Capture of Winchester, and release of Stephen, Sept., 1141.
With his aid[126] and the aid of the Londoners,[127] the queen was enabled to reduce Winchester and to effect the liberation of her husband by exchanging the Earl of Gloucester, brother of the empress, for the captured king.
His second charter to Mandeville.
After being solemnly crowned, for the second time,[128] at Canterbury, Stephen issued a second charter[pg 053] (about Christmas time, 1141),[129] to Geoffrey de Mandeville, confirming and augmenting the previous grant by the empress. Instead of sheriff and justiciar of his own county of Essex merely, he is now made sheriff and justiciar of London and Middlesex, as well as of Hertfordshire.
London holds the balance between the rival powers.
But even these great concessions failed to secure the earl's fidelity to the king. Again he broke away from his allegiance and planned a revolt in favour of the empress who recompensed him with still greater dignities and possessions than any yet bestowed. This second charter of the empress,[130] is remarkable for a clause in which she promises never to make terms with the Londoners without the earl's consent, "because they are his mortal foes."[131] But the plans of the earl were doomed to be frustrated. The empress, tired of the struggle, soon ceased to be dangerous, and eventually withdrew to the continent, and Stephen was left free to deal with the rebel earl alone. With the assistance of the Londoners, who throughout the long period of civil dissension, were generally to be found on the winning side, and held as it were the balance between the rival powers, Stephen managed after considerable bloodshed to capture the fortifications erected by the Earl at Farringdon.[132]
Arrest of the earl, his freebooting life and death, September, 1143.
The earl was subsequently treacherously arrested and made to give up his castles. Thenceforth his life was that of a marauding freebooter, until, fatally wounded at the siege of Burwell, he expired in September, 1143.
Arrival of Henry of Anjou in England, 1153
Notwithstanding the absence of the empress and the death of the faithless earl, a desultory kind of war continued to be carried on for the next ten years on behalf of Henry of Anjou, son of the empress. In 1153 that prince arrived in England to fight his own battles and maintain his right to the crown, which the king had already attempted to transfer to the head of his own son Eustace. This attempt had been foiled by the refusal of the bishops, at the instigation of the pope, to perform the ceremony. The sudden death of Eustace made the king more ready to enter into negotiations for effecting a peaceful settlement.