As soon as King Henry was dead, his nephew Stephen, who was very handsome, and brave, and good-natured, was made king. A great many Norman barons, and English lords and bishops, went with him to Westminster Abbey, and there the Archbishop of Canterbury put a crown upon his head, and they all promised to obey him as their king. But the other barons, and lords, and bishops, who, as I told you before, had promised to obey the Empress Maude as Queen of England, and to keep the kingdom for her young son Henry, sent to fetch them from Anjou, which was their own country, and tried to make her queen. I am sorry to say that the friends of Stephen and the friends of Maude began to fight, and never ceased for fifteen years.
This fighting was very mischievous to the country; whole towns were destroyed by it; and while the war between Stephen and Maude lasted, the corn-fields were laid waste, so that many people died for want of bread; the flocks of sheep and herds of cattle were killed, or died for want of care; the trees were cut down, and nobody planted young ones; and there was nothing but misery from one end of the kingdom to the other. This sort of war between two parties of the people of the same country is called civil war, and it is the most dreadful of all warfare.
If strangers come to fight, and all the people of a country join to drive them away, the mischief they may have done is soon repaired; and the people of a country love one another the better because they have been defending one another.
But in a civil war, when people in the same country fight, it is not so. The very next door neighbours may take different sides, and then the mischief they may do one another will be always remembered, and they will dislike one another even after peace is made.
I have heard things so dreadful about civil wars, you would hardly believe them. It is said even that two brothers have taken different sides in a civil war, and that when there was a battle it has happened that one brother has killed the other, and when he found out what he had done, he was ready to kill himself with grief. Only think how dreadful such a thing is, and how sorry the father and mother of those brothers must have been!
These sad wars lasted more than fifteen years: at last everybody got tired of them, and it was settled by some of the wisest of the barons and bishops that Stephen should be king as long as he lived; that Maude should live in Anjou; and that when Stephen died, her son Henry should be king of England.
Stephen did not live very long after this agreement was made. He had some very good qualities, but the wars, which troubled all England while he reigned, prevented their being of much use. He was King of England for nineteen years.
CHAPTER XVIII.
HENRY II.—1154 to 1189.
How Henry the Second did many good things for England; how the gentry went hawking; how Strongbow conquered a great part of Ireland; and how the kings of Scotland became under-kings to the kings of England.
We have so much to learn about King Henry the Second, that I think I must divide the account of his reign into two chapters.