calling for help. He never in his life had been so good as he was
then. He cried in an agony, 'Row back at any risk! I cannot bear
to leave her!'
They rowed back. As the Prince held out his arms to catch his
sister, such numbers leaped in, that the boat was overset. And in
the same instant The White Ship went down.
Only two men floated. They both clung to the main yard of the
ship, which had broken from the mast, and now supported them. One
asked the other who he was? He said, 'I am a nobleman, GODFREY by
name, the son of GILBERT DE L'AIGLE. And you?' said he. 'I am
BEROLD, a poor butcher of Rouen,' was the answer. Then, they said
together, 'Lord be merciful to us both!' and tried to encourage one
another, as they drifted in the cold benumbing sea on that
unfortunate November night.
Page 45
Dickens, Charles - A Child's History of England
By-and-by, another man came swimming towards them, whom they knew,
when he pushed aside his long wet hair, to be Fitz-Stephen. 'Where
is the Prince?' said he. 'Gone! Gone!' the two cried together.
'Neither he, nor his brother, nor his sister, nor the King's niece,
nor her brother, nor any one of all the brave three hundred, noble
or commoner, except we three, has risen above the water!' Fitz-
Stephen, with a ghastly face, cried, 'Woe! woe, to me!' and sunk to
the bottom.
The other two clung to the yard for some hours. At length the
young noble said faintly, 'I am exhausted, and chilled with the
cold, and can hold no longer. Farewell, good friend! God preserve
you!' So, he dropped and sunk; and of all the brilliant crowd, the
poor Butcher of Rouen alone was saved. In the morning, some
fishermen saw him floating in his sheep-skin coat, and got him into
their boat - the sole relater of the dismal tale.
For three days, no one dared to carry the intelligence to the King.
At length, they sent into his presence a little boy, who, weeping
bitterly, and kneeling at his feet, told him that The White Ship
was lost with all on board. The King fell to the ground like a
dead man, and never, never afterwards, was seen to smile.
But he plotted again, and promised again, and bribed and bought
again, in his old deceitful way. Having no son to succeed him,
after all his pains ('The Prince will never yoke us to the plough,
now!' said the English people), he took a second wife - ADELAIS or
ALICE, a duke's daughter, and the Pope's niece. Having no more
children, however, he proposed to the Barons to swear that they
would recognise as his successor, his daughter Matilda, whom, as
she was now a widow, he married to the eldest son of the Count of
Anjou, GEOFFREY, surnamed PLANTAGENET, from a custom he had of
wearing a sprig of flowering broom (called Genˆt in French) in his
cap for a feather. As one false man usually makes many, and as a
false King, in particular, is pretty certain to make a false Court,
the Barons took the oath about the succession of Matilda (and her
children after her), twice over, without in the least intending to
keep it. The King was now relieved from any remaining fears of
William Fitz-Robert, by his death in the Monastery of St. Omer, in
France, at twenty-six years old, of a pike-wound in the hand. And
as Matilda gave birth to three sons, he thought the succession to
the throne secure.
He spent most of the latter part of his life, which was troubled by
family quarrels, in Normandy, to be near Matilda. When he had
reigned upward of thirty-five years, and was sixty-seven years old,
he died of an indigestion and fever, brought on by eating, when he
was far from well, of a fish called Lamprey, against which he had
often been cautioned by his physicians. His remains were brought
over to Reading Abbey to be buried.
You may perhaps hear the cunning and promise-breaking of King Henry
the First, called 'policy' by some people, and 'diplomacy' by
others. Neither of these fine words will in the least mean that it
was true; and nothing that is not true can possibly be good.
His greatest merit, that I know of, was his love of learning - I
should have given him greater credit even for that, if it had been
strong enough to induce him to spare the eyes of a certain poet he
once took prisoner, who was a knight besides. But he ordered the
poet's eyes to be torn from his head, because he had laughed at him
in his verses; and the poet, in the pain of that torture, dashed
out his own brains against his prison wall. King Henry the First
Page 46
Dickens, Charles - A Child's History of England
was avaricious, revengeful, and so false, that I suppose a man
never lived whose word was less to be relied upon.
CHAPTER XI - ENGLAND UNDER MATILDA AND STEPHEN
THE King was no sooner dead than all the plans and schemes he had
laboured at so long, and lied so much for, crumbled away like a
hollow heap of sand. STEPHEN, whom he had never mistrusted or
suspected, started up to claim the throne.
