The Prose Works of Jonathan Swift, D.D. — Volume 10 / Historical Writings

by Jonathan Swift

1140

Stephen having thus subdued his inveterate enemies the Scots, and reduced his rebellious nobles, began to entertain hopes of enjoying a little ease. But he was destined to the possession of a crown with perpetual disturbance; for he was hardly returned from his northern expedition, when he received intelligence that the Empress, accompanied by her brother the Earl of Gloucester, was preparing to come for England, in order to dispute her title to the kingdom. The King, who knew by experience what a powerful party she already had to espouse her interests, very reasonably concluded, the defection from him would be much greater, when she appeared in person to countenance and reward it; he therefore began again to repent of the licence he had granted for building castles, which were now like to prove so many places of security for his enemies, and fortifications against himself; for he knew not whom to trust, vehemently suspecting his nobles ever since their last revolt. He therefore cast about for some artifice to get into his hands as many of their castles as he could: in the strength and magnificence of which kind of structures, the bishops had far outdone the rest, and were upon that, as well as other accounts, very much maligned and envied by the temporal lords, who were extreme jealous of the Church's increasing power, and glad upon all occasions to see the prelates humbled. The King, therefore, having formed his project, resolved to make trial where it would be least invidious, and where he could foresee least danger in the consequences. At a Parliament or assembly of nobles at Oxford, it was contrived to raise a quarrel between the servants of some bishops and those of Alan Count of Dinan in Bretagne, upon a contention of rooms in their inns. Stephen took hold of this advantage, sent for the bishops, taxed them with breaking his peace, and demanded the keys of their castles, adding threats of imprisonment if they dared to disobey. Those whom the King chiefly suspected, or rather who had built the most and strongest castles, were Roger Bishop of Salisbury, with his nephew and natural son the Bishops of Ely and Lincoln, whom the King, by many circumstances of rigour, compelled to surrender, going himself in person to seize the Devizes, then esteemed the noblest structure of Europe, and built by the forementioned Bishop Roger, whose treasure, to the value of forty thousand marks,[31] there likewise deposited, fell, at the same time, into the King's hand, which in a few days broke the bishop's heart, already worn with age and infirmity.

[Footnote 31: This prelate's treasure is doubtless computed by the smaller or Saxon mark; the use of which still prevailed in England: and even thus computed, it amounts to a vast sum, equal to about £116,350 of modern money. [D.S.]

It may, perhaps, not be thought a digression to say something of the fortunes of this prelate, who, from the lowest beginnings, came to be, without dispute, the greatest churchman of any subject in his age. It happened that the late King Henry, in the reign of his brother, being at a village in Normandy, wanted a priest to say mass before him and his train, when this man, who was a poor curate thereabouts, offered his service, and performed it with so much dexterity and speed, that the soldiers who attended the prince recommended him to their master, upon that account, as a very proper chaplain for military men; but it seems he had other talents; for having gotten into the prince's service, he soon discovered great application and address, much order and economy in the management of his master's fortunes, which were wholly left to his care. After Henry's advancement to the crown, this chaplain grew chief in his favour and confidence; was made Bishop of Salisbury, Chancellor of England, employed in all his most weighty affairs, and usually left vicegerent of the realm while the King was absent in Normandy. He was among the first that swore fealty to Maud and her issue; and among the first that revolted from her to Stephen, offering such reasons in council for setting her aside, as, by the credit and opinion of his wisdom, were very prevalent. But the King, in a few years, forgot all obligations, and the bishop fell a sacrifice in his old age to those treasures he had been so long heaping up for its support. A just reward for his ingratitude towards the Prince that raised him, to be ruined by the ingratitude of another, whom he had been so very instrumental to raise.

