Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 22.djvu/558

 head, declared against him. Henry called a council, laid formal charges against the king, and threatened to appeal to Rome. In the midst of this crisis Matilda and her half-brother, Robert of Gloucester, landed in the south of England, and a civil war began. From this time forward, for fourteen dismal years, the land knew no peace. It is needless to go into details. Neither party was strong enough to deal a final blow at the other. The nobility changed sides as they pleased, fighting generally for their own interests or for plunder; bands of freebooters wandered up and down the country ; upwards of a thousand castles, each of which was a den of robbers, were erected ; the church found threats and persuasion equally ineffective to restore peace and order. " Men said openly," we are told by the chronicler, " that Christ and His saints slept." At the battle of Lincoln in 1141 Stephen was taken prisoner. After this Matilda was elected queen, but she soon forfeited the allegiance of her supporters. The Londoners revolted, the empress fled to Oxford, and the earl of Gloucester was taken prisoner. He was exchanged for Stephen, and matters went on as before. About 1147 there came a change. Matilda left the country, and her son Henry took the lead. His predominance was further secured by the death of Robert of Gloucester in 1148. Three years later Henry became count of Anjou on the death of his father, while his marriage with Eleanor of Aquitaine made him one of the most powerful princes in Europe. This great accession of strength enabled him to meet Stephen on more than equal terms, and Stephen on the death of his son Eustace was more inclined to peace. In November 1153 the treaty of Wallingford brought the long struggle to an end. It was agreed that Stephen should reign till his death, and that Henry should succeed him. A scheme of reform was drawn up, which Stephen endeavoured, during the short remainder of his reign, to carry out. He died on October 25, 1154. A brave man, a good soldier, merciful and generous, but devoid of moral strength and political insight, he was utterly incapable to discharge a task which demanded all the skill and energy of his great successor. His nominal reign was a period of anarchy in English history, important only as a full justification for the tyrannies of Henry I. and Henry II. Authorities. Ordericus Vitalis, eel. Le Prevost; William of Malmesbury, ed. Hamilton (Rolls Series) ; Gesta Stepfutni, ed. Sewell (Engl. Hist. Soc.); Gervase of Canterbury, ed. Stubbs (Rolls Series) ; Henry of Huntingdon, ed. Arnold (Rolls Series) ; English Clironicle, ed. Thorpe (Rolls Series) ; Freeman, Norman Conquest, vol. v. ; Lappenberg, Gcsch. Englands,vo. iii. (G. W. P. )

STEPHEN, SIR JAMES (1789–1859), historian, was the son of James Stephen, master in chancery, author of The Slavery of the West India Colonies and other works, and was born in London 3d January 1789. He was educated at Trinity Hall, Cambridge, graduating B.A. in 1812, after which he studied for the bar and was called at Lincoln’s Inn. He obtained an extensive practice as a chancery barrister, being ultimately counsel to the colonial department and counsel to the Board of Trade. In 1834 he became assistant under-secretary for the colonies, and shortly afterwards permanent under-secretary. On his retirement in 1847 he was made a knight commander of the Bath. In 1849 he was appointed regius professor of modern history in the university of Cambridge, having already distinguished himself by his brilliant studies in ecclesiastical biography contributed to the Edinburgh Review, which were published that year under the title Essays in Ecclesiastical Biography and Other Subjects ; a 4th edition, with a short memoir, appeared in 1860. He was also tha author of Lectures on the History of France, 2 vols., 1851, 3d ed. 1857, and Desultory and Systematic Reading, a lecture, 1853. He died at Coblentz on the 15th of September 1859. STEPHENS, the incorrect English form of the name of Estienne, the distinguished French family of scholars and printers.

The founder of the race was (d. 1520), the scion of a noble family of Provence, who came to Paris in 1502, and soon afterwards set up a printing establishment at the top of the Rue St Jean cle Beauvais, on the hill of Sainte-Genevieve opposite the law school. He died in 1520, and, his three sons being minors, the business was carried on by his foreman Simon de Colines, who in 1521 married his widow.

(1503–1559) was Henri’s second son. After his father’s death he acted as assistant to his step-father, and in this capacity superintended the printing of a Latin edition of the New Testament in 16mo (1523). Some slight alterations which he had introduced into the text brought upon him the censures of the faculty of theology. It was the first of a long series of disputes between him and that body. It appears that he had intimate relations with the new Evangelical preachers almost from the beginning of the movement, and that soon after this time he definitely joined the Reformed Church. In 1526 he entered into possession of his father’s printing establishment, and adopted as his device the celebrated olive-tree (a reminiscence doubtless of his grandmother’s family of Montolivet), with the motto from the epistle to the Romans (xi. 20), Noli altum sapere, sometimes with the addition sed time. In 1528 he married Perrette, a daughter of the scholar and printer Josse Bade (Jodocus Badius), and in the same year he published his first Latin Bible, an edition in folio, upon which he had been at work for the last four years. In 1532 appeared his Thesaurus Linguæ Latinæ, a dictionary of Latin words and phrases, upon which for two years he had toiled incessantly, with no other assistance than that of Thierry of Beauvais. A second edition, greatly enlarged and improved, appeared in 1536, and a third, still further improved, in 3 vols. folio, in 1543. Though the Thesaurus is now superseded, its merits must not be forgotten. It was vastly superior to anything of the kind that had appeared before ; it formed the basis of future labours, and even as late as 1734 was considered worthy of being re-edited. In 1539 Robert was appointed king’s printer for Hebrew and Latin, an office to which, after the death of Conrad Neobar in 1540, he united that of king’s printer for Greek. In 1541 he was entrusted by Francis I. with the task of procuring from Claude Garamond, the engraver and type-founder, three sets of Greek type for the royal press. The middle size were the first ready, and with these Robert printed the editio princeps of the Ecclesiasticæ Historiæ of Eusebius and others (1544). The smallest size were first used for the 16mo edition of the New Testament known as the O mirificam (1546), while with the largest size was printed the magnificent folio of 1550. This edition involved the printer in fresh disputes with the faculty of theology, and towards the end of the following year he left his native town for ever, and took refuge at Geneva, where he published in 1552 a caustic and effective answer to his persecutors, under the title Ad Censuras Theologorum Parisiensium, quibus Biblia a R. Stephano, Typographo Regio, excusa calumniose notarunt, eiusdem R. S. Responsio. A French translation, which is remarkable for the excellence of its style, was published by him in the same year (printed in Rénouard’s Annales de l’Imprimerie des Estienne}. At Geneva Robert proved himself an ardent partisan of Calvin, several of whose works he published. He died there September 7, 1559.

It is by his work in connexion with the Bible, and especially as an editor of the New Testament, that he is on the whole best known. The text of his New Testament of 1550, either in its original form or in such slightly modified form as it assumed in the Elzevir text of 1634, remains to this day the traditional text. But, as modern