tenderness, he prevailed on her to disclose unfruitful, his hopes of succession were a plot which had been laid for murdering centred in his daughter Maud, the widow him when he should be withdrawing from of the emperor Henry V., by whom she her apartment. But he escaped from this had no issue. The emperor had bestowed foul attack only to receive his death-wound on this lady at an early age the apparently in open warfare shortly after at Alost.* important office of regent of Italy, and The tidings of his early death must soon Henry regarded her with an affection have followed those of his brief greatness which is one of the humane features in his into the dungeon of his blind and aged character. He called a great council of father. prelates and nobles, who swore fealty to Henry, on this and on some other occa- her if the king should die without issue sions, manifested somewhat of that forbear- male. The king of Scotland, and Stephen ance towards the vanquished, which was in earl of Boulogne, the king's nephew, took his time slowly stealing into the fierce the oath, according to their dignity, before manners of the German nations,-a part the rest. He gave her, in 1128, in marof the system of chivalry, which there will riage to Geoffrey Plantagenet, eldest son be a future occasion for more fully consid- of the earl of Anjou, in order to detach ering. But it was exclusively a generosity that powerful lord from the interest of the towards high-born dames and noble warri- French king, and from the cause of Wilors, which charmed the fancy by grace and liam Fitz-Robert. This marriage with an courtesy. It never stooped so low as jus- adverse neighbor was very unpopular tice and good faith towards all men. He among the Norman barons; but the king, set at naught his charters, and violated his in 1131, caused another general council to promises to his people without shame.† take the oath of fealty to her at NorthampVery few drops even of pity reached them. ton, where she was herself present. In "It is not easy to describe the sufferings of March, 1133, she was delivered of a son; this land, from manifold and never-ceasing and the nobility once more took the oath wrongs; wheresoever the king went, there of fealty, in an assembly holden at Oxford, was full license to his company to harrow to her and to her new-born son Henry Fitzhis wretched people, oftentimes with burn- Empress. Two more sons born to his darings and slaughter. His exactions were ling daughter promised stability to the orcruel, in the amount and in the means. der of succession which he had established, As justice was a source of revenue, judi- while the overthrow or extinction of all cial murder was a frequent instrument of his competitors appeared to secure a quiet extortion."- "The Norman clergy in that old age to the victorious monarch, when a reign," says the contemporary Eadmer, surfeit of lampreys, in which he had been "were more wolves than shepherds. No always forbidden to indulge, at last termivirtue nor merit could advance an English-nated his days, on Sunday, the 1st of De man." To be called an Englishman was cember, 1135, in the sixty-seventh year of an insult. Nor did the succession, for the his age, and in the thirty-sixth year of a greater part of Henry's reign, hold out any reign so agitated that he had passed no hope to the proscribed natives. Maud, more than five years of unbroken quiet in the good queen," or Mold, as she was long England. The support given by Louis le called by the English poets, died in 1118, Gros to Robert and his gallant son, as well with the sad reflection that she had sacri- as to the malcontent nobles of Normandy, ficed herself for her race in vain. Wil- may be considered as the earliest precauliam, her degenerate son, openly threaten- tionary wars to preserve such a balance in ed that if he ever ruled England he should the force of neighboring states, that one or yoke the Saxons to the plow like oxen. a few might not acquire the means of opFrom such premature insolence, for he was pressing the rest. drowned in his seventeenth year, he might be expected to prove one of those youthful tyrants whose sport is cruelty to men, as boys amuse themselves in torturing the most harmless animals. After the death of her son, Henry married a daughter of the duke of Louvain. But the union proving

* Ord. Vital. lib. xii.

66

Talibus promissis, quæ tamen in fine impudenter violavit, omnium Corda sibi inclinavit.-Matt.

Par. 52.

Sax, Chron. A. D. 1105 et passim.

§ Crudelis exactionibus per omnes desævit.-Eadmer, Hist. Nor.

Matt. Par. ix.

STEPHEN. 1135-1154.

