Time and Chance

PROLOGUE

It began with a shipwreck on a bitter-cold November eve in God’s Year 1120. The English king Henry, son of William the Bastard, conqueror of England, lost his only lawfully begotten son in the sinking of the White Ship. In his despair, he named his daughter Maude, widow of the Holy Roman Emperor, as his heir. But his lords balked at being governed by a woman, and when the old king died, Maude’s cousin Stephen seized the throne.

Stephen was not feared by his lords, who dismissed him as a mild man, gentle and good, who did no justice. When the Empress Maude and her bastard brother Robert, the Earl of Gloucester, led an army onto English shores, many rallied to her cause. Even more served only themselves or the Devil. Outlaws roamed the roads and barons became bandits, raising up stone castles by forced labor, emerging from these wolf lairs to raid towns and plunder the countryside. Women, pilgrims, priests-none were spared by the lawless and the damned. Because men feared to venture into the fields, the earth was not tilled, crops did not grow, and hunger stalked the land. In this wretched way did nineteen years pass, years of suffering and anarchy, and people said openly that Christ and his saints slept.

The Empress Maude failed in her attempt to reclaim her stolen crown. But by her marriage to Geoffrey, Count of Anjou, she had given birth to a son who vowed to recover his lost birthright. He called himself Henry Fitz Empress and men began to hope that he might deliver them from their misery. It was said that he was Fortune’s favorite; when that was reported to him, he said a man makes his own luck and some thought that was blasphemy. He was only nineteen when he stunned Christendom by wedding Eleanor, the beautiful and headstrong Duchess of Aquitaine, less than two months after she’d been freed from her marriage to the King of France. He then turned his gaze upon Stephen’s unhappy realm. Within a twelvemonth, he had forced Stephen to recognize him as the rightful heir, and it was agreed that Stephen would rule for the rest of his days and then Henry would be king. In less than a year, it came to pass. He was but one and twenty when he was crowned as the second Henry to rule England since the Conquest, and the people rejoiced, for he promised them justice and peace.