The early Plantagenets E-Book

William Carter Stubbs

• Herausgeber: Librorium Editions
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2023

Beschreibung

The geographical area of that history which alone deserves the name has more than once changed. The early home of human society was in Asia. Greece and Italy successively became the theatres of the world’s drama, and in modern times the real progress of society has moved within the limits of Western Christendom. So, too, with the material history. At one period the growth of the life of the world is in its literature, at another in its wars, at another in its institutions. Sometimes everything circles round one great man; at other times the key to the interest is found in some complex political idea such as the balance of power, or the realization of national identity.

Leseprobe

Epochs of Modern History

THE EARLY PLANTAGENETS

W. STUBBS, M.A.

MEDIEVAL EUROPE

Epochs of Modern History

THE

Early Plantagenets

BY

WILLIAM STUBBS, M.A.

REGIUS PROFESSOR OF MODERN HISTORY IN THE UNIVERSITY OF OXFORD

WITH TWO MAPS1900.

© 2023 Librorium Editions

ISBN : 9782385741532

THE EARLY PLANTAGENETS.

CHAPTER I.

CHAPTER II.

CHAPTER III.

CHAPTER IV.

CHAPTER V.

CHAPTER VI.

CHAPTER VII.

CHAPTER VIII.

CHAPTER IX.

CHAPTER X.

CHAPTER XI.

CHAPTER XII.

INDEX.

THE EARLY PLANTAGENETS.

CHAPTER I.

INTRODUCTION.

Importance of the Epoch—Its character in French and German History—In English History—Geographical Summary—Italy—Germany—France—Spain.

Various areas and stages of human history.

The geographical area of that history which alone deserves the name has more than once changed. The early home of human society was in Asia. Greece and Italy successively became the theatres of the world’s drama, and in modern times the real progress of society has moved within the limits of Western Christendom. So, too, with the material history. At one period the growth of the life of the world is in its literature, at another in its wars, at another in its institutions. Sometimes everything circles round one great man; at other times the key to the interest is found in some complex political idea such as the balance of power, or the realization of national identity. The successive stages of growth in the more advanced nations are not contemporaneous and may not follow in the same order. The quickened energy of one race finds its expression in commerce and colonization, that of another in internal organization and elaborate training, that of a third in arms, that of a fourth in art and literature. In some the literary growth precedes the political growth, in others it follows it; in some it is forced into premature luxuriance by national struggles, in others the national struggles themselves engross the strength that would ordinarily find expression in literature. Art has flourished greatly both where political freedom has encouraged the exercise of every natural gift and where political oppression has forced the genius of the people into a channel which seemed least dangerous to the oppressor. Still, on the whole, the European nations in modern history emerge from somewhat similar circumstances. Under somewhat similar discipline, and by somewhat similar expedients, they feel their way to that national consciousness in which they ultimately diverge so widely. We may hope, then, to find, in the illustration of a definite section or well ascertained epoch of that history, sufficient unity of plot and interest, a sufficient number of contrasts and analogies, to save it from being a dry analysis of facts or a mere statement of general laws.

The epoch to be now treated.

France.

Germany.

Such a period is that upon which we now enter; an epoch which in the history of England extends from the accession of Stephen to the death of Edward II.; that is, from the beginning of the constitutional growth of a consolidated English people to the opening of the long struggle with France under Edward III. It is scarcely less well defined in French and German history. In France it witnesses the process through which the modern kingdom of France was constituted; the aggregation of the several provinces which had hitherto recognized only a nominal feudal supremacy, under the direct personal rule of the king, and their incorporation into a national system of administration. In Germany it comprises a more varied series of great incidents. The process of disruption in the German kingdom, never well consolidated, had begun with the great schism between North and South under Henry IV., and furnished one chief element in the quarrel between pope and emperor. During the first half of the twelfth century it worked more deeply, if not more widely, in the rivalry between Saxon and Swabian. Under Frederick I. it necessitated the remodelling of the internal arrangement of Germany, the breaking up of the national or dynastic dukedoms. Under Frederick II. it broke up the empire itself, to be reconstituted in a widely different form and with altered aims and pretensions under Rudolf of Hapsburg. This is by itself a most eventful history, in which the varieties of combinations and alternations of public feeling abound with new results and illustrations of the permanence of ancient causes.

The Empire.

In the relations of the Empire and the Papacy the same epoch contains one cycle of the great rivalry, the series of struggles which take a new form under Frederick I. and Alexander III., and come to an end in the contest between Lewis of Bavaria and John XXII. It comprises the whole drama of the Hohenstaufen, and the failure of the great hopes of the world under Henry VII., which resulted in the constituting of a new theory of relations under the Luxemburg and Hapsburg emperors.

