King of the North Wind: The Life of Henry II in Five Acts. Claudia Gold
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The freezing weather had brought Henry a truce. Now, he spent the next few months making huge territorial gains throughout the Midlands, taking castle after castle, including Warwick and Tutbury, by force or negotiation. He held court wherever he went, behaving as if he were already king. It was a spectacular display of strength, pomp and showmanship, and it painted a picture for the nobility of what his rule would look like.
At Easter, Henry held a lavish court at Gloucester, and called himself ‘duke of Aquitaine’ for the first time. He granted charters and lands; unlike Stephen, he had the power to grant lands in Normandy, enticing to the nobility. Henry could now assert his right to rule through succession, including a standard clause in his charters confirming rights, by granting beneficiaries, ‘everything that King Henry my grandfather gave him’. This representation of himself as restorer and regenerator of his grandfather’s government was a theme Henry would return to again and again throughout his own reign.
Henry knew that the game was not yet won, in spite of his successes over the spring and early summer. Wallingford would change that; for Stephen, it marked the beginning of the end.
In July or August 1153, Henry was finally in a strong enough position to relieve his supporters besieged at Wallingford Castle. Stephen and Eustace arrived with ‘an inexpressibly large army from every part of England’.7 Again, Henry was to be disappointed – there was no battle between the enemies. Stephen’s men did not want to fight the man who it now seemed inevitable would be king. The Gesta Stephani recorded how the barons on both sides offered irresistible arguments for a peace to save the kingdom: ‘Wherefore the leading men of each army … were greatly grieved and shrank, on both sides, from a conflict that was not merely between fellow countrymen but meant the desolation of the whole kingdom.’8
Men who knew the politics and the country better than Henry advocated a negotiated peace rather than the uncertainty and loss of life of a battle.
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