Stephen of England 1092 -1154

King Stephen of England

Stephen (c. 1092/6 – 25 October 1154),  Stephen of  Blois 
(French:  Étienne de Blois, 
Medieval French: Estienne de Blois).  

 
Was a grandson of William the Conqueror. 

 
He was King of England from 1135 to his death, and also the Count of Boulogne in right of his wife. Stephen's reign was marked by the Anarchy, a civil war with his cousin and rival, the Empress Matilda.  
He was succeeded by Matilda's son, Henry II, the first of the Angevin kings.

Stephen was born in the County of Blois in middle France; his father, Count Stephen-Henry, was one of the leaders of the First Crusade,  died while Stephen was still young, and he was brought up by his mother, Adela. Placed into the court of his uncle, Henry Beauclerc Stephen rose in prominence and was granted extensive lands. Stephen married Matilda of Boulogne, inheriting additional estates in Kent and Boulogne that made the couple one of the wealthiest in England. 


Stephen of Blois married Matilda of Boulogne in 1125. They had the following issue:

Eustace (c. 1130 – 1153), who succeeded his parents as Count Eustace IV of Boulogne
Matilda (died before 1141), married Waleran de Beaumont, 1st Earl of Worcester
Marie (1133–1182), who succeeded as Countess Marie I of Boulogne
Baldwin (died before 1135)
Adela (died before 1146)

William (c. 1137 – 1159),
who succeeded as Count William I of Boulogne in 1148 Married  Isabel de Warenne, 4th Countess of Surrey 1148. They had no children before his death in 1159. He was succeeded as Count of Boulogne by his sister, Mary I.
His widow remarried to Hamelin Plantagenet.






King Stephen's illegitimate children by a certain Damette were:

1. Gervase, Abbot of Westminster
2. Raoul /Ralph
3. Americ

As King Henry I of England lay dying, he extracted from his barons a promise to accept his daughter Matilda, his only surviving legitimate child, as Queen of England.  His plans were to be thwarted.  Henry’s nephew Stephen of Blois, son of his sister Adela, seized the throne with the support of the barons.
Matilda, once the wife of Henry V, Emperor of Germany, married Geoffrey Plantagenet , 10 years her junior. Geoffrey Plantagenet, Count of Anjou, was the son of Fulk, King of Jerusalem. Geoffrey expanded his possessions beyond Anjou to include the duchy of Normandy, which made him the most powerful man in France.
While the fortunes of the civil war between King Stephen and Geoffrey’s well-funded wife shifted back and forth, England was lawless without stable leadership.  In 1141/2  Matilda actually managed to capture the throne, but was so haughty the Londoners drove her out.  In the winter of 1142, with King Stephen besieging Matilda’s forces in Oxford Castle, she made a desperate escape by walking through the enemy lines in the dead of night.
Finally, King Stephen agreed to a truce:  In exchange for disinheriting his son Eustace, and accepting Geoffrey and Matilda’s son Henry as heir apparent, Stephen was allowed to live out his reign.  He died on 25 Oct 1154 and was buried in the Cluniac Abbey of Faversham, which he had founded.  The new king of England, Henry II, was absent among the mourners.
The abbey was demolished during the reign of King Henry VIII.  The bones of King Stephen, his wife Matilda of Boulogne, and his son Eustace are said to have been thrown into Faversham Creek.

 Stephen narrowly escaped drowning with Henry I's son, William Adelin, in the sinking of the White Ship in 1120; William's death left the succession of the English throne open to challenge. When Henry I died in 1135, Stephen quickly crossed the English Channel and with the help of his brother Henry of Blois, a powerful ecclesiastic, took the throne, arguing that the preservation of order across the kingdom took priority over his earlier oaths to support the claim of Henry I's daughter, the Empress Matilda.

The early years of Stephen's reign were largely successful, despite a series of attacks on his possessions in England and Normandy from David I of Scotland, Welsh rebels and the Empress Matilda's husband, Geoffrey of Anjou. 
In 1138 the Empress's half-brother Robert of Gloucester rebelled against Stephen, threatening civil war. Together with his close advisor, Waleron de Beaumont, Stephen took firm steps to defend England, including arresting a powerful family of bishops. When the Empress and Robert invaded in 1139, however, Stephen was unable to rapidly crush the revolt, which took hold in the south-west of England. 
Captured at the battle of Lincoln in 1141, Stephen was abandoned by many of his followers and lost control of Normandy. Stephen was only freed after his wife also named Matilda and William of Ypres, one of his military commanders, captured Robert at the Rout of Winchester, but the war dragged on for many years with neither side able to win an advantage.
Stephen became increasingly concerned with ensuring that his son, Eustace, would inherit his throne after him. 
The king attempted to convince the church to agree to crown Eustace to reinforce his claim: Pope Eugene III refused and Stephen found himself in a sequence of increasingly bitter arguments with his senior clergy. 

In 1153 the Empress's son, Henry FitzEmpress, invaded England and built an alliance of powerful regional barons to support his claim for the throne. The two armies met at Wallingford but neither side's barons were keen to fight another pitched battle. Stephen began to examine a negotiated peace, a process hastened by the sudden death of Eustace. 
Stephen and Henry agreed the Treaty of Winchester later in the year, in which Stephen recognised Henry as his heir in exchange for peace, passing over Stephen's second son  William I, Count of Boulogne. 
Stephen died the following year. Modern historians have extensively debated the extent to which Stephen's personality, external events, or the weaknesses in the Norman state contributed to this prolonged period of civil war.

 
by Jeffrey Thomas Chipman on June 9, 2011.