Whilst these greater actors are thus preparing for the struggle which forms the later history of European politics, Spain and Italy are passing through a different discipline. In the midst of all runs the history of the Church and the Crusades, which supplies one continuous clue to the reading of the period, a common ground on which all the actors for a time and from time to time meet.

An epoch of great men.

Manners and religion.

Moral lessons.

But the interest of the time is not confined to political history. It abounds with character. It is an age in which there are very many great men, and in which the great men not only occupy but deserve the first place in the historian’s eye. It is their history rather than the history of their peoples that furnishes the contribution of the period to the world’s progress. This is the heroic period of the middle ages,—the only period during which, on a great scale and on a great stage, were exemplified the true virtues which were later idealized and debased in the name of chivalry,—the age of John of Brienne and Simon de Montfort, of the two great Fredericks, of St. Bernard and Innocent III., and of St. Lewis and Edward I. It is free for the most part from the repulsive features of the ages that precede, and from the vindictive cruelty and political immorality of the age that follows. Manners are more refined than in the earlier age and yet simpler and sincerer than those of the next; religion is more distinctly operative for good and less marked by the evils which seem inseparable from its participation in the political action of the world. Yet not even the thirteenth century was an age of gold, much less those portions of the twelfth and fourteenth which come within our present view. It was not an age of prosperity, although it was an age of growth; its gains were gained in great measure by suffering. If Lewis IX. and Edward I. taught the world that kings might be both good men and strong sovereigns, Henry III. and Lewis VII. taught it that religious habits and even firm convictions are too often insufficient to keep the weak from falsehood and wrong. The history of Frederick II. showed that the race is not always to the swift or the battle to the strong, that of Conrad and Conradin that the right is not always to triumph, and that the vengeance which evil deeds must bring in the end comes in some cases very slowly and with no remedy to those who have suffered.

Importance of England’s work in this epoch.

Character of this book.

It is but a small section of this great period that we propose to sketch in the present volume; the history of our own country during this epoch of great men and great causes; but it comprises the history of what is one at least of England’s greatest contributions to the world’s progress. The history of England under the early kings of the house of Plantagenet unfolds and traces the growth of that constitution which, far more than any other that the world has ever seen, has kept alive the forms and spirit of free government; which has been the discipline that formed the great free republic of the present day; which was for ages the beacon of true social freedom that terrified the despots abroad and served as a model for the aspirations of hopeful patriots. It is scarcely too much to say that English history, during these ages, is the history of the birth of true political liberty. For, not to forget the services of the Italian republics, or of the German confederations of the middle ages, we cannot fail to see that in their actual results they fell as dead before the great monarchies of the sixteenth century, as the ancient liberties of Athens had fallen; or where the spirit survived, as in Switzerland, it took a form in which no great nationality could work. It was in England alone that the problem of national self-government was practically solved; and although under the Tudor and Stewart sovereigns Englishmen themselves ran the risk of forgetting the lesson they had learned and being robbed of the fruits for which their fathers had labored, the men who restored political consciousness, and who recovered the endangered rights, won their victory by argumentative weapons drawn from the storehouse of medieval English history, and by the maintenance and realization of the spirit of liberty in forms which had survived from earlier days. It is an introduction to the study of English history during the period of constitutional growth, that we shall attempt to sketch the epoch, not as a Constitutional History, but as an outline of the period and of the combinations through which the constitutional growth was working, the place of England in European history and the character of the men who helped to make her what she ultimately became. Before we begin, however, we may take a glance at the map of Europe at the point of time from which we start.

Geographical summary.

Eastern Europe.

Italy.

Eastern Europe, from the coasts of the Adriatic to the limits of Mahometan conquest eastward, was subject to the emperor who reigned at Constantinople, and may, except for its incidental connection with the Crusades, be left out of the present view. The northern portions were in the hands of half-civilized, half-Christianized races, which formed a barrier dangerous but efficacious between the Byzantine emperor and Western Christendom. The kingdom of Hungary, and the acquisitions of Venice on the east of the Adriatic fenced medieval Europe from the same enemies. Italy was divided between the Normans, who governed Apulia and Sicily, and the sway of the Empire, which under Lothar II.—the Emperor who was on the throne when our period begins—had become little more than nominal south of the Alps; the independence of the imperial cities and small principalities reaching from the Alps to Rome itself was maintained chiefly by the inability of the Germans to keep either by administrative organization or by dynastic alliances a permanent hold upon it. With both the Republican north and the Normanized south, the political history of the Plantagenet kings came in constant connection; and even more close and continuous was the relation through the agency of the Church with Rome itself. At the opening of the period, Englishmen were not only studying in the universities of Italy, at Salerno, at Bologna, and at Pavia, but were repaying to Italy, in the services of prelates and statesmen, the debt which England had incurred through Lanfranc and Anselm. An Englishman was soon to be pope. The Norman kings chose ministers and prelates of English birth; and the same Norman power of organization which worked in England under Henry I. and Roger of Salisbury, worked in similar line in Sicily under King Roger and his posterity.

