From that moment Henry’s position in England was secured; but all his remonstrances failed to make his indolent elder brother fulfil his part of their compact. The traitors whom Henry expelled from England only carried their treason over sea to a more congenial climate, and the helpless, heedless duke looked passively on while Robert of Bellême, William of Mortain the banished earl of Cornwall, and their fellows slaked their thirst for vengeance upon King Henry by ravaging the Norman lands of those who were faithful to him in England.[32] Their victims, as well as Henry himself, began to see that his personal intervention alone could re-establish order in the duchy. On his appearance there in 1104 he was joined by all the more reasonable among the barons. For the moment he was pacified by fresh promises of amendment on Robert’s part, and by the cession of the county of Evreux; but he knew that all compromise had become vain; and in the last week of Lent 1105 he landed again at Barfleur in the full determination of making himself master of Normandy. His Norman partisans rallied round him at once,[33] and he was soon joined by two valuable allies, Elias count of Maine and his intended son-in-law, the young count Geoffrey of Anjou.[34] It was they who won for Henry his first success, the capture of Bayeux.[35] Warned by the fate of this unhappy city, which was burnt down, churches and all, Caen surrendered at once, and Henry thus came into possession of the Norman treasury. A siege of Falaise failed through the unexplained departure of Count Elias,[36] and the war dragged slowly on till Henry, now busy in another quarter with negotiations for the return of S. Anselm, went back at Michaelmas to England. Thither he was followed first by Robert of Bellême, then by Robert of Normandy,[37] both seeking for peace; but peace had become impossible now. Next summer Henry was again in Normandy, reconciled to S. Anselm, released from anxieties at home, free to concentrate all his energies upon the final struggle. It was decided with one blow. As he was besieging the castle of Tinchebray on Michaelmas Eve Duke Robert at the head of all his forces approached and summoned him to raise the siege. He refused, “preferring,” as he said, “to take the blame of a more than civil war for the sake of future peace.” But when the two hosts were drawn up face to face, the prospect of a battle seemed too horrible to be endured, composed as they were of kinsmen and brothers, fathers and sons, arrayed against each other. The clergy besought Henry to stay his hand; he listened, pondered, and at length sent a final message to his brother. He came, he said, not wishing to deprive Robert of his duchy or to win territories for himself, but to answer the cry of the distressed and deliver Normandy from the misrule of one who was duke only in name. Here then was his last proposition: “Give up to me half the land of Normandy, the castles and the administration of justice and government throughout the whole, and receive the value of the other half annually from my treasury in England. Thus you may enjoy pleasure and feasting to your heart’s content, while I will take upon me the labours of government, and guarantee the fulfilment of my pledge, if you will but keep quiet.” Foolish to the last, Robert declined the offer; and the two armies made themselves ready for battle.[38] In point of numbers they seem to have been not unequally matched, but they differed greatly in character. Robert was stronger in footsoldiers, Henry in knights; the flower of the Norman nobility was on his side now, besides his Angevin, Cenomannian and Breton allies;[39] while of those who followed Robert some, as the issue proved, were only half-hearted. Of Henry’s genuine English troops there is no account, but the men of his own day looked upon his whole host as English in contradistinction to Robert’s Normans, and the tactics adopted in the battle were thoroughly English. The king of England fought on foot with his whole army, and it seems that the duke of Normandy followed his example.[40]

