To King Henry the birth of his grandson was the crowning of all his hopes. The greatest difficulty which had hitherto stood in the way of his scheme for the descent of the crown—the objection which was sure to be made against Matilda on account of her sex—would lose more than half its force now that she could be regarded as regent for her infant son; and Henry at once summoned another great council at which he again made the archbishops, bishops, earls and barons of his realm swear fealty to the Empress “and also to her little son whom he appointed to be king after him.”[650] All things seemed as safe as human foresight could make them when in the beginning of August he crossed over to Normandy.[651] Signs and wonders in earth and sky, related afterwards as tokens of coming evil, accompanied his voyage;[652] but nearly two years passed away before the portents were fulfilled. In the spring Matilda joined her father at Rouen, and there, shortly before Whitsuntide, her second son was born.[653] The old king’s pleasure in his two little grandchildren was great enough to keep him lingering on in Normandy with them and their mother, leaving England to the care of Bishop Roger, till the middle of the following year,[654] when there came tidings of disturbance on the Welsh border which made him feel it was time he should return.[655] His daughter however set herself against his departure. Her policy is not very clear; but it seems impossible to acquit her of playing a double game and secretly instigating her husband to attack her father while the latter was living with her in unsuspecting intimacy and confidence. Geoffrey now suddenly put forth a claim to certain castles in Normandy which he asserted had been promised to him at his marriage.[656] Henry denied the claim; the Angevin temper burst forth at once; Geoffrey attacked and burned the castle of Beaumont, whose lord was like himself a son-in-law of Henry, and altogether behaved with such insulting violence that the king in his wrath was on the point of taking Matilda, who was with him at Rouen all the while, back with him to England. But he now found it impossible to leave Normandy. The land was full of treason; many barons who only disguised their real feelings from awe of the stern old king had been gained over in secret to the Angevin cause; among those whose fidelity was most suspected were Roger of Toëny and William Talvas the lord of Alençon, who had been restored to the forfeited estates of his family at the intercession of Geoffrey’s father in 1119. Roger’s castle of Conches was garrisoned by the king; William Talvas was summoned to Rouen more than once, but the conscious traitor dared not shew his face; at last Henry again seized his estates, and then, in September, Talvas fled across the border to be received with open arms by the count of Anjou.[657] The countess pleaded warmly with her father for the traitor’s pardon, but in vain. When she found him inexorable, she suddenly threw off the mask and shewed on which side her real sympathies lay by parting from the king in anger and going home to her husband at Angers.[658] Father and daughter never met again. In the last week of November Henry fell sick while hunting in the Forest of Lions; feeling his end near, he sent for his old friend Archbishop Hugh of Rouen to receive his confession and give him the last sacraments. His son Earl Robert of Gloucester hurried to the spot at the first tidings of his illness; his daughter made no sign of a wish for reconciliation; yet when the earl and the primate asked for his final instructions concerning the succession to the crown, he remained true to his cherished purpose and once more bequeathed all his dominions on both sides of the sea to Matilda and her heirs for ever.[659] He died on the night of December 1, 1135.[660]

With him expired the direct male line of the Conqueror; for Duke Robert’s long captivity had ended a year before.[661] Of the nine children of William the Conqueror and Matilda of Flanders, the youngest and the last survivor was now gone, leaving as his sole representatives his daughter the countess of Anjou and her infant boys. By a thrice-repeated oath the barons of Normandy and England stood pledged to acknowledge her as their sovereign. Suddenly there sprang forth an unexpected competitor. A rivalry which had seemed dead for nearly a hundred years revived in a new form; and the house of Anjou, on the very eve of its triumph, found itself once more face to face with the deadliest of its early foes—the house of Blois.