But Henry Bishop of Winchester, the Pope's legate, not able to endure this violation of the Church, called a council of all the prelates to meet at Winchester, where the King being summoned, appeared by his advocate, who pleaded his cause with much learning; and the Archbishop of Rouen coming to the council, declared his opinion, That although the canons did allow the bishops to possess castles, yet in dangerous times they ought to deliver them up to the King. This opinion Stephen followed very steadily, not yielding a tittle, although the legate his brother used all means, both rough and gentle, to work upon him.

The council of bishops broke up without other effect than that of leaving in their minds an implacable hatred to the King, in a very opportune juncture for the interests of Maud, who, about this time, landed at Portsmouth with her brother Robert Earl of Gloucester. The whole force she brought over for this expedition consisted but of one hundred and forty knights;[32] for she trusted altogether in her cause and her friends. With this slender attendance she went to Arundel, and was there received into the castle by the widow of the late King; while Earl Robert, accompanied only by twenty men, marched boldly to his own city of Gloucester, in order to raise forces for the Empress, where the townsmen turned out the King's garrison as soon as they heard of his approach.

[Footnote 32: In these times none served on horseback but gentlemen or knights, in right of their fiefs, or their representatives, called Men-at-arms; and each of these was attended by at least two servants or retainers mounted and armed. [D.S.]

King Stephen was not surprised at the news of the Empress's arrival, being a thing he had always counted upon, and was long preparing himself against. He was glad to hear how ill she was provided, and resolved to use the opportunity of her brother's absence; for, hasting down to Arundel with a sufficient strength, he laid siege to the castle, in hopes, by securing her person, to put a speedy end to the war.

But there wanted not some very near about the King, who, favouring the party of Maud, had credit enough to prevail with him not to venture time and reputation against an impregnable fortress, but rather, by withdrawing his forces, permit her to retire to some less fortified place, where she might more easily fall into his hands. This advice the King took against his own opinion; the Empress fled out of Arundel by night; and, after frequent shifting her stages through several towns, which had already declared in her favour, fixed herself at last at Lincoln; where, having all things provided necessary for her defence, she resolved to continue, and expect either a general revolt of the English to her side, or the decision of war between the King and her brother.

But Stephen, who had pursued the Empress from place to place, hearing she had shut herself up in Lincoln, resolved to give her no rest; and to help on his design, it fell out that the citizens in hatred to the Earl of Chester, who commanded there for the Empress, sent a private invitation to the King, with promise to deliver the town and their governor into his hands. The King came accordingly, and possessed himself of the town; but Maud and the Earl made their escape a few days before. However, many great persons of Maud's party remained prisoners to the King, and among the rest the Earl of Chester's wife, who was daughter to the Earl of Gloucester. These two Earls resolving to attempt the relief of their friends, marched with all their forces near Lincoln, where they found the enemy drawn up and ready to receive them.

The next morning, after battle offered by the lords, and accepted by the King, both sides made ready to engage. The King having disposed his cavalry on each wing, placed himself at the head of his foot, in whom he reposed most confidence. The army of the lords was divided in three bodies; those whom King Stephen had banished were placed in the middle, the Earl of Chester led the van, and the Earl of Gloucester commanded the rear. The battle was fought at first with equal advantage, and great obstinacy on both sides; at length the right wing of the King's horse, pressed by the Earl of Chester, galloped away, not without suspicion of treachery; the left followed the example. The King beheld their flight, and encouraging those about him, fell with undaunted valour upon the enemy; and being for some time bravely seconded by his foot, did great execution. At length overpowered by numbers, his men began to disperse, and Stephen was left almost alone with his sword in his hand, wherewith he opposed his person against a whole victorious army, nor durst any be so hardy to approach him; the sword breaking, a citizen of Lincoln put into his hands a Danish battle-axe,[33] with which he struck to the ground the Earl of Chester,[34] who presumed to come within his reach. But this weapon likewise flying in pieces with the force of those furious blows he dealt on all sides, a bold knight of the Empress's party, named William de Keynes, laid hold on his helmet, and immediately cried out to his fellows, "I have got the King." Then the rest ran in, and he was taken prisoner.[35]

[Footnote 33: Sim. Dunelmensis. [D.S.]

