There is a case to be argued that the last ruler to be reckoned by contemporaries as a member of the Norman dynasty was also the best of them. To argue that, you would have to make the case on two grounds: on spirituality and political integrity. Stephen was a man of the same spiritual stamp as his grandfather, the Conqueror, who lived his life to the rhythm of the ecclesiastical day. Like the elder William, Stephen seems to have made the witness of the mass the anchor of his day, although there is no direct evidence that he also went so far as to attend the chapel offices sung by his clerks. He was discriminating in his choice of clerical associates, preferring his household clerks to be clergy first, rather than administrators. Even so, very few of them found promotion to the hierarchy; the sort of bishops Stephen seems to have liked were learned and spiritual men, not politicians and administrators in mitres. Like his uncle Henry I, Stephen cultivated a personal penitential regime, with an Augustinian father confessor licensed to hear him by the archbishop of Canterbury. But his character was more religious than that of his uncle; a quality he shared with his brother Count Theobald, commemorated by one writer as ‘a prince of great sanctity and of deep generosity to the poor’, a man who became regarded almost as a saint by the next generation. This quality was what - apart from his misfortunes - distinguished him in the memory of the next generation. Writers of the later twelfth century frequently refer to him (and to no other English king) as rex piissimus-. ‘most pious king’. Religious observance and seriousness of life were what distinguished him from his forbears and from his immediate successor in the perceptions of contemporaries.
There was a wide streak of moral introspection in his character, and it came out in his political behaviour at times. In 1138 he avoided besieging Ludlow, which was commanded by a woman. The next year he would not take advantage of the empress and the countess of Gloucester’s entrapment at Arundel, partly to spare the embarrassment of Queen Adeliza. Having trapped the wives of the earls of Chester and
Lincoln in the castle of Lincoln in 1141, he let them go. This seems to have been the result of his meditation on his coronation promises to protect the weak and powerless. The moral scrupulosity comes out most strongly in the marvellous memoir of his behaviour in front of Newbury castle in 1152, when he had the cheerful and attractive five-year-old son of its lord, John Marshal, at his mercy as a hostage. Although urged by his barons to intimidate the garrison by killing the boy in several dramatic fashions - as was indeed his right - he refused, and instead took him on as a page. The boy later remembered games of toy knights he played with the venerable old king on the flower-strewn floor of his royal pavilion over the following months.
Stephen can be criticised for poor judgement, and more particularly for trusting men whose advice was self-interested and questionable. The silliest decisions of his career were made under the influence of others. The arrest of Bishop Roger of Salisbury and his family in 1139 was carried out because Roger was seen as an obstacle to the ambitions of leading lay courtiers. Although Stephen and his advisers came out of the affair richer in possessions and patronage, it was at the cost of the trust of his senior clergy. Geoffrey de Mandeville was likewise sacrificed by Stephen in 1143 to the greed of a clique of royal administrators. When Geoffrey fought back savagely, the king was severely punished for his decision. It has to be said that the arrests carried out at Stephen’s court had a number of precedents in Henry Ts reign. The reason that Stephen’s reputation was more damaged by them than that of his uncle is because the prestige of his kingship was undermined by the civil unrest of his reign in England.
Stephen is the first king of England who fits the model of a chivalric king. There was no doubting his success as a military commander and leader of men in battle, as successful as any of his predecessors; he had all their courage, vigour and coolness of purpose. But he belonged also to an age when a theory of military virtue was beginning to fix itself in military minds. Its origins we have seen as far back as the time of William Longsword, count of Rouen, who was memorialised by his elegaist as ‘maker and lover of peace; comforter and defender of the poor; main-tainer of widows and orphans’. It was the prescription for the conduct of a Christian prince that the Church had devised for Carolingian royalty. Stephen was the first (and last) of the Normans consciously to Approach the realisation of this ecclesiastical manifesto in his life. Except in one case, he forbore to kill any opponents who surrendered. The only time he did so (at Shrewsbury in 1138) he was well within his rights, for the garrison had refused the summons to surrender. He was more likely to let honourable enemies go into exile, or even to go free; as he let Geoffrey de Mandeville go free in 1143, despite the risks that he would take the field against him. This preference for being merciful and for scrutinising the morality of his own case was perhaps his legacy to later medieval kings of England. Stephen cannot be linked to the ‘bad’ kings of English history, for as a king he was not bad in any of the multiple senses of that adjective.
His physical successors did not survive him for long. Count William of Boulogne, his surviving son, lived on as the most splendid magnate of the Anglo-Norman realm until October 1159. William’s relationship with the new king, Henry II, was not entirely happy, as could have been predicted. In 1157 the king decided to renegotiate the terms of 1153 with the count. William, who seems to have been a reasonable man, surrendered his rights in Norwich and Pevensey, and even put up with King Henry’s hostile demand that he surrender his castles in England and Normandy to royal castellans, although he did complain to the pope (perhaps about the king’s abrogation of a solemn pact sworn before God) and pay out the large sum of 700 marks to facilitate the case at Rome. But the next year, the king and he were on good enough terms for Henry to have knighted him at Carlisle on 24 June, when William must have been well past the customary ages of delivery of arms. Count William loyally stood by the king in his campaign to recover the overlordship of Toulouse in 1159, and it was in October of that year that he died (apparently of the dysentery which had killed his royal father) on campaign. William’s heir was his sister, Mary. She was in 1159 the young abbess of Romsey, a royal monastery in Hampshire long favoured by royal ladies. King Henry II would not leave her there, surprisingly. He was prepared to let the blood line she inherited loose, although she was harmless to him in the situation in which she was on her brother’s death.
Mary was the indisputable heir to the county of Boulogne. All her father’s lands were denied her, but her mother’s inheritance could not be gainsaid, as it was outside the Anglo-Norman realm. It would seem that negotiations over her future must have begun as soon as her brother was dead, and the approaches almost certainly came from the count of Flanders, Thierry. Thierry had a younger son, Matthew, and for him to secure Boulogne for Matthew would be a magnificent coup. His scheme was to negotiate Mary’s release from Romsey and to marry her to Matthew, thus tying Boulogne into closer alliance with Flanders. The marriage was sucessfully arranged for the early summer of 1160, despite Archbishop Becket’s vociferous objections to the release of a professed nun from her vows. She died in 1182 without issue, arguably the last of the Norman dynasty, in that she was the last surviving child of a Norman king of England; although perhaps Alice, countess of Eu who died in 1246, last descendant of the cadet line of counts which descended from Duke Richard I, may be considered a rival to that inconsequential dynastic claim.
World History
