第32章 ENGLAND UNDER MATILDA AND STEPHEN(2)

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 and silver,were tortured with fire and smoke,were hung up by the thumbs,were hung up by the heels with great weights to their heads,were torn with jagged irons,killed with hunger,broken to death in narrow chests filled with sharp-pointed stones,murdered in countless fiendish ways.In England there was no corn,no meat,no cheese,no butter,there were no tilled lands,no harvests.

Ashes of burnt towns,and dreary wastes,were all that the traveller,fearful of the robbers who prowled abroad at all hours,would see in a long day's journey;and from sunrise until night,he would not come upon a home.

The clergy sometimes suffered,and heavily too,from pillage,but many of them had castles of their own,and fought in helmet and armour like the barons,and drew lots with other fighting men for their share of booty.The Pope (or Bishop of Rome),on King Stephen's resisting his ambition,laid England under an Interdict at one period of this reign;which means that he allowed no service to be performed in the churches,no couples to be married,no bells to be rung,no dead bodies to be buried.Any man having the power to refuse these things,no matter whether he were called a Pope or a Poulterer,would,of course,have the power of afflicting numbers of innocent people.That nothing might be wanting to the miseries of King Stephen's time,the Pope threw in this contribution to the public store-not very like the widow's contribution,as I think,when Our Saviour sat in Jerusalem over-against the Treasury,'and she threw in two mites,which make a farthing.'