[Footnote 34: The Earl of Chester lived nevertheless to fight other battles, and died twelve years afterwards by poison. [D.S.]

[Footnote 35: Gervase. [D.S.]

The King being thus secured, was presented to the Empress, then at Gloucester, and by her orders conveyed to Bristol, where he continued in strict custody nine months, although with honourable treatment for some time, until either upon endeavouring to make his escape, or in malice to the Londoners, who had a great affection for their King, he was, by express command from the Empress, laid in irons, and used with other circumstances of severity.

This victory was followed by a general defection of almost the whole kingdom; and the Earl of Anjou, husband to the Empress, upon the fame of the King's defeat and imprisonment, reduced without any difficulty the whole Duchy of Normandy to his obedience.

The legate himself, although brother to King Stephen, received her at Winchester with great solemnity, accepted her oath for governing with justice, redressing grievances, and supporting the rights of the Church, and took the old conditional one of fealty to her; then in an assembly of bishops and clergy convoked for the purpose, he displayed the miscarriages of his brother, and declared his approbation of the Empress to be Queen; to which they unanimously agreed. To complete all, he prevailed by his credit with the Londoners, who stood out the last of any, to acknowledge and receive her into the city, where she arrived at length in great pomp, and with general satisfaction.

But it was the misfortune of this Princess to possess many weaknesses that are charged to the sex, and very few of its commendable qualities: she was now in peaceable possession of the whole kingdom, except the county of Kent, where William d'Ypres pretended to keep up a small party for the King; when by her pride, wilfulness, indiscretion, and a disobliging behaviour, she soon turned the hearts of all men against her, and in a short time lost the fruits of that victory and success which had been so hardly gained by the prudence and valour of her excellent brother. The first occasion she took to discover the perverseness of her nature, was in the treatment of Maud, the wife of King Stephen, a lady of great virtue, and courage above her sex, who, coming to the Empress an humble suitor in behalf of her husband, offered, as a price of his liberty, that he should resign all pretensions to the crown, and pass the rest of his life in exile, or in a convent: but this request was rejected with scorn and reproaches; and the Queen finding all entreaties to no purpose, writ to her son Eustace to let him understand the ill success of her negotiation, that no relief was to be otherwise hoped for than by arms, and therefore advised him to raise immediately what forces he could for the relief of his father.

Her next miscarriage was towards the Londoners, who presented her a petition for redressing certain rigorous laws of her father, and restoring those of Edward the Confessor. The Empress put them off for a time with excuses, but at last discovered some displeasure at their importunity. The citizens, who had with much difficulty been persuaded to receive her against their inclinations, which stood wholly for the King, were moved with indignation at her unreasonable refusal of their just demands, and entered into a conspiracy to seize her person. But she had timely notice of their design, and leaving the city by night in disguise, fled to Oxford.

A third false step the Empress made,[36] was in refusing her new powerful friend the legate a favour he desired in behalf of Eustace, the King's son, to grant him the lands and honours held by his father before he came to the crown. She had made large promises to this prelate, that she would be directed in all things by his advice, and to be refused upon his first application a small favour for his own nephew, stung him to the quick; however, he governed his resentments a while, but began at the same time to resume his affection for his brother. These thoughts were cultivated with great address by Queen Maud, who prevailed at last so far upon the legate, that private measures were agreed between them for restoring Stephen to his liberty and crown. The bishop took leave of the Empress, upon some plausible pretence, and retired to Winchester, where he gave directions for supplying with men and provisions several strong castles he had built in his diocese, while the Queen with her son Eustace prevailed with the Londoners and men of Kent to rise in great numbers for the King; and a powerful army was quickly on foot, under the command of William d'Ypres Earl of Kent.

[Footnote 36: William of Malmesbury. [D.S.]

