REIGN OF STEPHEN.
[Sidenote: A.D. 1135.]
Although the authority of the crown had been exercised with very little
restraint during the three preceding reigns, the succession to it, or
even the principles of the succession, were but ill ascertained: so that
a doubt might justly have arisen, whether the crown was not in a great
measure elective. This uncertainty exposed the nation, at the death of
every king, to all the calamities of a civil war; but it was a
circumstance favorable to the designs of Stephen, Earl of Boulogne, who
was son of Stephen, Earl of Blois, by a daughter of the Conqueror. The
late king had raised him to great employments, and enriched him by the
grant of several lordships. His brother had been made Bishop of
Winchester; and by adding to it the place of his chief justiciary, the
king gave him an opportunity of becoming one of the richest subjects in
Europe, and of extending an unlimited influence over the clergy and the
people. Henry trusted, by the promotion of two persons so near him in
blood, and so bound by benefits, that he had formed an impenetrable
fence about the succession; but he only inspired into Stephen the design
of seizing on the crown by bringing him so near it. The opportunity was
favorable. The king died abroad; Matilda was absent with her husband;
and the Bishop of Winchester, by his universal credit, disposed the
churchmen to elect his brother, with the concurrence of the greatest
part of the nobility, who forgot their oaths, and vainly hoped that a
bad title would necessarily produce a good government. Stephen, in the
flower of youth, bold, active, and courageous, full of generosity and a
noble affability, that seemed to reproach the state and avarice of the
preceding kings, was not wanting to his fortune. He seized immediately
the immense treasures of Henry, and by distributing them with a
judicious profusion removed all doubts concerning his title to them. He
did not spare even the royal demesne, but secured himself a vast number
of adherents by involving their guilt and interest in his own. He
raised a considerable army of Flemings, in order to strengthen himself
against another turn of the same instability which had raised him to the
throne; and, in imitation of the measures of the late king, he concluded
all by giving a charter of liberties as ample as the people at that time
aspired to. This charter contained a renunciation of the forests made by
his predecessor, a grant to the ecclesiastics of a jurisdiction over
their own vassals, and to the people in general an immunity from unjust
tallages and exactions. It is remarkable, that the oath of allegiance
taken by the nobility on this occasion was conditional: it was to be
observed so long as the king observed the terms of his charter,--a
condition which added no real security to the rights of the subject, but
which proved a fruitful source of dissension, tumult, and civil
violence.
The measures which the king hitherto pursued were dictated by sound
policy; but he took another step to secure his throne, which in fact
took away all its security, and at the same time brought the country to
extreme misery, and to the brink of utter ruin.
At the Conquest there were very few fortifications in the kingdom.
William found it necessary for his security to erect several. During the
struggles of the English, the Norman nobility were permitted (as in
reason it could not be refused) to fortify their own houses. It was,
however, still understood that no new fortress could be erected without
the king's special license. These private castles began very early to
embarrass the government. The royal castles were scarcely less
troublesome: for, as everything was then in tenure, the governor held
his place by the tenure of castle-guard; and thus, instead of a simple
officer, subject to his pleasure, the king had to deal with a feudal
tenant, secure against him by law, if he performed his services, and by
force, if he was unwilling to perform them. Every resolution of
government required a sort of civil war to put it in execution. The two
last kings had taken, and demolished several of these castles; but when
they found the reduction, of any of them difficult, their custom
frequently was, to erect another close by it, tower against tower, ditch
against ditch: these were called Malvoisins, from their purpose and
situation. Thus, instead of removing, they in fact doubled the mischief.
Stephen, perceiving the passion of the barons for these castles, among
other popular acts in the beginning of his reign, gave a general license
for erecting them. Then was seen to arise in every corner of the
kingdom, in every petty seigniory, an inconceivable multitude of
strongholds, the seats of violence, and the receptacles of murderers,
felons, debasers of the coin, and all manner of desperate and abandoned
villains. Eleven hundred and fifteen of these castles were built in this
single reign. The barons, having thus shut out the law, made continual
inroads upon each other, and spread war, rapine, burning, and desolation
throughout the whole kingdom. They infested the highroads, and put a
stop to all trade by plundering the merchants and travellers. Those who
dwelt in the open country they forced into their castles, and after
pillaging them of all their visible substance, these tyrants held them
in dungeons, and tortured them with a thousand cruel inventions to
extort a discovery of their hidden wealth. The lamentable representation
given by history of those barbarous times justifies the pictures in the
old romances of the castles of giants and magicians. A great part of
Europe was in the same deplorable condition. It was then that some
gallant spirits, struck with a generous indignation at the tyranny of
these miscreants, blessed solemnly by the bishop, and followed by the
praises and vows of the people, sallied forth to vindicate the chastity
of women and to redress the wrongs of travellers and peaceable men. The
adventurous humor inspired by the Crusade heightened and extended this
spirit; and thus the idea of knight-errantry was formed.
[Sidenote: A.D. 1138.]
[Sidenote: A.D. 1139.]
[Sidenote: A.D. 1141.]
