King Stephen
By Edmund King
Yale University Press, 2010
In tackling the history of King Stephen of
England (1135-1154), Edmund King engages his readers in a discussion of the
failure of a dynasty, and the roots of an English civil war in the early 12th
century. Biographical but topical in
nature, King examines the events of the disputed English crown from the point
of view of a moderate outsider. Henry of
Huntingdon and William of Malmesbury speak for the author, who in his turn
tries to identify the feelings of the English and Norman nobility who form the
backdrop of the drama of rights to succession.
King demonstrates well the sympathetic
situation of Stephen, by arguing alongside his subject that indeed it was the
nobility who feared for their landed rights at the death of King Henry I
(d.1135), who were responsible for elevating Stephen to the crown. Ignoring the rights of the late monarch’s
daughter Matilda and her son Henry Fitz Empress, King argues throughout his
work that Stephen was elected more or less as a powerful figurehead of the
designs of the nobility. Passive, pious,
and in love with pageantry, King describes a monarch whose power base derives
not from himself, but from his strong willed queen Matilda of Boulogne, his
brothers Henry of Winchester and Theobald, Count of Blois. The eventual loss of the crown to the future
Henry II is described as the result of failures of a single man, and the
mitigation of powerful magnates wanting peace within their poverty and war stricken
domains.
King’s arguments are substantive and well documented,
and his conclusions seem to hit the mark.
His main subject is rarely quoted in the whole work, arguably to
substantiate his claim that the king was slow to uphold even his own rights,
but it appears to give a disadvantage to the work. The reader could use more information on the
king’s actual activities, charters and words to better understand King’s thesis
that the Stephen rarely raised his voice, let alone got listened too by his
subjects. This one drawback underscores
the whole work, which really accomplishes its goal in describing the priorities
of the English and Norman nobility and the scramble to gain and keep power in
12th century England.
John Lowe (J. Sharp)
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