News reached Stephen that his uncle was on his deathbed while he was residing in the county of Boulogne, perhaps on Wednesday 27 November 1135. It must have taken him aback. Although the old king was now sixty-seven, he had been well and vigorous till that week, on a hunting holiday in the forest of Lyons. Stephen had probably last seen him a month or two previously, when he joined the king patrolling the southern marches of Normandy with his military household. The fact that Stephen was in Boulogne when he heard that the king was dying explains what happened next. There is every reason to believe that Theobald and
Stephen had already agreed a strategy to seize the throne on Henry’s death. But when it came to the crunch, Theobald was in central France and Stephen was in an excellent position to move on England. Even more luckily, Stephen was at liberty to move, unlike many of his colleagues at court, who were bound by a solemn oath to stay in Normandy till the king was appropriately buried. The king died during the evening of Advent Sunday, 1 December, and the all-important news may have reached Stephen during Monday, if teams of horses brought the message by relay.
If Stephen had taken ship on Monday afternoon from the port of Wissant, he would have been in Kent with favourable weather as early as 3 December. It is unlikely, however, that he did move that fast, for news had reached England of the king’s death before Stephen arrived with it. Knowing what we do of Stephen’s intense piety, it is quite likely that, before he crossed the Channel, he would have thought it decent first to organise appropriate commemoration and alms for his departed uncle and benefactor’s soul. Dover shut its gates against him; it had been forewarned from Normandy by its lord, Robert of Gloucester, who attempted to close the Channel ports. Stephen landed nonetheless, and, although he found the gates of the city of Canterbury also closed against travellers, rode on to London, where he found a very different welcome. The city was in a tumult over the old king’s death: a royal succession was an uncertain time and bad for business. Stephen arrived there at the right time. He was known by the city fathers and popular with the people. A party already existed in the country at large which looked to Stephen and Theobald as lords, as contemporaries tell us - and it was nowhere stronger than in the capital. Count Stephen, the king’s nephew, was often in the city, was patron of two of its great churches, St Martin-le-Grand and Aldgate priory, and his mother-in-law was buried at Cluniac Bermondsey, just down the river from the city.I So he found the ground for his succession already well prepared. His brother Theobald was hardly known to the English. So rather than proclaim Theobald the rightful king, Stephen rode the moment and answered the popular mood by nominating himself for the succession. The city responded with enthusiasm and its leaders and people were the first to hail him as king.
But Stephen was not yet king; he had a way to go yet before he could Sit on his late uncle’s throne. In England, from the time of the Conqueror till the time of King John, kingship ceased on the death of the old king, and there was a gap till the new king was formally inaugurated by anointing and coronation. Stephen as yet needed to get himself anointed, and so put his status beyond dispute. Fortunately for him the means were ready to hand in the agency of his younger brother, Henry. Henry of Blois was four or five years younger than Stephen; named not after his uncle but more probably his father, Stephen-Henry of Blois. His mother had arranged for his reception as a boy in the great abbey of Cluny in Burgundy, and there he was educated and professed in what was then the very centre of western monasticism. But in the end, when his uncle offered him the abbacy of Glastonbury in 1126, he followed Stephen into a career in the Anglo-Norman realm. Three years later, when he reached the canonical age of thirty, Henry was nominated to the rich and distinguished see of Winchester, a senior bishopric which he held in conjunction with Glastonbury abbey. He was a singularly princely and political bishop - although no one has ever questioned his dedication to his vows as monk, priest and bishop. By the time King Henry died, he dominated the bench of English bishops with his intellect, authority and self-assurance.
Bishop Henry soon joined his brother in London, and with him came another invaluable adviser. Bishop Roger of Salisbury, the head of the administration of the kingdom. The two bishops got to work. They went into conference with the archbishop of Canterbury, who had doubts about the propriety of setting aside the oath to support Mathilda’s succession that Henry I had imposed on the bishops, abbots and magnates of England in 1127. They argued that the king had done wrong in imposing such an oath on his unwilling subjects; and that he had done it only to keep the realm together. Finally - their trump card - they produced the royal steward, Hugh Bigod, who had attended Henry’s deathbed and was willing to swear that the king had released his barons from the oath as he was dying, and at the end was not insistent that they accepted his daughter as ruling queen. In the meantime they were urging on the archbishop that the unsettled state of the kingdom would soon cause internal collapse unless he consented to anoint a king: and who was more suitable than Stephen, by lineage and by his military capacity? The archbishop wearily consented, and on the third Sunday of Advent, 22 December 1135, Stephen was crowned king in Westminster abbey. It was a sparsely attended event, since most of the great magnates were still in Normandy, and the coronation banquet was also less than splendid, but the point was that the deed was done, and England had a king. It remained as yet to see whether he would be challenged as king.
The main source of dissent was likely to be in Normandy, where the great magnates of the court had begun their deliberations as to the proper successor while the dead king’s body was being embalmed in Rouen. A series of conferences led in the second week of December to an invitation being issued to Theobald of Blois to assume the rule of Normandy, as might have been expected. But all was thrown into confusion when, in the middle of Theobald’s first court with his future subjects, a monk brought news from England that London had already accepted Stephen as king. Rather than start a fraternal civil war, Theobald withdrew to Chartres; annoyed, as the sources say - although if so, his annoyance was only temporary. For him, the most important thing was that the count of Anjou was excluded from the succession. For their part, the count of Anjou and the empress had seized several border fortresses north of Maine on news of King Henry’s death, but that was all they accomplished. The bulk of the Normans simply refused to accept them, and so, when Stephen was crowned, he was already accepted {faute de mieux) as duke of Normandy.