Stephen was the son of ADELA, the Conqueror's daughter, married to
the Count of Blois. To Stephen, and to his brother HENRY, the late
King had been liberal; making Henry Bishop of Winchester, and
finding a good marriage for Stephen, and much enriching him. This
did not prevent Stephen from hastily producing a false witness, a
servant of the late King, to swear that the King had named him for
his heir upon his death-bed. On this evidence the Archbishop of
Canterbury crowned him. The new King, so suddenly made, lost not a
moment in seizing the Royal treasure, and hiring foreign soldiers
with some of it to protect his throne.
If the dead King had even done as the false witness said, he would
have had small right to will away the English people, like so many
sheep or oxen, without their consent. But he had, in fact,
bequeathed all his territory to Matilda; who, supported by ROBERT,
Earl of Gloucester, soon began to dispute the crown. Some of the
powerful barons and priests took her side; some took Stephen's; all
fortified their castles; and again the miserable English people
were involved in war, from which they could never derive advantage
whosoever was victorious, and in which all parties plundered,
tortured, starved, and ruined them.
Five years had passed since the death of Henry the First - and
during those five years there had been two terrible invasions by
the people of Scotland under their King, David, who was at last
defeated with all his army - when Matilda, attended by her brother
Robert and a large force, appeared in England to maintain her
claim. A battle was fought between her troops and King Stephen's
at Lincoln; in which the King himself was taken prisoner, after
bravely fighting until his battle-axe and sword were broken, and
was carried into strict confinement at Gloucester. Matilda then
submitted herself to the Priests, and the Priests crowned her Queen
of England.
She did not long enjoy this dignity.
The people of London had a
great affection for Stephen; many of the Barons considered it
degrading to be ruled by a woman; and the Queen's temper was so
haughty that she made innumerable enemies. The people of London
revolted; and, in alliance with the troops of Stephen, besieged her
at Winchester, where they took her brother Robert prisoner, whom,
as her best soldier and chief general, she was glad to exchange for
Stephen himself, who thus regained his liberty. Then, the long war
went on afresh. Once, she was pressed so hard in the Castle of
Oxford, in the winter weather when the snow lay thick upon the
ground, that her only chance of escape was to dress herself all in
white, and, accompanied by no more than three faithful Knights,
dressed in like manner that their figures might not be seen from
Stephen's camp as they passed over the snow, to steal away on foot,
cross the frozen Thames, walk a long distance, and at last gallop
away on horseback. All this she did, but to no great purpose then;
Page 47
Dickens, Charles - A Child's History of England
for her brother dying while the struggle was yet going on, she at
last withdrew to Normandy.
In two or three years after her withdrawal her cause appeared in
England, afresh, in the person of her son Henry, young Plantagenet,
who, at only eighteen years of age, was very powerful: not only on
account of his mother having resigned all Normandy to him, but also
from his having married ELEANOR, the divorced wife of the French
King, a bad woman, who had great possessions in France. Louis, the
French King, not relishing this arrangement, helped EUSTACE, King
Stephen's son, to invade Normandy: but Henry drove their united
forces out of that country, and then returned here, to assist his
partisans, whom the King was then besieging at Wallingford upon the
Thames. Here, for two days, divided only by the river, the two
armies lay encamped opposite to one another - on the eve, as it
seemed to all men, of another desperate fight, when the EARL OF
ARUNDEL took heart and said 'that it was not reasonable to prolong
the unspeakable miseries of two kingdoms to minister to the
ambition of two princes.'
Many other noblemen repeating and supporting this when it was once
uttered, Stephen and young Plantagenet went down, each to his own
bank of the river, and held a conversation across it, in which they
arranged a truce; very much to the dissatisfaction of Eustace, who
swaggered away with some followers, and laid violent hands on the
Abbey of St. Edmund's-Bury, where he presently died mad. The truce
led to a solemn council at Winchester, in which it was agreed that
Stephen should retain the crown, on condition of his declaring
Henry his successor; that WILLIAM, another son of the King's,
should inherit his father's rightful possessions; and that all the
Crown lands which Stephen had given away should be recalled, and
all the Castles he had permitted to be built demolished. Thus
terminated the bitter war, which had now lasted fifteen years, and
had again laid England waste. In the next year STEPHEN died, after
a troubled reign of nineteen years.
Although King Stephen was, for the time in which he lived, a humane
and moderate man, with many excellent qualities; and although
nothing worse is known of him than his usurpation of the Crown,
which he probably excused to himself by the consideration that King
Henry the First was a usurper too - which was no excuse at all; the
people of England suffered more in these dread nineteen years, than
at any former period even of their suffering history. In the
division of the nobility between the two rival claimants of the
Crown, and in the growth of what is called the Feudal System (which
made the peasants the born vassals and mere slaves of the Barons),
every Noble had his strong Castle, where he reigned the cruel king
of all the neighbouring people. Accordingly, he perpetrated
whatever cruelties he chose. And never were worse cruelties
committed upon earth than in wretched England in those nineteen
years.
