The rise of this great power to the west was necessarily the absorbing political question of the day.  It menaced every potentate in France; and before a month was out a ring of foes had gathered round the upstart Angevin ruler.  The outraged King of France; Stephen, King of England, and Henry’s rival in the Norman duchy; Stephen’s nephew, the Count of Champagne, brother of the Count of Blois; the Count of Perche; and Henry’s own brother, Geoffrey, were at once united by a common alarm; and their joint attack on Normandy a month after the marriage was but the first step in a comprehensive design of depriving the common enemy of the whole of his possessions.  Henry met the danger with all the qualities which mark a great general and a great statesman.  Cool, untroubled, impetuous, dashing from point to point of danger, so that horses sank and died on the road in his desperate marches, he was ready wherever a foe threatened, or a friend prayed help.  Foreign armies were driven back, rebel nobles crushed, robber castles broken down; Normandy was secured and Anjou mastered before the year was out.  The strife, however, had forced him for the first time into open war with Stephen, and at twenty Henry turned to add the English crown to his dominions.

Already the glory of success hung about him; his footsteps were guided by prophecies of Merlin; portents and wonders marked his way.  When he landed on the English shores in January 1153, he turned into a church “to pray for a space, after the manner of soldiers,” at the moment when the priest opened the office of the mass for that day with the words, “Behold there cometh the Lord, the Ruler, and the kingdom is in his hand.”  In his first battle at Malmesbury the wintry storm and driving rain which beat in the face of Stephen’s troops showed on which side Heaven fought.  As the king rode out to the next great fight at Wallingford, men noted fearfully that he fell three times from his horse.  Terror spread among the barons, whose interests lay altogether in anarchy, as they saw the rapid increase of Henry’s strength; and they sought by a mock compromise to paralyse the power of both Stephen and his rival.  “Then arose the barons, or rather the betrayers of England, treating of concord, although they loved nothing better than discord; but they would not join battle, for they desired to exalt neither of the two, lest if the one were overcome the other should be free to govern them; they knew that so long as one was in awe of the other he could exercise no royal authority over them.”  Henry subdued his wrath to his political sagacity.  He agreed to meet Stephen face to face at Wallingford; and there, with a branch of the Thames between them, they fixed upon terms of peace.  Stephen’s son Eustace, however, refused to lay down arms, and the war lingered on, Stephen being driven back to the eastern counties, while Henry held mid-England.  In August, however, Eustace died suddenly, “by the favour of God,” said lovers of peace; and Stephen, utterly broken in spirit, soon after yielded.