353 



HENRY I. (OF ENGLAND). 



HENRY I. (OF ENGLAND). 



351 



mistresses and profligate minions of the late king; but this show of 

 reformation, like most of his other professions, was soon found to be 

 merely an expedient adopted for the purposes of tho moment. 



The history of the reign opens with the contest between Henry and 

 his elder brother for the crown. At the moment of the death of 

 Rufus the gallant and thoughtless Duke Robert, after a brilliant 

 career of arms in the Holy Land, was lingering on his return home in 

 the south of Italy, detained there by the fascinations of the beautiful 

 Sibylla, daughter of the Count of Conversano, whom he eventually 

 married and brought with him to Normandy. After his arrival in his 

 own territories he threw away more time in a succession of festive 

 displays, but at last he prepared to make a descent upon England. 

 He landed with a considerable force at Portsmouth, soon after Whit- 

 suntide, 1101. But this effort ended in nothing: Henry, having an 

 army assembled at Pevensey, marched forward and overtook his 

 brother before he could reach Winchester, of which it was his object 

 to obtain possession. After some negotiation the two princes met in 

 a vacant space between the armies, and in a few minutes agreed to 

 make up their differences on the terms of Henry retaining England 

 and Robert Normandy, with the proviso that if either died without 

 legitimate issue the survivor should be his heir. The easy temper of 

 the one brother and the craft of the other are equally conspicuous in 

 this treaty, by which Henry extricated himself at little or no cost from 

 all the inconveniences and hazards of his present position, while Robert 

 at once relinquished the whole object in dispute, bating only what 

 part of it he may have conceived was made over to him in his qualified 

 and precarious reversionary right. It was by no means Henry's intention 

 however that he should escape even at this sacrifice. Several of the 

 English barons who possessed estates in Normandy, anxious for their 

 own interests to secure the union of the two countries, had taken part 

 in Robert's attempt : it was one of the stipulations of the treaty that a 

 full pardon should be extended to all the subjects of either brother 

 who might thus have gone over to the other ; but no sooner was the 

 duke returned to Normandy than Henry proceeded to take systematic 

 measures for effecting the ruin of the leading barons who had deserted 

 him. In this way he soon provoked a series of petty insurrections in 

 England, which he easily crushed, extinguishing thereby, one after 

 another, all the persons that were most obnoxious to him, and acquiring 

 their estates to distribute among new men who were his devoted 

 adliereutH. These proceedings could not fail to rouse the indignation 

 of Robert, and Henry was not slow in taking advantage of the courses 

 into which his irritated feelings drove him, to declare that the peace 

 between them was for ever at an end. Circumstances were now in 

 every way much more favourable for tho English king than when he 

 formerly contrived to avoid a contest of arms with his brother : on 

 the one hand, some years of possession bad established him more 

 firmly on his throne; on the other, the strength of Duke Robert was 

 broken and wasted, and his extravagance and misgovernment had both 

 dissipated his means of every description and loosened the very tenure 

 of his sovereignty. Henry, in the first instance, called upon him to 

 cede the duchy for a sum of money or an annual pension ; he then 

 (1105), on this demand being scornfully rejected, crossed over to 

 Normandy at the head of an army, and speedily made himself master 

 of many of the chief places of strength. 



The following year the English king, who had returned home, again 

 crossed the seas with a more numerous force than before. About the 

 end of July he commenced the siege of the castle of Tenchebrai; 

 Robert, after some time, advanced to its relief; and on the 28th of 

 September a long and sanguinary battle was fought between the two 

 brothers before the walls of that fortress, the result of which was the 

 utter ruin of Robert and his cause. He himself, after a last splendid 

 display of the heroic valour which he had always shown, was taken 

 pri-oner, with 400 of his knights. Ha was condemned by his brother 

 to confinement for life. According to Matthew Paris, an unsuccessful 

 attempt which he soon after made to effect bis escape was diabolically 

 punished, on the order of his merciless brother, by the extinction of 

 his sight : a basin of iron made red-hot was held before his eyes, which 

 were kept open by force, until they were burned blind ; and in this 

 state the miserable prince survived for twenty-eight years, dying in 

 Cardiff Castle, at the age of eighty, in February 1135, not quite twelve 

 months bcf'irc Henry : but the story seems inconsistent with the 

 statement of William of Malmcsbury, a contemporary, that the only 

 evil ho endured was that of solitude. Immediately after tho victory 

 of Tenchebrai Henry was, without opposition, acknowledged their 

 duko by the Norman barons. About the same time also was termi- 

 nated by a compromise, for the present, the dispute with Anselm, the 

 i.rcl.i'Uhop of Canterbury, on the subject of investitures, which had 

 been proceeding ever since the commencement of the reign. [ANSEI.M.] 



The next six or seven years passed without any events of much 

 moment. In 1113 however Henry was attacked in Normandy by 

 Louis VI. of France and Fulk, earl of Anjou, acting in confederacy in 

 support of tho interests of William, styled Fitz-Kobert, tho sou of 

 Duke Robert, who bad escaped the vengeance of his uncle, and became 

 from this time a rallying point for the friends of his father's house and 

 the enemies of the English king. The war lasted fur about two years, 

 and wa* on tho whole adverse to Henry ; but lie then manngeil, with 

 ii.ll dexterity, to bring it to a clos by a treaty, which restored 

 to him all that he had loot, and for the present wholly detached the 



Biuo. DIT. Tot. III. 



