Since the Empress’s departure, Stephen had made but little progress in reducing the castles of those barons who still, either in her name or in their own, chose to defy his authority. A revolt of Ralf of Chester and Gilbert of Pembroke in 1149 and two unsuccessful attempts made by the king to recover Worcester from Waleran of Meulan, to whom he had himself intrusted it in the days when Waleran was one of his best supporters,[1173] make up almost the whole military history of the last four years. Ralf of Chester’s obstinate claim upon Lincoln was at last disposed of by a compromise.[1174] There was however one fortress which throughout the whole course of the war had been, almost more than any other, a special object of Stephen’s jealousy. This was Wallingford, a castle of great strength seated on the right bank of the Thames some twelve miles south of Oxford, and held as a perpetual thorn in the king’s side by a Breton adventurer, Brian Fitz-Count, one of the most able and energetic as well as most faithful and persevering members of the Angevin party in England. Hitherto all Stephen’s attempts against Wallingford—even the erection of a rival fortress, Crowmarsh, directly over against it—had produced no effect at all. At last, in the winter of 1152, he built a strong wooden tower at the foot of the bridge over the Thames whereby alone the garrison of Wallingford obtained their supplies. Brian and his men saw their convoys hopelessly shut out; they knew that none of their friends in England were strong enough to relieve them; they therefore sent to their lord the young duke of the Normans, and begged that he would either give them leave to surrender with honour, or send help to deliver them out of their strait.[1175]

Henry did not send; he came. Landing with a small force on the morning of the Epiphany,[1176] he entered a church to honour the festival with such brief devotion as a soldier could spare time for, and the first words that fell on his ear sounded like an omen of success: “Behold, the Lord the ruler cometh, and the kingdom is in his hand.”[1177] Before the week was out he had taken the town of Malmesbury and the outworks of the castle, and was blockading Bishop Roger’s impregnable keep. Stephen, warned by its commandant, hastened to its relief. On a bitter January morning king and duke, each at the head of his troops, met for the first time face to face, divided only by the river Avon—here at Malmesbury a mere streamlet in itself, but so swollen by the winter’s rains that neither party dared venture to cross it. A torrent of rain, sleet and hail was pouring down, drifting before a violent west wind, striking the Angevins in their backs, but beating hard in the faces of the king and his host; drenched, blinded, scarce able to hold their weapons, they stood shivering with cold and terror, feeling as if Heaven itself had taken up arms against them, till Stephen turned away in despair and led his dispirited forces back to London. Malmesbury surrendered as soon as he was gone.[1178] The young duke marched straight upon Wallingford, demolished Stephen’s wooden tower at the first assault, and revictualled the castle. He then laid siege to Crowmarsh. Stephen advanced to relieve it; again the two armies fronted each other in battle array, but again no battle took place. The barons, who were only anxious to maintain both the rival sovereigns as a check upon each other, and dreaded nothing so much as the complete triumph of either, took advantage of a supposed bad omen which befell the king[1179] to insist upon a parley, and proposed that Stephen and Henry in person should arrange terms with each other, subject to ratification by their respective followers.[1180] Yielding to necessity, and both fully aware of their advisers’ disloyal motives, the two leaders held a colloquy across a narrow reach of the Thames.[1181] For the moment a truce was arranged, on condition that Stephen should raze Crowmarsh at the end of five days.[1182] As the barons doubtless expected, however, no solution was reached on the main question at issue between the rivals, and with mutual complaints of the treason of their followers they separated once again.[1183]

But there were others who, in all sincerity, were labouring hard for peace. Archbishop Theobald was in constant communication with the king in person and with the duke through trusty envoys, endeavouring to establish a basis for negotiations between them. He found an ally in Henry of Winchester, now eager to help in putting an end to troubles which he at last perceived had been partly fostered by his own errors.[1184] The once rival prelates, thus united in their best work, saw their chief obstacle in Eustace.[1185] Not only was it the hope of his son’s succession which made Stephen cling so obstinately to every jot and tittle of his regal claims; but Eustace’s character was such that the mere possibility of his rule could not be contemplated without dread; and to look for any self-renunciation on his part was far more hopeless than to expect it from Stephen. Eustace was in fact a most degenerate son, unworthy not only of his high-souled mother but even of his weak, amiable father. He had one merit—he was an excellent soldier;[1186] for the rest, his character was that of the house of Blois in its most vicious phase, unredeemed by a spark of the generous warmth and winning graciousness for which so much had been forgiven to Stephen.[1187] Even with his own party and his own father he could not keep at peace. The issue of the Crowmarsh expedition threw him into a fury; after loading his father with reproaches, he deserted him altogether and rode away to Canterbury, vowing to ravage the whole country from end to end, sparing neither the property of the churches nor the holy places themselves. He began with S. Edmund’s abbey. He was hospitably received there, but his demand for money was refused, and he ordered the crops to be destroyed. A century and a half before, the heathen Danish conqueror Swein had in like manner insulted East Anglia’s patron saint, and had been stricken down by a sudden and mysterious death. So too it was with Eustace. As he sat at table in the abbey, the first morsel of food choked him, and in the convulsions of raging madness he expired.[1188]

