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 Rnfus 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 Peveneey, marched forward and overtook his brother before he could reach Winchester, of which it was his object to obtain possession. After soma negociation 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 eeries of petty insurrections in England, which be easily cm-shed, extinguishing thereby, one after another, all the persona that were most obnoxious to him, and acquiring their estates to distribute among new men who were his devoted adherents. 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 conch 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 tennre 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 homo, 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 be had always shown, was taken prisoner, with 400 of his knights. He was condemned by his brother to confinement for life. According to Matthew Paris, an unsuccessful attempt which he soon after made to effect his escape was diabolically punished, on the order of his merciless brother, by the extinction of his eight : 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 1185, not quite twelve months before Henry : but the story seems locoosisteut with the statetneut of William of Malmeebury, a contemporary, that the only evil he endured was that of solitude. Immediately after tho victory
of Teneliebrai Henry was, without opposition, acknowledged their duke by the Norman barons. About the same time also was termi nated by a compromise, for the present, the dispute with Ansehn, the archbishop of Canterbury, on the subject of investitures, which had been proceeding ever since the commencement of the reign. (Astseut.] 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 the interests of William, styled Fitz-Robert, tho son of Duke Robert, who had escaped the vengeance of his uncle, and became from this time a rallying point for the friends of his father's hones and the enemies of the English king. The war lasted for about two years, and was on the whole adverse to henry; but lie then managed, with leis usual dexterity, to bring it to a close by a treaty, which restored to him all that he had lost, and for the present wholly detached the Earl of Anjou from the cause of his young prot60. 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 eon, Prince William of England. But Henry aeema to have made this engagement with no intention of ever ful filling it : as soon as it had served its immediate purpose, ho showed in the most open manner his disregard of every stipulation of tho 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 Heury 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 the leas, on Friday the 25th of November, of the ship in which his son had embarked at Barfleur 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 Cheater, with his wife and her brother, who were the niece and nephew of the king, and about 140 of tho members of the meet 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 ho bad 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 lost 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 Anjou, and so to deprive the Norman prince of the hand of the fair Sibylla, when he had it almost in his grasp.