While the king was in England, Earl Robert of Gloucester had all the time he needed in Normandy to decide how to adapt to the new and hostile regime at court. His choice was not to adapt but to resist, and late in May 1138 sent emissaries to the king to ‘defy’ him; to return that faith he had sworn to him and explain his reasons. According to William of Malmesbury, one of Robert’s reasons was his belief that the king had conspired to have him murdered, which was a reason sufficient alone to cancel out any oath of fealty he had sworn. His friends and allies in England had already realised that the earl was going to rebel, and those in Kent, the March and west country put their castles in defence soon after Easter (3 April) before the earl’s messengers actually reached the king. Now the king was faced with more than just armed protest; a significant party in England were openly embracing the empress’s cause and civil war was looming.
The king reacted admirably; it was almost as if he was relieved that the pussy-footing of diplomacy and court factions was over and it was down to simple fighting. He seems to have visualised four zones of command: Waleran and William of Ypres were sent to deal with Normandy; he himself took the midlands and the March; the north and the danger of Scotland was confided to Archbishop Thurstan; and Kent was left to the queen to deal with. In every zone, the rebels were crushed.
In Normandy Count Waleran outmanoeuvred Geoffrey of Anjou and humiliated Earl Robert, when he drove him back on Caen. In the north the Scottish invasion was annihilated at the Battle of the Standard near Northallerton. In the March of Wales, Stephen first recovered Hereford by a determined siege, and, when it fell on 15 June, harried and drove Earl Robert’s supporters from castle to castle until they were penned within the fortifications of Bristol. Then he turned back and wiped out the rebel strongholds in the middle March, finally storming Shrewsbury castle and putting its garrison to the sword. As news of the Scottish defeat and the rout of the rebels in the March was brought to Kent, Dover castle too surrendered to the queen. It had taken Stephen and the royalist party only four months of 1138 to wipe out the most serious rebellion in the Anglo-Norman realm since 1101. It was a military achievement of the first rank, and outmatched the campaigns of all of Stephen’s predecessors since the Conqueror’s great wars of the 1070s.
But 1138 did not see the end of the rebellion in England. Bristol did not fall to the king, nor was the king able to find the time and resources to move into the southern March of Wales, the heart of the earl of Gloucester’s power. Stephen and his new aristocratic advisers spent much of the next year tinkering with local government measures, and plotting against internal rivals. The year also saw progress towards the marriage of the king’s son, Eustace, to Constance, sister of Louis VII of France, with Waleran acting as ambassador to Paris in the spring of 1139. The marriage eventually took place in February 1140, with the town of Cambridge as Constance’s dower possession. Bishop Roger of Salisbury and his family fell in June 1139 to a court conspiracy sponsored by Waleran of Meulan, but this event did not at the time contribute to the furtherance of the rebel party’s aims. Yet 1139 did see the renewal of the rebellion, and the extension of civil war. The rebels for most of the year had been humiliated, imprisoned, exiled and marginalised, but they were not entirely eliminated, and Earl Robert remained in Normandy, biding his time. Eventually, in September, his frustrations got the better of him and, at the very end of the month, he assembled a small fleet of ships and took ship in western Normandy with his half-sister, the empress, his wife and a body of knights, including some of the previously unacceptable Flemish mercenaries. Taking the long crossing of the Channel, they arrived off Sussex and landed near Arundel On Saturday 30 September. The crossing was perilous in other ways, for Stephen’s agents in Normandy had warned the king of what Earl Robert and the empress were planning, and he had closed the south coast ports. However, the earl and the empress knew that Arundel would welcome them, for its owner was the dowager queen Adeliza, and she had been in correspondence with her step-daughter, apparently offering her services as a mediator with King Stephen.
Once the empress had set foot in England, the marginalised rebellion burst out again with far greater violence. Now that a rival claimant was actually in England, all the discontented and dispossessed had an alternative court to which to appeal and at which they could attend. At the end of 1139, rebellion became civil war, as two rival centres of power vied and competed for England. The king was in Dorset when the empress landed, having been distracted (probably intentionally) by a coastal raid of her supporters under Baldwin de Redvers, returned from exile. Stephen reacted rapidly, leading his force eastward in haste to blockade Arundel, but he was still not quick enough to prevent Earl Robert slipping out and taking the back lanes of Hampshire and Wiltshire to reach Gloucestershire and rally his supporters. Once he was present there, his former colleague, Miles of Gloucester, and many of the barons of Herefordshire and the southern March, who had hung back from the rebellion of the previous year but had since promised aid, joined his party with their knights. Meanwhile the king was encamped with a large force outside the formidable fortifications of Arundel, within which the empress was sheltering with Queen Adeliza. Although it might look from this as though the civil war was over before it began, the king was in a difficult situation. Stephen did not make war on women, as he had already demonstrated the previous year by refusing to attack Ludlow, which was commanded by Sybil de Lacy. But Arundel was a greater problem than that. Adeliza was actually a firm supporter of his, and she had recently consented to marry Stephen’s friend, the loyalist earl, William d’Aubigne. The king had paid the new couple a friendly visit only the previous year. How could he now burn her castle over her head?
At this point. Bishop Henry, his brother and now papal legate in England, arrived at Arundel and got busy negotiating. The eventual arrangement was that the empress and Countess Mabel of Gloucester (who had been left with her) should be released. The bishop and Count
Waleran agreed to escort them and their entourage safely to Bristol, which was done, much to the amazement of contemporaries (some of whom thought Stephen should have ruthlessly taken and imprisoned the women, as his ancestors would supposedly have done). In the meantime, the civil war had gathered pace. The lower Severn valley was lost to Stephen and strategic castles in the north of Wiltshire, notably Marlborough and Malmesbury, were defying him too. Hereford was once more under seige, and on 7 November 1139 Earl Robert sent a force to sack Count Waleran’s city of Worcester: a brutal pay-back for the count’s ravaging of his Norman lands the previous year. This brought the king and Waleran into the middle Severn valley, and Waleran retaliated viciously by pillaging and burning Sudeley, the castle of his own cousin, John fitz Harold, now one of Earl Robert’s allies.
