consent, the nobles held by a strained analogy that their own assent was needful to the marriage of Maud.  Henry found a more pressing danger in the greed of her husband Geoffry, whose habit of wearing the common broom of Anjou, the planta genista, in his helmet gave him the title of Plantagenet.  His claims ended at last in intrigues with the Norman nobles, and Henry hurried to the border to meet an Angevin invasion; but the plot broke down at his presence, the Angevins retired, and at the close of 1135 the old king withdrew to the Forest of Lions to die.

[Sidenote:  Stephen]

“God give him,” wrote the Archbishop of Rouen from Henry’s death-bed, “the peace he loved.”  With him indeed closed the long peace of the Norman rule.  An outburst of anarchy followed on the news of his departure, and in the midst of the turmoil Earl Stephen, his nephew, appeared at the gates of London.  Stephen was a son of the Conqueror’s daughter, Adela, who had married a Count of Blois; he had been brought up at the English court, had been made Count of Mortain by Henry, had become Count of Boulogne by his marriage, and as head of the Norman baronage had been the first to pledge himself to support Matilda’s succession.  But his own claim as nearest male heir of the Conqueror’s blood (for his cousin, the son of Robert, had fallen some years before in Flanders) was supported by his personal popularity; mere swordsman as he was, his good-humour, his generosity, his very prodigality made Stephen a favourite with all.  No noble however had as yet ventured to join him nor had any town opened its gates when London poured out to meet him with uproarious welcome.  Neither baron nor prelate was present to constitute a National Council, but the great city did not hesitate to take their place.  The voice of her citizens had long been accepted as representative of the popular assent in the election of a king; but it marks the progress of English independence under Henry that London now claimed of itself the right of election.  Undismayed by the absence of the hereditary counsellors of the crown its “Aldermen and wise folk gathered together the folk-moot, and these providing at their own will for the good of the realm unanimously resolved to choose a king.”  The solemn deliberation ended in the choice of Stephen, the citizens swore to defend the king with money and blood, Stephen swore to apply his whole strength to the pacification and good government of the realm.  It was in fact the new union of conquered and conquerors into a single England that did Stephen’s work.  The succession of Maud meant the rule of Geoffry of Anjou, and to Norman as to Englishman the rule of the Angevin was a foreign rule.  The welcome Stephen won at London and Winchester, his seizure of the royal treasure, the adhesion of the Justiciar Bishop Roger to his cause, the reluctant consent of the Archbishop, the hopelessness of aid from Anjou where Geoffry was at this moment pressed by revolt, the need above all