King Stephen of England

“ ENGLAND UNDER MATILDA AND STEPHEN.
The King was no sooner dead, than all the plans and schemes he had labored at so long, and lied so much for, crumbled away like a hollow heap of sand. Stephen, a grandson of the Conqueror, whom he had never mistrusted or suspected, started up to claim the throne.
Stephen was the son of Adela, the Conqueror's daughter, married to the Count of Blois. To Stephen, and to his brother Henry, the late King had been liberal; making Henry Bishop of Winchester, and finding a good marriage for Stephen, and much enriching him. ”

“ The solemn deliberation ended in the choice of Stephen, the citizens swore to defend the king with money and blood, Stephen swore to apply his whole strength to the pacification and good government of the realm. It was in fact the new union of conquered and conquerors into a single England that did Stephen's work. ”

“ Although King Stephen was, for the time in which he lived, a humane and moderate man, with many excellent qualities; and although nothing worse is known of him than his usurpation of the Crown, which he probably excused to himself by the consideration that King Henry the First was a usurper too—which was no excuse at all; the people of England suffered more in these dread nineteen years, than at any former period even of their suffering history. ”

“ This year went the King Stephen over sea to Normandy, and there was received; for that they concluded that he should be all such as the uncle was; and because he had got his treasure: but he dealed it out, and scattered it foolishly. Much had King Henry gathered, gold and silver, but no good did men for his soul thereof. When the King Stephen came to England, he held his council at Oxford; where he seized the Bishop Roger of Sarum, and Alexander, Bishop of Lincoln, and the chancellor Roger, his nephew; and threw all into prison till they gave up their castles. ”

“ It is easy to see that the conditions of life in England were most unsettled in the reign of King Stephen. There was no safety in town or village, and the dwellers on the manors must have suffered most severely. Their own lord would send and gather in all their store to victual his castle from time to time: his enemy would send his men to seize what they could. ”

“ A plot which Robert of Gloucester had been weaving from the outset of his reign came indeed to a head in 1138, and the Earl's revolt stripped Stephen of Caen and half Normandy. But when his partizans in England rose in the south and the west and the King of Scots, whose friendship Stephen had bought in the opening of his reign by the cession of Carlisle, poured over the northern border, the nation stood firmly by the king. Stephen himself marched on the western rebels and soon left them few strongholds save Bristol. His people fought for him in the north. ”

“ After the death of his son William, the king placed his affections on his nephew, and always liked his companionship in all his voyages. Stephen was a great favorite in 075England, for he was as affable and agreeable to the poorest and humblest people as he was to the nobles. His wife, too, was daily winning hearts, and when the king's health began to decline, it was fondly hoped that this young couple would succeed him instead of his daughter, the Empress Matilda. ”

“ Stephen's monastery, which he had built and had richly endowed. Oh, how false, how unstable, is the good of this world! He, who had been a powerful king and the lord of many territories, possessed not then, of all his lands, more than seven feet of ground; and he, who was erewhile adorned with gold and with gems, lay then covered with mould. He left three sons: Robert the eldest was earl of Normandy after him; the second, named William, wore the crown of England after his father's death; and his third son was Henry, to whom he bequeathed immense treasures. ”

“ At the time of the dispute with Robert of Gloucester on the subject of precedence, Stephen professed that his gratitude to the king impelled him to be the first to offer allegiance to Matilda; but his whole course of action at this period shows that his designs upon the English crown were fully matured. He exerted himself to attain popularity among the people, as well as among the barons. His daring and gallantry secured him the admiration of the Normans, while his affable and familiar manners, joined to a generosity without stint, obtained the affections of the people. ”

“ Stephen's friends would have been willing that he should give up trying to be king, but they could not leave him in prison for life; and so they went on fighting for him, while more and more of the English joined them, as they felt how bad and unkind a queen they had in the Empress. Indeed, she was so proud and violent, that her husband would not come over to England to help her, but staid to govern Normandy. She was soon in great distress, and had to flee from Winchester, riding through the midst of the enemy, and losing almost all her friends by the way as they were slain or made prisoners. ”

“ Now while still a young man, with rare disregard of self, he gave up his conquest to his son, who had been brought up to consider himself as belonging rather to England than to Anjou. On the other side of the channel, during this year 1150, Stephen seems to have decided upon a plan which he bent every effort in the following years to carry out, but unsuccessfully,—the plan of securing a formal recognition of his son Eustace as his successor in the throne, or even as king with him. ”

“ In the same year, after Easter, Robert earl of Gloucester, of whose prudence Stephen chiefly stood in awe, came to England. While he was yet resident in Normandy, he had most earnestly considered, what line of conduct he should determine upon in the present state of affairs. If he became subject to Stephen, it seemed contrary to the oath he had sworn to his sister; if he opposed him, he saw that he could nothing benefit her or his nephews, though he must grievously injure himself. For the king, as I said before, had an immense treasure, which his uncle had been accumulating for many years. ”

“ He hastened on to London in the midst of a terrible thunder-storm, and convened an assembly of barons, before whom the steward of King Henry's household swore that the late sovereign had disinherited the Empress Matilda 076on his deathbed, and named Stephen as his heir. Thereupon the Archbishop of Canterbury absolved the nobles from the oath of fealty they had twice sworn to the daughter of their dead king, and Stephen was crowned without opposition. ”

“ At his coronation Stephen renewed his oath to respect the liberty of the Church, and he issued a brief charter to the nation at large which is drawn up in very general terms, confirming the liberties and good laws of Henry, king of the English, and the good laws and good customs of King Edward, but this can hardly be regarded as anything more than a proclamation that he intended to make no changes, a general confirmation of existing rights at the beginning of a new reign. ”

