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Act II

Triumph

Henry was drawn ‘as much to the business of arms as to the toga; to war as much as to books’.

Gerald of Wales, On the Instruction of Princes

I

Henry was poised on the threshold of unimaginable power. But he would have to work for it.

He sailed to England through a tempest to relieve his friends and claim his crown. Once again, luck was with him. He and his mercenaries landed safely, probably at Wareham in Dorset, on 6 January. This time, Stephen took the threat of Henry seriously.

Eustace, obsessed with Henry, followed his prey from France across the winter seas. Both sides expected this to be the final bloody battle between enemies whose camps had been fighting for nearly twenty years, and Eustace did not want to miss his victory. Only one man could be crowned king of England. The pope had refused Eustace; now only Henry’s murder would enable him to inherit the throne on Stephen’s death.

The chroniclers talked of Henry’s coming in almost messianic terms. The author of the Gesta had England ‘shaking’ at Henry’s arrival; Henry of Huntingdon wrote of England, ‘That wretched country, before reduced to ruin, but now regaining new life by the prospect of his coming to her assistance’, where Henry is cast as the saviour of a battered land.1 Henry of Huntingdon positioned the young duke as inheritor of all that had been his namesake grandfather’s, Henry I:

Heir to thy grandsire’s name and high renown,

Thy England calls thee, Henry, to her throne:

Now, fallen from her once imperial state,

Exhausted, helpless, ruined, desolate,

She sighs her griefs, and fainting scarcely lives:

One solitary hope alone survives.

‘Save me, oh save me! Henry; or I die …’2

But this was retrospective propaganda. These dazzling words aside, Henry had not yet won.

He did not go directly to the aid of his friends at Wallingford; it was firmly royalist territory where Stephen had erected at least two additional castles and, together with Eustace, had gathered his army. Henry did not yet feel strong enough to be so far from towns loyal to his cause – Bristol, Gloucester and Devizes – and their supplies. Instead he marched his men sixty miles or so north of his landing place to Malmesbury in Wiltshire, to besiege the castle, ensuring Stephen’s appearance. Stephen duly dashed his men westwards to fend off the attack.

Henry ‘threw himself straight into the siege, for delay was not his way, and soon took it’.3 He stormed the town and took the castle; these tactics would form Henry’s distinctive movements in defensive warfare – swift, decisive, brutal and nearly always effective. But disappointingly there was no battle. Numbed by freezing rain and hungry – famine had ravaged the area – Stephen’s army refused to engage; Henry was forced to agree to a truce. Malmesbury’s castellan handed the fortress over to him without a fight.

Stephen’s men slowly turned to Henry, not least because a number of the most influential magnates felt that in doing so, they would end the civil war. Stephen was evidently ‘gloomy and downcast’ by the defections; the author of the Gesta records that the king was dispirited and ‘noticed that some of his leading barons were slack and very casual in their service and had already sent envoys by stealth and made a compact with the duke’.4

By early spring, many of the country’s leading magnates stood firmly behind Henry – his uncle, Reginald earl of Cornwall, William earl of Gloucester, John the Marshal, and Robert of Dunstanville. Henry had a stunning coup when the powerful and respected magnate Robert earl of Leicester, one of the Beaumont twins, came over to his side. Robert, close to Henry I, had been at the old king’s bedside as he died. Although previously, if only nominally, loyal to Stephen, he now saw England’s future with Duke Henry rather than a weakened Stephen, or Eustace. Gervase of Canterbury wrote that by April, ‘he began to take the duke’s part and for some time ministered to his needs’.5 The Anglo-Norman nobility looked to Robert; he was level-headed and seen as a natural leader. With his newly pledged loyalty, and the thirty castles he brought, the campaign was turning in Henry’s favour.6

The freezing weather had brought Henry a truce. Now, he spent the next few months making huge territorial gains throughout the Midlands, taking castle after castle, including Warwick and Tutbury, by force or negotiation. He held court wherever he went, behaving as if he were already king. It was a spectacular display of strength, pomp and showmanship, and it painted a picture for the nobility of what his rule would look like.

At Easter, Henry held a lavish court at Gloucester, and called himself ‘duke of Aquitaine’ for the first time. He granted charters and lands; unlike Stephen, he had the power to grant lands in Normandy, enticing to the nobility. Henry could now assert his right to rule through succession, including a standard clause in his charters confirming rights, by granting beneficiaries, ‘everything that King Henry my grandfather gave him’. This representation of himself as restorer and regenerator of his grandfather’s government was a theme Henry would return to again and again throughout his own reign.

Henry knew that the game was not yet won, in spite of his successes over the spring and early summer. Wallingford would change that; for Stephen, it marked the beginning of the end.

In July or August 1153, Henry was finally in a strong enough position to relieve his supporters besieged at Wallingford Castle. Stephen and Eustace arrived with ‘an inexpressibly large army from every part of England’.7 Again, Henry was to be disappointed – there was no battle between the enemies. Stephen’s men did not want to fight the man who it now seemed inevitable would be king. The Gesta Stephani recorded how the barons on both sides offered irresistible arguments for a peace to save the kingdom: ‘Wherefore the leading men of each army … were greatly grieved and shrank, on both sides, from a conflict that was not merely between fellow countrymen but meant the desolation of the whole kingdom.’8

Men who knew the politics and the country better than Henry advocated a negotiated peace rather than the uncertainty and loss of life of a battle.