So far so good, but after April 1136 troubles began to gather around the head of the new king, which was perhaps no more than any new king should have expected. They were not troubles as serious as had confronted King Henry between 1100 and 1103. But, ominously, they proved difficult for Stephen and his episcopal advisers to resolve, and demonstrated rather too publicly that as a king he had limitations. Discontented barons were the first to challenge him. In May 1136, Stephen heard that two west country magnates - Robert of Bampton and Baldwin de Redvers - had put their castles in defence and defied him. Both were men with a grievance. Robert had been discriminated against by the king in a land dispute with Bishop Henry of Winchester; Baldwin believed that the sheriffdom of Devon and control of Exeter castle were his by right. Neither man apparently declared himself a supporter of the empress, although Robert had an unfortunate and close connection with David of Scotland’s household which may not have endeared him to the king. King Stephen knew that he had been put on his mettle, and he was going to rise to the challenge: ‘zero tolerance’ of disorder was his policy. So he gathered a mighty army, headed west, and drove Robert out of Bampton and into a Scottish exile. Then on to Exeter, but here Baldwin proved very stubborn, and a long siege followed which lasted through the summer of 1136. Stephen now found himself trapped by his initial manifesto as king - he must curb disorder. His advisers were not much help: Bishop Henry urged him to stick to the task until Baldwin was a captive. But summer had passed before the rebel was brought to heel in Hampshire and triumphantly exiled. By then Stephen had made a dreadful mistake in the organisation of his priorities.
During the siege of Exeter a party of alarmed barons had urged the king again and again that he was missing something and was in the wrong place. What he was missing was the fact that in the Welsh Marches the dominant power of the English marcher barons and royal border sheriffs had in May 1136 been suddenly challenged and overthrown by an alliance of Welsh kings. By August 1136 marcher power was everywhere in retreat. When Richard de Clare was killed near Talgarth on 15 April, it had set in motion a train of events which led to the extinction of the Anglo-Norman lordships established in Ceredigion, Dyfed, Glamorgan and Gwent in the 1090s. A new generation of Welsh leaders, using new tactics and strategies, led their war bands against the English and overthrew them. These new young kings, Morgan ab Owain of Glamorgan and Owain ap Gruffudd of Gwynedd, knew all too well how to use castles, and how to penetrate them. While Stephen was pounding the fortifications of Exeter, the English position in the March was being set back to what it had been before the Conqueror died. Stephen did not ignore this developing disaster, but his only response was to send a minor baron of the southern March, Robert of Ewyas, with money and mercenaries to stem the Welsh advance in the south. He sent Baldwin, brother of Richard de Clare, to try to do the same in mid Wales. Neither made much headway, and the king seems to have insisted on the major barons of the March (notably Robert of Gloucester) staying with him at Exeter.
Stephen’s problems were compounded by the fact that he had not followed through what seems to have been his original plan to go to Normandy after Pentecost 1136. At the beginning of May he had been expected in the duchy to repeat there the triumphal progress he had made through England. Rumours of the death of Bishop Roger offered a flimsy justification for Stephen to cancel his crossing, and the rebellions in the south west soon entangled him. As with Wales, Stephen knew that something should be done. He had sent Count Waleran of Meulan in advance to Rouen to begin the work just after Easter ir36. Waleran was now the king’s son-in-law, having been betrothed to Stephen’s two-year-old daughter, Mathilda, so he was a reliable choice. But when the king did not appear in the duchy when he said he would, Waleran found the whole task of pacifying Normandy and containing Angevin aggression fell on him alone. A nobleman of great wealth and very grand connections, a cousin of King Louis VI, Waleran allied with Count Theobald of Blois and Count Alan of Brittany, and was able to restore a precarious peace to the duchy. In September 1136 Count Geoffrey of Anjou attempted to extend his enclave northwards towards Lisieux, but his campaign failed to attract Norman sympathisers, and turned into an embarrassing retreat, with Geoffrey sustaining a serious Leg wound. Stephen was fortunate in the skills and determination of his lieutenant in this case, but clearly Normandy would not wait for him forever.
