Before quitting the point, I would venture briefly to resume my grounds for urging that, in comparing Stephen with his successor, the difference between their circumstances has been insufficiently allowed for. At Stephen's accession, thirty years of legal and financial oppression had rendered unpopular the power of the Crown, and had led to an impatience of official restraint which opened the path to a feudal reaction: at the accession of Henry, on the contrary, the evils of an enfeebled administration and of feudalism run mad had made all men eager for the advent of a strong king, and had prepared them to welcome the introduction of his centralizing administrative reforms. He anticipated the position of the house of Tudor at the close of the Wars of the Roses, and combined with it the advantages which Charles II. derived from the Puritan tyranny. Again, Stephen was hampered from the first by his weak position as a king on sufferance, whereas Henry came to his work unhampered by compact or concession. Lastly, Stephen was confronted throughout by a rival claimant, who formed a splendid rallying-point for all the discontent in his realm: but Henry reigned for as long as Stephen without a rival to trouble him; and when he found at length a rival in his own son, a claim far weaker than that which had threatened his predecessor seemed likely for a time to break his power as effectually as the followers of the Empress had broken that of Stephen. He may only, indeed, have owed his escape to that efficient administration which years of strength and safety had given him the time to construct. It in no way follows from these considerations that Henry was not superior to Stephen; but it does, surely, suggest itself that Stephen's disadvantages were great, and that had he enjoyed better fortune, we might have heard less of his defects. It will be at least established by the evidence adduced in this work that some of the charges which are brought against him can no longer be maintained. [3] _Early Plantagenets_, p. 13; _Const Hist._ (1874), i. 319. [4] _Gesta Stephani_, p. 3. [5] "A Dourensibus repulsus, et a Cantuarinis exclusus" (_Gervase_, i. 94). As illustrating the use of such adjectives for the garrison, rather than the townsfolk, compare Florence of Worcester's "Hrofenses Cantuariensibus ... cædes inferunt" (ii. 23), where the "Hrofenses" are Odo's garrison. So too "Bristoenses" in the _Gesta_ (ed. Hewlett, pp. 38, 40, 41), though rendered by the editor "the people of Bristol," are clearly the troops of the Earl of Gloucester. [6] _Early Plantagenets_, p. 14. Compare _Const. Hist._, i. 319: "The men of Kent, remembering the mischief that had constantly come to them from Boulogne, refused to receive him." Miss Norgate adopts the same explanation (_England under the Angevin Kings_, i. 277).