Germany.

Looking northwards, we see Germany, in the middle of the twelfth century, still administered, although uneasily, under the ancient system of the four nations, Saxony, Franconia, Swabia, and Bavaria; four distinct nationalities which refused permanent combination. This system was, however, in its last decay. Its completeness was everywhere broken in upon by the great ecclesiastical principalities which the piety and policy of the emperors had interposed among the great secular states, to break the impulse of aggressive warfare, to serve as models of good order, and to maintain a direct hold in the imperial hands on territories which could not become hereditary in a succession of priests. Not only so; the debatable lands which lay between the great nations were breaking up into minor states: landgraves, margraves, and counts palatine were assuming the functions of dukes; the dukes, where they could not maintain the independence of kings, were seeing their powers limited and their territories divided. Thus Bavaria was soon to be dismembered to form a duchy of Austria; Saxony was falling to pieces between the archbishops of Cologne and the margraves of Brandenburg: Franconia between the Emperor and the Count Palatine; Swabia was the portion of the reigning imperial house, the treasury therefore out of which the Emperor had to carve rewards for his servants. Between the great house of the Welf in Saxony, Bavaria, and Lombardy, and the Hohenstaufen on the imperial throne and in Franconia and Swabia, subsisted the jealousy which was sooner or later to reach the heart of the Empire itself, to supply the force which threw the dislocated provinces into absolute division.

The intermediate provinces.

France.

Westward was France under Lewis VII., divided from Germany by the long narrow range of the Lotharingian provinces, over which the imperial rule was recognized as nominal only. These provinces formed a debatable boundary line, which had for one of its chief functions the maintenance of peace between the descendants of Hugh Capet and the representatives of the majesty of Charles and Otto; and which served its turn, for between France and the Hohenstaufen empire there was peace and alliance. But many of the provinces which now form part of France were then imperial, and beyond the Rhone and Meuse the king of Paris had no vassals and but uncertain allies. Within his feudal territory, the count of Flanders to the north, the duke of Aquitaine to the south, the duke of Normandy with his claims over Maine and Brittany, cut him off from the sea; and even the little strip of coast between Flanders and Normandy was held by the count of Boulogne, who at the moment was likewise king of England. Yet the kingdom of France was by no means at its deepest degradation. Lewis VI. had kept alive the idea of central power, and had obtained for his son the hand of the heiress of Aquitaine; the schemes were already in operation by which the kings were to offer to the provinces a better and firmer rule than they enjoyed under their petty lords, by which fraud and policy were to split up the principalities and attract them fragment by fragment to the central power, and by which even Normandy itself was in little more than fifty years to be recovered; by which a real central government was to be instituted, and the semblance of national unity to be completed by the formation of a distinct national character.

The Low Countries.

North of France the imperial provinces of Lower Lorraine, and the debatable lands between Lorraine and Saxony, had much the same indefinite character as belonged to the southern parts of the intermediate kingdom. They seldom took part in the work of the Empire, although they were nominally part of it, and the stronger emperors enforced their right. But as a rule they were too distant from the centre of government to fear much interference, and, enjoying such freedom as they could, they gladly recognized the emperor’s sway when they required his help. We shall see the princes of Lorraine taking no small part in the negotiations between England and Germany under Richard and John, but they generally played a game with Flanders, France, and the Empire which has but an indirect bearing on European politics; and we chiefly hear of these lands as furnishing the hordes of mercenary soldiers for the crusades and internal wars of Europe, until almost suddenly the Flemish cities break upon our eye as centres of commerce and political life.

Spain and Portugal.

Southward lie Spain and Portugal; divided into several small kingdoms between closely allied and kindred kings, all employed in the long crusade of seven centuries against the Moor; a crusade which is now beginning to have hopes of successful issue. Central Spain, on the line of the Tagus, is still in dispute, although Toledo had been taken in 1085, and Saragossa in 1118. Lisbon was taken with the help of the Crusaders in 1147. In each of the Christian states of Spain, free institutions of government, national assemblies and local self-government, preserved distinct traces of the Teutonic or Gothic origin of the ruling races; and even before the English parliament grew to completeness, the Cortes of Castile and Aragon were theoretically complete assemblies of the three estates. The growth of Spain is one of the distinct features of our epoch; but it is a growth apart. There are as yet scarcely more than one or two points at which it comes in contact with the general action of Europe.

CHAPTER II.

STEPHEN AND MATILDA.

Accession of Stephen—Arrest of the Bishops—Election of Matilda—The Anarchy—The Pacification.

Results of the Norman rule.

