And the royal mother contented herself with standing on the steps of the great hall to receive her gallant son, Henry Plantagenet, the future King of England, destined to restore peace to the troubled land, but whose sun was to set in such dark clouds, owing to his quarrel with the Church, and the cruel misbehaviour of his faithless wife and rebellious sons.
But we must not anticipate. The gallant boy was at hand, and his mother clasped him to the maternal breast: "so greatly comforted," said the chronicler, "that she forgot all the troubles and mortifications she had endured, for the joy she had of his presence." Then she turned to her right trusty brother, and wept on his neck.
The following day was the birthday of the "Prince of Peace," and these children of war kept it in right honour. They attended Mass at the Church of St. Mary's in the town in great state, and afterwards banqueted in the Castle hall with multitudes of guests. Meanwhile Ranulph, Earl of Chester, had returned home to keep the feast; but his representatives kept it right well, and the two parties actually sent presents to each other, and wished mutual good cheer.
The feast was over, and the maskers dropped their masks, and turned to the business of life in right earnest—that was war, only war. The Empress Maude, with her son, under the care of her brother, shortly left Wallingford for Bristol, where the young prince remained for four years, under the care of his uncle, who had brought him up.
But all around the flames of war broke out anew, and universal bloodshed returned. It was a mere gory chaos: no great battles, no decisive blows; only castle against castle, all through the land, as at Wallingford and Crowmarsh. Each baron delved the soil for his dungeons, and raised his stern towers to heaven. All was pillage and plunder; men fought wherever they met; every man's hand was against every man; peaceful villages were burnt daily; lone huts, isolated farms, were no safer; merchants scarcely dared to travel, shops to expose their wares; men refused to till the fields for others to reap; and they said that God and His Saints were fast asleep. The land was filled with death; corpses rotted by the sides of the roads; women and children took sanctuary in the churches and churchyards, to which they removed their valuables. But the bands of brigands and murderers, who, like vultures, scented the quarry afar, and crowded from all parts of the Continent into England—unhappy England—as to a prey delivered over into their hands, did not always respect sanctuary. Famine followed; men had nought to eat; it was even said that they ate the bodies of the dead like cannibals. Let us hope this ghastly detail is untrue, but we do not feel sure it is; the pangs of hunger are so dreadful to bear.
Then came pestilence in the train of famine, and claimed its share of victims. And so the weary years went on—twelve long years of misery and woe.
Summer had come—hot and dry. There had been no rain for a month. It was the beginning of July, in the year 1142. Fighting was going on in England in general; at Wilton, near Salisbury, in particular. The king was there: he had turned the nunnery of that place into a castle, driving out the holy sisters, and all the flock of the wounded and poor to whom, with earnest piety, they were ministering. The king put up bulwark and battlement, and thought he had done well, when on the 1st of July came Robert of Gloucester from Bristol, and sat down before the place to destroy it.
The king and his brother—the Papal legate, the fighting Bishop of Winchester, the turncoat—were both there, and after a desperate defence, were forced to escape by a secret passage, and fly by night. Their faithful seneschal, William Martel, Lord of Shirburne, and a great enemy and local rival of Brian, remained behind to protract the defence, and engage the attention of the besiegers until his king had had time to get far enough away with his affectionate brother Henry; and his self-devotion was not in vain, but he paid for it by the loss of his own liberty. He was taken prisoner after a valiant struggle, and sent to Wallingford, to be under the custody of Brian Fitz-Count, his enemy and rival.