Stephen by Carl Watkins

Author:Carl Watkins
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780141977157
Publisher: Penguin Books Ltd
Published: 2015-07-22T04:00:00+00:00

4

The Trackless Maze

On Christmas Day 1141, Stephen was re-crowned at Canterbury with all the panoply of lights, chanting and regalia that had attended his first coronation. It was a new beginning. And yet whatever messages were inscribed in the ritual, it seems likely that the ructions of 1141 had taken their toll on both of the chief protagonists. Matilda’s nerves were shattered in the wake of the Winchester debacle, and Stephen, too, fell sick in 1142, even leading to rumours that he was dead. How far physical privations or mental pressures arising from the king’s captivity brought on the collapse is unclear. But he recovered, as did the empress.

In seeking to renew her cause, Matilda now looked to her husband for help. This was a gamble, for if Geoffrey pulled the Angevin irons from the fire, then this might encourage old fears about his own ambitions. Perhaps mindful of this, but more likely too preoccupied with consolidating his control of Normandy, he did not come. He even lured Earl Robert away to the duchy to help in his campaigns there, leaving Matilda to stand, alone, on the defensive. In these circumstances, Stephen detected a military opportunity. He came up quickly to Oxford, where Matilda was lodged, trapping her inside the castle. Characteristically, the royal army was not able to take the defences by storm, and so settled instead into a siege. The noose seemed to be tightening slowly on the empress. But a little before Christmas 1142, and in the dead of night, Matilda escaped. Legend quickly crystallized around these events. With a handful of companions, so it was said, she left the castle, crossed the wintry ground ‘wrapped in white garments which reflected and resembled the snow, deceiving the eyes of the besiegers’, and passed over the Thames, travelling some six miles to safety.1 The Gesta author wondered at the charmed life of the empress, at why God continued to preserve her.2

These events proved a metaphor for the politics and warfare that set in after 1141. Chance and mischance characterized these years. Matilda withdrew deeper into the West Country, where she based herself at Devizes, the great castle of Roger of Salisbury, one of the bishops arrested in 1139, and a fortress beyond Stephen’s reach. The deadlock only deepened in 1143 as a move to break it on the king’s part went wrong. That year, Stephen mounted a new campaign on the circumference of the Angevin sphere, circling round to Wareham, an important harbour, so as to sever communications between Angevin England and Normandy. Again, the king was unable to overcome fortifications, and so he withdrew. But now he in turn was hunted. Robert of Gloucester, who had returned from Normandy, chased him down and caught the king’s army unawares, while it was encamped near Wilton Abbey.3 The two sides came to blows on 1 July. In a messy engagement that followed, fought out partly in the dark, the king came within a whisker of capture. This time he

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.