[Sidenote:  A.D. 1120.]

[Sidenote:  A.D. 1127.]

As the king extricated himself happily from so great an affair, so all the other difficulties of his reign only exercised, without endangering him.  The efforts of France in favor of the son of Robert were late, desultory, and therefore unsuccessful.  That youth, endued with equal virtue and more prudence than his father, after exerting many useless acts of unfortunate bravery, fell in battle, and freed Henry from all disturbance on the side of France.  The incursions of the Welsh in this reign only gave him an opportunity of confining that people within narrower bounds.  At home he was well obeyed by his subjects; abroad he dignified his family by splendid alliances.  His daughter Matilda he married to the Emperor.  But his private fortunes did not flow with so even a course as his public affairs.  His only son, William, with a natural daughter, and many of the flower of the young nobility, perished at sea between Normandy and England.  From that fatal accident the king was never seen to smile.  He sought in vain from a second marriage to provide a male successor; but when he saw all prospect of this at an end, he called a great council of his barons and prelates.  His daughter Matilda, after the decease of the Emperor, he had given in marriage to Geoffrey Plantagenet, Count of Anjou.  As she was his only remaining issue, he caused her to be acknowledged as his successor by the great council; he enforced this acknowledgment by solemn oaths of fealty,—­a sanction which he weakened rather than confirmed by frequent repetition:  vainly imagining that on his death any ties would bind to the respect of a succession so little respected by himself, and by the violation of which he had procured his crown.  Having taken these measures in favor of his daughter, he died in Normandy, but in a good old age, and in the thirty-sixth year of a prosperous reign.

CHAPTER V.

REIGN OF STEPHEN.

[Sidenote:  A.D. 1135.]

Although the authority of the crown had been exercised with very little restraint during the three preceding reigns, the succession to it, or even the principles of the succession, were but ill ascertained:  so that a doubt might justly have arisen, whether the crown was not in a great measure elective.  This uncertainty exposed the nation, at the death of every king, to all the calamities of a civil war; but it was a circumstance favorable to the designs of Stephen, Earl of Boulogne, who was son of Stephen, Earl of Blois, by a daughter of the Conqueror.  The late king had raised him to great employments, and enriched him by the grant of several lordships.  His brother had been made Bishop of Winchester; and by adding to it the place of his chief justiciary, the king gave him an opportunity of becoming one of the richest subjects in Europe, and of extending an unlimited influence over the clergy and the people.  Henry