Eustace’s death was only one of a striking series. The roll had opened with Geoffrey of Anjou in September 1151. Suger and Theobald of Blois both died in January 1152. Politically as well as personally, the death of the good and wise brother who had stood by him so faithfully and so unselfishly through all his difficulties in Normandy and at Rome must have been a heavy blow to Stephen; but heavier still was the blow that fell upon him three months later, when on May 3 he lost the wisest, probably, of his counsellors as well as the truest and bravest of all his partizans in England—his queen, Matilda of Boulogne.[1189] She was followed in little more than a month by her cousin Henry of Scotland.[1190] Next year the list of remarkable deaths was longer still. On this side of the sea it included, besides Eustace, Ralf earl of Chester,[1191] Walter Lespec,[1192] and David king of Scots.[1193] Another person who had made some figure in the history of northern England, William bishop of Durham, had died in the previous November.[1194] The appointment of Hugh of Puiset to his vacant chair,[1195] being strongly opposed by Archbishop Murdac, nearly caused another schism in the province; the southern primate, however, doubtless feeling that it was no time now for ecclesiastical squabbles, took the case into his own hands and sent the elect of Durham to be consecrated at Rome by the Pope.[1196] But the Pope was no longer Eugene III. Rome lost her Cistercian bishop on July 9, 1153. Six weeks later Clairvaux itself became a valley of the shadow of death, as its light passed away with S. Bernard;[1197] and two months later still the metropolitan chair of York was again vacated, and the three great Cistercian fellow-workers were reunited in their rest, by the death of Henry Murdac.[1198] The generation which had been young with Stephen seemed to be rapidly passing away; the primate, the bishop of Winchester and the king himself were left almost alone, like survivors of a past age, in presence of the younger race represented by Henry of Anjou.

With the life of Eustace ended the resistance of Stephen. He had other sons, but they were mere boys; it was hopeless to think of setting up even the eldest of them as a rival to Henry. The young duke was carrying all before him; Stamford, Nottingham,[1199] Reading, Barkwell, had yielded to him already, when Countess Gundrada of Warwick surrendered Warwick castle,[1200] and the adhesion of Earl Robert of Leicester placed more than thirty fortresses all at once at the young conqueror’s disposal.[1201] Henry was, however, fully alive to the wisdom of securing his kingdom by a legal settlement rather than by the mere power of the sword. At last a treaty was made, on November 6, in the place where it had been first projected—Wallingford.[1202] It was agreed that Stephen and Henry should adopt each other as father and son; that Stephen should keep his regal dignity for the rest of his life, Henry acting as justiciar and practical ruler of the kingdom under him; and that after his death Henry should be king.[1203] The details of the settlement have come down to us only in a poetical shape which expresses not so much what the contracting parties actually undertook to do as what needed to be done—what was the ideal at which the peace-makers aimed, and how far removed from it was the actual condition of the country. The rights of the Crown, which the nobles had everywhere usurped, were to be resumed; the “adulterine castles”—castles built during the anarchy and without the king’s leave, to the number of eleven hundred and fifteen—were to be destroyed; all property was to be restored to the lawful owners who had held it in King Henry’s time. The farms were again to be supplied with husbandmen; the houses which had been burnt down were to be rebuilt and filled with inhabitants; the woods were to be provided with foresters, the coverts replenished with game, the hill-sides covered with flocks of sheep and the meadows with herds of cattle. The clergy were to enjoy tranquillity and peace, and to be relieved from all extraordinary and exorbitant demands. The sheriffs were to be regularly appointed in accustomed places, and held strictly to their duties; they were not to indulge their greed, nor to prosecute any one out of malice, nor shew undue favour to their own friends, nor condone crimes, but to render to every man his due; some they were to influence by the threat of punishment, others by the promise of reward. Thieves and robbers were to be punished with death. Soldiers were to beat their swords into ploughshares and their spears into pruning-hooks; the Flemings were to quit the camp for the farm, the tent for the workshop, and render to their own masters the service which they had so long forced upon the English people; the country-folk were to dwell in undisturbed security, the merchants to grow rich through the revival of trade. Finally, one standard of money was to be current throughout the realm.[1204]