In the mean time the Empress began to be sensible of the errors she had committed; and in hope either to retrieve the friendship of the legate, or take him prisoner, marched with her army to Winchester, where being received and lodged in the castle, she sent immediately for the legate, spoke much in excuse of what was past, and used all endeavours to regain him to her interests. Bishop Henry, on the other side, amused her with dubious answers, and kept her in suspense for some days; but sent privately at the same time to the King's army, desiring them to advance with all possible speed; which was executed with so much diligence, that the Empress and her brother had only time with their troops to march a back way out of the town. They were pursued by the enemy so close in the rear, that the Empress had hardly time, by counterfeiting herself dead, to make her escape; in which posture she was carried as a corpse to Gloucester; but the Earl her brother, while he made what opposition he could, with design to stop her pursuers, was himself taken prisoner, with great slaughter of his men. After the battle, the Earl was in his turn presented to Queen Maud, and by her command sent to Rochester to be treated in the same manner with the King.

Thus the heads of both parties were each in the power of his enemy, and Fortune seemed to have dealt with great equality between them. Two factions divided the whole kingdom, and, as it usually happens, private animosities were inflamed by the quarrel of the public; which introduced a miserable face of things throughout the land, whereof the writers of our English story give melancholy descriptions, not to be repeated in this history; since the usual effects of civil war are obvious to conceive, and tiresome as well as useless to relate. However, as the quarrel between the King and Empress was grounded upon a cause that in its own nature little concerned the interests of the people, this was thought a convenient juncture for transacting a peace, to which there appeared an universal disposition. Several expedients were proposed; but Earl Robert would consent upon no other terms than the deposing of Stephen, and immediate delivery of the crown to his sister. These debates lasted for some months, until the two prisoners, weary of their long constraint, by mutual consent were exchanged for each other, and all thoughts of agreement laid aside.

The King, upon recovery of his freedom, hastened to London, to get supplies of men and money for renewing the war. He there found that his brother of Winchester had, in a council of bishops and abbots, renounced all obedience to the Empress, and persuaded the assembly to follow his example. The legate, in excuse for this proceeding, loaded her with infamy, produced several instances wherein she had broken the oath she took when he received her as Queen, and upon which his obedience was grounded; said, he had received information that she had a design upon his life.[37]

[Footnote 37: William of Malmesbury. [D.S.]

It must be confessed that oaths of fealty in this Prince's reign were feeble ties for binding the subject to any reasonable degree of obedience; and the warmest advocates for liberty cannot but allow, from those examples here produced, that it is very possible for people to run upon great extremes in this matter, that a monarch may be too much limited, and a subject too little; whereof the consequences have been fully as pernicious for the time as the worst that can be apprehended from arbitrary power in all its heights, although not perhaps so lasting or so hard to be remedied; since all the miseries of this kingdom, during the period we are treating of, were manifestly owing to that continual violation of such oaths of allegiance, as appear to have been contrived on purpose by ambitious men to be broken at pleasure, without the least apprehension of perjury, and in the mean time keep the prince in a continual slavish dependence.

The Earl of Gloucester, soon after his release, went over into Normandy, where he found the Earl of Anjou employed in completing the conquest of that duchy; there he delivered him the sons of several English noblemen, to be kept as hostages for their fathers' fidelity to the Empress, and used many arguments for persuading him to come over in person with an army to her assistance: but Geoffrey excused himself by the importance of other affairs, and the danger of exposing the dominions he had newly acquired to rebellions in his absence. However, he lent the Earl of Gloucester a supply of four hundred men, and sent along with him his eldest son Henry, to comfort his mother, and be shewn to the people.

During the short absence of the Earl of Gloucester, the Empress was closely besieged in Oxford by the King; and provisions beginning to fail, she was in cruel apprehensions of falling into his hands. This gave her occasion to put in practice the only talent wherein she seemed to excel, which was that of contriving some little shift or expedient to secure her person upon any sudden emergency. A long season of frost had made the Thames passable upon the ice, and much snow lay on the ground; Maud with some few attendants clad all in white, to avoid being discovered from the King's camp, crossed the river at midnight on foot, and travelling all night, got safe to Wallingford Castle, where her brother and young son Henry, newly returned from France, arrived soon after, to her great satisfaction: but Oxford, immediately upon the news of her flight, surrendered to the King.

