Stephen I of England

“ Stephen was a brave, generous, and popular noble, and both the peers and commons of England would have preferred his rule to that of the King’s daughter; when, therefore, he made claim to the throne no opposition was raised. “For when the nobles of the kingdom were assembled at London, he promised that the laws should be reformed to the satisfaction of every one of them, and William, Archbishop of Canterbury, who was the first of all the nobles to take the oath of fidelity to the Empress as Queen of England, now consecrated Stephen to be King. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Each of them had a legal claim to the throne, Stephen's the better, he being the nearest male heir. No woman had as yet ruled in England. Maud's mother had been of ancient English descent, which gave her popularity among the Saxon inhabitants of the land. Stephen was personally popular, a good-humored, generous prodigal, his very faults tending to make him a favorite. Yet he was born to be a swordsman, not a king, and his only idea of royalty was to let the land rule—or misrule it if preferred—itself, while he enjoyed the pleasures and declined the toils of kingship. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ If Stephen's refusal to allow his brother's advancement had been a part of a systematic policy, carefully planned and firmly executed, of weakening and finally overthrowing the great ecclesiastics and barons of England who were so strong as to be dangerous to the crown, it would have been a wise act and a step towards final success. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Her brother, who was the soul of her cause, being soon after taken prisoner, was exchanged for Stephen, and he dying soon after, Maud was forced to leave the kingdom to her competitor. However, Stephen continuing still embroiled with the clergy, her son Henry, in a few years after, invaded England, and was joined by multitudes; but some noblemen, who loved their country, mediated a peace, and at last established it on the following terms; that Stephen should reign during life ”

“ Should he succeed to the throne of England, he must never be allowed to mount it,” exclaimed Stephen. “He will not be content till he has crushed out our civil and religious liberties, which the best blood of our country has been shed to obtain. Would that when the gallant Duke of Monmouth came to the west, the thousands who greeted him had banded together and marched to London to insist on the exclusion of the Duke of York and the nomination of Monmouth as heir to his father.” ”

“ 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. ”

“ On his coronation, Stephen, in general terms, promised to uphold the good laws of his predecessors. At the first great council of his reign he issued a more explicit charter, securing to the Church their property and privileges, and promising to suppress illegalities on the part of the sheriffs. The character of the reign rendered such a charter quite inoperative. The insurrection in Wales, which had been bringing Henry to England when he died, continued. Its conduct fell chiefly to Ranulf, Earl of Chester, and Richard Fitz-Gilbert of Clare. ”

“ Contemporary writers call him the most powerful man in England, and they regard his abilities with as much respect as his possessions and power. Stephen took his opportunity in the autumn of 1143, at a court held at St. Albans. The time was not wisely chosen. Things had not been going well with him during the summer. At Wilton he had been badly defeated by the Earl of Gloucester, and nearly half of England was in Matilda's possession or independent of his own control. But he yielded to the pressure of Geoffrey's enemies at the court, and ordered and secured his arrest on a charge of treason. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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.
On the death of Henry, Stephen landed in England before the news could reach Matilda; and though the gates of Dover and Canterbury were shut against him, he passed on without hesitation to London, where a majority of the people saluted him king with acclamations. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Field sports did not attract him, though he practised shooting at birds when a boy, and killed a boar when attending Queen Victoria in Germany in 1860.
As a statesman he was a sincere but not a demonstrative patriot; he wrote of England as ‘the country whose freedom I have worshipped.’ Proud of his country and jealous of its honour, he nobly upheld the whig motto of civil and religious liberty throughout the world. Every movement for freedom had his hearty support. He championed every measure that he believed would increase the happiness of the people. ”

“ Stephen has confined himself exclusively to Englishmen of the past. All this shows not only how rich England has been in men, but how studiously she has accumulated and preserved her records of “the great of old.” To an extent, the same is true of our own people and the people of those other American lands which share with us that immeasurable and inextinguishable debt to the heroic sailor of Genoa, for who shall say what devotion to high causes, what courage, industry, fortitude, genius, self-abnegation, and large capacity for great affairs are not here made permanent record of? ”

“ Stephen’s mercenaries.
This anarchy began to assume a form when Robert of Gloucester, alleging his previous oath to Matilda, and asserting that the conditions on which he had accepted Stephen had not been kept, renounced [81] his fealty. His influence was in his earldom, and in the West of England; the headquarters of his party was Bristol; and his agent during his absence was Milo, Constable of Gloucester, afterwards Earl of Hereford. Nearly all the West, and by no means the West only, declared for Matilda. ”

“ 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. ”

“ William's successors failed to comprehend what he had done, or why. By the time of Stephen (1135) [15] we find the barons of England wellnigh as powerful as those of other lands. A civil war arises in which Stephen and his rival Matilda are scarce more than pawns upon the board. The lords shift sides at will, retreat to safety in their strong castles, plunder the common folk, and make private war quite as they please. ”

“ 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? ”

“ The brilliant Easter court had been deliberately made a time of lavish display; mercenary troops could have been collected only at considerable cost; and the siege of Exeter castle had been expensive as well as troublesome. Stephen's own possessions in England were very extensive, and the royal domains were in his hands; but the time was rapidly coming when he must alienate these permanent sources of supply, lands and revenues, to win and hold support. ”

“ In 1147 the situation improved for Stephen; Robert of Gloucester, the ablest of the Angevin partisans, died, and the empress left England in dispair. But her son soon appeared in England to renew the struggle (1140) and conciliate new supporters. Soon after his return to Normandy Henry was invested by his father with the duchy (1150) . He succeeded to Anjou in 1151; next year he acquired the duchy of Aquitaine by marriage. Stephen struggled hard to secure the succession for Eustace, his elder son. ”

“ 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. ”