While Henry was busy, doing all he could to make his daughter queen, he died. I must tell you the cause of his death; for I think it is a good lesson to all of us. He had been told by the physicians that he ought not to eat too much, but one day a favorite dish was brought to his table (I have read that it was potted lampreys), and he ate such a quantity that it made him ill, and so he died, after he had been king thirty-five years. CHAPTER XVII. STEPHEN.—1135 to 1154. How Stephen was made king; and of the civil wars in his reign. As soon as King Henry was dead, his nephew Stephen, who was very handsome, and brave, and good-natured, was made king. A great many Norman barons, and English lords and bishops, went with him to Westminster Abbey, and there the Archbishop of Canterbury put a crown upon his head, and they all promised to obey him as their king. But the other barons, and lords, and bishops, who, as I told you before, had promised to obey the Empress Maude as Queen of England, and to keep the kingdom for her young son Henry, sent to fetch them from Anjou, which was their own country, and tried to make her queen. I am sorry to say that the friends of Stephen and the friends of Maude began to fight, and never ceased for fifteen years. This fighting was very mischievous to the country; whole towns were destroyed by it; and while the war between Stephen and Maude lasted, the corn-fields were laid waste, so that many people died for want of bread; the flocks of sheep and herds of cattle were killed, or died for want of care; the trees were cut down, and nobody planted young ones; and there was nothing but misery from one end of the kingdom to the other. This sort of war between two parties of the people of the same country is called civil war, and it is the most dreadful of all warfare. If strangers come to fight, and all the people of a country join to drive them away, the mischief they may have done is soon repaired; and the people of a country love one another the better because they have been defending one another. But in a civil war, when people in the same country fight, it is not so. The very next door neighbours may take different sides, and then the mischief they may do one another will be always remembered, and they will dislike one another even after peace is made. I have heard things so dreadful about civil wars, you would hardly believe them. It is said even that two brothers have taken different sides in a civil war, and that when there was a battle it has happened that one brother has killed the other, and when he found out what he had done, he was ready to kill himself with grief. Only think how dreadful such a thing is, and how sorry the father and mother of those brothers must have been!