So commenced what historians once called the ‘Anarchy’; meaning a time of unbridled political and social chaos when the barons of England fought out their private feuds and ambitions across the kingdom. This view of the period is mistaken, although what happened after September 1139 was bad enough. King Stephen in fact never lost control of much of his kingdom, as Gloucestershire, Herefordshire and Somerset remained the core of the rebellion (with Devon and Cornwall added to it after 1141). In the rest of the realm - even in Northumberland and Cumberland, which David of Scotland secured as the price of his compliance in 1139 - Stephen’s kingship remained a reality, and in the south east he was unchallengeable. Nevertheless, a war zone opened up in 1140 along the Cotswolds, on the Wiltshire downs and in the upper Thames valley, a zone which fluctuated but persisted until the final settlement of the civil war in 1153. Here the war was fiercest while Earl Robert of Gloucester headed the Angevin party in England, and with the backing of his Flemish and Welsh mercenary armies he could not be easily dislodged. The campaigns of 1140 demonstrated to the king and Count Waleran that the Angevin party was deeply dug in. They could damage and contain the rebels, but the king was unable to prevent Miles of Gloucester fulfilling his ambition of controlling Hereford.
The king seems to have become frustrated as a result of his failure to close with the Angevin party. This becomes apparent in two ways. At the end of the summer of 1140 Bishop Henry was allowed by his brother to do what he did best and convene a peace conference at Bath - a Royalist outpost in Somerset. There the queen and the new archbishop of Canterbury, Theobald of Bee, sat across a table from Earl Robert of Gloucester and his chief supporters for over a week and actually found some common ground. Possible conditions for peace were thrashed out and taken back, not just to the empress and the king, but even conveyed overseas by Bishop Henry in September to King Louis and Count Theobald. But by November the king had lost interest in the proposals, whatever they were. The second indication of the king’s frustration is military: on campaign in Devon early in 1140, commentators believed that he was openly seeking a pitched battle with Earl Robert’s field army, something prudent commanders generally tried to avoid but which would have instantly solved Stephen’s English problems, if he had been successful in the field.
This is perhaps the root of the recklessness which led to the central catastrophe of Stephen’s reign: the battle of Lincoln. The episode began with the seizure of Lincoln castle by Earl Ranulf of Chester, a powerful magnate of the north midlands who had been until then a supporter of the king, although he was married to Earl Robert of Gloucester’s daughter. Ranulf had ambitions to extend his power in Lincolnshire and reckoned that he had claims to Lincoln castle itself. He was clearly frustrated that they were being ignored. Before Christmas 1140, the king travelled north to reason with him, and the meeting ended in a written settlement very favourable to the earl of Chester, leaving him in possession of the castle and much else besides, most notably the town and castle of Derby. When Stephen returned to Westminster he found his advisers in a state of astonishment at what he had done. When messengers arrived from the bishop of Lincoln early in January 1141, saying that Earl Ranulf and his brother and their wives were happily keeping Christmas in the city, and that they were without a strong garrison, Stephen was urged to take advantage of the earl’s weakness and seize Lincoln back. So the king marched north again, taking with him most of the earls of the court for a swift strike at Earl Ranulf, which was so unexpected that the earl of Chester was besieged before he knew what had happened. Ranulf himself slipped out of the walls in the night, and, on surrender of the castle, his brother and their wives were allowed to follow after him.
It was at this point, as he retreated on Derby, that Earl Ranulf remembered who his father-in-law was. Urgent messengers brought Robert of Gloucester, his principal associates and a small host of Welsh mercenaries into Ranulf’s camp at Barrow-on-Soar in Leicestershire by the end of January. On i February 1141, Earl Ranulf and Earl Robert and their army approached Lincoln again from the south west, up the Fosse Way. Early in the morning of 2 February, the feast of the Purification or Candlemas, they forced their way across the River Witham upstream of the city and offered battle. Stephen was all too keen to accept the chance to destroy his enemies, even though his own army was outnumbered; so, despite both dissent in his council and unsettling omens, he marched out of the city and accepted the offer of battle. His army included his own household, a number of his most considerable earls and their military households, and a force of Flemish knights under William of Ypres, but there was not much more than the city militia of Lincoln to act as infantry. The rebel force was much stronger in infantry, and a credible interpretation of what happened next is that in the battle on the river meadows the royalist cavalry charge meant to scatter the Welsh infantry failed. While the earls and their knights hesitated and rallied, the rebel knights followed up by the English infantry launched themselves on the king and the main force, which had dismounted. They were quickly surrounded and beleaguered. The earls found themselves separated from the king, and gave up the fight, riding off the field. The king and his bodyguard made a stand, but in the end they were all killed or captured. The king was one of the last down, defying the onset of the earl of Gloucester’s knights and laying about with an axe, a gift from the city of Lincoln, until it broke. He swept out his sword and carried on the fight almost alone. In the end he was stunned by a rock hurled at his helmet and William de Cahaignes, a Dorset knight, grabbed him round the neck shouting: ‘Here everybody! Here! I’ve got the king!’ As with most medieval battles, the issue was decided within an hour. In this case, the verdict was grim in its implications.
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