The King was no sooner dead than all
the plans and schemes he had laboured at so long,
and lied so much for, crumbled away like a hollow
heap of sand. Stephen, 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. This did not prevent
Stephen from hastily producing a false witness, a servant
of the late King, to swear that the King had named
him for his heir upon his death-bed. On this
evidence the Archbishop of Canterbury crowned him.
The new King, so suddenly made, lost not a moment
in seizing the Royal treasure, and hiring foreign
soldiers with some of it to protect his throne.
If the dead King had even done as
the false witness said, he would have had small right
to will away the English people, like so many sheep
or oxen, without their consent. But he had,
in fact, bequeathed all his territory to Matilda;
who, supported by Robert, Earl of Gloucester,
soon began to dispute the crown. Some of the
powerful barons and priests took her side; some took
Stephen’s; all fortified their castles; and again
the miserable English people were involved in war,
from which they could never derive advantage whosoever
was victorious, and in which all parties plundered,
tortured, starved, and ruined them.
Five years had passed since the death
of Henry the First and during those five
years there had been two terrible invasions by the
people of Scotland under their King, David, who was
at last defeated with all his army when
Matilda, attended by her brother Robert and a large
force, appeared in England to maintain her claim.
A battle was fought between her troops and King Stephen’s
at Lincoln; in which the King himself was taken prisoner,
after bravely fighting until his battle-axe and sword
were broken, and was carried into strict confinement
at Gloucester. Matilda then submitted herself
to the Priests, and the Priests crowned her Queen
of England.
She did not long enjoy this dignity.
The people of London had a great affection for Stephen;
many of the Barons considered it degrading to be ruled
by a woman; and the Queen’s temper was so haughty
that she made innumerable enemies. The people
of London revolted; and, in alliance with the troops
of Stephen, besieged her at Winchester, where they
took her brother Robert prisoner, whom, as her best
soldier and chief general, she was glad to exchange
for Stephen himself, who thus regained his liberty.
Then, the long war went on afresh. Once, she
was pressed so hard in the Castle of Oxford, in the
winter weather when the snow lay thick upon the ground,
that her only chance of escape was to dress herself
all in white, and, accompanied by no more than three
faithful Knights, dressed in like manner that their
figures might not be seen from Stephen’s camp
as they passed over the snow, to steal away on foot,
cross the frozen Thames, walk a long distance, and
at last gallop away on horseback. All this she
did, but to no great purpose then; for her brother
dying while the struggle was yet going on, she at last
withdrew to Normandy.
In two or three years after her withdrawal
her cause appeared in England, afresh, in the person
of her son Henry, young Plantagenet, who, at only
eighteen years of age, was very powerful: not
only on account of his mother having resigned all
Normandy to him, but also from his having married
Eleanor, the divorced wife of the French King,
a bad woman, who had great possessions in France.
Louis, the French King, not relishing this arrangement,
helped Eustace, King Stephen’s son, to invade
Normandy: but Henry drove their united forces
out of that country, and then returned here, to assist
his partisans, whom the King was then besieging at
Wallingford upon the Thames. Here, for two days,
divided only by the river, the two armies lay encamped
opposite to one another on the eve, as
it seemed to all men, of another desperate fight, when
the earl of Arundel took heart and
said ’that it was not reasonable to prolong the
unspeakable miseries of two kingdoms to minister to
the ambition of two princes.’
Many other noblemen repeating and
supporting this when it was once uttered, Stephen
and young Plantagenet went down, each to his own bank
of the river, and held a conversation across it, in
which they arranged a truce; very much to the dissatisfaction
of Eustace, who swaggered away with some followers,
and laid violent hands on the Abbey of St. Edmund’s-Bury,
where he presently died mad. The truce led to
a solemn council at Winchester, in which it was agreed
that Stephen should retain the crown, on condition
of his declaring Henry his successor; that William,
another son of the King’s, should inherit his
father’s rightful possessions; and that all
the Crown lands which Stephen had given away should
be recalled, and all the Castles he had permitted
to be built demolished. Thus terminated the
bitter war, which had now lasted fifteen years, and
had again laid England waste. In the next year
Stephen died, after a troubled reign of nineteen
years.
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. In the
division of the nobility between the two rival claimants
of the Crown, and in the growth of what is called the
Feudal System (which made the peasants the born vassals
and mere slaves of the Barons), every Noble had his
strong Castle, where he reigned the cruel king of
all the neighbouring people. Accordingly, he
perpetrated whatever cruelties he chose. And
never were worse cruelties committed upon earth than
in wretched England in those nineteen years.
The writers who were living then describe
them fearfully. They say that the castles were
filled with devils rather than with men; that the
peasants, men and women, were put into dungeons for
their gold and silver, were tortured with fire and
smoke, were hung up by the thumbs, were hung up by
the heels with great weights to their heads, were torn
with jagged irons, killed with hunger, broken to death
in narrow chests filled with sharp-pointed stones,
murdered in countless fiendish ways. In England
there was no corn, no meat, no cheese, no butter, there
were no tilled lands, no harvests. Ashes of
burnt towns, and dreary wastes, were all that the
traveller, fearful of the robbers who prowled abroad
at all hours, would see in a long day’s journey;
and from sunrise until night, he would not come upon
a home.
The clergy sometimes suffered, and
heavily too, from pillage, but many of them had castles
of their own, and fought in helmet and armour like
the barons, and drew lots with other fighting men
for their share of booty. The Pope (or Bishop
of Rome), on King Stephen’s resisting his ambition,
laid England under an Interdict at one period of this
reign; which means that he allowed no service to be
performed in the churches, no couples to be married,
no bells to be rung, no dead bodies to be buried.
Any man having the power to refuse these things,
no matter whether he were called a Pope or a Poulterer,
would, of course, have the power of afflicting numbers
of innocent people. That nothing might be wanting
to the miseries of King Stephen’s time, the
Pope threw in this contribution to the public store not
very like the widow’s contribution, as I think,
when Our Saviour sat in Jerusalem over-against the
Treasury, ’and she threw in two mites, which
make a farthing.’