The English had had hard times under the Conqueror and his sons, but they had learned a great lesson; they had learned that they were one people. The Normans too, the great nobles who had divided the land, and hoped to create little monarchies of their own in every county and manor, had had hard times. Confiscation, mutilation, exile, death had come heavily upon them. They also had had a lesson to learn, to rid themselves of personal and selfish aims, to consolidate a powerful state under a king of their own race, and to content themselves as servants of the law with the substantial enjoyment of powers which they found themselves too weak to wrest out of the hands of the king, the supreme lawgiver and administrator of the law. This lesson they had not learned. They had submitted with an ill grace to the strong rule of the king’s ministers, the men whom they had taught to guard against their attempts at usurpation. Hence throughout these reigns the Norman king and the English people had been thrown together. They soon learned that they had common aims, finding themselves constantly in array against a common enemy. Hence, too, the English had already an earnest of the final victory. They grew whilst their adversaries wasted. The successive generations of the Normans found their wiser sons learning to call themselves English, while those who would not learn English ways declined in number and strength from year to year.

Alliance of king and people.

The Conqueror in a measure, and Henry I. with more clearness, perceived this, and foresaw the result. They were careful not only to call themselves English kings, but nominally at least to maintain English customs, and to rule by English laws. One by one the great houses which furnished rivals to their power dropped before them, and Henry I. at the close of his reign was so strong that, had it not been for the fact that he had by habit and routine made himself a law to himself, he might easily have played the part of a tyrant. But the forces which he and his father had so sturdily repressed were not extinguished; nor was the administrative system, by which they at once maintained the rights of the English and kept their own grasp of power, sufficiently consolidated to stand steadily when the hands that had reared it were taken away.

Question of succession.

This also, it may seem probable, Henry I. distinctly saw. It was to his apprehensions on this account that for years before his death he was busily employed in securing the succession by every possible means to his own children. The feeling which led him to do so is not quite capable of simple analysis. He had no great love for his daughter, the empress Matilda; what paternal affection he had to lavish had been spent on his son William, whose death was no doubt the trouble that went nearest to his heart. We cannot suppose that he cared much for the people whom, although they had delivered him more than once in the most trying times, he never scrupled, when it suited his purpose, to treat as slaves. It would almost seem as if he felt that, unless he could anticipate the continuance of power in the hands of his daughter and her offspring, his own tenure of it for the present would be incomplete, and the great glory of the sons of Rollo would suffer diminution in his hands.

Precautions taken by Henry I.

Three times, therefore, by the most solemn oaths, he had tried to secure the adherence of the nation to her and to her son. Vast assemblies had been held, attended by Normans and English alike. Earl Stephen and earl Robert had vied with one another as to who should take the first oath of homage; the concurrence of the Church had been promised and, so far as gratitude and a sense of interest as well as duty could go, had been secured. But all this had been insufficient to stay Henry’s misgivings. At the time of his death he had been already four years in Normandy striving to keep peace between Matilda and her husband, Geoffrey of Anjou, between the Normans and the Angevins, and to consolidate his hold on the duchy, which had at last, since the death of his nephew and brother, become indisputably his own. His sudden death occurred in the midst of these designs. It was said and sworn to by his steward, Hugh Bigot, a man whose later career adds little to his authority as a witness, that just before his death, provoked by her perverseness, he had disinherited his daughter. It may have been so; the threat of disinheritance may have been a menace which his unexpected death gave him no time to recall. But the very report was enough. He died on December 1, 1135; and from that moment the succession was treated as an open question, to be discussed by Normans and Englishmen, together or apart, as they pleased.

Who were the competitors?

Stephen of Blois.

We may if we choose speculate on the motives that swayed the great men. No doubt the pure Norman nobles would gladly have set aside altogether the descendants of Harlotta; all the Normans together would have refused the rule of Geoffrey of Anjou. A new duke, if they must have a duke, might be chosen from the house of Champagne, from among the sons of Adela, the Conqueror’s greatest and most famous daughter; Count Theobald was the reigning count, but he was not the eldest son, and as his elder brother had been set aside so might he. Stephen, the next brother, the Count of Mortain and Boulogne, and first baron of Normandy, had already his footing in the land. His wife too was of English descent. Her mother was sister to the good queen of Henry I., and whatever the old king had hoped to gain by his blood connection with his subjects, Stephen might gain by his wife. Stephen was a brave man, too, and he had as yet made no enemies.

Stephen’s arrival in England.

