her friends, or anything like general acceptance.

Stephen’s fortunes reached their lowest depth when the Londoners a few days before Midsummer received Matilda’s the empress as their sovereign. She had no sooner achieved success than she began to alienate the friends who had won it for her. The bishop of Winchester, although he had not scrupled to sacrifice his brother’s title to the exigencies of his policy, bore no grudge against the queen and her children, and endeavored to prevail on the empress to guarantee to the latter at least their mother’s inheritance. Matilda would be satisfied with nothing less than the utter ruin of the rival house, and although the queen was raising a great army in Kent for Stephen’s liberation, she refused even to temporize. Henry in disgust retired from court and took up his residence at Winchester; thither the empress, having in vain attempted to recall him to her side, and having made London too hot to hold her, followed him, and established herself in the royal castle as he had done in the episcopal palace. Winchester thus witnessed the gathering of the two hosts for a new struggle.

The queen brought up her army from Kent, the king of Scots and the earl of Gloucester brought up their forces from the north and west. But the queen showed the most promptitude. The baronage who were not bound to the legate’s policy refused to complete the king’s ruin, and stood aloof, intending to profit by the common weakness of the competitors. In attempting to secure the empress’s retreat to Devizes, on September 14, the earl of Gloucester was taken prisoner, and the two parties from this time forward played with more equal chances. An exchange of the two great captives was at once proposed, but mutual distrust, and the both sides to take the utmost advantage of their situation, delayed the negotiation for six weeks. Stephen at Bristol, Robert at Rochester, must have watched the debate with longing eyes. The countess Mabilia of Gloucester was prepared to ship Stephen off to Ireland, if a hair of Robert’s head were injured; the queen demanded no less security for her husband’s safety. At last, on All Saints’ Day, both Exchange were released, each leaving security in the hands of the other that the terms should be fairly observed.

As soon as they were free they both prepared for a continuance of the struggle. The empress fixed her court again at Oxford; Stephen, who seems at once to have resumed his royal position, the claims founded by the election of the empress suffering a practical refutation by his release, re-entered London. The legate, still desiring to direct the storm, called a council at Westminster in December, where he apologized for his conduct rather than defended it, and where the king laid a formal complaint against the treason of the men who had taken and imprisoned him. But the time for open hostilities was deferred, the certain exhaustion which after a few months more renders the history an absolute blank, was beginning to tell. Six months passed without a sign. By Easter the empress had determined to send for her husband. Geoffrey would not obey his wife’s summons until he had earl Robert’s personal assurance that he should not be made a fool of. Earl Robert went to persuade his brother-in-law to throw his sword into the scale. Geoffrey determined first to secure Normandy, and kept the earl at work there until the news from England peremptorily recalled him.

Stephen had waited until Robert had left England, and then, emerging from his sick room, had pounced down upon Wareham, the strong castle which the earl had entrusted to his son, had taken it, and then hastening northwards, had burnt the town of Oxford, and shut up the empress in the castle. There she remained until her brother could succor her. He returned at once, recovered Wareham and some castles in Dorset, and called together the forces of his party at Cirencester. But the winter was now advancing; the empress contrived a romantic escape in the snow from Oxford, and before active war could be resumed she directed that the castle should be surrendered. So the year 1142 comes to an end, and we see the two parties resting in their exhaustion. The western shires acknowledged Matilda, who reigned at Gloucester; the eastern acknowledged Stephen, who made Kent his head quarters. The midland counties were the seat of languid warfare, partly carried on about Oxford, which was a central debating ground between the two competitors, partly in Lincolnshire and Essex, where Stephen had to keep in order those great nobles who aimed at independence. Geoffrey de Mandeville, the earl of Essex, who accepted his earldom from both the courts, employed him chiefly in 1143 and 1144. The earl of Chester, who was uniformly opposed to Stephen, but who no doubt fought for himself far more than for the empress, held Lincoln as a constant thorn in the royal side. In 1145 Oxfordshire and Berkshire were the seat of war; in 1146 Stephen surprised the earl of Chester at Northampton and compelled him to give up Lincoln, and now for the first time seems to have thought himself a king. In despite of all precedent and all prejudice, defying a superstition to which even Henry II thought it wise to bow, that no king should wear his crown within the walls of Lincoln, he wore his crown there on Christmas Day.

