STEPHEN.—1135 to 1154.
How Stephen was made king; and of the civil wars in his reign.
As soon as King Henry was dead, his nephew Stephen, who was very
handsome, and brave, and good-natured, was made king. A great many
Norman barons, and English lords and bishops, went with him to
Westminster Abbey, and there the Archbishop of Canterbury put a crown
upon his head, and they all promised to obey him as their king. But
the other barons, and lords, and bishops, who, as I told you before,
had promised to obey the Empress Maude as Queen of England, and to
keep the kingdom for her young son Henry, sent to fetch them from
Anjou, which was their own country, and tried to make her queen. I am
sorry to say that the friends of Stephen and the friends of Maude
began to fight, and never ceased for fifteen years.
This fighting was very mischievous to the country; whole towns were
destroyed by it; and while the war between Stephen and Maude lasted,
the corn-fields were laid waste, so that many people died for want of
bread; the flocks of sheep and herds of cattle were killed, or died
for want of care; the trees were cut down, and nobody planted young
ones; and there was nothing but misery from one end of the kingdom to
the other. This sort of war between two parties of the people of the
same country is called civil war, and it is the most dreadful of all
warfare.
If strangers come to fight, and all the people of a country join to
drive them away, the mischief they may have done is soon repaired;
and the people of a country love one another the better because they
have been defending one another.
But in a civil war, when people in the same country fight, it is not
so. The very next door neighbours may take different sides, and then
the mischief they may do one another will be always remembered, and
they will dislike one another even after peace is made.
I have heard things so dreadful about civil wars, you would hardly
believe them. It is said even that two brothers have taken different
sides in a civil war, and that when there was a battle it has
happened that one brother has killed the other, and when he found out
what he had done, he was ready to kill himself with grief. Only think
how dreadful such a thing is, and how sorry the father and mother of
those brothers must have been!
These sad wars lasted more than fifteen years: at last everybody got
tired of them, and it was settled by some of the wisest of the barons
and bishops that Stephen should be king as long as he lived; that
Maude should live in Anjou; and that when Stephen died, her son Henry
should be king of England.
Stephen did not live very long after this agreement was made. He had
some very good qualities, but the wars, which troubled all England
while he reigned, prevented their being of much use. He was King of
England for nineteen years.