But his success, such as it was, was due to his own promptness. He had, as count of Boulogne, the command of the shortest passage to England. Whilst the Normans were discussing the merits of his brother Theobald, he took on himself to be his own messenger. He remembered how his uncle had won the crown and treasure of William Rufus; he left the Norman lords to look after the funeral of their dead lord and sailed for Kent; at Dover and at Canterbury he was received with sullen silence. The men of Kent had no love for the stranger who came, as his predecessor Eustace had done, to trouble the land; on he went to London, and there he learned that the same prejudice which existed in Normandy against the Angevins was in full force. “We will not have,” the Londoners said, “a stranger to rule over us;” though how Stephen of Champagne was more a stranger than Geoffrey of Anjou it is not easy to see. Anyhow, as nothing succeeds like success, nothing is so potent to secure the name of king as the wearing of the crown. So Stephen went on to Winchester, and there secured the crown and treasure. In little more than three weeks he had come again to London and claimed the crown as the elect of the nation.

Election of Stephen and coronation.

The assembly which saw the coronation and did homage on St. Stephen’s day was but a poor substitute for the great councils which had attended the summons of William and Henry, and in which Stephen, as a subject, had played a leading part. There was his brother Henry of Winchester, the skilled and politic churchman, who was willing enough to be a king’s brother if he might build up ecclesiastical supremacy through him; there was Archbishop William of Corbeuil, who had undertaken by the most solemn obligations to support Matilda, and who knew that his prerogative vote might decide the contest against Stephen, although it could not restore the chances of peace; there was Roger of Salisbury, the late king’s prime minister, the master builder of the constitutional fabric, undecided between duty and the desire of retaining power. Very few of the barons were there; Hugh Bigot, indeed, with his convenient oath, and a few more whose complicity with Stephen had already thrown them on him as a sole chance of safety. The rest of the great men present were the citizens of London, Norman barons of a sort, foreign merchants, some few rich Englishmen: all of them men who were used to public business, who knew how Henry I. had held his courts, who believed confidently in force and money. They had first encouraged Stephen from fear of Geoffrey; and more or less they held to Stephen as long as he lived. These men constituted the witenagemot that chose him king, and overruled the scruples of the inconstant archbishop. They took upon them to represent the nation that should ratify the election of a new king with their applause.

First charter of Stephen.

Henry I. was not yet in his grave; but all promises made to him were forgotten. With what seems a sort of irony, Stephen issued as his coronation charter a simple promise to observe and compel the observance of all the good laws and good customs of his uncle.

The news of the great event traveled rapidly. Count Theobald, vexed and disappointed as he was, refused to contest the crown which his brother already wore; Geoffrey and Matilda were quarrelling with their own subjects in Anjou; and Robert of Gloucester, who hated Stephen more than he loved Matilda, saw that he must bide his time. Some crisis must soon occur; he knew that Stephen would soon spend his treasure and break his promises. Meanwhile the old king must be buried like a king; and the great lords came over with the corpse to Reading where he had built his last resting-place. There Stephen met them, within the twelve days of Christmas; and after the funeral, at Oxford or somewhere in the neighborhood, he arranged terms with them; terms by which he endeavored, amplifying the words of his charter, to catch the good-will of each class of his subjects. To the clergy he promised relief from the exactions of the late reign and freedom of election; to the barons he promised a relaxation of the forest law, the execution of which had been hardened and sharpened by Henry I.; and to the people he promised the abolition of danegeld. “These things chiefly and other things besides he vowed to God,” says Henry of Huntingdon, “but he kept none of them.” The promises were perhaps not insincere at the time; anyhow they had the desired effect, and united the nation for the moment.

First invasion by the Scots.

The king by this means got time to hasten into the North, where King David of Scots, the uncle of the empress, had invaded the country in her name. The two kings met at Durham. David had taken Newcastle and Carlisle; Newcastle he surrendered, Carlisle Stephen left in his hands as a bribe for neutrality. It was too much for David, who, although a good king, was a Scot. He agreed to make peace: but he had sworn fealty to his niece: he could not become Stephen’s man. His son Henry, however, might bear the burden; so Henry swore and Stephen sealed the bargain with the gift of Huntingdon, part of the inheritance of Henry’s mother, the daughter of Waltheof, the last of the English earls. Then Stephen went back to London and so to Oxford. There he published a new charter, intended to comprise the new promises of good government.

Second charter of Stephen.

This was done soon after Easter, and, as the name of earl Robert of Gloucester is found among the witnesses, it is clear that he had submitted; but the oath which he took to Stephen was a conditional one, more like that of a rival potentate than of a dependent; he would be faithful to the king so long as the king should preserve to him his rights and dignities. This was no slight concession, made by Robert, doubtless because he saw that his sister’s cause was hopeless; but it was no slight obligation for Stephen to undertake. Robert had great feudal domains in England, and all the personal friends of his father and sister were at his beck. Stephen might have been safer with him as a declared enemy. But for the moment there was peace.

The charter, published at Oxford, promised good government very circumstantially; the abuses of the Church, of the forests, and of the sheriffs, were all to be remedied. But the enactments made were not nearly so clear or circumstantial as the promises made at the late king’s funeral.

