The warning took effect; Stephen changed his policy at once. He was weary of all his fruitless labour; his chief anxiety now was to secure the crown to his son; and he suddenly awoke to the necessity of setting himself right with the one power which alone could enable him to carry out his desire. Eustace himself was sent to act as mediator between his father and Henry Murdac; a reconciliation took place, and the archbishop was enthroned at York on S. Paul’s day 1151. Thence he went to keep Easter with the Pope, having undertaken, at Stephen’s request, to intercede for him with Eugene concerning the state of politics in England, and especially to obtain, if possible, the papal sanction to a formal acknowledgement of Eustace as heir to the crown.[1107] The southern primate meanwhile was beginning his legatine career with a Mid-Lenten council in London, at which Stephen, Eustace, and the principal barons of England were present. The main feature of this council was a crowd of appeals to Rome, whereof three were made by the bishop of Winchester.[1108] One of these appeals must have been against the suspension to which he had been sentenced at the council of Reims, and by which the Pope, less placable than the primate, still held him bound. Moreover, complaints against him were pouring into Rome from all quarters; so he carried his appeals in person, and went to clear himself before the supreme pontiff. He succeeded in obtaining absolution;[1109] his friends, of whom there were still many at the papal court, tried hard to win for him something more—either a renewal of the legation, or the accomplishment of his old scheme of a primacy over Wessex, or at least the exemption of his own see from the jurisdiction of Canterbury; but Eugene was inexorable. He believed that Stephen’s misconduct towards the Church was instigated by his brother; a very natural view, but somewhat unjust to the bishop.[1110] The truth seems rather to be that Henry, after vainly trying to rule the storm, had for awhile been swept away by its violence. Now he had emerged into the calm once more; and there henceforth he was content to remain. He consoled himself for the failure of his political hopes with a choice collection of antique statues purchased in Rome for the adornment of his palace at Winchester, and sailed quietly home with these treasures, stopping on his way to pay his devotions at the shrine of S. James at Compostella.[1111] At his request the Pope ordered Archbishop Murdac to absolve Hugh of Puiset, who was making himself useful at Winchester, not on clerical duty, but in taking charge of the bishop’s castles during his absence.[1112] With Hugh’s absolution the schism in the northern province came to an end, and the English Church was once again reunited.

For England and for Stephen alike the prospect seemed to be brightening. Stephen however was clearly beginning to feel that for him as well as for his Angevin rivals it was time to give place to a younger generation. It must have been chiefly for Eustace’s sake that he valued his crown; and in Eustace’s case, as in that of Henry Fitz-Empress, there were many circumstances which might make the pretensions of the child more generally acceptable than those of the parent. Eustace seems to have been about the same age as Henry, or probably a few years older; he was free from the personal obloquy and suspicion attaching to Stephen from the errors of the past; on the other hand, as the son of Matilda of Boulogne, he might reap the benefit of his mother’s well-earned personal popularity, as well as of her descent from the royal house of Wessex. Henceforth, therefore, Stephen showed a disposition to treat Henry Fitz-Empress as the rival less of himself than of his son, and to follow up every movement in Henry’s public life by a parallel step in the career of Eustace. And as Henry’s first independent act had been a sort of reconnoitring expedition to England, so the first retaliation was a visit made by Eustace to the king of France, with a view to ascertain his chances of support in an attempt to regain Normandy.

The existing phase of the rivalry between the houses of Anjou and Blois—their struggle for the dominion of Normandy and England—was a matter which concerned the interests of the French Crown almost as deeply as the earlier phase in which Fulk the Black and Odo of Champagne strove with each other for political mastery over their common lord paramount. Neither the accumulation of England, Normandy, Maine, Anjou and Touraine in a single hand, nor the acquisition of Normandy and England by a branch of the mighty and troublesome house which already held Blois, Chartres and Champagne, could be viewed by the French king without grave uneasiness. Either alternative had its dangers; to Louis VII., however, the danger would appear much less threatening than to his father. Shortly before the dying Louis VI. granted the investiture of Normandy to Stephen’s little son in 1137, the last of the old line of the dukes of Aquitaine—William IX., son of the gay crusader and troubadour whom the Red King had hoped to succeed—died on a pilgrimage at Compostella.[1113] His only son was already dead, and before setting out for his pilgrimage he did what a greater personage had done ten years before: with the consent of his barons, he left the whole of his dominions to his daughter. Moreover, he bequeathed the girl herself as wife to the young King Louis of France.[1114] This marriage more than doubled the strength of the French Crown. It gave to Louis absolute possession of all western Aquitaine, or Guyenne as it was now beginning to be called; that is, the counties of Poitou and Gascony, with the immediate overlordship of the whole district lying between the Loire and the Pyrenees, the Rhône and the ocean:—a territory five or six times as large as his own royal domain, and over which his predecessors had never been able to assert more than the merest shadow of a nominal superiority.[1115] To a man who was at once king of France and duke of Aquitaine it was comparatively no great matter whether the dominions of Henry I. were to be annexed to those of Geoffrey of Anjou or allied to those of Theobald of Blois. The truest interest of France, however, obviously was that England and Normandy should be divided, one of them being held by each of the two competitors; and it was doubtless with this view that Louis, while sanctioning and aiding Geoffrey’s conquest of the Norman duchy, still kept on peaceful terms with the English king, and held to a promise of marriage made some years before between his own sister and Stephen’s son Eustace.[1116]

