The queen brought up her army from Kent, the king of Scots and the earl of Gloucester brought up their forces from the north and west. But the queen showed the most promptitude. The baronage who were not bound to the legate’s policy refused to complete the king’s ruin, and stood aloof, intending to profit by the common weakness of the competitors. In attempting to secure the empress’s retreat to Devizes, on September 14, the earl of Gloucester was taken prisoner, and the two parties from this time forward played with more equal chances. An exchange of the two great captives was at once proposed, but mutual distrust, and the desire on both sides to take the utmost advantage of their situation, delayed the negotiation for six weeks. Stephen at Bristol, Robert at Rochester, must have watched the debate with longing eyes. The countess Mabilia of Gloucester was prepared to ship Stephen off to Ireland, if a hair of Robert’s head were injured; the queen demanded no less security for her husband’s safety. At last, on All Saints’ Day, both were released, each leaving security in the hands of the other that the terms should be fairly observed.
As soon as they were free they both prepared for a continuance of the struggle. The empress fixed her court again at Oxford; Stephen, who seems at once to have resumed his royal position, the claims founded by the election of the empress suffering a practical refutation by his release, re-entered London. The legate, still desiring to direct the storm, called a council at Westminster in December, where he apologized for his conduct rather than defended it, and where the king laid a formal complaint against the treason of the men who had taken and imprisoned him. But the time for open hostilities was deferred, the certain exhaustion which after a few months more renders the history an absolute blank, was beginning to tell. Six months passed without a sign. By Easter the empress had determined to send for her husband. Geoffrey would not obey his wife’s summons until he had earl Robert’s personal assurance that he should not be made a fool of. Earl Robert went to persuade his brother-in-law to throw his sword into the scale. Geoffrey determined first to secure Normandy, and kept the earl at work there until the news from England peremptorily recalled him.
Success of
Stephen in
1142.
The
kingdom
divided.
Stephen had waited until Robert had left England, and then, emerging from his sick room, had pounced down upon Wareham, the strong castle which the earl had entrusted to his son, had taken it, and then hastening northwards, had burnt the town of Oxford, and shut up the empress in the castle. There she remained until her brother could succor her. He returned at once, recovered Wareham and some castles in Dorset, and called together the forces of his party at Cirencester. But the winter was now advancing; the empress contrived a romantic escape in the snow from Oxford, and before active war could be resumed she directed that the castle should be surrendered. So the year 1142 comes to an end, and we see the two parties resting in their exhaustion. The western shires acknowledged Matilda, who reigned at Gloucester; the eastern acknowledged Stephen, who made Kent his head quarters. The midland counties were the seat of languid warfare, partly carried on about Oxford, which was a central debating ground between the two competitors, partly in Lincolnshire and Essex, where Stephen had to keep in order those great nobles who aimed at independence. Geoffrey de Mandeville, the earl of Essex, who accepted his earldom from both the courts, employed him chiefly in 1143 and 1144. The earl of Chester, who was uniformly opposed to Stephen, but who no doubt fought for himself far more than for the empress, held Lincoln as a constant thorn in the royal side. In 1145 Oxfordshire and Berkshire were the seat of war; in 1146 Stephen surprised the earl of Chester at Northampton and compelled him to give up Lincoln, and now for the first time seems to have thought himself a king. In despite of all precedent and all prejudice, defying a superstition to which even Henry II. thought it wise to bow, that no king should wear his crown within the walls of Lincoln, he wore his crown there on Christmas Day.
Period of
anarchy.
In passing thus rapidly over these years we are but following the example of our historians, who share in the exhaustion of the combatants, recording little but an occasional affray, and a complaint of general misery. Neither side had strength to keep down its friends, much less to encounter its enemies. The price of the support given to both was the same—absolute license to build castles, to practice private war, to hang their private enemies, to plunder their neighbors, to coin their money, to exercise their petty tyrannies as they pleased. England was dismembered. North of the Tees ruled the king of Scots, David the lawgiver and the church builder, under whose rule Cumberland, Westmoreland and Northumberland were safe; the bishopric of Durham, too, under his wing, had peace. The West of England, as we have seen, was under the earl of Gloucester, who in his sister’s name founded earldoms, and endeavored to concentrate in the hands of his supporters such vestiges of the administrative organization as still subsisted. But the great earls of the house of Beaumont, Roger of Leicester and Waleran of Meulan, who dominated the midland shires, chose to act as independent sovereigns and made terms both in England and Normandy as if they had been kings.
Departure
of Matilda.
In all the misery, and exhaustion, and balance of evils, however, time was working. The first generation of actors was leaving the stage, and a new one—if not better, still freed from the burden of odium, duplicity, and dishonesty which had marked the first—came into play. And the balance of change veered now to Stephen’s side. The year 1145 cut off Geoffrey de Mandeville in the midst of his sins, the year 1143 had seen the death of Miles of Hereford, the empress’s most faithful servant. In 1147 the great earl Robert of Gloucester passed away, and it is no small sign of the absolute deadness of the country at the time, that both his death and the departure of the empress, which must have almost coincided with it, are not even noticed in the best of the contemporary historians.
The second
Crusade.