Stephen, King of England over the kingdom and the duchy, and was certainly preferable to Matilda. Theobald met with the Norman barons and Robert of Gloucester at Lisieux on 21 December, but their discussions were interrupted by the sudden news from England that Stephen's coronation was to occur the next day. Theobald then agreed to the Normans' proposal that he be made king, only to find that his former support immediately ebbed away: the barons were not prepared to support the division of England and Normandy by opposing Stephen, who subsequently financially compensated Theobald, who in return remained in Blois and supported his brother's
The History of the Norman Conquest of England a wide readership that the "History" was "among the great works of the present century". But in the later years of Freeman's life the book's reputation was injured by a series of attacks levelled on it by the genealogist and local historian J. H. Round. Round brought against Freeman the same kind of aggressively pedantic nit-picking that Freeman himself had been used to bring against other historians. Round was neither interested in nor knowledgeable about Anglo-Saxon history, but had "an instinctive feeling that in England our consecutive political history does, in a sense, begin with the Norman conquest". Part of