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England and, to a lesser degree, Normandy remained crippled by conflict. The country, wrote the chronicler William of Newburgh, was ‘mutilated’. From 1142 England was firmly split between two courts – one under the king, nominally at Westminster and Winchester, and the other with Matilda, who ruled from Devizes in the south-west. The rule of law dissolved. With it went public order. England was torn three ways by a vicious civil war, between those who backed Stephen, those who backed Matilda, and those who backed themselves and no one else. With no adequate king in the north, King David I of Scotland ruled Westmorland, Cumberland and Northumberland. England, which under Henry I had been wealthy, well governed and stoutly defended at its borders, had now become apatchwork of competing loci of authority and power. The country groaned with popular anguish. ‘It was as if,’ wrote the author of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle , ‘Christ and his saints were asleep.’
    In such a situation there were no victors. Stephen and Matilda both saw themselves as the lawful successor of Henry I, and set up official governments accordingly: they had their own mints, courts, systems of patronage and diplomatic machinery. But there could not be two governments. Neither could be secure or guarantee that their writ would run, hence no subject could be fully confident in the rule of law. As in any state without a single, central source of undisputed authority, violent self-help and spoliation among the magnates exploded. Flemish mercenaries garrisoned castles and newly fortified houses the length and breadth of the country. Forced labour was exacted to help arm the countryside. General violence escalated as individual landholders turned to private defence of their property. The air ran dark with the smoke from burning crops and the ordinary people suffered intolerable misery at the hands of marauding foreign soldiers.
    The chronicles from the time are full of records of the bleak days that accompanied the war. The author of the Gesta Stephani records one example:
[The King] set himself to lay waste that fair and delightful district, so full of good things, round Salisbury; they took and plundered everything they came upon, set fire to houses and churches, and, what was a more cruel and brutal sight, fired the crops that had been reaped and stacked all over the fields, consumed and brought to nothing everything edible they found. They raged with this bestial cruelty especially round Marlborough, they showed it very terribly round Devizes, and they had in mind to do the same to their adversaries all over England.
    Eventually, in 1148, Matilda left England. It may seem strange that she left a fight in which she had invested so much of her life, but after a decade spent leading the Plantagenet cause, her work was done. Her children – Henry and his two younger brothers Geoffrey and William– were growing up across the Channel. Matilda aimed to live out the remaining nineteen years of her life in comfortable retirement at the priory of Notre-Dame-du-Pré, a cell of the abbey of Bec at Quevilly, where across the Seine she could visit Rouen, the Norman capital that Orderic Vitalis described as a ‘fair city set among murmuring streams and smiling meadows … strongly encircled by walls and ramparts and battlements …’ The city owed her much, for her grim efforts to distract King Stephen on the English front had allowed Geoffrey Plantagenet to capture it. Now she intended to enjoy the view.
    And in any case, England was not abandoned. Her eldest son was approaching his sixteenth birthday. It was time for him to take up the struggle, time for Henry FitzEmpress to try his hand at conquest.

Ambition
    Henry, sixteen years old and burning with ambition, landed on the shores of Devon on 13 April 1149. It was his third visit to the fractured realm that he would have heard his mother tell him time after time was his by birthright. He had seen the