least as worthily as his son’s daughter and her Angevin husband. And if a sovereign was to be chosen for his personal qualifications, it would have been hard to find a better choice than Theobald the Great, count of Blois, Chartres and Champagne. He did not owe his historical epithet solely to his vast possessions; he was almost the only member of the house of Blois who shewed any trace of intellectual or moral greatness. His public life was one long series of vexations and disappointments; the misfortunes which his race were so apt to bring upon themselves by their own unsteadiness and self-will seemed to fall upon him without provocation on his part; it was as if his heritage had come to him charged with the penalties of all his forefathers’ errors. But it had not come to him charged with the heavier burthen of their fatal intellectual perversity and moral weakness. In its place he had the tact, the dignity, the stedfastness of his Norman mother; and the whole of his after-career fully justified the esteem of the Norman barons, grounded upon their acquaintance with his person and character during those wars against the king of France in which his cause had been inseparably bound up with that of his uncle Henry. In England, however, he could only be known by report, as the nephew and ally of the king, and the elder brother of Stephen. It was Stephen, not Theobald, who had been the king’s favourite and constant companion, lacking nothing of the rank of an adoptive son save the avowed prospect of the crown. Stephen had lived in England from his childhood; his territorial possessions, his personal interests, lay wholly in England and Normandy; his name and his face were almost as familiar there as those of Henry himself; he was the first baron of the duchy, the first layman of the kingdom; moreover, he was the husband of a lady who stood as near to the Old-English royal line and represented it, to say the least, as worthily as her imperial cousin and namesake. Lastly, his marriage gave him yet one more advantage, slight in itself, but of no small practical use at the moment. As count of Boulogne, he had immediate command of the shortest passage from the Continent to England. [667] Eng. Chron. a. 1135. The tidings of Henry’s death soon reached Angers; and before the first week of December was out, Matilda presented herself in Normandy to take possession of her inheritance. The officer in charge of the border-territories, comprising the forfeited lands of William Talvas and the county of Hiesmes, at once surrendered them to her and received her as his liege lady;[668] but before she had time to secure the duchy, the kingdom was snatched from her grasp. Stephen set out at once from Wissant and crossed the Channel amid a storm so terrific that men on shore deemed it could bode nothing less than the end of the world.[669] It only boded the arrival at Dover of a candidate for the English crown.