Since Geoffrey Martel’s victory over Theobald III. in 1044 the counts of Blois have ceased to play a prominent part in our story. Theobald himself accepted his defeat as final; he seems indeed to have been almost crushed by it, for he scarcely makes any further appearance in history, save at his brother Stephen’s death in 1047, when he requited the help which Stephen had given him against Anjou by turning his son out of Champagne and appropriating all his possessions. The injured heir took refuge in Normandy, married the Conqueror’s sister, and afterwards found in England such ample compensation for what he had lost that neither he nor his posterity ever made any attempt to regain their continental heritage. The reunion of Champagne thus helped to repair the fortunes of the elder line of Blois, so severely shattered by the blows of the Angevin Hammer; and the ill-gotten gain prospered so far that some thirty-five years later Theobald’s son and successor—the young Count Stephen-Henry who in 1069 received Fulk Rechin’s homage for Touraine—could venture on aspiring to the hand of King William’s daughter Adela.[662] In winning her he won a prize of which he was scarcely worthy. Stephen-Henry was indeed, in every way, a better man than either his father or his grandfather; but he had the nerveless, unstable temper which was the curse of his race. He went on the Crusade, and deserted before Antioch was won. He came home to bury his shame; his wife sent him out again to expiate it. Her burning words changed the coward into a martyr, and the stain was washed out in his life-blood beneath the walls of Ramah.[663] In the ordinary course of things, his successor in the counties of Blois, Chartres and Champagne would have been his eldest son William. But Stephen had left the entire control of his affairs, including the disposal of his territories, to his wife; and Adela knew that her firstborn was a youth of slow wit, quite unfit for public life. She therefore disinherited him, to his own complete satisfaction; for he had sense enough to be conscious of his incapacity for government, and gladly withdrew to the more congenial life of a simple country gentleman on the estates of his wife, the lady of Sully in Champagne, while the duties and responsibilities of the head of the family were laid on the abler shoulders of his next brother, Theobald. Of the two remaining brothers, the youngest had been from his infancy dedicated to the Church; the third, who bore his father’s name of Stephen, had been intrusted for education to his uncle the king of England.[664] Adela seems to have been Henry’s favourite sister; she was certainly, in all qualities both of heart and head, well worthy of his confidence and esteem; and she once at least did him a service which deserved his utmost gratitude, for it was she who contrived the opportunity for his reconciliation with S. Anselm. She was moreover the only one of his sisters who had children; and the relation between a man and his sister’s son was in the Middle Ages held as a specially dear and sacred tie. Its force was fully acknowledged by Henry in the case of the little Stephen. He had the child carefully brought up at his court with his own son; he knighted him with his own hand, and bestowed on him, in addition to ample estates in England, the Norman county of Mortain, which had been for several generations held by a near connexion of the ducal house, and entitled its possessor to rank as the first baron of the duchy. Finally, some few years before the second marriage of the Empress, he arranged a match between Stephen and another Matilda of scarcely less illustrious descent—the only daughter and heiress of Count Eustace of Boulogne and Mary of Scotland, sister to Henry’s own queen.[665] Stephen seems in fact to have been, next to William the Ætheling, the person for whom Henry cared most; and after the disaster of the White Ship—in which a lucky attack of illness saved him from sharing—he became virtually the king’s adoptive son, and the first layman in the kingdom. His position is illustrated by a dispute which occurred when the barons took the oath of homage and fealty to Matilda in the Christmas council of 1126. They swore in order of precedence. The first place among the lay peers belonged as an unquestioned right to the king of Scots; the second was claimed at once by Stephen and by the king’s son Earl Robert of Gloucester; the dignity of the nephew was held to outweigh the privilege of the son; and the second layman who swore on bended knee to acknowledge the Empress Matilda as her father’s successor was her cousin Count Stephen of Mortain and Boulogne.[666]