STEPHEN earl of Boulogne was the second son of Stephen earl of Blois, by Adela the daughter of the Conqueror. The empress Maud and her three sons, not to mention his own elder brother Theobald earl of Blois, stood between him and all hereditary pretensions to succeed to the Conqueror. He had a quarrel with Robert earl of Gloucester, the late king's natural son, for the honor of being the first of the laity to

swear fealty to Maud. Henry had procured cruelly oppressed the wretched men of the him a marriage with the only child of land with castle work. They filled the Mary of Scotland, sister of the " good castles with devils and evil men. They queen Maud," by which he became earl of seized those whom they supposed to have Boulogne. In spite of oaths and gratitude, any goods, men, and laboring women, and and with no pretension, on any ground, to threw them into prison, for their gold and the crown, he hastened to London, where silver, and inflicted on them unutterable the populace received him with acclama- tortures. Some they hanged up by the tions, such as they often lavish on beauty, feet, and smoked with foul smoke; some bravery, and prodigality. His brother ob- by the thumbs or by the beard, and hung tained the consent of the archbishop of coats of mail on their feet. They put them Canterbury, by causing Bigod to swear, into dungeons with adders, and snakes, and with signal falsehood, that Henry had on toads. Many thousands they wore out with his deathbed disinherited Maud, and de- hunger. This lasted the nineteen years clared Stephen his successor. By these while Stephen was king, and it grew conand other unusually flagitious expedients, tinually worse and worse. They burned he was crowned and anointed king of England, at Westminster, on the 22d day of December, 1135. In the beginning of the charter, which, in imitation of his uncle, he issued immediately after his coronation, with an unparalleled variety of jarring ti- This description of a contemporary † tles, he described himself as-being by the comprises by far the most important part grace of God, and the consent of the cler- of that confused alternation and succession gy and people, elected king of England, as of anarchy and tyranny, which the poverty well as consecrated by William archbishop of language compels us to call the reign of Canterbury, legate of the holy see, and of Stephen. It perhaps contains the most confirmed by Innocent, pontiff of the apos- perfect condensation of all the ills of feutolic church of Rome. This charter, like dality to be found in history. The whole the former, promises an ample redress of narrative would have been rejected, as degrievances, and grants to the people all the void of all likeness to truth, if it had been good laws and good customs which subsist- hazarded in fiction.

all the towns:-thou mightest go a day's journey, and not find a man sitting in a town, nor an acre of land tilled. Wretched men starved of hunger: to till the ground was to plow the sea."

ed in the time of king Edward. The pow- During the first year of Stephen, he was er of administering justice, and of afford-disturbed only by the revolt of Baldwin ing equal security to the rights of all, was earl of Exeter, and by a Scottish irruption now become the object of forcible contests, in support of Matilda, by her uncle David, as unvarnished by a pretence of right as the able and virtuous prince of a rude and the conflicts of rival gangs of avowed ban- fierce people. In the year 1138, this exditti for the spoils of the unoffending. Ste- cellent prince was defeated in a second inphen prevailed over the empress, because, vasion, after an obstinate action at the faBoulogne being nearer than Rouen or An- mous battle of the Standard near Northaljou to London, he could spring more quick- lerton, of which some characteristics are ly on his prey. But the suspension of all to be found in the work of Sir Walter hereditary succession for fourscore years,

closes the Hist. Norman. at the accession of Ste

even from the Norman stock, made amends *The anonymous continuator of William Abbot for its immediate evils by guarding the of Jumieges, commonly called Guil. Gemmetic. people from the slavish feeling that gov- phen. Orderic Vital, an Englishman born within ernment is a descendible property, which three miles of Shrewsbury, about four years after might otherwise have sunk into their the conquest, who passed near sixty years as a hearts; without blinding them to the inconveniences of election in the case of an office, which stirs up passions so violent that there is perhaps as little likelihood of appointments, generally good, from the modes of election known to us, as even from a succession dependent on the chance of birth itself."

monk in the monastery of St. Evroul en Ouche, brings down his Historia Eccles. Norman. only to 1140. Eadmer, the scholar, and friend of Anselm, concludes his Hist. Nor. with 1122, so that in the confused reign of Stephen we particularly want contemporary evidence. The Gesta Stephani are by an unknown contemporary. The beginning of his work singularly coincides with the Saxon Chronicle. Both seem better to express the universal misery by language of general horror than would be possible

by examples.

† I am informed by my learned friend Mr. Price of Bristol, who is about to give us the first critical edition and accurate version of the Saxon laws, that the original Saxon of the passage in the text is of a metrical structure; a curious circumstance, which, however, does not seem to me to lower its credit as a work of the twelfth century.

