STEPHEN. King of England, was the third son of Stephen, count of Blois, by Adele or Alise, daughter of William the Conqueror, and was consequently nephew of Henry I., and cousin of Matilda, daughter of Henry. He was born in 1105, brought over to Eng land at an early age, and became a favorite with his uncle, who bestowed on him largo estates, both in that country and in Normandy, and procured for him a narriage with Mahout, or Matilda, daughter of Eustace, third count of Boulogne, and voungerhrother of the famous Godfrey of Bouillon. By this marriage Stephen not only inherited the earl . dom of Boulogne en the death of his father-in-law (1125), but also became related to the royal family of Scotland, for his wife's mother, Maria, was a daughter of Malcolm Can more. When his uncle Henry resolved to settle the crown on his daughter Matilda, whose first husband was Henry V., emperor of Germany (whence she is often spoken of as the "Empress Maud "), he naturally relied on his project receiving the support of hie nephew; and at a council held in London, Jan., 1127, Stephen, along with all the other dignitaries of the land, lay and ecclesiastical, took the oath of fealty to \land. A few months later, the widowed empress married Geoffrey Plantagenet (q.v.). On the death of Henry I. (Dec. 1, 1135). Stephen, knowing well the temper and wish of the English people. hurried over to England from Normandy, where he had been in attendance on his dying uncle. and before the year was out had got himself surrounded by a powerful body of the nobles and clergy and crowned at Westminster. His usurpation of the throne was confirmed by a bull of pope Innocent. But Stephen was doomed to find his crown si crown of thorns. Although a gallant, generous, handsome prince, immeasurably sue perior in personal and royal virtues to Maud (who was suspected of having murdered her first husband, who quarrelled with her seconthand was altogether a fiery, insolent, unwise, and exasperating female): yet it must not be forgotten that on Stephen rests the responsi bility of causing a civil war as sanguinary, if not us protracted, as the famous Wars of the Roses. Listen to the Faxon Chronicle: " in this king's time,all was dissension and evil and rapine. . . . Thou mightest go a whole day's journey, and not find a man sitting in a
town, nor an acre of land tilled. The poor died of hunger, and those who had been men well-to-do begged for bread. Never was more done by heathen invaders.. . . To till the ground was to plough the sands of the sea. This lasted the nineteen years that Stephen was king, and it grew continually worse." We have not space to narrate in detail the struggle of these nineteen years. It is enough to say, that in Feb. 1141, after five years of the hardest fighting imaginable —against David of Scotland, cock of Maud, who had taken up arms for his niece (see STANDARD, BATTLE OF TITE); against Robert, earl of Gloucester, natural son of the late king Henry, who had also raised the standard of his half-sister, against individual no bles who simply wished to live in anarchy and barbarous independence, and finally, against the power of the church, which he vainly sought to diminish—he was taken pris oner by the earl of Gloucester, and placed in chains in the castle of Bristol. Maud was now elected queen by her own party, but her rapacity and other bad qualities soon made her rule intolerable, and the wife of ;he imprisoned Stephen (also called Maud or Matilda) found it impossible to continue the war, by the help of the Londoners,who were staunch adherents of her husband. Stephen obtained his liberty in exchange for the earl of Gloucester, who had fallen into the hands of Stephen's friends at Winchester, and the war was resumed with greater violence than ever. The death of the earl of Gloucester, in 1146, forced Maud to take refuge in but a conspiracy of nobles, headed by Ra nulph, earl of Chester, and another quarrel with the church kept Stephen's hands as full of work as before, and no sooner were these matters settled, than Maud's son, young prince Henry, appeared in England (1153), at the head of an army to support his claim to the throne, fortunately for the nation, so sadly wasted a compromise was effected between the two rivals, which saved the necessity of further bloodshed—Stephen agreeing to acknowledge Henry as his successor. Stephen died at Dover the year after (Oct. 25, 1154).