CHAPTER I.
THE ACCESSION OF STEPHEN.
Before approaching that struggle between King Stephen and his rival, the Empress Maud, with which this work is mainly concerned, it is desirable to examine the peculiar conditions of Stephen's accession to the crown, determining, as they did, his position as king, and supplying, we shall find, the master-key to the anomalous character of his reign.
The actual facts of the case are happily beyond question. From the moment of his uncle's death, as Dr. Stubbs truly observes, "the succession was treated as an open question."[3] Stephen, quick to see his chance, made a bold stroke for the crown. The wind was in his favour, and, with a handful of comrades, he landed on the shores of Kent.[4] His first reception was not encouraging: Dover refused him admission, and Canterbury closed her gates.[5] On this Dr. Stubbs thus comments:—
"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."[6]
But "the men of Kent" were faithful to Stephen, when all others forsook him, and, remembering this, one would hardly expect to find in them his chief opponents. Nor, indeed, were they. Our great historian, when he wrote thus, must, I venture to think, have overlooked the passage in Ordericus (v. 110), from which we learn, incidentally, that Canterbury and Dover were among those fortresses which the Earl of Gloucester held by his father's gift.[7] It is, therefore, not surprising that Stephen should have met with this reception at the hands of the lieutenants of his arch-rival. It might, indeed, be thought that the prescient king had of set purpose placed these keys of the road to London in the hands of one whom he could trust to uphold his cherished scheme.[8]
Stephen, undiscouraged by these incidents, pushed on rapidly to London. The news of his approach had gone before him, and the citizens flocked to meet him. By them, as is well known, he was promptly chosen to be king, on the plea that a king was needed to fill the vacant throne, and that the right to elect one was specially vested in themselves.[9] The point, however, that I would here insist on, for it seems to have been scarcely noticed, is that this election appears to have been essentially conditional, and to have been preceded by an agreement with the citizens.[10] The bearing of this will be shown below.
There is another noteworthy point which would seem to have escaped observation. It is distinctly implied by William of Malmesbury that the primate, seizing his opportunity, on Stephen's appearance in London, had extorted from him, as a preliminary to his recognition, as Maurice had done from Henry at his coronation, and as Henry of Winchester was, later, to do in the case of the Empress, an oath to restore the Church her "liberty," a phrase of which the meaning is well known. Stephen, he adds, on reaching Winchester, was released from this oath by his brother, who himself "went bail" (made himself responsible) for Stephen's satisfactory behaviour to the Church.[11] It is, surely, to this incident that Henry so pointedly alludes in his speech at the election of the Empress.[12] It can only, I think, be explained on the hypothesis that Stephen chafed beneath the oath he had taken, and begged his brother to set him free. If so, the attempt was vain, for he had, we shall find, to bind himself anew on the occasion of his Oxford charter.[13]
At Winchester the citizens, headed by their bishop, came forth from the city to greet him, but this reception must not be confused (as it is by Mr. Freeman) with his election by the citizens of London.[14] His brother, needless to say, met him with an eager welcome, and the main object of his visit was attained when William de Pont de l'Arche, who had shrunk, till his arrival, from embracing his cause, now, in concert with the head of the administration, Roger, Bishop of Salisbury, placed at his disposal the royal castle, with the treasury and all that it contained.[15]
Thus strengthened, he returned to London for coronation at the hands of the primate. Dr. Stubbs observes that "he returned to London for formal election and coronation."[16] His authority for that statement is Gervase (i. 94), who certainly asserts it distinctly.[17] But it will be found that he, who was not a contemporary, is the only authority for this second election, and, moreover, that he ignores the first, as well as the visit to Winchester, thus mixing up the two episodes, between which that visit intervened. Of course this opens the wider question as to whether the actual election, in such cases, took place at the coronation itself or on a previous occasion. This may, perhaps, be a matter of opinion; but in the preceding instance, that of Henry I., the election was admittedly that which took place at Winchester, and was previous to and unconnected with the actual coronation itself.[18] From this point of view, the presentation of the king to the people at his coronation would assume the aspect of a ratification of the election previously conducted. The point is here chiefly of importance as affecting the validity of Stephen's election. If his only election was that which the citizens of London conducted, it was, to say the least, "informally transacted."[19] Nor was the attendance of magnates at the ceremony such as to improve its character. It was, as Dr. Stubbs truly says, "but a poor substitute for the great councils which had attended the summons of William and Henry."[20] The chroniclers are here unsatisfactory. Henry of Huntingdon is rhetorical and vague; John of Hexham leaves us little wiser;[21] the Continuator of Florence indeed states that Stephen, when crowned, kept his Christmas court "cum totius Angliæ primoribus" (p. 95), but even the author of the Gesta implies that the primate's scruples were largely due to the paucity of magnates present.[22] William of Malmesbury alone is precise,[23] possibly because an adversary of Stephen could alone afford to be so, and his testimony, we shall find, is singularly confirmed by independent charter evidence (p. 11).
It was at this stage that an attempt was made to dispel the scruples caused by Stephen's breach of his oath to the late king. The hint, in the Gesta, that Henry, on his deathbed, had repented of his act in extorting that oath,[24] is amplified by Gervase into a story that he had released his barons from its bond,[25] while Ralph "de Diceto" represents the assertion as nothing less than that the late king had actually disinherited the Empress, and made Stephen his heir in her stead.[26] It should be noticed that these last two writers, in their statement that this story was proved by Hugh Bigod on oath, are confirmed by the independent evidence of the Historia Pontificalis.[27]