"In this king's time," says the Saxon chronicler, "all was dissension, and evil, and rapine. Against him soon rose rich men. They had sworn oaths, but no truth maintained. They were all forsworn and forgetful of their troth. They built castles be denied that this great writer was, to use the lanwhich they held out against him. They guage of his own age, a monarchomatist.

Buchanan's Dedication to James VI. It cannot

Scott.* The commanders in that battle, that they became his enemies, and conwho had lost no part of the Norman inso- tributed mainly to his misfortunes. On her lence, addressed the captains by whom arrival in London, Matilda was joyfully they were surrounded::-"Illustrious chiefs welcomed by the citizens; and Maud, the of England, by blood and race Normans, wife of Stephen (for there were three royal before whom bold France trembles, to ladies of that name), made humble suit for whom fierce England has submitted, under the liberty of her husband, on condition of whom Apulia has been restored to her sta- his resigning all claims, and retiring into tion, and whose names are famous at Anti- private life. Her suit was rejected in och and Jerusalem." The language in terms of reproach. The citizens of Lonwhich the Norman writers describe a Scot- don also made suit that the laws of king tish invasion is somewhat unaccountable in Edward might be restored, and the harsh the mouths of Stephen's subjects:-"They changes of the Normans abolished. The exercised their barbarity," says one writer, empress manifested such high displeasure "in the manner of wild beasts. They at this prayer for the observance of so spared no one. The helplessness of child- many oaths, that the citizens began to think hood and that of old age were equally in- of bringing her to reason by the same dueffectual securities against their cruelty. ress from which she refused to release SteThey put pregnant women to death by phen. Warned of this enterprise, she fled tearing the unborn infants out of the womb from the city by night, and established her with their swords."+" The king of Scots," head-quarters at Oxford. The indignant says another writer, “was a prince of gen- Londoners joined the king's party at Wintle disposition; but the Scots are a barbar- chester, and by their help her army was ous and impure nation; and their king, utterly discomfited. She was obliged to leading great bodies of them from the fur- feign herself to be dead, and to be conveyed thest parts of his country, was unable to in a hearse to Gloucester. Her brother restrain them." While these events were Robert was made prisoner; and his liberty, passing, Stephen reduced Normandy, which of more value to his party than that of most was a considerable security to his power in kings, was purchased by the release of SteEngland. He was strengthened, also, by a phen, who was Robert's prisoner in the considerable band of Breton and Flemish castle of Gloucester. Both prisoners were soldiers, whom he had hired and brought alike weary of the irksomeness and irons with him to this island. The leader of Ma- inflicted or retaliated on each by rival tortilda's party was Robert, a natural son of mentors. The escapes, stratagems, and vithe late king, who had become earl of cissitudes incident to a tumultuary war, Gloucester by marriage with the heiress of might have been very interesting, if they Robert Fitz-Haymon, a distinguished fol- could have been related tolerably in the lower of the Conqueror. This chief, the midst of such confusion. The empress fled most conspicuous of his time in peace and from Oxford when besieged there, in the war, now prepared to assert the legitimate inclement winter of 1142, by dressing herclaims of his sister. He conducted her self and attendants in white, when the into England in July, 1139. After many earth was whitened by snow. In every battles, of which we know little but the town and village the factions of the royalmisery which they brought on the people, ists and imperialists (as the party of Mathe army of the empress Maud defeated tilda might be called) had almost daily conStephen near Lincoln in 1141. "He was flicts. Families were ranged on opposite taken prisoner she was then declared sides; brother met brother in the shock; queen; and she provided so ill for the in- fathers imbrued their hands in the blood stability of fortune as to send him in irons of their sons; command existed nowhere; to his prison at Bristol." It is a prevalent fear and disappointment made men change opinion among old, but not contemporary, their party, according to the favor experiwriters, that the clergy, who hoped to pur- enced from their own leaders, or the hope chase the help of an usurper cheaply in the held forth by the opponents. The bands contest which they then carried on against led by Stephen were no otherwise distinthe civil powers, were so far disappointed guished from others than by the audacity in their hopes from his flagrant usurpation, with which the numbers of his Flemish

*Cab. Cyc. Hist. Scot. i. 36-42.

