4) Stephen (1135-54)

Pre-reading task: Find out what the reasons of the civil war were and how it ended.

Although they have sworn to support Henry I's daughter Matilda as their ruler if the King should die without an heir, few of the barons in England and Normandy were prepared to stand by their oath. Not only was she a woman, she was also arrogant and unpopular, and above all she was married to the Count of Anjou, ruler of Normandy and England’s traditional enemy. When Henry I died, at the end of 1135, the barons assembled to debate the succession, and from several possible candidates - including Matilda's infant son Henry - they chose Count Theobald of Blois, the elder son of William the Conqueror's daughter Adela. The throne was offered to Theobald, and negotiations were in progress when startling news arrived - another candidate, Theobald's younger brother Stephen, Count of Mortain and Boulogne, had already made himself King of England.

Stephen had been a particular favourite with his uncle Henry I. The King had virtually brought him up, arranged his marriage with an heiress and endowed him with the Norman county of Mortain and so many English estates that he was one of the wealthiest men in England. It had seemed as though Henry might be grooming him for future kingship, and such was the basis of Stephen's claim. As soon as he heard that the King was dead, he sailed for England, where he declared that Henry had named him as his heir on his deathbed. With the support of his brother Henry, whom the king had created Bishop of Winchester, and the citizens of London, he persuaded the clergy to acknow­ledge him, and the Archbishop of Canterbury crowned him on 22 December 1135.

Stephen had been popular at King Henry's court. He was charming, he was courageous in battle, he was a generous patron of the Church, and he was, in general, chivalrous - he later became the first English king to permit jousting. 'When he was a Count', wrote a contemporary chronicler, 'by his good nature, and by the way that he sat and ate in the company of even the humblest, he had earned an affection that can hardly be imagined.' The barons were willing at first to accept Stephen's rule. At a prolonged Easter court in 1136 nearly all of them, including the late King's favourite illegitimate son, Earl Robert of Gloucester, swore allegiance to him. It was not long before they became disillusioned. Though Stephen was a fine courtier and soldier, he was a failure as a king and a commander. He quickly lost the support of the Norman barons through his incompetence; and in the spring of 1138 the powerful Earl Robert of Gloucester transferred his allegiance to his half-sister, Matilda.

When the news became known, Robert’s English vassals and friends fortified their castles in open rebellion, and while Stephen continued to make mistakes, the opposition mounted. Instead of attacking the rebel headquarters at Bristol, he wasted his time attacking smaller insignificant castles; when his loyal northern barons defeated a Scots invasion at the Battle of the Standard (so called because the Archbishop of York had constructed an enormous standard with the banners of the patron saints of York, Ripon and Beverly flying from it), he squandered the victory by ceding the earldom of Northumbria to the son of the king of Scots in return for no more than a token contingent of Scots for his army. In order to weaken the power of the bureaucracy build up by King Henry, which might be expected to support his daughter, he arrested the Bishop of Salisbury and other bishops and councillors who were members of his family thereby losing himself the vital support of the Church; and when Matilda landed in England with Earl Robert, in the autumn of 1139, he was persuaded to abandon his plans to besiege the castle of Arundel where Matilda had taken up residence, and, most foolish of all, to grant her safe passage to join Earl Robert in Bristol.

With the last chivalrous but fatal gesture, the rebellion became a full-scale civil war. Barons bargained with Stephen and Matilda selling their support to the highest bidder and then changing sides as it suited them. In some areas they fought their own private wars. In others they raided and pillaged like bandits, until it seemed, in the words of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, that 'Christ and his saints slept'.

On 2 February 1141, Stephen was besieging the rebel castle of Lincoln when Earl Robert appeared in his rear with an army. Although he was outnumbered, Stephen gave battle. Even after he had been surrounded he fought on, swinging a sword until the blade broke and then an axe till the shaft shattered, and he was finally stunned by a stone thrown from behind.

King Stephen was held as a prisoner in chains at Bristol, and in the summer Matilda entered London. But she was never crowned. Enraged by her heavy taxes the citizens drove her out, and when Earl was captured by the King's supporters in September, she was forced to release the king in return for her most valuable ally.

After his release, Stephen was reconciled with the disenchanted clergy. With her supporters under threat of excommunica­tion, Matilda sent Earl Robert to Anjou to plead for help from her husband, but Count Geoffrey was engaged in a successful inva­sion of Normandy, and could offer nothing. While Robert was away, Stephen laid siege to Matilda in Oxford Castle, but on a December night, shortly before the castle surrendered, when the river was frozen and the fields covered in snow, Matilda and four knights, dressed all in white, climbed down from a tower and slipped unnoticed through Stephen's lines.

For the next five years the war was a miserable stalemate. With the death of Earl Robert in October 1147, Matilda finally lost heart, and early in the following year she departed for Anjou. She never saw England again.

The civil war did not end with her departure, however. By 1145 her husband had conquered the whole of Normandy, and since it seemed unlikely that the incompetent Stephen would reconquer the duchy, some of the English barons who owned Norman estates concluded that their only hope of retaining their possessions on both sides of the Channel lay in continuing to fight for an Angevin victory in England. Since Matilda had forsaken them, they turned to her son Henry - the heir to the House of Anjou.

It seemed that the struggle between Stephen and Matilda was to be carried on into the next generation. To counter the threat from Henry, Stephen attempted to ensure the succession for his own elder son, Eustace, by having his heir crowned in his own lifetime. But the Archbishop of Canter­bury, backed by the Pope, refused to perform the coronation.

By the time Henry returned to England, in 1153, he had become the most powerful feudal prince in Europe: through inheritance and marriage, the hereditary Count of Anjou was now Duke of Normandy and Aquitaine as well. When he landed with a small army, barons flocked to join him, and the issue might, it seemed, be decided in a single battle. Realising this, the barons on both sides began to fear that an outright victory might end in reprisals, and they attempted to conclude a peace. For a time Stephen was adamant that his son should succeed, but when Eustace died, in August 1153, the King lost interest in the succession, and on 6 November the civil war was ended by the Treaty of Winchester. It was agreed that Stephen should rule for the rest of his life, while Henry was acknowledged as his heir.

Stephen did not enjoy the peace for long. He died on 25 October 1154.

(from “The Kings and Queens of Great Britain” by Josephine Ross, L. 1982)

Part 2. THE ANGEVINS

Pre-Reading Task