Thus ended this tedious and ruinous civil war. Stephen survived it near two years; and now, finding himself more secure as the lawful tenant than he had been as the usurping proprietor of the crown, he no longer governed on the maxims of necessity. He made no new attempts in favor of his family, but spent the remainder of his reign in correcting the disorders which arose from his steps in its commencement, and in healing the wounds of so long and cruel a war. Thus he left the kingdom in peace to his successor, but his character, as it is usual where party is concerned, greatly disputed. Wherever his natural dispositions had room to exert themselves, they appeared virtuous and princely; but the lust to reign, which often attends great virtues, was fatal to his, frequently hid them, and always rendered them suspected.
The death of Stephen left an undisputed succession for the first time since the death of Edward the Confessor. Henry, descended equally from the Norman Conqueror and the old English kings, adopted by Stephen, acknowledged by the barons, united in himself every kind of title. It was grown into a custom for the king to grant a charter of liberties on his accession to the crown. Henry also granted a charter of that kind, confirming that of his grandfather; but as his situation was very different from that of his predecessors, his charter was different,--reserved, short, dry, conceived in general terms,--a gift, not a bargain. And, indeed, there seems to have been at that juncture but little occasion to limit a power which seemed not more than sufficient to correct all the evils of an unlimited liberty. Henry spent the beginning of his reign in repairing the ruins of the royal authority, and in restoring to the kingdom peace and order, along with its ancient limits; and he may well be considered as the restorer of the English monarchy. Stephen had sacrificed the demesne of the crown, and many of its rights, to his subjects; and the necessity of the times obliged both that prince and the Empress Matilda to purchase, in their turns, the precarious friendship of the King of Scotland by a cession of almost all the country north of the Humber. But Henry obliged the King of Scotland to restore his acquisitions, and to renew his homage. He took the same methods with his barons. Not sparing the grants of his mother, he resumed what had been so lavishly squandered by both of the contending parties, who, to establish their claims, had given away almost everything that made them valuable. There never was a prince in Europe who better understood the advantages to be derived from its peculiar constitution, in which greater acquisitions of dominion are made by judicious marriages than by success in war: for, having added to his patrimonial territories of Anjou and Normandy the Duchy of Guienne by his own marriage, the male issue of the Dukes of Brittany failing, he took the opportunity of marrying his third son, Geoffrey, then an infant, to the heiress of that important province, an infant also; and thus uniting by so strong a link his northern to his southern dominions, he possessed in his own name, or in those of his wife and son, all that fine and extensive country that is washed by the Atlantic Ocean, from Picardy quite to the foot of the Pyrenees.