The writers who were living then describe them fearfully. They say
that the castles were filled with devils rather than with men; that
the peasants, men and women, were put into dungeons for their gold
and silver, were tortured with fire and smoke, were hung up by the
thumbs, were hung up by the heels with great weights to their
heads, were torn with jagged irons, killed with hunger, broken to
death in narrow chests filled with sharp-pointed stones, murdered
in countless fiendish ways. In England there was no corn, no meat,
no cheese, no butter, there were no tilled lands, no harvests.
Ashes of burnt towns, and dreary wastes, were all that the
traveller, fearful of the robbers who prowled abroad at all hours,
would see in a long day's journey; and from sunrise until night, he
Page 48
Dickens, Charles - A Child's History of England
would not come upon a home.
The clergy sometimes suffered, and heavily too, from pillage, but
many of them had castles of their own, and fought in helmet and
armour like the barons, and drew lots with other fighting men for
their share of booty. The Pope (or Bishop of Rome), on King
Stephen's resisting his ambition, laid England under an Interdict
at one period of this reign; which means that he allowed no service
to be performed in the churches, no couples to be married, no bells
to be rung, no dead bodies to be buried. Any man having the power
to refuse these things, no matter whether he were called a Pope or
a Poulterer, would, of course, have the power of afflicting numbers
of innocent people. That nothing might be wanting to the miseries
of King Stephen's time, the Pope threw in this contribution to the
public store - not very like the widow's contribution, as I think,
when Our Saviour sat in Jerusalem over-against the Treasury, 'and
she threw in two mites, which make a farthing.'
CHAPTER XII - ENGLAND UNDER HENRY THE SECOND - PART THE FIRST
HENRY PLANTAGENET, when he was but twenty-one years old, quietly
succeeded to the throne of England, according to his agreement made
with the late King at Winchester. Six weeks after Stephen's death,
he and his Queen, Eleanor, were crowned in that city; into which
they rode on horseback in great state, side by side, amidst much
shouting and rejoicing, and clashing of music, and strewing of
flowers.
The reign of King Henry the Second began well. The King had great
possessions, and (what with his own rights, and what with those of
his wife) was lord of one-third part of France. He was a young man
of vigour, ability, and resolution, and immediately applied himself
to remove some of the evils which had arisen in the last unhappy
reign. He revoked all the grants of land that had been hastily
made, on either side, during the late struggles; he obliged numbers
of disorderly soldiers to depart from England; he reclaimed all the
castles belonging to the Crown; and he forced the wicked nobles to
pull down their own castles, to the number of eleven hundred, in
which such dismal cruelties had been inflicted on the people. The
King's brother, GEOFFREY, rose against him in France, while he was
so well employed, and rendered it necessary for him to repair to
that country; where, after he had subdued and made a friendly
arrangement with his brother (who did not live long), his ambition
to increase his possessions involved him in a war with the French
King, Louis, with whom he had been on such friendly terms just
before, that to the French King's infant daughter, then a baby in
the cradle, he had promised one of his little sons in marriage, who
was a child of five years old. However, the war came to nothing at
last, and the Pope made the two Kings friends again.
Now, the clergy, in the troubles of the last reign, had gone on
very ill indeed. There were all kinds of criminals among them -
murderers, thieves, and vagabonds; and the worst of the matter was,
that the good priests would not give up the bad priests to justice,
when they committed crimes, but persisted in sheltering and
defending them. The King, well knowing that there could be no
peace or rest in England while such things lasted, resolved to
reduce the power of the clergy; and, when he had reigned seven
years, found (as he considered) a good opportunity for doing so, in
the death of the Archbishop of Canterbury. 'I will have for the
Page 49
Dickens, Charles - A Child's History of England
new Archbishop,' thought the King, 'a friend in whom I can trust,
who will help me to humble these rebellious priests, and to have
them dealt with, when they do wrong, as other men who do wrong are
dealt with.' So, he resolved to make his favourite, the new
Archbishop; and this favourite was so extraordinary a man, and his
story is so curious, that I must tell you all about him.
Once upon a time, a worthy merchant of London, named GILBERT A
BECKET, made a pilgrimage to the Holy Land, and was taken prisoner
by a Saracen lord. This lord, who treated him kindly and not like
a slave, had one fair daughter, who fell in love with the merchant;
and who told him that she wanted to become a Christian, and was
willing to marry him if they could fly to a Christian country. The
A Child's History of England Page 11
