At this point the campaign of the count and the earl seems to have been interrupted by tidings of Stephen’s success and Matilda’s danger at Oxford. That Robert must go at once was clear; but that it would be wise for Geoffrey to accompany him was even more doubtful now than it had been six months ago. A substitute was found in the person of little Henry Fitz-Empress, who, if he could do nothing practically to help his mother’s cause and his own, at least ran no risk of damaging it by raising such a storm of ill-feeling as would probably have greeted the count of Anjou himself. While Robert and Henry sailed for England together, Geoffrey remained to finish his work in Normandy. Avranches, the next place which he threatened, made a ready submission; he took up his abode in the castle, and summoned the lords of all the fortresses in the Avranchin to come and do him homage, one after another. When they had all obeyed, he set himself to win the Cotentin. St.-Lô, which had been strongly fortified by the bishop of the diocese, surrendered after a three days’ siege. The victor advanced straight upon Coutances; the bishop was absent; no one else dared to offer resistance; Geoffrey simply marched into the city and took it. Thither, as at Avranches, he summoned the barons of the county to perform their homage, and they all obeyed except two brothers, Ralf and Richard of La Haye. Ralf was soon brought to submission; Richard flung himself with some two hundred knights into Cherbourg, a mighty fortress on a foundation of solid rock, guarded on one side by a belt of woodland full of wild beasts, and on the other by a bay whose advantages as a naval station have only been put to their full use in much later times. A siege of Cherbourg was likely to be a lengthy, troublesome and costly undertaking. But such a siege was of all military operations that in which Geoffrey most excelled and most delighted. He had little sympathy with the downright hand-to-hand fighting by which Fulk Nerra had won his spurs at Conquereux, or Fulk V. had repulsed Theobald and Stephen before Alençon, or Stephen had put his very captors to shame beneath the walls of Lincoln. Engineering was Geoffrey’s favourite science; in its developement he spared neither labour nor expense; and he now brought up against Cherbourg such a formidable array of machines that Richard thought it prudent to slip away by sea, intending to go to England and ask help of King Stephen. He was however overtaken by pirates and carried away “among strange peoples”; and a rumour of his fate reaching the garrison whom he had left behind, they lost heart and made submission to the Angevin.[986] The whole duchy south and west of the Seine was now his,[987] except the one town of Vaudreuil; before the close of the year this, too, was won, and the Angevin power even advanced beyond the river, for “Walter Giffard and all the people of the Pays de Caux made agreement with Count Geoffrey.”[988] The Norman capital now stood out alone against the Angevin conqueror of Normandy, as Tours had once stood out alone against the conqueror of Touraine. In January 1144 Geoffrey crossed the Seine at Vernon and pitched his camp at La Trinité-du-Mont, close to the walls of Rouen.[989] Next day the citizens opened their gates, and conducted him in solemn procession to the cathedral church.[990] The castle was still held against him by some followers of the earl of Warren;[991] the barons, headed by Waleran of Meulan, came to help him in besieging it, but neither their valour nor his machines were of any avail, and it was not till a three months’ blockade had reduced the garrison to the last straits of hunger that the citadel of Rouen was given up on S. George’s day.[992]

Allies offered themselves readily now to help in the little that remained to be done; foremost among them was the overlord of Normandy, the young King Louis VII. of France. All was changed since the days when his father, Louis VI., had granted the investiture of Normandy to Stephen’s little son. The inveterate enmity between the house of Blois and the French Crown had broken out afresh, in a new and most disastrous form, between Count Theobald and the young king; Louis fell back upon the traditional policy of his forefathers and gladly embraced the Angevin alliance against all the branches of the house of Blois on both sides of the sea. Thus when Geoffrey, after composing matters as well as he could at Rouen, mustered his forces to subdue the few still outstanding castles, he was joined at once by his own brother-in-law Theodoric of Flanders and by the king of France. Driencourt was the first place won by their united hosts; then Lions-la-Forêt—the old hunting-seat where King Henry had died—was given up by Hugh of Gournay;[993] the rest of the castles beyond Seine were quickly won, and then Geoffrey was master of the whole Norman duchy,[994] save one fortress, Arques, which a Fleming called William the Monk held so pertinaciously for Stephen that the Angevin was obliged to leave a body of troops before the place and go home without waiting to finish the siege in person.[995] Next summer the “monk” was shot dead by a chance arrow, and the surrender of Arques completed Geoffrey’s conquest of Normandy.[996] He made no pretence of holding it in the name of either his wife or his son; it was his own by right of conquest, and that right was formally acknowledged by the king of France. Before they parted in 1144 Louis granted to Geoffrey the investiture of the whole Norman duchy, save one spot which he claimed as the price of his favour:—the old bone of contention, Gisors.[997]

The Angevin conqueror had been called home by a revolt among his own barons.[998] The leader was, as before, Robert of Sablé;[999] but there was worse to come. Geoffrey’s brother Elias was persuaded by the rebels to put forth a claim to the county of Maine and uphold his pretension by force of arms. Geoffrey defeated him, took him prisoner, and put him in ward at Tours,[1000] where he remained five years, and whence he was released only to die of the effects of his imprisonment.[1001] The revolt failed as all previous revolts against Geoffrey had failed; the count swooped down upon Robert and his accomplices with such irresistible energy that they were utterly confounded and made submission at once.[1002] Undisputed master from the Poitevin border to the English Channel, Geoffrey once more cast his eyes across the sea, not with any thought of joining his wife in her desperate venture, but with an uneasy longing to get his heir safe out of the entanglement of a losing cause and bring him home to share in his own triumph. He therefore sent envoys to Earl Robert, begging that Henry might be allowed to come and see him, if only for a short time. The request was at once granted, and by Ascension-tide 1147 the boy was again at his father’s side.[1003] His uncle the earl of Gloucester had escorted him as far as Wareham;[1004] there they parted, as it turned out, for the last time. Robert caught a fever and died at Bristol early in the following November.[1005] Then at last the Empress herself felt that all was lost. Her last faint chance had expired with the wise and valiant brother whose patient devotion she had never fully appreciated until it was too late. In the early spring of 1148 she gave up the struggle and followed her son back to Normandy, to live thenceforth in peace by her husband’s side;[1006] while the knot which the sword had failed to cut was left to be slowly disentangled by more skilful hands which had long been preparing for their task.

Note.
THE TOPOGRAPHY OF THE BATTLE OF LINCOLN.

The topography of the battle of Lincoln is a very puzzling matter. We have two sources of information, and it seems impossible to make them agree. The questions to be solved are two: 1. Which way did Robert and Ralf approach the city? 2. Where was the battle actually fought?

1. The first question lies between William of Malmesbury and Henry of Huntingdon. William (Hist. Nov., l. iii. cc. 39, 40; Hardy, p. 741) says distinctly that the main army started from Gloucester; that Ralf and his troops joined them somewhere on the road; that Stephen, hearing of their approach, left off besieging the castle and went forth to meet them; and that on Candlemas day they arrived “ad flumen quod inter duos exercitus præterfluebat, Trenta nomine, quod et ortu suo et pluviarum profluvio tam magnum fuerat ut nullatenus vado transitum præberet.” He then gives the story of the crossing. Henry of Huntingdon (l. viii. c. 13; Arnold, p. 268) describes the crossing much in the same way, except that the “consul audacissimus” to whom he attributes the first plunge seems to be Ralf, whereas in William’s version Robert is the hero. But Henry makes no mention of the Trent; in his story the plunge is into “paludem pœne intransibilem.”