Stephen felt personally these inconveniences; but because the evil was
too stubborn to be redressed at once, he resolved to proceed gradually,
and to begin with the castles of the bishops,--as they evidently held
them, not only against the interests of the crown, but against the
canons of the Church. From the nobles he expected no opposition to this
design: they beheld with envy the pride of these ecclesiastical
fortresses, whose battlements seemed to insult the poverty of the lay
barons. This disposition, and a want of unanimity among the clergy
themselves, enabled Stephen to succeed in his attempt against the Bishop
of Salisbury, one of the first whom he attacked, and whose castles, from
their strength and situation, were of the greatest importance. But the
affairs of this prince were so circumstanced that he could pursue no
council that was not dangerous. His breach with the clergy let in the
party of his rival, Matilda. This party was supported by Robert, Earl of
Gloucester, natural son to the late king,--a man powerful by his vast
possessions, but more formidable through his popularity, and the courage
and abilities by which he had acquired it. Several other circumstances
weakened the cause of Stephen. The charter, and the other favorable
acts, the scaffolding of his ambition, when he saw the structure raised,
he threw down and contemned. In order to maintain his troops, as well as
to attach men to his cause, where no principle bound them, vast and
continual largesses became necessary: all his legal revenue had been
dissipated; and he was therefore obliged to have recourse to such
methods of raising money as were evidently illegal. These causes every
day gave some accession of strength to the party against him; the
friends of Matilda were encouraged to appear in arms; a civil war
ensued, long and bloody, prosecuted as chance or a blind rage directed,
by mutual acts of cruelty and treachery, by frequent surprisals and
assaults of castles, and by a number of battles and skirmishes fought to
no determinate end, and in which nothing of the military art appeared,
but the destruction which it caused. Various, on this occasion, were the
reverses of fortune, while Stephen, though embarrassed by the weakness
of his title, by the scantiness of his finances, and all the disorders
which arose from both, supported his tottering throne with wonderful
activity and courage; but being at length defeated and made prisoner
under the walls of Lincoln, the clergy openly declare for Matilda. The
city of London, though unwillingly, follows the example of the clergy.
The defection from Stephen was growing universal.
[Sidenote: A.D. 1153.]
But Matilda, puffed up with a greatness which as yet had no solid
foundation and stood merely in personal favor, shook it in the minds of
all men by assuming, together with the insolence of conquest, the
haughty rigor of an established dominion. Her title appeared but too
good in the resemblance she bore to the pride of the former kings. This
made the first ill success in her affairs fatal. Her great support, the
Earl of Gloucester, was in his turn made prisoner. In exchange for his
liberty that of Stephen was procured, who renewed the war with his usual
vigor. As he apprehended an attempt from Scotland in favor of Matilda,
descended from the blood royal of that nation, to balance this weight,
he persuaded the King of France to declare in his favor, alarmed as he
was by the progress of Henry, the son of Matilda, and Geoffrey, Count of
Anjou. This prince, no more than sixteen years of age, after receiving
knighthood from David, King of Scotland, began to display a courage and
capacity destined to the greatest things. Of a complexion which strongly
inclined to pleasure, he listened to nothing but ambition; at an age
which is usually given up to passion, he submitted delicacy to politics,
and even in his marriage only remembered the interests of a
sovereign,--for, without examining too scrupulously into her character,
he married Eleanor, the heiress of Guienne, though divorced from her
husband for her supposed gallantries in the Holy Land. He made use of
the accession of power which he acquired by this match to assert his
birthright to Normandy. This he did with great success, because he was
favored by the general inclination of the people for the blood of their
ancient lords. Flushed with this prosperous beginning, he aspired to
greater things; he obliged the King of France to submit to a truce; and
then he turned his arms to support the rights of his family in England,
from whence Matilda retired, unequal to the troublesome part she had
long acted. Worn out with age, and the clashing of furious factions, she
shut herself up in a monastery, and left to her son the succession of a
civil war. Stephen was now pressed with renewed vigor. Henry had rather
the advantage in the field; Stephen had the possession, of the
government. Their fortunes appearing nearly balanced, and the fuel of
dissension being consumed by a continual and bloody war of thirteen
years, an accommodation was proposed and accepted. Henry found it
dangerous to refuse his consent, as the bishops and barons, even of his
own party, dreaded the consequences, if a prince, in the prime of an
ambitious youth, should establish an hereditary title by the force of
foreign arms. This treaty, signed at Wallingford, left the possession of
the crown for his life to Stephen, but secured the succession to Henry,
whom that prince adopted. The castles erected in this reign were to be
demolished; the exorbitant grants of the royal demesne to be resumed. To
the son of Stephen all his private possessions were secured.
Thus ended this tedious and ruinous civil war. Stephen survived it near
two years; and now, finding himself more secure as the lawful tenant
than he had been as the usurping proprietor of the crown, he no longer
governed on the maxims of necessity. He made no new attempts in favor of
his family, but spent the remainder of his reign in correcting the
disorders which arose from his steps in its commencement, and in healing
the wounds of so long and cruel a war. Thus he left the kingdom in peace
to his successor, but his character, as it is usual where party is
concerned, greatly disputed. Wherever his natural dispositions had room
to exert themselves, they appeared virtuous and princely; but the lust
to reign, which often attends great virtues, was fatal to his,
frequently hid them, and always rendered them suspected.