† Ord. Vit. lib. xiii.-Duchesne, 917.

mercenaries encouraged him to assault and destroy the magnificent monasteries, from an attack on which, those who were most Gesta Steph. Duchesne, 939. This description, inured to rapine, but who still dreaded the which, I fear, must comprehend my Highland forefathers, forms a melancholy contrast to the account guilt of sacrilege, recoiled with horror. of them ascribed to Ossian in the reign of Severus, This miserable warfare raged, with little but calls up very consolatory reflections in the minds of those who know their honest and brave descend mitigation, till the year 1147, when Matilda returned to Normandy, which her father

ants in the present age.

had wrested from Stephen. Her son had court, to scatter far and wide the firebrands been brought to England by the earl of of war, and to rekindle a flame which no Gloucester, and educated for three years at man might have the power to extinguish. that lord's castle of Bristol. Robert him- He began to ravage Cambridgeshire; and self was carried off by a fever, the natural being established at the princely abbey of consequence of an alternate succession of St. Edmund's Bury, he commanded the excess and privation. A breathing time country round about, including the lands of two years seems to have followed. In of the abbot, to be laid waste, and their 1149, Henry Fitz-Empress revisited Eng-fruits to be brought for his use into the abland, where he was knighted by his uncle bot's granary. As he sat down to a festival David, king of Scotland. The claims of he was suddenly seized with a frenzy, of his mother were strengthened in him by which he speedily died: in all likelihood his sex and his age. By the decease of his owing to an inflammation of the brain, the father Geoffrey Plantagenet, he succeeded fruit of habitual intemperance and of franto the territories of Anjou: Normandy he tic passions. The principal obstacle to conheld in the name of his mother. In the cession from Stephen being thus happily year following, with more policy than deli- removed, he no longer persevered in a vain cacy, he married Eleanor, duchess of Aqui- resistance to the just demands of the most taine, one of the most considerable sove- powerful of western princes. A common reigns of Europe, whose dominions extend- council of the kingdom was held at Wined from the Loire to the Pyrenees, who chester in November, 1153, where it was had been repudiated by Louis the Young agreed that Stephen should retain the for criminal commerce with her uncle the crown during his life; that he should adopt prince of Antioch, and for having stooped Henry, who was declared his successor; to the embraces of a young Turk; aggra- and that William, a young son of Stephen, vations of vice before unknown to the dis- should, on condition of swearing allegiance solute amours of the crusaders' camp. The to Henry, have a large appanage, of which young duke of Normandy, however, es- the city of Norwich was a part. He was poused her within six weeks of her divorce, also to succeed to his patrimonial earldom and thus became lord of western France, of Boulogne. On the 25th of October, from the confines of Flanders to the bor-1154, the boisterous life and wretched ders of Spain. Both the competitors for reign of Stephen were brought to a close. England essayed their arms on the conti- He deserves no other reproach than that nent. Eustace, the only survivor among of having embraced the occupation of a Stephen's sons, overran Normandy. But captain of banditti. If that were a legitiHenry, who expelled his own brother Geof-mate profession, he must be owned to posfrey from Anjou, speedily recovered the sess many of its best qualities,―valor, atduchy; and having made peace with Louis, tachment, prodigal generosity, and somewho too late repented a fastidiousness which times even mercy. Inferior as he is to the cost him the vast territories of Aquitaine Robin Hoods and Rob Roys which are exand Poitou, he was at liberty to turn his hibited to us by the hand of genius, he whole force against Stephen. The armies probably had better qualities than the real of the competitors came in sight of each persons who bore these names.

HENRY II. 1154-1189.

other at Wallingford. The lords of both parties, weary of the dreadful scene in which they had been for many years engaged, labored to persuade both princes to peace. The earl of Arundel had the boldHENRY PLANTAGENET ascended the ness to think, and to say, "that it was not throne without an adverse murmur, and reasonable to prolong the calamities of a was hailed with more hope than even that whole nation on account of the ambition of usually excited by young kings, as the two princes." The two chiefs, in a short most potent prince of his time, about to conversation between them across a narrow employ his youth and his power in compospart of the Thames, agreed to a truce, in ing the long disorders under which Enghopes of negotiating a peace. land had suffered.