But for that council and its oath, the succession both to the English crown and to the Norman ducal coronet would have been at Henry’s death an open question. Had Matilda’s child been old enough to step at once into the place destined for him by his grandfather, there would most likely have been no question at all; Henry II. would have succeeded Henry I. without opposition, and England would have been spared nineteen years of anarchy. But Henry Fitz-Empress was not yet three years old. The practical choice at the moment lay between the surviving adult descendants of the Conqueror; and of these there were, besides the Empress, at least two others who might be considered quite as well qualified to represent him as she was. Independently of any special engagement, the barons would be fully entitled to choose between the daughter of William’s son and the sons of his daughter—between Matilda of Anjou, Theobald of Blois, and Stephen of Boulogne. Of the three, Matilda was on the whole the one who had least to recommend her. Her great personal advantage was that she, and she alone, was the child of a crowned king and queen, of the “good Queen Maude” in whose veins flowed the ancient royal blood of Wessex, and the king whom his English subjects revered after he was gone as “a good man,” who “made peace for men and deer.”[667] Matilda’s birth would be a valuable qualification in English eyes; but it would carry very little weight in Normandy. Old-English blood-royal went for nothing there; and King Henry’s good peace had been much less successfully enforced, and when enforced much less appreciated, in the duchy than in the kingdom. Personally, Matilda was almost a stranger in both countries. She had left her own people and her father’s house at the age of eight years, to be educated not as the daughter of the English king but as the child-wife of the Emperor. All her associations, all her interests, were in Germany; there she was known and respected, there she was at home. She had only returned to England very unwillingly for a couple of years, and then left it again to become the wife of a man known there only as the son of that “earl of Anjou” who had been King Henry’s most troublesome foe; while in Normandy the Angevin was known but too well, and hated with a mingled hate and scorn which had grown with the growth and strengthened with the strength of both county and duchy ever since the days of Geoffrey Martel. If the principle of female succession was to be admitted at all—if the Conqueror’s throne was to be filled by a stranger—one of his daughter’s sons might fill it at least as worthily as his son’s daughter and her Angevin husband. And if a sovereign was to be chosen for his personal qualifications, it would have been hard to find a better choice than Theobald the Great, count of Blois, Chartres and Champagne. He did not owe his historical epithet solely to his vast possessions; he was almost the only member of the house of Blois who shewed any trace of intellectual or moral greatness. His public life was one long series of vexations and disappointments; the misfortunes which his race were so apt to bring upon themselves by their own unsteadiness and self-will seemed to fall upon him without provocation on his part; it was as if his heritage had come to him charged with the penalties of all his forefathers’ errors. But it had not come to him charged with the heavier burthen of their fatal intellectual perversity and moral weakness. In its place he had the tact, the dignity, the stedfastness of his Norman mother; and the whole of his after-career fully justified the esteem of the Norman barons, grounded upon their acquaintance with his person and character during those wars against the king of France in which his cause had been inseparably bound up with that of his uncle Henry. In England, however, he could only be known by report, as the nephew and ally of the king, and the elder brother of Stephen. It was Stephen, not Theobald, who had been the king’s favourite and constant companion, lacking nothing of the rank of an adoptive son save the avowed prospect of the crown. Stephen had lived in England from his childhood; his territorial possessions, his personal interests, lay wholly in England and Normandy; his name and his face were almost as familiar there as those of Henry himself; he was the first baron of the duchy, the first layman of the kingdom; moreover, he was the husband of a lady who stood as near to the Old-English royal line and represented it, to say the least, as worthily as her imperial cousin and namesake. Lastly, his marriage gave him yet one more advantage, slight in itself, but of no small practical use at the moment. As count of Boulogne, he had immediate command of the shortest passage from the Continent to England.

The tidings of Henry’s death soon reached Angers; and before the first week of December was out, Matilda presented herself in Normandy to take possession of her inheritance. The officer in charge of the border-territories, comprising the forfeited lands of William Talvas and the county of Hiesmes, at once surrendered them to her and received her as his liege lady;[668] but before she had time to secure the duchy, the kingdom was snatched from her grasp. Stephen set out at once from Wissant and crossed the Channel amid a storm so terrific that men on shore deemed it could bode nothing less than the end of the world.[669] It only boded the arrival at Dover of a candidate for the English crown.