“ The power of his empire he could not break up. The real control of the whole, and even the greater part of the revenues, must remain in his hands. The conflict of ideas in his mind, when he tried to be true to them all in practice, led inevitably to a like conflict of facts and of physical force.
The coronation of the young Henry as king of England, considered by itself, seems an unaccountable act. Stephen had tried to secure the coronation of his son Eustace in his own lifetime, but there was a clear reason of policy in his case. ”

“ A meeting of representatives of both sides near Bath led to no result, and a journey of Henry's to France, perhaps to bring the influence of his brother Theobald and of the king of France to bear in favour of peace, was also fruitless. During the summer Stephen gained an advantage in securing the hand of Constance, the sister of Louis VII of France, for his son Eustace, it was believed at the time by a liberal use of the treasures of Bishop Roger. ”

“ On 1 Jan. 1127 he was called upon by his father to join the other barons assembled at Westminster in doing homage to Henry's only surviving lawful child, the widowed Empress Matilda, as heiress of England and Normandy. On this occasion a dispute arose between Robert and the king's nephew, Stephen, count of Boulogne, as to which was entitled to precedence in taking the oath; it was decided in favour of Stephen. Some six months later Robert shared with Brian FitzCount the duty of escorting Matilda over sea for her marriage with Geoffrey of Anjou. ”

“ In declaring how he had become king, Stephen adds to choice by clergy and people, and consecration by the archbishop, the confirmation of the pope. Since when had England, recognized the right of the pope to confirm its sovereigns or to decide cases of disputed succession? Or is the papacy securing here, from the necessities of Stephen, a greater concession than any other in the charter, a practical recognition of the claim which once Gregory VII had made of the Conqueror only to have it firmly rejected, and which the Church had not succeeded in establishing in any European land? ”

“ Finally, some few years before the second marriage of the Empress, he arranged a match between Stephen and another Matilda of scarcely less illustrious descent—the only daughter and heiress of Count Eustace of Boulogne and Mary of Scotland, sister to Henry’s own queen. [665] Stephen seems in fact to have been,274 next to William the Ætheling, the person for whom Henry cared most; and after the disaster of the White Ship—in which a lucky attack of illness saved him from sharing—he became virtually the king’s adoptive son, and the first layman in the kingdom. ”

“ The grants of land which had been made during the reign of Stephen, had impoverished the state to such an extent that the revenues were inadequate to the support of the crown. Various gifts also had been made during the brief reign of Matilda, who found it necessary to reward her followers in the same manner as had been done by Stephen. Soon after the truce between Henry and the late king, a treaty had been signed at Winchester, according to which Stephen agreed to resume possession of the royal domains, which had been given to the nobles or taken by them forcibly ”

“ King Stephen’s Queen, to whom many of the fugitives from Lincoln had betaken themselves, made use of the discontent thus excited to advance against London. The inhabitants rose, and the Empress barely escaped with a few followers to Oxford. The insurgents demanded the liberation of Stephen. In this demand the Bishop of Winchester now joined, and the Empress besieged him in his castle outside the town of Winchester. But her besieging army was soon itself besieged, its communications and means of subsistence cut off, and she found herself obliged to retire. ”

“ He did not take part in the coronation of Stephen (Will. Malm. Historia Novella, i. c. 461) , but attended his court at Easter 1136. A fire did some damage to his cathedral church on 8 June 1137. As David of Scotland was in that year preparing to invade England, Thurstan, though much weakened by age, met him at Roxburgh, and prevailed on him to agree to a truce until Stephen's return from Normandy in December. The see of Canterbury being then vacant, he presided over the prelates at a council that the king held at Northampton on 10 April 1138 (Cont. Flor. Wig.) ”

“ It has been thought that the famous picture of the sufferings of the people of England during the anarchy of Stephen's reign, which was written in the neighbouring city of Peterborough, where the last of the English Chronicles was now drawing to its close, gained its vividness from the writer's personal knowledge of the horrors of this time; and this is probable, though he speaks in general terms. His pitiful account runs thus in part: "Every powerful man made his castles and held them against him [the king] ; and they filled the land full of castles. ”

“ In 1284 he negotiated a marriage between the Scots king and Joletta or Yolande, daughter of the Count of Dreux (Fordun, i. 309; cf. art. Alexander III) . As an official under the crown, he received on 5 Feb. 1289 a fee of 20l. sterling from the chamberlain of Scotland (Stevenson, Documents relating to Scotland, i. 53) . But he was also employed officially in England. In Feb. 1292 he was custodian of the lands of Hugh Lovel, a tenant-in-chief of the king of England, and in March received from Edward I a writ of protection while staying beyond seas for a year. ”

“ Wherever there is civil war, there is sure to be famine and misery of all kinds, and there never was more misery in England than during the reign of king Stephen; for, in order to keep as many of the Barons on his side as he could, he let them do just as they pleased; and he gave titles and estates to a great many bold and bad men, who built castles and kept bands of ruffians, who went at night to rob and plunder the towns [81] and villages; so that the people, when they shut up their houses at night, used to kneel down and pray that God would protect them from robbers and murderers. ”

“ That bishop Roger had greatly injured king Stephen; that he seldom came to court, but his people, presuming on his power, excited tumults; that they had, frequently at other places and very lately at Oxford, attacked the attendants, and even the very nephew of earl Alan, as well as the servants of Hervey de Lyons, a man of such high nobility, and so extremely haughty, that he had never deigned to visit England though king Henry had invited him; that the injury, therefore, of such violence having been offered him, doubly recoiled on king Stephen, through respect to whom he had come hither ”