revolted; and, in alliance with the troops of Stephen, besieged her
at Winchester, where they took her brother Robert prisoner, whom,
as her best soldier and chief general, she was glad to exchange for
Stephen himself, who thus regained his liberty. Then, the long war
went on afresh. Once, she was pressed so hard in the Castle of
Oxford, in the winter weather when the snow lay thick upon the
ground, that her only chance of escape was to dress herself all in
white, and, accompanied by no more than three faithful Knights,
dressed in like manner that their figures might not be seen from
Stephen’s camp as they passed over the snow, to steal away on foot,
cross the frozen Thames, walk a long distance, and at last gallop
away on horseback. All this she did, but to no great purpose then;
Page 47
Dickens, Charles – A Child’s History of England
for her brother dying while the struggle was yet going on, she at
last withdrew to Normandy.
In two or three years after her withdrawal her cause appeared in
England, afresh, in the person of her son Henry, young Plantagenet,
who, at only eighteen years of age, was very powerful: not only on
account of his mother having resigned all Normandy to him, but also
from his having married ELEANOR, the divorced wife of the French
King, a bad woman, who had great possessions in France. Louis, the
French King, not relishing this arrangement, helped EUSTACE, King
Stephen’s son, to invade Normandy: but Henry drove their united
forces out of that country, and then returned here, to assist his
partisans, whom the King was then besieging at Wallingford upon the
Thames. Here, for two days, divided only by the river, the two
armies lay encamped opposite to one another – on the eve, as it
seemed to all men, of another desperate fight, when the EARL OF
ARUNDEL took heart and said ‘that it was not reasonable to prolong
the unspeakable miseries of two kingdoms to minister to the
ambition of two princes.’
Many other noblemen repeating and supporting this when it was once
uttered, Stephen and young Plantagenet went down, each to his own
bank of the river, and held a conversation across it, in which they
arranged a truce; very much to the dissatisfaction of Eustace, who
swaggered away with some followers, and laid violent hands on the
Abbey of St. Edmund’s-Bury, where he presently died mad. The truce
led to a solemn council at Winchester, in which it was agreed that
Stephen should retain the crown, on condition of his declaring
Henry his successor; that WILLIAM, another son of the King’s,
should inherit his father’s rightful possessions; and that all the
Crown lands which Stephen had given away should be recalled, and
all the Castles he had permitted to be built demolished. Thus
terminated the bitter war, which had now lasted fifteen years, and
had again laid England waste. In the next year STEPHEN died, after
a troubled reign of nineteen years.
Although King Stephen was, for the time in which he lived, a humane
and moderate man, with many excellent qualities; and although
nothing worse is known of him than his usurpation of the Crown,
which he probably excused to himself by the consideration that King
Henry the First was a usurper too – which was no excuse at all; the
people of England suffered more in these dread nineteen years, than
at any former period even of their suffering history. In the
division of the nobility between the two rival claimants of the
Crown, and in the growth of what is called the Feudal System (which
made the peasants the born vassals and mere slaves of the Barons),
every Noble had his strong Castle, where he reigned the cruel king
of all the neighbouring people. Accordingly, he perpetrated
whatever cruelties he chose. And never were worse cruelties
committed upon earth than in wretched England in those nineteen
years.
The writers who were living then describe them fearfully. They say
that the castles were filled with devils rather than with men; that
the peasants, men and women, were put into dungeons for their gold