Rebellion of 1136.

The first cloud, and it was a very little one, arose soon after. Before Whitsuntide Stephen was taken ill, and a rumor went forth that he was dead. The Norman rage for treason began to ferment. Hugh Bigot, the lord of Norwich, was the first to take up arms; Baldwin of Redvers, the greatest lord in Devonshire, followed. But the king recovered as quickly as he had sickened. He took Norwich and Exeter, but—deserting thus the uniform policy of his predecessors—spared the traitors. Cheered by this measure of success, he immediately broke the second of his constitutional promises, holding a great court of inquiry into the forests, and impleading and punishing at his pleasure.

Beginning of troubles.

Second invasion by the Scots, in 1138.

Battle of the Standard.

The year 1136 affords little more of interest; the year 1137 was spent in securing Normandy, which Geoffrey and Matilda were unable to hold against him, and in forming a close alliance with France. When he returned, just before Christmas, he had spent nearly all his money, and the evil day was not far off. Rebellion was again threatening, and a mighty dark cloud had for the second time arisen in the North. We are not told by the historians exactly whether the king’s misrule made the opening for the revolt, or the revolt forced him into misrule. Possibly the two evils waxed worse and worse together; for neither party trusted the other, and under the circumstances every precaution wore the look of aggression. Stephen was to the last degree impolitic; and to say that is to allow that he was more than half dishonest. Still he had the great majority of the people on his side. A premature but general rebellion in the early months of 1138 was crushed in detail. Castle after castle was taken; but Robert of Gloucester had now declared himself, and King David, seeing Stephen busily employed in the South, invaded Yorkshire. It was a great struggle, but the Yorkshiremen were equal to the trial. Whether or not they loved Stephen they hated the Scots. The great barons who were on the king’s side did their part; the ancient standards of the northern churches, of St. Peter of York, St. Wilfrid of Ripon, and St. John of Beverley, were hoisted, and all men flew to them. The old archbishop Thurstan, who had struggled victoriously twenty years before against King Henry and the archbishop of Canterbury to boot, sent his suffragan to preach the national cause. Not only the knights with their men-at-arms, but the husbandmen, with their sons and servants, the old Anglo-Saxon militia, the parish priests at the head of their parishioners, streamed forth over hill and plain, and in the Battle of the Standard, as it was called, they beat the Scots at Cowton Moor with such completeness that the rebellion came to nothing in consequence.

Stephen’s imprudent policy.

His new earls.

Coinage debased.

Mercenaries imported.

Stephen felt no small addition of strength from this victory, but he was nearer the end of his treasure and the days of peace were over. Without money it is hard to act like a statesman; the difficulties were too strong for Stephen’s gratitude and good faith. Yet he began his misrule not without some method. The power of Robert of Gloucester lay chiefly in his influence with the great earls who represented the families of the Conquest. Stephen also would have a court of great earls, but in trying to make himself friends he raised up persistent enemies. He raised new men to new earldoms, but as he had no spare domains to bestow, he endowed them with pensions charged on the Exchequer: thus impairing the crown revenue at the moment that his personal authority was becoming endangered. To refill the treasury he next debased the coinage. To recruit his military power, diminished by the rebellion, and by the fact that the weakness of his administration was letting the county organization fall into decay, he called in Fleming mercenaries. The very means that he took to strengthen his position ruined him. The mercenaries alienated the people: the debased coinage destroyed the confidence of the merchants and the towns: the new and unsubstantial earldoms provoked the real earls to further hostility; and the newly created lords demanded of the king new privileges as the reward and security for their continued services.

Breach with the clergy.

Still the clergy were faithful; and the clergy were very powerful; they conducted the mechanism of government, they filled the national councils; they were rich too, and earnest in the preservation of peace. With Henry of Winchester his brother, Roger of Salisbury his chief minister, Theobald of Canterbury his nominee, he might still flourish. The Church at all events was sure to outlive the barons. With almost incredible imprudence Stephen contrived to throw the clergy into opposition, and by one fell stroke to break up all the administrative machinery of the realm. It may be that he was growing suspicious, or jealous: it is more probable that he acted under foolish advice. Anyhow he did it.

Roger of Salisbury.

Roger of Salisbury, the great justiciar of Henry I., was now an old man. He had contributed more perhaps than any other to set Stephen on the throne, and had not only first placed in his hands the sinews of war, but had maintained the revenue of the crown by maintaining the administration of justice and finance. He had not served for naught. He had got his son made chancellor; two of his nephews were bishops, one of them treasurer of the king as well. He had no humble idea of his own position: he had built castles the like of which for strength and beauty were not found north of the Alps. He had perhaps some intention of holding back when the struggle came and of turning the scale at the last moment as seemed him best, an intention which he shared with the chief of his brethren; for Henry of Winchester, although the king’s brother, was before all things a churchman; and Theobald of Canterbury, although he owed his place either to the good-will or to the connivance of Stephen, was consistently and more or less actively a faithful adherent to Matilda and her son.