King Stephen’s advisers, with the remorseless energy that is characteristic now of a presidential campaign team, ploughed onwards. Bishop Henry masterminded an international offensive against the empress and her claims. During the Christmas season, a brief was prepared for the papal curia, and testimonials collected not just from the bishops of England and Normandy but from northern French courts. Louis VI of France and Count Theobald of Blois both obliged, happy to see Anjou excluded from the succession. A high-powered embassy was despatched to Rome to present the dossier and seek the endorsement of Pope Innocent II. Its members were somewhat discomfited when an Angevin ambassador, the bishop of Le Mans, turned up to dispute their case, but in the end the pope was persuaded by Stephen’s advocates, and his cardinals no doubt by English money. A papal letter was sent back to Stephen accepting his claims.2 The pope asserted his own God-given right to judge such claims and make kings if he wished, and recited What he had been told of the circumstance of Stephen’s succession. He deplored the civil anarchy into which he understood England had fallen before Stephen’s prompt action recalled it to peace, and he noted Stephen’s claims of close kinship to the late Henry and his promises to honour the Church and St Peter in particular. For all these reasons, Pope Innocent accepted Stephen’s claims and confirmed him as king. The king’s advisers prudently circulated dozens of copies of the letter throughout England (and doubtless Normandy too). The reason we know of it is because one was sent as far north as Hexham, whose prior was a man of literary tastes and copied it into his historical notes.
Another thing that the letter established, which would in the end be to King Stephen’s disadvantage, was the idea that public order in England tottered on Henry Ts death. Stephen’s advisers presented their man to the pope and to England as the public order candidate, a man strong on aristocratic disorder: another King Henry, in other words. Stephen was just the sort of man who could continue the good old Anglo-Norman tradition of strong, administrative kingship. As Stephen would find out, ‘zero tolerance’ of public disorder is a brittle weapon in the hands of a politician. In fact, there had been insecurity when Henry died, but no widespread disorder other than one nasty murder of one of the late king’s nastier servants in Pontefract. Stephen pardoned the murderers on the apparent grounds that he had not been king when the assassination had been carried out, so his majesty could not have been offended by it. Henry’s kingship had been rather more subtle than ‘zero tolerance’, and he specialised in trade offs and bribery in order to keep people quiet and happy. Stephen had to continue to operate that venal system, and he would continue to be challenged by discontented magnates, but he had saddled himself now with a public position that would make any sort of compromise in the affairs of state look like weakness.
King Stephen’s episcopal advisers stage-managed an effortless first six months as king for their master. He met the late King’s Henry’s funeral cortege as it landed in Hampshire, and on 4 lanuary 1136 he was at Reading to witness the elaborate and sumptuous funeral. He put his royal shoulder to the bier of the dead king on its procession into the abbey. Stephen then moved north, gathering troops and support as he went to confront his wife’s uncle. King David of Scotland, who had occupied Cumberland and Northumberland in support of the empress, his other niece. David, however, proved amenable when Stephen entered the north with an impressive army funded from the bottomless royal treasury, and a fortnight’s conference at Durham between the monarchs in February 1136 settled their differences for the time being. The next item on his advisers’ agenda was a fitting court at Easter to make good the paltry support on the day of his coronation and at his first Christmas court. The court began at Westminster on 22 March with the coronation of Queen Mathilda, who had arrived from Boulogne after the birth of their latest child. There was a great banquet with king and queen wearing their gold crowns, the giving of gifts and high festivities as the glittering and densely populated court moved up the Thames to Oxford. But not too many gifts were given. Under the tutelage of his advisers, and being already unquestionably king, Stephen could be more economical with his patronage than his uncle had been in 1100. Some courtiers were annoyed at this. The marcher baron, Richard de Clare, left Oxford muttering darkly about the king’s parsimony, and was so intent on his grievance that he blundered into a Welsh ambush in the hills and was murdered. Others were content simply to be confirmed in what Henry had given them. Others again were relieved to get blanket pardons for any misdeeds done in the late king’s service. Few got much in the way of new lands or acquisitions.
It was not just the barons who were treated economically. They had been wooed earlier in the year by talk of abolishing the Danegeld and limiting forest pleas; all things the aristocracy of Henry Fs reign found onerous - at least those who lacked the king’s direct favour. After the papal confirmation arrived in time for Easter, such talk was dropped. Stephen (and the bishops who were advising him) was not quite so cavalier with the Church. He issued a general confirmation of its liberties and relieved it of some of the forest dues imposed on it in the last reign. He also promised to show more respect to churches experiencing a vacancy than his uncle had; he would exact no fees from appointees to bishoprics and abbeys. But Stephen was not too cavalier with his magnates. We know of at least one edict that seems to have come out of his court at this time, which answered an aristocratic concern. He allowed that when in future a baron left several daughters as heirs, his estates could be divided up among them. This allowed a baron to provide For all his daughters, and increased the amount of profitable marriages available for the upwardly mobile.
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