In passing thus rapidly over these years we are but following the example of our historians, who share in the exhaustion of the combatants, recording little but an occasional affray, and a complaint of general misery. Neither side had strength to keep down its friends, much less to encounter its enemies. The price of the support given to both was the same—absolute license to build castles, to practice private war, to hang their private enemies, to plunder their neighbors, to coin their money, to exercise their petty tyrannies as they pleased. England was dismembered. North of the Tees ruled the king of Scots, David the lawgiver and the church builder, under whose rule Cumberland, Westmoreland and Northumberland were safe; the bishopric of Durham, too, under his wing, had peace. The West of England, as we have seen, was under the earl of Gloucester, who in his sister’s name founded earldoms, and endeavored to concentrate in the hands of his supporters such vestiges of the administrative organization as still subsisted. But the great earls of the house of Beaumont, Roger of Leicester and Waleran of Meulan, who dominated the midland shires, chose to act as independent sovereigns and made terms both in England and Normandy as if they had been kings.

In all the misery, and exhaustion, and balance of evils, however, time was working. The first generation of actors was leaving the stage, and a new one—if not better, still freed from the burden of odium, duplicity, and dishonesty which had marked the first—came into play. And the balance of change veered now to Stephen’s side. The year 1145 cut off Geoffrey de Mandeville in the midst of his sins, the year 1143 had seen the death of Miles of Hereford, the empress’s most faithful servant. In 1147 the great earl Robert of Gloucester passed away, and it is no small sign of the absolute deadness of the country at the time, that both his death and the departure of the empress, which must have almost coincided with it, are not even noticed in the best of the contemporary historians.

This year 1147 sees Stephen again ostensibly the sole ruler; really, however, devoid of power, as he had always been of counsel, his only strength being the weakness of everyone else. This year is marked by the great crusade of the emperor Conrad of Hohenstaufen, and of Lewis VII, and Eleanor of Aquitaine, an expedition in which England nationally had no share, and in which few of the barons took part, but which was recruited to a considerable extent by volunteers from the English ports. The capture of Lisbon from the Moors, and the placing of the kingdom of Portugal upon a sound footing there by, was the work mainly of the English pilgrims, but it was not a national work, and it touches our history merely as suggesting a probability that some of our most turbulent spirits may have joined the crusade, and thereby increased the chances of peace at home. With 1147, then, begins a new series of movements and a new set of actors, the details of whose doings are involved and obscure.

The death of earl Robert and the departure of the empress left their party without an ostensible head; for Geoffrey of Anjou was far more intent on securing Normandy than England, and his son Henry was only just springing into manhood, David of Scotland being looked upon apparently as the guardian of his interests. Henry of Winchester had lost the legation, which had given him such great strength in the earlier part of the struggle; the popes who had conferred it and promised to renew it, had rapidly given way to successors who were less favorable, and the chair of St. Peter was now filled by Eugenius III, the friend of St. Bernard, who was at this time the great spiritual power in European politics. The scantiness of our authorities does not allow us to speak with certainty, or to decide whether St. Bernard in the English quarrel was moved by a conviction of Stephen’s wrong-doing, or by the influence of the Cistercian order; it is, however, certain that the king and his brother by attempting to “force their nephew, afterward canonized as St William, into the see of York, in opposition to the Cistercian abbot of Fountains, had thrown that strong order, of which Bernard was the ornament, into opposition; and it is also certain that the strings of political intrigue were held by Eugenius III, and that every possible advantage was given by him to Henry of Anjou. The Englishman, Nicolas of St. Alban’s, afterward pope Adrian IV, was a close confidant of the pope, and John of Salisbury, the friend of Becket, was a close confidant of Nicolas; Becket was the clerk and secretary of Archbishop Theobald of Canterbury. These may have been the three strands of a strong diplomatic cord. The first impulse, however, which was to bring about Stephen’s final humiliation was, as before, given by himself. In 1148, Eugenius III called a council at Rheims. Archbishop Theobald asked leave to go. Stephen suspected that a plot would be concocted on behalf of the empress and her son; Henry of Winchester suspected that the archbishop wanted to apply for the legation. Leave was therefore refused, and Theobald went without leave; Stephen took the measures usual in such cases, confiscation and threats, and sent his chief ministers, Richard de Lucy and William Martel, to counteract the archbishop’s influence in the council. This had the effect of throwing Theobald, who had hitherto only been restrained by his oath of allegiance from taking the side of the empress, openly into the arms of her party; so much so that he preferred exile to submission, and even went so far as to consecrate the celebrated Gilbert Foliot, the abbot of Gloucester, and nominee of Henry of Anjou, to the see of Hereford, in opposition to both king and bishops Neither Stephen nor Theobald was, however, as yet in a position to act freely. Stephen confiscated and Theobald excommunicated, but a hollow peace was patched up between them in the autumn by Hugh Bigot and the bishops.

