King Stephen’s eldest son Eustace IV, count of Boulogne, was twenty-three years old in 1153. Already he was a veteran of the long struggle between his father and the Plantagenets. He had grown up knowing nothing but division and war, told always that he was a king in waiting, and encouraged to fight for the sake of securing his Crown. He was his father’s heir, and as a result, Henry duke of Normandy was his bitterest enemy.
Henry’s rise had been meteoric. Between 1150 and 1153 he had changed from the landless son of an ambitious count to the apparent master of half of France. He had driven several great men into opposition, Eustace the chief among them. And Eustace had made it his business to see that the Norman chronicler Robert of Torigni’s assessment that ‘almost all of the Normans thought that Duke Henry would rapidly lose all of his possessions’ came true as rapidly as possible. To that end he had allied with Louis VII – whose sister Constance he had married – and Henry’s own brother, Geoffrey Plantagenet the Younger, who felt his brother had cheated him out of a portion of their father’s inheritance. Together, they had contrived to wage war against the duke of Normandy wherever and whenever they could.
Eustace was, by definition, the man who stood to lose the most in any rapprochement between Stephen and Henry. His position was unusually weak. An argument between Stephen and Pope Eugene III meant that in 1153 Eustace had not yet been anointed as co-king, in the manner that was now customary. This paved the way for an eventual peace in which Stephen could disinherit his sons (Eustace had a younger brother, William) and name Henry as his heir. After Wallingford that seemed more and more likely.
According to the author of the Gesta Stephani, Eustace was ‘greatly vexed and angry because the war, in his opinion, had reached no proper conclusion’. To give vent to some of this anger and frustration, he stormed eastward to Bury St Edmunds, where he indulged in a bout of fairly pointless burning and pillaging.
Alas, for the unfortunate Eustace, God – or perhaps St Edmund – was on hand to punish the iniquitous. Shortly after his self-indulgent orgy of violence and rapine, Eustace fell ill and died in early August 1153. The cause was thought to be either rotten food or sheer grief. Cynics might have suspected poison.
Eustace’s death was heartbreaking to Stephen. Yet it was also providential, in that it opened the path for negotiations that would allow Duke Henry to take his place. The agreement took the form of a sort of legal fostering that would hand the Crown to the Plantagenet line and end the war for good. Stephen’s second son, William, was evidently more tractable than his late elder brother, and accepted a large landed settlement in recompense for abandoning any claim to the throne.
Discussions between the two parties took place throughout the late summer, overseen by Archbishop Theobald of Canterbury and King Stephen’s brother, Henry bishop of Winchester. In November 1153, at a conference in Winchester, a formal truce was agreed. Stephen formally adopted Henry as his son and heir. ‘What inestimable joy! What blessed day!’ cheered Henry of Huntingdon. ‘The king himself received the young prince at Winchester with a magnificent procession of bishops and nobles through the cheering crowds.’ England could harbour its greatest hope of peace and prosperity under a single, unified and universal royal authority since 1135.
The peace was sealed in a highly symbolic venue and ceremony. Winchester was the place where English kingship was sanctified: the old Minster was the resting-place of St Swithun and legendary Saxon kings like Aedwig. The great men of the land gathered in the chill of the cathedral, to be addressed by King Stephen and Duke Henry.
What a pair they made. The 61-year-old Stephen performed his role with dignity. ‘A mild man, and gentle, and good,’ was how the Gesta Stephani described him. Next to the impish, scruffily red-headed, twenty-year-old Henry, he seemed a relic of a departing generation. But he stood with grace and spoke to the congregation, uttering words that would have had his eldest son spinning in his recently dug grave.
‘Know that I, King Stephen, appoint Henry duke of Normandy after me as my successor in the kingdom of England and my heir by hereditary right,’ Stephen said. ‘Thus I give and confirm to him and his heirs the Kingdom of England.’
Henry made a similar statement. Then, in the presence of all his future nobles, he did homage to Stephen, and received the homage of Stephen’s younger son William. It was an open and wholly visible representation of the new order of things. A new narrative of royal lineage had been publicly constructed. The legal chaos of a usurpation or deposition was avoided. Through sound military leadership and brilliant diplomacy, Henry had muscled his way into the English succession.
The celebrations were lavish. Stephen swept into England’s ancient capital with his newly adopted son: ‘the illustrious young man was gloriously received in the city of Winchester, led by the king, with a glittering procession of bishops and famous men,’ wrote William of Newburgh. ‘Then the king took the duke to London, and there he was received with joy by an innumerable assembly of common people, with splendid processions …’ The truce of Winchester was formally sealed and distributed at Westminster. ‘Peace dawned on the ruined realm,’ wrote Henry of Huntingdon, ‘putting an end to its troubled night.’
During the limbo that prevailed between Henry’s acceptance as heir and Stephen’s future death, the old king agreed to act on the next king’s advice. Together they began the long process of cleaning up the broken kingdom. There were three key tasks: suppressing violence and spoliation; ejecting the gangs of hired foreign mercenaries that had flooded the country; and levelling the castles that had sprung up since Stephen’s accession.
There were still extremist factions who disapproved of the peace process. At a meeting in Canterbury in March 1154, Henry was informed of a plot against his life by dissident Flemings. It was alleged that Stephen’s son William knew about it. Judging that the situation in England was now stable enough to make his continued presence unnecessary, and also just dangerous enough to justify his departure, Henry decided to return to Normandy. As Stephen went on progress to the north of England, and busied his administrators with the task of circulating a new coinage, Henry left England that March, taking a discreet route to the Channel via Rochester and London.
In late October 1154, Henry was campaigning with Louis VII against rebellious vassals in the borderland region between Normandy and France known as the Vexin, when the news reached him that Stephen was dead. According to the chronicler Gervase of Canterbury, Stephen had been meeting with the count of Flanders on 25 October 1154 when he was taken ill. ‘The king was suddenly seized with a violent pain in his gut, accompanied by a flow of blood (as had happened to him before),’ wrote Gervase. ‘After he had taken to his bed in [Dover Priory] he died.’ Stephen was buried in the Cluniac monastery in Faversham, Kent, alongside his wife Queen Matilda, whose wise counsel he had lost with her death in May 1152, and his intemperate son Eustace.
Stephen died disconsolate. He was a man obsessed with royal dignity and ceremony, and his failure freely to choose and anoint one of his sons as heir would have been compounded by the humiliation of losing the loyalty and support of his sworn nobles when Duke Henry came to England. But if his reign was a dismal failure, the Stephanic peace was a resounding success, negotiated well and upheld by the admirable will of the major magnates. Henry and Stephen had successfully created a vehicle to ensure the first peaceful transfer of royal power for nearly seventy years. When Henry came to England to claim his Crown in December 1154, it was at his leisure, knowing that he was wanted and implicitly accepted by the political community as king. He promised stability and a single, universal royal authority, such as had been sorely missing for the past, miserable nineteen years. What was more, he had proven himself. There was sycophancy, no doubt, in Henry bishop of Huntingdon’s invocation on the coming of the king, but there was real hope too:
England, long numbed by mortal chill, now you grow warm, revived by the heat of a new sun. You raise the country’s bowed head, and with tears of sorrow wiped away, you weep for joy … With tears you utter these words to your foster child: ‘You are spirit, I am flesh: now as you enter, I am restored to life.’