Arrest of the bishops, 1139.

How much Stephen knew of the designs of the bishops we know not, what he suspected we can only suspect: but the result was unmistakable. He tried a surprise that turned to his own discomfiture. He arrested bishop Roger and his nephew, Alexander, bishop of Lincoln, and compelled them to resign the castles which he pretended to think they were fortifying against him. At once the church was in arms: sacrilege and impiety determined even Henry of Winchester, who in 1139 became legate of the see of Rome, against his brother.

The Empress Matilda arrives.

This would have been hard enough to bear, as many far stronger kings than Stephen had learnt and were to learn to their cost. But the very men on whom his violence had fallen were his own ministers, justiciar, chancellor, and treasurer. The Church was in danger, the ministers were in prison: justice, taxation, police, everything else was in abeyance; and just at the right time the empress landed. At Christmas 1139 the whole game was up: the land was divided, the empress had the west, Stephen the east; the Church was in secession from the State. Roger died broken-hearted. Henry was negotiating with the empress. The administration had come to naught, there were no courts of law, no revenue, no councils of the realm. There was not even strength for an honest open civil war. The year 1140 is filled with a mere record of anarchy. At the court at Whitsuntide only one bishop attended and he was a foreigner. Stephen we see now obdurate, now penitent; now energetic, now despondent; the barons selling their services for new promises from each side.

Beginning of anarchy.

It is now that the period begins which William of Newburgh likens to the days when there was no king in Israel, but every man did what was right in his own eyes, nay, not what was right, but what was wrong also, for every lord was king and tyrant in his own house. Castles innumerable sprang up, and as fast as they were built they were filled with devils; each lord judged and taxed and coined. The feudal spirit of disintegration had for once its full play. Even party union was at an end, and every baron fought on his own behalf. Feudalism had its day, and the completeness of its triumph ensured its fall.

Stephen taken prisoner, 1141.

Election of Matilda.

All this was not realized at once. The new year 1141 found Stephen besieging Lincoln, which was defended by Ranulf, earl of Chester, and Robert of Gloucester. Stephen had not yet been defeated in the field, and he had still by his side a considerable body of barons, though none so great as the almost independent earl whom he was attacking. Now, however, he was outmatched or out-generaled. After a struggle marked chiefly by his own valiant exploits he was taken prisoner, and sent to the empress by her brother as a great prize. The battle of Lincoln was fought on February 2, and a week after Easter, in a great council of bishops, barons, and abbots, Matilda, the empress of the Romans, was elected Lady of England at Winchester. This assembly was, it must be allowed, mainly clerical; but there is no doubt that it represented the wishes of a great part of the barons, who, so far as they were willing to have a king or queen at all, preferred Matilda to Stephen. Henry of Winchester, however, took advantage of the opportunity to make somewhat extravagant claims on behalf of his order, declaring that the clergy had the right to elect the sovereign, and actually carrying out the ceremony of election. The citizens of London pleaded hard for the release of Stephen, whom they, six years before, had elected with scarcely less audacious assumption, but in vain. Henry was now at the crest of the wave, and he saw the triumph of the Church in the humiliation of his brother. War was the great trial by combat ordained between kings. Stephen had failed in that ordeal; judgment of God was declared against him; like Saul he was found wanting.

Purpose of the barons.

So Matilda became the Lady of the English; she was not crowned, because perhaps the solemn consecration which she had received as empress sufficed, or perhaps Stephen’s royalty was so far forth indefeasible; but she acted as full sovereign nevertheless, executed charters, bestowed lands and titles, and exerted power sufficient to show that she had all the pride and tyrannical intolerance of her father, without his prudence or self-control. She, too, was on the crest of her wave and had her little day. But the barons looked coolly on the triumph; it was their policy that neither competitor should destroy the other, but that both should grow weaker and weaker, and so leave room for each several feudatory to grow stronger and stronger. Neither king nor empress had anything like command of his or her friends, or anything like general acceptance.

Matilda’s imprudent rule.

Stephen’s fortunes reached their lowest depth when the Londoners a few days before Midsummer received the empress as their sovereign. She had no sooner achieved success than she began to alienate the friends who had won it for her. The bishop of Winchester, although he had not scrupled to sacrifice his brother’s title to the exigencies of his policy, bore no grudge against the queen and her children, and endeavored to prevail on the empress to guarantee to the latter at least their mother’s inheritance. Matilda would be satisfied with nothing less than the utter ruin of the rival house, and although the queen was raising a great army in Kent for Stephen’s liberation, she refused even to temporize. Henry in disgust retired from court and took up his residence at Winchester; thither the empress, having in vain attempted to recall him to her side, and having made London too hot to hold her, followed him, and established herself in the royal castle as he had done in the episcopal palace. Winchester thus witnessed the gathering of the two hosts for a new struggle.

