However, he made it, and held onto power. He acted fast, while his brother Robert was still travelling back from the Holy Land, he was annoyed that Henry had taken the throne but did nothing. This might be the ignorance of Robert which should be not never ignore and he should immediately adopt a defensive posture. Lately, he did so, after a year, when Flambard escaped from the Tower to Normandy early in Feburary 1101, Flambard encouraged the duke to prepare an invasion fleet. Here, when Robert begins his preparations, Henry began to lose the support of the great nobility in England (Count William of Mortain, nephew of the Conqueror, William de Warenne, Ealr of Surrey, Robert de Belleme, Earl od Shrewsbury and Ivo de Grandmesnil). When in July 1101, Duke Robert took an invasion fleet to England, Henry was in a far worse position than Harold Godwinsson had been in 1066. He met his brother at Alton but the two armies showed no inclination to fight. The ‘invasion’ finished with a negotiations and Robert accepted £2000 a year to renounce his claim to throne.
If Duke Robert would took an invasion early it may caused him a new king of England and made this the biggest failure of Henry I and finished his reign forever and in the future doesn’t let him to be a ruler of Normandy. This all was due to a good fortune and he could continue being a king of England for thirty-five years. Next, he spent next five years neutralising his enemies of 1101 and building up new allies.
He won over William de Warenne by 1105, and hounded out William of Mortain and Ivo of Grandmesnil. He also outwitted and forced Robert de Belleme to leave England in 1102, in what was the last baronial rebellion in England for the next thirty-six years. Finally, he started to have his allies back and staring to being success.
The next and the biggest success gave him a visit to Normandy in 1104 and 1105 where he demonstrate to the Norman nobility and Church that he could be a better ruler of the duchy and that Robert’s competences as a governor and military leader had not been improved by his crusading activities. Robert realized his brother deadly game, visited England in 1106 to negotiate, but Henry refused and took an army to Tinchebray in Normandy. According to a good contemporary witness, defeated him in only an hour (Douglas and Greenaway 1981:329-30); the imprisonment which followed lasted for twenty-eight years until Robert's death in 1134. This success had wider implications, for it inevitably made Henry into a key figure in the politics of northern Europe, a role which he took on without any hesitation. Throughout the reign it seemed to him quite natural to spend much of his time out of England implementing these wider ambitions.
The next success which is attributed to him is his change of government, his new reforms which were very successive and gave England a lot of positives. Henry’s efficient - in some sense ruthless – organisation of England administration, was therefore necessary, not only to help finance this policy, but also because he needed a governmental system upon which he could rely when he was away.
Under Henry a constitution for the royal household was drawn up, with allowances for authorised officers and departments. It illustrates how well organised and institutionalised the royal household had became. The king used his increasing welth to built up a larger military section of the household which became an elite force that formed the core of his army at Tinchebray. Others countries were attracted to his household and wanted to learn the art of warfare, this shows how great Henry’s reputation was. The changes in exchequer and pipe role system were a good idea and another success of Henry. He also changed the important procedural developments in royal and criminal justice and his firm application of the law’s penalties. In 1108 he increased the penalties for various offences, making theft and robbery capital crimes and decreeing the false moneyers should be punished by blinding or castration. This kept the towns more safe. The royal justice was financially beneficial to the king, hence the position of Roger as both justiciar and chief baron of the Exchequer, the intinerant justices gathered the rents of the royal estates and fined those who had failed in their duties, this gave £11,000 to the royal income. Royal government in the provinces till depended very much on the sheriffs. He was concerned that the Sheriffs did not become too powerful so Henry I replaced Sheriffs.
Relations with Scotland were far more peaceful under Henry I. After Malcolm’s death in 1093, peace predominated between England and Scotland until 1136. In Wales he was responsible for the successful settlement of the Flemings in Pembrokeshire. He organised settlements if whole colonies in lands needing to be brought under cultivation. He intervened often in Welsh affairs; launching large-scale invasions in 1114 and 1121, and making and braking alliances and families.
For all but the first two years of the thirty-five year reign of Henry I, England was at peace. This is what I would take for the granted and most important success in his reign. He formatted diplomatic alliances with the neighbouring regions of Maine and Anjou and peace treaties with the King of France in 1113 and 1120.
Despite his success in achieving ‘everything that contributes to worldly glory’, Henry I remained acutely conscious that in William of Malmesbury’s words, ‘nothing can remain in shaken for a long, even with the greatest labouts’ (Strubbs 1889) He was right.
In November 1120 he lost his only legitimate son, William, drowned off the coast of northern France (The White Ship disaster). The death of the heir to the throne was a personal and national catastrophe. William was a good heir, he had made a good name for himself, his mother was of the Old English royal line and represented union between Norman and Saxon. The English aristocracy gave him their support. The White Ship disaster seems to have emphasised this streak in his character, many of his actions after this time, like the foundation and lavish endowment of Reading Abbey, can be at least partly explained by a belief that not even the most powerful kings could expect their plans to survive divine displeasure. With William’s death, Henry’s plans for the succession collapsed. This led first to Henry’s attempt to produce a new legitimate heir through remarriage and then, when this failed, to his reconstruction of the Angevin alliance through the marriage of Matilda to Geoffrey of Anjou.
Henry needed to ‘born again’ and maintain the peace on his borders. As in 1108, Louise VI became a king of France he flexed his muscles and therefore there was a border confrontations and disputes between Louis and Henry until 1124, when some sorts of least peace was established.
Overall Henry was a great ruler and his achievements were successive. He kept thirty-five years peace in England, finally England and Normandy were united, he made legal reforms and financial reforms in government which laid foundations for change throughout the 12thCentury. He settled the Walsh rebellion of his brother’s reign and fortified the new borders of Wales with many castles. Although the fact of not having a male heir which leads England to be ruled by Stephen of Blois and as a result of this, everything Henry I had worked for was shattered, and England was plunged into uncertainty, dispute and division for the next nineteen years.
