s. These foreigners were much discontented at the peace,
whereby they were likely to become useless and burthensome to the
present King, and hateful to the successor. To prevent which, the
commanders among them began to practise upon the levity and ambition of
William the King's son. They urged the indignity he had received in
being deprived of his birthright; offered to support his title by their
valour, as they had done that of his father; and, as an earnest of their
intentions, to remove the chief impediment by dispatching his rival out
of the world, The young prince was easily wrought upon to be at the head
of this conspiracy; time and place were fixed; when, upon the day
appointed, William broke his leg by a fall from his horse; and the
conspirators wanting their leader immediately dispersed. This
disappointment and delay, as it usually happens among conspirators, were
soon followed by a discovery of the whole plot, whereof the Duke, with
great discretion, made no other use than to consult his own safety;
therefore, without any shew of suspicion or displeasure, he took leave
of the King, and returned to Normandy.

1154.

Stephen lived not above a year to share the happiness of this peace with
his people, in which time he made a progress through most parts of the
kingdom, where he gained universal love and veneration, by a most
affable and courteous behaviour to all men. A few months after his
return he went to Dover, to have an interview with the Earl of
Flanders;[43] where, after a short sickness, he died of the iliac
passion, together with his old distemper the hemorrhoids, upon the
twenty-fifth day of October, in the forty-ninth year of his age, and the
nineteenth of his reign.

[Footnote 43: The Earl of Flanders was a potent sovereign on the
continent, and had landed at Dover, in order to meet and confer with the
King. [D.S.]]

He was a prince of wonderful endowments, both in body and mind: in his
person tall and graceful, of great strength as well as vigour: he had a
large portion of most virtues that can be useful in a King towards the
happiness of his subjects or himself; courtesy and valour, liberality
and clemency, in an eminent degree; especially the last, which he
carried to an extreme, though very pardonable, yet hardly consisting
with prudence, or his own safety. If we except his usurpation of the
crown, he must be allowed a prince of great justice, which most writers
affirm to have been always