However, he lent the Earl of Gloucester a supply of four hundred men, and sent along with him his eldest son Henry, to comfort his mother, and be shewn to the people.
During the short absence of the Earl of Gloucester, the Empress was closely besieged in Oxford by the King; and provisions beginning to fail, she was in cruel apprehensions of falling into his hands.

This gave her occasion to put in practice the only talent wherein she seemed to excel, which was that of contriving some little shift or expedient to secure her person upon any sudden emergency.

A long season of frost had made the Thames passable upon the ice, and much snow lay on the ground; Maud with some few attendants clad all in white, to avoid being discovered from the King's camp, crossed the river at midnight on foot, and travelling all night, got safe to Wallingford Castle, where her brother and young son Henry, newly returned from France, arrived soon after, to her great satisfaction: but Oxford, immediately upon the news of her flight, surrendered to the King.
However, this disgrace was fully compensated soon after by another of the same kind, which happened to King Stephen; for whilst he and his brother of Winchester were fortifying a nunnery at Wilton, to bridle his enemies at Salisbury, who very much harassed those parts by their frequent excursions, the Earl of Gloucester, who watched all opportunities, came unaware with a strong body of men, and set fire on the nunnery while the King himself was in it.

Stephen, upon the sudden surprise of the thing, wholly lost or forgot his usual courage, and fled shamefully away, leaving his soldiers to be cut in pieces by the Earl.
During the rest of the war, although it lasted nine years longer, there is little memorable recorded by any writer; whether the parties being pretty equal, and both sufficiently tired with so long a contention, wanted vigour and spirit to make a thorough conquest, and only endeavoured to keep what they had, or whether the multitude of strong castles, whose number daily increased, made it very difficult to end a war between two contending powers almost in balance; let the cause be what it will, the whole time passed in mutual sieges, surprises, revolts, surrenders of fortified places, without any decisive action, or other event of importance to be related.

By which at length the very genius of the people became wholly bent upon a life of spoil, robbery, and plunder; many of the nobles, although pretending to hold their castles for the King or the Empress, lived like petty independent princes in a perpetual state of war against their neighbours; the fields lay uncultivated, all the arts of civil life were banished, no veneration left for sacred persons or things; in short, no law, truth, or religion among men, but a scene of universal misery, attended with all the consequences of an embroiled and distracted state.
About the eleventh year of the King's reign, young Henry, now growing towards a man, was sent for to France by a message from his father, who was desirous to see him; but left a considerable party in England, to adhere to his interests; and in a short time after (as some write[38]) the Empress herself grown weary of contending any longer in a cause where she had met with nothing but misfortunes of her own procuring, left the kingdom likewise, and retired to her husband.