The prospect of peace seemed likely to The invasion of Ireland, the most memobe marred by the ambition of Eustace, a rable event of Henry's reign, will be reyouth of seventeen, whom the archbishop lated by Mr. Moore; and the great advanof Canterbury, by the advice of the pope, tages which he obtained over Scotland are had, a short time before, refused to perpetu-sufficiently touched upon by Sir Walter ate his country's miseries by crowning. Scott. On the provinces occupied by such Offended and alarmed by the truce, he re- historians, no prudent writer would choose proved his father coarsely for such an to encroach; and as two parts of the common agreement; and in a furious rage left the histories of England are thus happily sepa

rated from it by the plan of our collection, dominions of Henry II. extended over more it is sufficient to take this opportunity of than a fifth of that great country, including warning the reader to expect no narrative the whole Atlantic coast, so important both of Scotch or Irish affairs in the succeeding in itself and for its communication with portions of this historical summary. England. Both these princes were equally The wars of Henry with France do not French: in that respect alike acceptable to deserve a longer recital than our limits the French, and, perhaps, to the ruling part may contain. His contests with the church, of the English nation. Henry's strength an important part of the history of every enabled him safely to assume the deportEuropean country in the middle age, are ment of a vassal; and, often by address still deserving of consideration. The pro-and insinuation, to dispense with the use gress of law and government, though, to be of superior force against his liege lord. A understood entirely, they must be studied great hereditary officet of the crown, which elsewhere, cannot even here be overlooked; he held in right of Anjou, afforded him leand the domestic misfortunes which embit- gal means or pretexts for exercising the tered the declining years of a puissant and prerogative of Louis without knowing or magnificent monarch always afford lessons regarding his pleasure; and he was too of signal instruction, even where there wise to weaken his authority over his own may be little to give them a claim to com- vassals by the example of a needless breach passion. of feudal duty to the king of France. The His coronation and that of Eleanor were interview for doing homage was employed solemnized with splendor, soon after his by Henry in disposing Louis to acquiesce arrival from Normandy. He issued a char- in stripping Geoffrey, Henry's younger broter confirmatory of that of his grandfather, ther, of Anjou, of the appanage settled on passing by in silence the acts of Stephen's Geoffrey by their father. As soon as Geoftumultuary usurpation. His first steps frey was compelled to accept a pension inwere those of a vigorous reformer. He stead of his principality, Henry made a took possession of the royal castles, usurp- progress of policy as well as magnificence ed during the late confusions; he levelled through his Aquitanian dominions; and rewith the ground the many fortresses of the ceived the fealty of his greater vassals, ir. same sort, erected without warrant of law, a great council holden at Bordeaux. On and more for the purpose of rapine than the death of Geoffrey, in 1158, Henry enfor that of security. He commanded by larged his dominions under pretence of ar proclamation all the Flemish mercenaries ambiguous claim of the brother whom he of Stephen's army to depart from the king- had robbed of a legitimate patrimony. dom under pain of death. He was not de- Charles the Simple appears to have grantterred by the abused titles of earls and ed to Rollo whatever supremacy the Carlobarons, which that prince had lavished on vingian family exercised or claimed over these ringleaders, from resuming the lands the country of the Armorican Britons, so and honors received by them as wages for that the rulers of Britany were considered their share in the oppression and destruc- as immediate vassals of Normandy, and tion of the kingdom. only through them feudally connected with "He reformed the adulterated coin,"* the crown of France. The infidelity of an says an ancient historian, ignorant of the Anglo-Norman lady involved Britany in a import of these momentous words, and as civil war, which lasted for half a century. little aware of the effect of adulterating, Duke Conan III., who had espoused and or even reforming, the coin, in spreading long endured Matilda, the natural daughter disorder and suffering among mankind, as of Henry I., declared on his deathbed that he was of the existence of the mighty her children were illegitimate. Amidst the powers of electricity and steam; referring, contests occasioned by this unseasonable therefore, with all other men for many declaration, the inhabitants of the county ages, the facts which alarmed or afflicted of Nantes, the most opulent part of the him to agents which had no direct share Armorican peninsula, unwilling to follow in producing such calamities. Henry did the fortunes of the Celtic race in Lower homage to Louis VII. for Normandy, Aqui- Britany, chose Geoffrey Plantagenet, a taine, Poitou, Anjou, Touraine, and a long neighboring French prince, to be their train of dependent territories, which must count. Henry claimed Nantes as heir to have rather awakened the jealousy, than Geoffrey; and as he also affirmed that he flattered the pride, of his lord paramount.

Less than a tenth part of modern France was subject to the immediate and effective authority of Louis VII. ; while the French

* "Novam fecit monetam."-Hoveden, 281.

† Great seneschal of France.

Daru, Hist. de Bretagne, i. 343. A work which would have been more commended if it had not been unreasonably forced into comparison with the History of Venice, one of the greatest accessions which historical knowledge has received in our age.