and its results. Let ns now turn to that given by the anonymous author of the "Acts of King Stephen." It relates that, on Henry's landing, he took no brilliant enterprise in hand, but wasted his time in sloth and negligence; that he was repulsed with disgrace from Cricklade and Bourton, the only places he is said to have attacked; and that his army, unnerved and enfeebled by their disasters, at length disbanded. We are then infonned that the young duke, worn out with shame and distress, applied to his mother, the Countess of Anjou, whose treasury being exhausted, she had no means of supplying his pressing necessities. He also, it is said, had recourse to his uncle, the Earl of Gloucester—who, according to all other accounts, died before his nephew's expedition—but he, we are told, was too fond of his money-bag's, and chose to reserve them for his own occasions. In this dilemma the young duke applied to King Stephen, his cousin, who generously supplied the wants of his greatest enemy.
This noble trait is perliaps not inconsistent with Stephen's general character, but, to say nothing of the anachronism resjiecting the Earl of Gloucester, and the improbability of the conduct attributed to so faithful an adherent to the cause of his sister and nephew, the account given of the young duke's pusillanimity and negligence is as much at variance with the personal history of that gallant and indefatigable prince, afterwards Henry II., as it is with Huntingdon's account of these transactions. Nor can it be understood how, with the ruined fortunes here described, Henry was shortly afterwards able to establish his right to the throne, as it is an undisputed fact that he did.
Our anonymous author's account of the closing scenes of Stephen's reign, of which we are deprived by the ravages of time, may have thrown some light on the inconsistency of the two statements, and it is just possible that his description of Henry's failure and distress may refer to some previous unsuccessful enterprise of the young prince, which Henry of Huntingdon and all the other chroniclers have passed over in silence. But this is by no means probable, and the reasonable conclusion appears to be, that the present is one of those
