Civil conflict has often erupted in England, with the Wars of the Roses (1455-1485) and the British Civil Wars (also known as the Wars of the Three Kingdoms, 1639-1653) being perhaps the most infamous examples. There were also two Barons’ Wars in the 13th century – yet before all of these came ‘The Anarchy’ in the mid-12th century, when ‘Christ and his saints slept’.
The genesis came on 25 November 1120, when Henry I’s only legitimate son, Prince William, was drowned and his vessel lost in the Channel in the ‘White Ship disaster’. Henry’s hopes now rested on his only daughter Matilda (1102-1167), known as ‘Empress Maud’ following her marriage to the Holy Roman Emperor in 1114. After the Emperor’s death in 1125, Henry made his barons swear over the winter of 1126/1127 to receive the widowed Matilda as Lady of England. Henry’s nephew Stephen of Blois and Matilda’s half-brother Earl Robert of Gloucester vied to be the first lay baron, after David of Scotland, to swear allegiance – though just over a decade later they’d be enemies. In 1128, Matilda married again – to Geoffrey Plantagenet, son of the Count of Anjou, to whom she bore the future Henry II (1133-1189), the first Plantagenet/ Angevin monarch.
Henry’s wishes were not to be granted. Instead, his death on 1 December 1135 (allegedly after eating a ‘surfeit of lampreys’) sparked a succession crisis. This saw his sister Adela’s son, the aforementioned Stephen of Blois, seizing the throne, becoming king by Christmas, and reigning from 1135 to 1154. Matilda would now have to wrest the crown from him.