The first line of the Norman or ducal host under William of Mortain charged the English front under Ralf of Bayeux, and by the fury of their onset compelled them to fall back, though without breaking their ranks. The issue was still doubtful, when the only mounted division of Henry’s troops, the Bretons and Cenomannians under Count Elias, came up to the rescue, took the duke’s army in flank, and cut down two hundred men in a single charge. Those Cenomannian swords which William the Conqueror was so proud to have overcome now carried the day for his youngest son. Robert of Bellême, as soon as he saw how matters were going, fled with all his followers, and the duke’s army at once dissolved.[41] In Henry’s own words, “the Divine Mercy gave into my hands, without much slaughter on our side, the duke of Normandy, the count of Mortain, William Crispin, William Ferrers, Robert of Estouteville, some four hundred knights, ten thousand foot—and the duchy of Normandy.”[42]

Forty years before, on the very same day, William the Conqueror had landed at Pevensey to bring the English kingdom under the Norman yoke. The work of Michaelmas Eve, 1066, was reversed on Michaelmas Eve, 1106; the victory of Tinchebray made Normandy a dependency of England.[43] Such was the view taken by one of the most clear-sighted and unprejudiced historians of the time, a man of mingled Norman and English blood. Such was evidently the view instinctively taken by all parties, and the instinct was a true one, although at first glance it seems somewhat hard to account for. The reign of Henry I., if judged merely by the facts which strike the eye in the chronicles of the time, looks like one continued course of foreign policy and foreign warfare pursued by the king for his own personal ends at the expense of his English subjects. But the real meaning of the facts lies deeper. The comment of the archbishop of Rouen upon Henry’s death—“Peace be to his soul, for he ever loved peace”[44]—was neither sarcasm nor flattery. Henry did love peace, so well that he spent his life in fighting for it. His early Norman campaigns are enough to prove that without being a master of the art of war like his father, he was yet a brave soldier and a skilful commander; and the complicated wars of his later years, when over and over again he had to struggle almost single-handed against France, Flanders and Anjou, amid the endless treasons of his own barons, show still more clearly his superiority to nearly all the other generals of his time. But his ambitions were not those of the warrior. Some gleam of the old northman’s joy of battle may have flashed across the wandering knight as he defied his besiegers from the summit of his rock “in Peril of the Sea,” or swooped down upon the turbulent lords of the Cenomannian border, like an eagle upon lesser birds of prey, from his eyrie on the crest of Domfront; but the victor of Tinchebray looked at his campaigns in another light. To him they were simply a part of his general business as a king; they were means to an end, and that end was not glory, nor even gain, but the establishment of peace and order. In his thirteen years of wandering to and fro between England, Normandy and France he had probably studied all the phases of tyranny and anarchy which the three countries amply displayed, and matured his own theory of government, which he practised steadily to the end of his reign. That theory was not a very lofty or noble one; the principle from which it started and the end at which it aimed was the interest of the ruler rather than of the ruled; but the form in which Henry conceived that end and the means whereby he sought to compass it were at any rate more enlightened than those of his predecessor. The Red King had reigned wholly by terror; Henry did not aspire to rule by love; but he saw that, in a merely selfish point of view, a sovereign gains nothing by making himself a terror to any except evil-doers, that the surest basis for his authority is the preservation of order, justice and peace, and that so far at least the interests of king and people must be one. It is difficult to get rid of a feeling that Henry enforced justice and order from motives of expediency rather than of abstract righteousness. But, as a matter of fact, he did enforce them all round, on earl and churl, clerk and layman, Norman and Englishman, without distinction. And this steady, equal government was rendered possible only by the determined struggle which he waged with the Norman barons and their French allies. His home policy and his foreign policy were inseparably connected; and the lifelong battle which he fought with his continental foes was really the battle of England’s freedom.