At the time of Geoffrey’s final success Louis was at deadly strife with the count of Blois; a strife in which the king was wholly in the wrong, and for whose disastrous consequences he afterwards grieved so deeply that his penitence was the chief motive which induced him to go on crusade.[1117] Since then, Geoffrey in his turn had incurred the royal displeasure. There was a certain Gerald, lord of a castle called Montreuil-Bellay, near the southern border of Anjou—one of the fortresses raised by the great castle-builder Fulk Nerra in the earliest days of his warfare with Odo of Blois—whom an Angevin chronicler describes as an absolute monster of wickedness,[1118] but who had so won the favour of the king that he made him seneschal of Poitou. In 1147 this Gerald was the ring-leader of a fresh revolt of the Angevin barons against their count. The revolt was as usual soon put down: but it was not so easy to punish Gerald; for Montreuil was an almost impregnable fortress, with a keep of great strength and height, “lifting itself up to the stars,” surrounded by a double wall and rampart, and further protected by an encircling chasm, very deep and precipitous, which was called the “Valley of Judas,” and prevented any engines of war from coming within range of the castle.[1119] Some time in 1148 Geoffrey built three towers of stone in the neighbourhood of Montreuil, as a base for future operations against it.[1120] In the summer of 1150 an outrage committed by Gerald upon the abbot and monks of S. Aubin at Angers brought matters to a crisis;[1121] Geoffrey made the monks’ quarrel his own and at once set his engineers to level the ground all around Montreuil, in preparation for bringing up his machines to the assault. After nearly twelve months’ labour,[1122] however, the “Judas-Valley” still yawned between himself and his foes, till he ordered the annual fair usually held at Saumur to be transferred to Montreuil. In a fortnight the energies of the crowd who flocked to the fair, joined to those of his own soldiers, filled up the valley and made it into level ground.[1123] Geoffrey could now bring his engines within range, and he used them with such effect that at the first assault the outworks were destroyed and the garrison driven to take refuge in the keep. A summons to surrender was, however, scornfully rejected by Gerald, trusting in the strength of his tower and the expected help of the king.[1124]

For Louis had now returned from Palestine;[1125] and so great was his wrath at Geoffrey’s treatment of his favourite that he consented to join Eustace in an attack upon the Norman duchy. Its defence was left to its young duke, then busy with the siege of Torigni on the Vire, held against him by his cousin Richard Fitz-Count—a son of Earl Robert of Gloucester.[1126] Louis and Eustace marched upon Arques; Henry led a force of Normans, Angevins and Bretons to meet them; but his “older and wiser” barons averted a battle,[1127] and nothing more came of the expedition. Geoffrey had never stirred from his camp before Montreuil. Despite a formidable array of engines,[1128] he made little progress; every breach made in the walls by day was mended by night with oaken beams, of which the besieged seemed to have a never-ending supply. Geoffrey was characteristically taking counsel with his books as to the best method of overcoming this difficulty when some monks of Marmoutier came to him on an errand for their convent. One of them took up the book which the count laid down— the treatise of Vegetius Renatus De Re Militari, then, and long after, the standard work on military engineering. It may have been some memory of bygone days when he, too, had worn helm and hauberk instead of cowl and scapulary that brought into the monk’s eyes a gleam which made Geoffrey exclaim, “Stay with me till to-morrow, good brother, and what you are now reading shall be put in action before you.” Next day a large red-hot iron vessel filled with boiling oil was launched from the beam of a mangonel against one of the timber insertions in the wall, and its bursting set the whole place on fire.[1129] Gerald, his spirit broken at last, came forth with his family and his garrison “like serpents crawling out of a cave,” as a hostile chronicler says,[1130] and surrendered to the mercy of the count, who sent him to prison at Angers. The keep was razed at once, save one fragment of wall, left by Geoffrey, and still standing at this hour, as a memorial of his victory and of the skill and perseverance by which it had been won.[1131]