Page:Dickens - A Child s History of England, 1900.djvu/87

Rh of age, was very powerful: not only on account of his mother having resigned all Normandy to him, but also from his having married, 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, 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 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, 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 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 an 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 Buffering history. In the division of the nobility between