But his success, such as it was, was due to his own promptness. He had, as count of Boulogne, the command of the shortest passage to England. Whilst the Normans were discussing the merits of his brother Theobald, he took on himself to be his own messenger. He remembered how his uncle had won the crown and treasure of William Rufus; he left the Norman lords to look after the funeral of their dead lord and sailed for Kent; at Dover and at Canterbury he was received with sullen silence. The men of Kent had no love for the stranger who came, as his predecessor Eustace had done, to trouble the land; on he went to London, and there he learned that the same prejudice which existed in Normandy against the Angevins was in full force. “We will not have,” the Londoners said, “a stranger to rule over us;” though how Stephen of Champagne was more a stranger than Geoffrey of Anjou it is not easy to see. Anyhow, as nothing succeeds like success, nothing is so potent to secure the name of king as the wearing of the crown. So Stephen went on to Winchester, and there secured the crown and treasure. In little more than three weeks he had come again to London and claimed the crown as the elect of the nation. [Sidenote: Election of Stephen and coronation. ] The assembly which saw the coronation and did homage on St. Stephen’s day was but a poor substitute for the great councils which had attended the summons of William and Henry, and in which Stephen, as a subject, had played a leading part. There was his brother Henry of Winchester, the skilled and politic churchman, who was willing enough to be a king’s brother if he might build up ecclesiastical supremacy through him; there was Archbishop William of Corbeuil, who had undertaken by the most solemn obligations to support Matilda, and who knew that his prerogative vote might decide the contest against Stephen, although it could not restore the chances of peace; there was Roger of Salisbury, the late king’s prime minister, the master builder of the constitutional fabric, undecided between duty and the desire of retaining power. Very few of the barons were there; Hugh Bigot, indeed, with his convenient oath, and a few more whose complicity with Stephen had already thrown them on him as a sole chance of safety. The rest of the great men present were the citizens of London, Norman barons of a sort, foreign merchants, some few rich Englishmen: all of them men who were used to public business, who knew how Henry I. had held his courts, who believed confidently in force and money. They had first encouraged Stephen from fear of Geoffrey; and more or less they held to Stephen as long as he lived. These men constituted the witenagemot that chose him king, and overruled the scruples of the inconstant archbishop. They took upon them to represent the nation that should ratify the election of a new king with their applause. [Sidenote: First charter of Stephen. ]