The treaty was ratified in an assembly of bishops, earls and barons, held at Winchester at the end of the month.[1205] Stephen afterwards accompanied his adoptive son to London, where he was joyfully welcomed by the citizens.[1206] King and duke seem to have kept Christmas apart; Henry indeed set himself to his task of reform in such earnest that he could have little time to spare for mere festivities. On the octave of Epiphany another assembly was held at Oxford, where the nobles of England swore homage and fealty to the duke as to their lord, reserving only the faith due to Stephen as long as he lived. The next meeting, at Dunstable, was not quite so satisfactory. Henry, doing his share of the public work with true Angevin thoroughness, was irritated at finding that some of the builders of unlicensed castles had gained the king’s ear and persuaded him to exempt their fortresses from the sentence of universal destruction. Against this breach of faith the duke earnestly remonstrated; but he found it impossible to enforce his wishes without a quarrel which he was too prudent to risk.[1207] He therefore let the matter rest, and in Lent he accompanied Stephen to Canterbury and thence to a meeting with the count and countess of Flanders at Dover.[1208] There it was discovered that some of the Flemish mercenaries, to whom Henry and his good peace were equally hateful,[1209] were conspiring to kill him on his return to Canterbury. The shock of this discovery, added to that of an accident which befell Stephen’s eldest surviving son William, who is said to have been aware of the plot,[1210] was too much for the king’s overwrought nerves, and with a last benediction he hurried his adoptive son out of the country at once.[1211] Henry passed through Canterbury before the conspirators were ready for him, made his way to Rochester and London, and thence safe over sea to Normandy,[1212] where he landed soon after Easter.[1213]

Only fifteen months had passed since his arrival in England; only five had passed since the treaty of Wallingford; yet in that short time Henry had made, as the contemporary English chronicler says, “such good peace as never was here”[1214]—never, that is, since peace and order were buried with his grandfather, eighteen years before. So well was the work begun that even when he was thus obliged to leave it for a while in the weak hands of Stephen, it did not fall to pieces again. Stephen indeed, as was remarked by the writers of the day, seemed now at length for the first time to be really king.[1215] For eighteen years he had been king only in name; his regal dignity had never been truly respected, his regal authority had never been fully obeyed, till the last twelve months of his life, when he was avowedly only holding them in trust for the future sovereign whom “all folk loved,” because he did what Stephen had failed to do—“he did good justice and made peace.”[1216] After Henry was gone Stephen gathered up his failing strength for a campaign against some of the rebellious castles in the north. Sick and weary as he was, his youthful valour and prowess were even yet not altogether departed; castle after castle fell into his hands, the last and most important being that of Drax in Yorkshire.[1217] He then went southward again to hold another meeting with the count of Flanders at Dover.[1218] There his health finally gave way; and eight days before the feast of All Saints his nineteen years’ reign, with all its troubles and disappointments, its blunders and failures, its useless labours and hopeless cares, was ended by a quiet death.[1219]

The primate and the nobles, while they laid him in Feversham abbey beside his wife and son,[1220] sent the news to the king-elect, begging him to come and take his crown without delay.[1221] The message reached Henry just as he was completing the suppression of a disturbance in Normandy. A series of desultory attacks made by the French king upon the duchy during Henry’s absence in 1153 had led to no direct result, but they probably helped to foster the turbulence of the Norman barons, who were fast getting into their old condition of lawless independence when at Easter 1154 the duke re-appeared in their midst. He began to assert his authority by resuming—not all at once, but gradually and cautiously—the demesne lands of the duchy, which his father had been compelled to alienate for a time in order to purchase the support of the nobles. A hurried visit to Aquitaine was followed in August by peace with the king of France; for Louis had at last come to see that his opposition was as vain as Stephen’s. Immediately afterwards the young duke was struck down by a severe illness. In October he was sufficiently recovered to join Louis in a campaign for the settlement of some disturbances in the Vexin; thence he went once more to besiege his rebellious cousin and vassal Richard Fitz-Count at Torigni. The place had apparently just surrendered when the tidings of Stephen’s death arrived. Henry took counsel first of all with his mother; then he summoned his brothers and the barons of Normandy to meet him at Barfleur; but when he arrived there with Eleanor the wind was so unfavourable that a whole month elapsed before they could venture to cross.[1222] Henry, however, could afford to wait; and England could wait for him. Three weeks without a king had been enough to throw the whole country into disorder when Henry I. had died leaving only a woman and an infant as his heirs; six weeks passed away without any disturbance now while Archbishop Theobald was guarding the rights of the Crown[1223] for one who had already proved himself King Henry’s worthy grandson. “No man durst do other than good, for the mickle awe of him.”[1224] At last, on December 8,[1225] he landed in Hampshire;[1226] first at Winchester, then in London, he received a rapturous welcome;[1227] and on the Sunday before Christmas Henry Fitz-Empress, duke of the Normans, count of Anjou and duke of Aquitaine, was crowned king of England in Westminster abbey.[1228]