In 1149, Henry of Anjou, now sixteen years old, was knighted by his great uncle David, at Carlisle. Stephen, accounting this the beginning of war, hastened to York; but went no farther, and that cloud seemed to have passed away. The king was growing old, and it was necessary for him to secure the succession to his son Eustace; the military interest of the time, always very languid, now flags altogether, and the real business is conducted at the papal court. There, as usual, fortune seems to halt according to the depth of the purses of the rivals, the balance, however, in the main inclining as the pope would have it. Sometimes there is talk of peace; now the bishop of Winchester is to be made archbishop of Wessex, now Theobald is to have the legation; now the bishops are persuaded to recognise Eustace, now they are forbidden peremptorily to do any such thing. And this goes on for five years, Stephen relieving the monotony of the time by an occasional expedition into the West of England.

Henry, however, was making good use of his time on the Continent. Eustace, whose marriage with Constantia of France, a marriage purchased by the treasures of bishop Roger in 1139, made him a dangerous competitor, laid claim to Normandy. Geoffrey, after defending it on his son’s behalf during two years, finally made it over to him in 1151 and then died. Henry the next year married Eleanor of Aquitaine, the divorced wife of Lewis VII, and so secured nearly the whole of Western France. By the Christmas of 1152 he was ready to make a bold stroke for England also.

And England was ready for him. The bishops were watching for their time. The young Eustace was offending and oppressing. The king had now thrown the great house of Leicester as well as the prelates into determined opposition. The cessation of justice and the prevalence of private war made every one long for any change that would bring rest. In 1152 the bishops, acting under instructions from Rome, finally refused to sanction the coronation of Eustace, and Stephen, having again tried force, was compelled to acquiesce. But he saw the end approaching. In January 1153 Henry of Anjou landed. His friends gathered round him, Stephen and Eustace collected their mercenaries. At Malmesbury, and again at Wallingford, the two armies stood face to face, but the great barons refused to abide by the decision of arms; on both occasions they mediated, and the armies separated without a blow. Just after the second meeting Eustace died, and Stephen whose health was failing, who had lost his noble-hearted wife in 1152, and whose surviving children were too young to be exposed to the chances or risks of a disputed succession, could only give way. The negotiations, begun at Wallingford, were carried on and completed by a treaty at Westminster, concluded in November, in which Stephen recognised Henry as his heir, and Henry guaranteed the rights of Stephen’s children to the inheritance of their parents. At the same time a scheme of reform, which was to replace the administrative system of Henry I, on its basis, was determined on, the details of which form a clue to the early policy of the reign of Henry II. Henry left England some three months after the conclusion of the peace. His life, it was said, was not safe, and the pressure which he had to put upon Stephen to induce him to carry out the reforms was only too likely to result in the renewal of war. He went away about Easter 1154. Stephen blundered on for six months and then died ; not of a broken heart, perhaps, as the kings of history generally die, but certainly a disappointed man.

The reign of Stephen was, it may be fairly said, the period at which all the evils of feudalism came in England into full bearing, previous to being cut off and abolished forever under his great successor. The reign exemplifies to us what the whole century that followed the Conquest must have been if there had not been strong kings like William I, and Henry I, sturdily to repress all the disintegrating designs of their barons and to protect the people. The personal Estimate of character of Stephen needs no comment. He was brave. He was at least so far gentle that none of the atrocious cruelties alleged against his predecessors are attributed to him. He was false, partly no doubt under the pressure of circumstances, which he could not control, but in which he had involved himself by his first betrayal of faith. What may be the legal force of his election by the nation we need not ask: it was the breach of his oath that condemned him. No man trusted him; and as he trusted no one, knowing that he did not deserve trust, and that those who had betrayed their oath to his uncle would not hesitate to betray their oaths to him, he expected no one to trust him. He was not great, either for good or for evil, in himself. If he had had more wisdom he might have shown more honesty; certainly if he had been more honest he would have gained more credit for wisdom. Had he been either a more unscrupulous knave or a more honest man he would certainly have been far more successful.

EARLY PLANTAGENETS.

II

THE EARLY YEARS OF HENRY II.