However, this disgrace was fully compensated soon after by another of the same kind, which happened to King Stephen; for whilst he and his brother of Winchester were fortifying a nunnery at Wilton, to bridle his enemies at Salisbury, who very much harassed those parts by their frequent excursions, the Earl of Gloucester, who watched all opportunities, came unaware with a strong body of men, and set fire on the nunnery while the King himself was in it. Stephen, upon the sudden surprise of the thing, wholly lost or forgot his usual courage, and fled shamefully away, leaving his soldiers to be cut in pieces by the Earl.

During the rest of the war, although it lasted nine years longer, there is little memorable recorded by any writer; whether the parties being pretty equal, and both sufficiently tired with so long a contention, wanted vigour and spirit to make a thorough conquest, and only endeavoured to keep what they had, or whether the multitude of strong castles, whose number daily increased, made it very difficult to end a war between two contending powers almost in balance; let the cause be what it will, the whole time passed in mutual sieges, surprises, revolts, surrenders of fortified places, without any decisive action, or other event of importance to be related. By which at length the very genius of the people became wholly bent upon a life of spoil, robbery, and plunder; many of the nobles, although pretending to hold their castles for the King or the Empress, lived like petty independent princes in a perpetual state of war against their neighbours; the fields lay uncultivated, all the arts of civil life were banished, no veneration left for sacred persons or things; in short, no law, truth, or religion among men, but a scene of universal misery, attended with all the consequences of an embroiled and distracted state.

About the eleventh year of the King's reign, young Henry, now growing towards a man, was sent for to France by a message from his father, who was desirous to see him; but left a considerable party in England, to adhere to his interests; and in a short time after (as some write[38]) the Empress herself grown weary of contending any longer in a cause where she had met with nothing but misfortunes of her own procuring, left the kingdom likewise, and retired to her husband. Nor was this the only good fortune that befell Stephen; for before the year ended, the main prop and pillar of his enemies was taken away by death; this was Robert Earl of Gloucester, than whom there have been few private persons known in the world that deserve a fairer place and character in the registers of time, for his inviolable faith, disinterested friendship, indefatigable zeal, and firm constancy to the cause he espoused, and unparalleled generosity in the conduct thereof: he adhered to his sister in all her fortunes, to the ruin of his own; he placed a crown on her head; and when she had lost it by her folly and perverseness refused the greatest offers from a victorious enemy, who had him in his power, and chose to continue a prisoner rather than recover his liberty by any hazard to her pretensions: he bore up her sinking title in spite of her own frequent miscarriages, and at last died in her cause by a fever contracted with perpetual toils for her service. An example fit to be shewn the world, although few perhaps are like to follow it; but however, a small tribute of praise, justly due to extraordinary virtue, may prove no ill expedient to encourage imitation.

[Footnote 38: Gervase. [D.S.]

But the death of this lord, together with the absence of the Empress and her son in France, added very little to the quiet or security of the King. For the Earl of Gloucester, suspecting the fidelity of the lords, had, with great sagacity, delivered their sons to the Earl of Anjou, to be kept as pledges for their fathers' fidelity, as we have before related: by which means a powerful party was still kept up against Stephen, too strong to be suddenly broken. Besides, he had, by an unusual strain of his conduct, lately lost much good-will, as well as reputation, in committing an act of violence and fraud on the person of the Earl of Chester, a principal adherent of the Empress. This nobleman, of great power and possessions, had newly reconciled himself to Stephen, and came to his court at Northampton, where, against all laws of hospitality, as well as common faith and justice, he was committed to prison, and forced to buy his liberty with the surrender of Lincoln, and all his other places, into the King's hands.