Earl of Anjou from the cause of his young protege". It had been 

 agreed that a marriage should take place between William and the 

 earl's daughter, Sibylla. That project was now given up, and it was 

 arranged instead that Matilda, another daughter of the earl, should be 

 united to Henry's only son, Prince William of England. But Henry 

 seems to have made this engagement with no intention of ever ful- 

 filling it : as soon as it had served its immediate purpose, ho showed 

 iu the most open manner his disregard of every stipulation of the 

 treaty. The consequence was the formation against him of a second 

 continental confederacy, in which the earl and the king of France 

 received the active and zealous co-operation of Baldwin, earl of 

 Flanders. Another war of about two years followed, in which success 

 inclined sometimes to the one side, sometimes to the other; but the 

 death of the Earl of Flanders of a wound received at the siege of Eu, 

 the secession of the Earl of Anjou, again drawn off by a renewal of the 

 proposal for the marriage of his daughter, the intrigues of Henry with 

 the disaffected Normau barons, and, finally, the mediation of the pope, 

 brought it also, in 1120, to a termination entirely favourable to the 

 English king. 



Immediately after this peace Henry's brightest hopes were turned 

 to sudden night by the frightful calamity of tho loss, on Friday the 

 25th of November, of the ship in which his son had embarked at 

 Barflour for England : with the exception of one individual, a butcher 

 of Rouen, all on board perished to the number of nearly 300 persons, 

 including the prince, his half-brother Richard, his half-sister Marie, 

 and the Earl of Chester, with his wife and her brother, who were the 

 niece and nephew of the king, and about 140 of the members of the 

 most noble houses of England and Normandy, of whom 18 were females. 

 Henry is said never to have been known to smile after this blow. It 

 did not however extinguish his spirit of ambition. Two years before 

 this he had lost his consort, the good Queen Maud; and a daughter, 

 Matilda, married in 1114 to the Emperor Henry V., was now his only 

 legitimate progeny. In the hope of male offspring, he now (February 

 2nd 1121) espoused the young and beautiful Adelais, or Alice, daughter 

 of Geoffrey, duke of Louvaine. Scarcely had he entered into this 

 alliance when he found himself called to meet a new revolt iu Nor- 

 mandy, excited by the restless Fulk, earl of Anjou, who now having 

 lo-t all hope of the English marriage, had renewed his connection with 

 Fitz-Robert, and again affianced to him his younger daughter Sibylla, 

 putting him in the meantime in possession of the earldom of Mons. 

 But this movement was very soon put down by Henry, who also 

 contrived once more to gain over the fickle and venal Earl of Aujou, 

 and so to deprive the Norman prince of the hand of the fair Sibylla, 

 when he had it almost in his grasp. 



When four or five years of his second marriage had passed without 

 producing any issue, Henry determined upon the bold enterprise of 

 endeavouring to secure the succession to his dominions for his daugh- 

 ter, the Empress Matilda, who had become a widow by the death of 

 her husbind in 1125. On Christmas-day 1123 she was unanimously 

 declared his heir, in a great council of the lords spiritual and temporal 

 assembled at Windsor Castle. The following year, in the octaves of 

 Whitsuntide, she was married to Geoffrey, suruamed Plantagenet, tho 

 son of Fulk, earl of Anjou, to whom, Although only a boy of sixteen, 

 his father had renounced that earldom on his departure for the Holy 

 Land, where he was a few years afterwards elected King of Jerusalem. 

 Soon after this settlement of his daughter, Henry was relieved of a 

 source of perpetual annoyance and apprehension by the death of his 

 nephew William Fitz Robert, which took place on the 27th of July 

 1128, in the twenty-sixth year of his age. This prince had not b^eu 

 abandoned by King Louis of France, who, after giving him iu 

 marriage Joan of Morienne, the sister of his queen, had tirst put him in 

 possession of the countries of Pontoise, Chaumont, and the Vexiu, and 

 then, on the murder of Charles the Good, had invested him with the 

 earldom of Flanders. The intrigues and the money of Henry how- 

 ever speedily stirred up against him a revolt of a party of his 

 Flemish subjects, who putting Thiedric or Thierry, landgrave of 

 AUace, at their head, endeavoured to drive him from the country ; 

 and it was in a battle with Thierry, under the walls of Alost, that in 

 the moment of victory ho received the wound of which he soon after 

 died in the monastery of St. Oiner. It was not however till March 

 1133 that Henry's longings for a grandchild wore gratified by tho 

 birth of Matilda's first child, Henry, styled Fitz Empress, afterwards 

 Henry II. Two other sons, Geoffrey and William, were born iu tho 

 course of the next two years. These events had been preceded by 

 such dissensions between the ex-empress and her husband as at one 

 time occasioned their separation ; and now that they were again living 

 together, Henry and his son-in-law quarrelled about the Norman 

 duchy, of which the latter wished to be put in immediate possession, 

 according to a promise which he said had been given on his marriage. 

 From these family broils Henry was only delivered by his death, 

 which took place at Rouen on Sunday the 1st of December 1135, 

 being tho seventh day of an illness brought on by eating to excess of 

 lampreys, after a day spent in hunting. Ho had completed the sixty- 

 seventh year of his age and the thirty-fifth of his roign. 



Besides the son and daughter born in wedlock that have already 

 been mentioned, the genealogists assign to Henry I. the following 

 natural children:!, Koburt, earl of Gloucester, who ilied, after a 

 distinguished career, in 1140, by Neat*, daughter of Khcoa-ap-Tudor, 



2 A 



