which was to be his characteristic on the throne.  Foiled in an early attempt to grasp the crown, he looked quietly on at the disorder which was doing his work till the death of his father at the close of 1151 left him master of Normandy and Anjou.  In the spring of the following year his marriage with its duchess, Eleanor of Poitou, added Aquitaine to his dominions.  Stephen saw the gathering storm, and strove to meet it.  He called on the bishops and baronage to secure the succession of his son Eustace by consenting to his association with him in the kingdom.  But the moment was now come for Theobald to play his part.  He was already negotiating through Thomas of London with Henry and the Pope; he met Stephen’s plans by a refusal to swear fealty to his son, and the bishops, in spite of Stephen’s threats, went with their head.  The blow was soon followed by a harder one.  Thomas, as Theobald’s agent, invited Henry to appear in England, and though the Duke disappointed his supporters’ hopes by the scanty number of men he brought with him in 1153, his weakness proved in the end a source of strength.  It was not to foreigners, men said, that Henry owed his success but to the arms of Englishmen.  An English army gathered round him, and as the hosts of Stephen and the Duke drew together a battle seemed near which would decide the fate of the realm.  But Theobald who was now firmly supported by the greater barons again interfered and forced the rivals to an agreement.  To the excited partizans of the house of Anjou it seemed as if the nobles were simply playing their own game in the proposed settlement and striving to preserve their power by a balance of masters.  The suspicion was probably groundless, but all fear vanished with the death of Eustace, who rode off from his father’s camp, maddened with the ruin of his hopes, to die in August, smitten, as men believed, by the hand of God for his plunder of abbeys.  The ground was now clear, and in November the Treaty of Wallingford abolished the evils of the long anarchy.  The castles were to be razed, the crown lands resumed, the foreign mercenaries banished from the country, and sheriffs appointed to restore order.  Stephen was recognized as king, and in turn recognized Henry as his heir.  The duke received at Oxford the fealty of the barons, and passed into Normandy in the spring of 1154.  The work of reformation had already begun.  Stephen resented indeed the pressure which Henry put on him to enforce the destruction of the castles built during the anarchy; but Stephen’s resistance was but the pettish outbreak of a ruined man.  He was in fact fast drawing to the grave; and on his death in October 1154 Henry returned to take the crown without a blow.

Chapter III
Henry the second
1154-1189

[Sidenote:  Henry Fitz-Empress]