In December 1136 the bishop of Winchester crossed the Channel to prepare the ground for his brother, who had set a new date for his arrival in the duchy. The bishop got busy preparing a diplomatic offensive which would complement Stephen’s progress through the duchy, particularly looking to arrange a face-to-face conference between Stephen and Louis VI. The king crossed the Channel early in March 1137 and landed in the west of the duchy. He headed east to overawe the last magnate of any consequence who was opposing him, the lord of Tancarville on the Seine. Tancarville quickly submitted and thereafter the king’s march became a more peaceful progress to receive the loyalty of the Normans. Easter was celebrated in style at the ducal city of Evreux, where the king had a formal meeting with his brother, Theobald, and his court. Rich gifts in land and rents were offered to the count; he was also given items from the superb treasury of precious plate that King Henry had built up, including; ‘two gold basins of huge weight and marvellous workmanship, in which were set most precious gems, which King Henry of England, his uncle, used to have placed on the table before him at his crown-wearings to show off his wealth and glory’.3 Nothing was spared in making the Evreux meeting a feast of fraternal affection. This was followed up by the conference with King Louis VI on the frontier, which Bishop Henry had apparently arranged. Here the king’s heir, Eustace, a boy of around ten years of age, performed homage for Normandy to Louis, and sealed formal Capetian support for the succession of Stephen to England and Normandy. It may have been subsequent to this that Stephen was formally invested with the duchy.
All was going well with Stephen in Normandy at this time, and we can quite clearly see the familiar hand of Bishop Henry, his brother, in orchestrating a careful mix of diplomacy, military threat and sumptuous ceremony by which the Normans submitted to their new lord. Yet the royal progress did not end quite so happily as it began. The fault may have been Bishop Henry’s in part. During the spring a considerable force of Flemish knights arrived in Normandy to join the king’s military household under the command of William of Ypres, who had been a claimant to the county of Flanders in 1127. The sequence of events resembles what happened in England in February 1136, when great cash sums were spent on hiring a big mercenary army to overawe David of Scotland. The target this time was Geoffrey of Anjou and the empress, for the king had to make some sort of border demonstration to force the Angevins to negotiate or withdraw. What the cosmopolitan bishop may have forgotten was how much Normans despised foreigners, and how their appearance in positions of trust close to the king could be used to undermine him. A riot was provoked within the royal camp, almost certainly by magnates who were hostile to Stephen; the name of Hugh de Gournay is mentioned by two chroniclers as chiefly responsible. But Earl Robert of Gloucester was also in the army, and he is said to have had a hostile encounter with William of Ypres at this time. So the crucial campaign failed, as a number of Norman barons packed up and went home rather than be slighted in favour of a bunch of Flemings. In the end, the king was only able to achieve a three-year truce with the Angevins, beginning on 24 June 1137; which was far less satisfactory than crushing them.
The final and most serious failures in Normandy in 1137 were the alienation of Robert of Gloucester from Stephen’s court and the fall from grace of Bishop Henry. Earl Robert does not seem ever to have taken to Stephen as king and the distaste may have been mutual; the two were regarded as rivals even before Stephen was crowned. But, like him or not, Stephen still needed his support. Robert, however, saw himself as threatened by the growing dominance of Count Waleran at court; a dominance all the more obvious as Bishop Henry was himself squeezed out of influence following the military failure that summer. As Waleran’s influence strengthened, the king began more and more to turn to direct military action to futher his ends, which was never the sort of policy that Bishop Henry would have suggested. Earl Robert did not accompany the king back to England at the end of November 1137, but Count Waleran did, even though his job in Normandy was not yet finished. Earl Robert stayed in the duchy pondering on the best way to express his opposition to the king, and in the new year resolved on defiance and rebellion.
The king should not have left Normandy in 1137. He should have learned by his uncle’s example that the key to security of the entire Anglo-Norman realm lay in Normandy, not England. If he had stayed In Normandy, his enemies would have had to meet him there, and while he was there they could not challenge him in England with any ease. But Stephen returned to England nonetheless, feeling insecure perhaps about Bishop Roger, and that insecurity was fed by Count Waleran and his family and friends, anxious to take advantage of the fruits of favour in England. There may also have been more personal and pressing reasons that lured the king back across the Channel. Two of his infant children, a boy, Baldwin, and the girl Mathilda who had been betrothed and married to Count Waleran, had died in his absence, and been buried in Aldgate priory in London during 1137. It was also the year that the Countess Adela, his mother, had died in the Cluniac nunnery of Marcigny-sur-Loire. Bereaved and perhaps exhausted by now, Stephen may well have wanted to be with his queen for a while.
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