ENGLAND UNDER MATILDA AND STEPHEN
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.’