The earl of Gloucester taken prisoner.

Exchange of prisoners.

The queen brought up her army from Kent, the king of Scots and the earl of Gloucester brought up their forces from the north and west. But the queen showed the most promptitude. The baronage who were not bound to the legate’s policy refused to complete the king’s ruin, and stood aloof, intending to profit by the common weakness of the competitors. In attempting to secure the empress’s retreat to Devizes, on September 14, the earl of Gloucester was taken prisoner, and the two parties from this time forward played with more equal chances. An exchange of the two great captives was at once proposed, but mutual distrust, and the desire on both sides to take the utmost advantage of their situation, delayed the negotiation for six weeks. Stephen at Bristol, Robert at Rochester, must have watched the debate with longing eyes. The countess Mabilia of Gloucester was prepared to ship Stephen off to Ireland, if a hair of Robert’s head were injured; the queen demanded no less security for her husband’s safety. At last, on All Saints’ Day, both were released, each leaving security in the hands of the other that the terms should be fairly observed.

As soon as they were free they both prepared for a continuance of the struggle. The empress fixed her court again at Oxford; Stephen, who seems at once to have resumed his royal position, the claims founded by the election of the empress suffering a practical refutation by his release, re-entered London. The legate, still desiring to direct the storm, called a council at Westminster in December, where he apologized for his conduct rather than defended it, and where the king laid a formal complaint against the treason of the men who had taken and imprisoned him. But the time for open hostilities was deferred, the certain exhaustion which after a few months more renders the history an absolute blank, was beginning to tell. Six months passed without a sign. By Easter the empress had determined to send for her husband. Geoffrey would not obey his wife’s summons until he had earl Robert’s personal assurance that he should not be made a fool of. Earl Robert went to persuade his brother-in-law to throw his sword into the scale. Geoffrey determined first to secure Normandy, and kept the earl at work there until the news from England peremptorily recalled him.

Success of Stephen in 1142.

The kingdom divided.

Stephen had waited until Robert had left England, and then, emerging from his sick room, had pounced down upon Wareham, the strong castle which the earl had entrusted to his son, had taken it, and then hastening northwards, had burnt the town of Oxford, and shut up the empress in the castle. There she remained until her brother could succor her. He returned at once, recovered Wareham and some castles in Dorset, and called together the forces of his party at Cirencester. But the winter was now advancing; the empress contrived a romantic escape in the snow from Oxford, and before active war could be resumed she directed that the castle should be surrendered. So the year 1142 comes to an end, and we see the two parties resting in their exhaustion. The western shires acknowledged Matilda, who reigned at Gloucester; the eastern acknowledged Stephen, who made Kent his head quarters. The midland counties were the seat of languid warfare, partly carried on about Oxford, which was a central debating ground between the two competitors, partly in Lincolnshire and Essex, where Stephen had to keep in order those great nobles who aimed at independence. Geoffrey de Mandeville, the earl of Essex, who accepted his earldom from both the courts, employed him chiefly in 1143 and 1144. The earl of Chester, who was uniformly opposed to Stephen, but who no doubt fought for himself far more than for the empress, held Lincoln as a constant thorn in the royal side. In 1145 Oxfordshire and Berkshire were the seat of war; in 1146 Stephen surprised the earl of Chester at Northampton and compelled him to give up Lincoln, and now for the first time seems to have thought himself a king. In despite of all precedent and all prejudice, defying a superstition to which even Henry II. thought it wise to bow, that no king should wear his crown within the walls of Lincoln, he wore his crown there on Christmas Day.

Period of anarchy.

In passing thus rapidly over these years we are but following the example of our historians, who share in the exhaustion of the combatants, recording little but an occasional affray, and a complaint of general misery. Neither side had strength to keep down its friends, much less to encounter its enemies. The price of the support given to both was the same—absolute license to build castles, to practice private war, to hang their private enemies, to plunder their neighbors, to coin their money, to exercise their petty tyrannies as they pleased. England was dismembered. North of the Tees ruled the king of Scots, David the lawgiver and the church builder, under whose rule Cumberland, Westmoreland and Northumberland were safe; the bishopric of Durham, too, under his wing, had peace. The West of England, as we have seen, was under the earl of Gloucester, who in his sister’s name founded earldoms, and endeavored to concentrate in the hands of his supporters such vestiges of the administrative organization as still subsisted. But the great earls of the house of Beaumont, Roger of Leicester and Waleran of Meulan, who dominated the midland shires, chose to act as independent sovereigns and made terms both in England and Normandy as if they had been kings.