From the year 1103 onward the battle was fought wholly on the other side of the Channel. In England Henry, as his English subjects joyfully told him, became a free king on the day when he drove out Robert of Bellême.[45] One great hindrance indeed still remained, hanging upon him like a dead weight throughout his early struggles in Normandy; the controversy concerning ecclesiastical investitures, with which the rest of Europe had been aflame for a quarter of a century before it touched England at all. The decree of the Lateran Council of 1075 forbidding lay sovereigns to grant the investiture of any spiritual office with ring and staff was completely ignored in practice by William the Conqueror and Lanfranc. Their position on this and all other matters of Church policy was summed up in their reply to Pope Gregory’s demand of fealty: William would do what the English kings who went before him had done, neither more nor less.[46] But the king and the primate were not without perceiving that, as a necessary consequence of their own acts, the English Church had entered upon a new and more complicated relation both to the state and to the Apostolic see, and that the day must shortly come when she would be dragged from her quiet anchorage into the whirlpool of European controversies and strifes. Their forebodings found expression in the three famous rules of ecclesiastical policy which William laid down for the guidance of his successors rather than himself:—that no Pope should be acknowledged in England and no letter from him received there by any one without the king’s consent;—that no Church council should put forth decrees without his permission and approval;—and that no baron or servant of the crown should be laid under ecclesiastical censure save at the king’s own command.[47] These rules, famous in the two succeeding reigns under the name of “paternal customs,” were never put to the test of practice as long as William and Lanfranc lived. The Red King’s abuse of the two first, by precipitating the crisis and driving S. Anselm to throw himself into the arms of Rome, showed not so much their inadequacy as the justice of the misgivings from which they had sprung. Henry at his accession took his stand upon them in the true spirit of their author; but the time was gone by; Anselm too had taken his stand upon ground whence in honour and conscience he could not recede, and the very first interview between king and primate threw open the whole question of the investitures. But in England and in the Empire the question wore two very different aspects. In England it never became a matter of active interest or violent partisanship in the Church and the nation at large. Only a few deep thinkers on either side—men such as Count Robert of Meulan among the advisers of the king, perhaps such as the devoted English secretary Eadmer among the intimate associates of Anselm—ever understood or considered the principles involved in the case, or its bearing upon the general system of Church and state. Anselm himself stood throughout not upon the abstract wrongfulness of lay investiture, but upon his own duty of obedience to the decree of the Lateran Council; he strove not for the privileges of his order, but for the duties of his conscience. The bishops who refused investiture at Henry’s hands clearly acted in the same spirit; what held them back was not so much loyalty to the Pope as loyalty to their own metropolitan. The great mass of both clergy and laity cared nothing at all how the investitures were given, and very little for papal decrees; all they cared about was that they should not be again deprived of their archbishop, and left, as they had already been left too long, like sheep without a shepherd. In their eyes the dispute was a personal one between king and primate, stirred up by Satan to keep the English Church in misery.

In the manner in which it was conducted on both sides, the case compares no less favourably with its continental parallel and with the later contest in England of which it was the forerunner, and for which, in some respects, it unquestionably furnished a model, though that model was very ill followed. For two years the dispute made absolutely no difference in the general working of the Church; Anselm was in full enjoyment of his canonical and constitutional rights as primate of all Britain; he ruled his suffragans, held his councils, superintended the restoration of his cathedral church, and laboured at the reform of discipline, with Henry’s full concurrence; and the clergy, with the archbishop at their head, were the life and soul of the party whose loyalty saved the king in his struggle with the barons. Even when Anselm’s position in England had become untenable, he went over sea in full possession of his property, as the king’s honoured friend and spiritual father. Not till Henry was provoked by a papal excommunication of all the upholders of the obnoxious “paternal customs” except himself, did he seize the temporalities of the archbishopric; and even then Anselm, from his Burgundian retreat, continued in active and unrestrained correspondence with his chapter and suffragans, and in friendly communication not only with Queen Matilda, but even with the king himself. And when at last the archbishop who had gone down on his knees to the Pope to save William Rufus from excommunication threatened to put forth that very sentence against William’s far less guilty brother, he was only, like Henry himself in Normandy at the same moment, preparing his most terrible weapon of war as the surest means of obtaining peace. Henry’s tact warned him, too, that the time for a settlement was come, and the sincerity of his motives enabled him to strike out a line of compromise which both parties could accept without sacrificing their own dignity or the principles for which they were contending. The English king and primate managed to attain in seven years of quiet decorous negotiation, without disturbing the peace or tarnishing the honour of either Church or crown, the end to which Pope and Emperor only came after half a century of tumult, bloodshed and disgrace; the island-pontiff who “loved righteousness and hated iniquity,” instead of “dying in exile” like his Roman brother, came home to end his days in triumph on the chair of S. Augustine. The settlement made little or no practical difference as far as its immediate object was concerned. Henry ceased to confer the spiritual insignia; but the elections, held as of old in the royal court, were as much under his control as before. He yielded the form and kept the substance; the definite concession of the bishops’ homage for their temporalities fully compensated for the renunciation of the ceremonial investiture. But the other side, too, had gained something more than a mere form. It had won a great victory for freedom by bringing Henry to admit that there were departments of national life which lay beyond the sphere of his kingly despotism. It had, moreover, gained a distinct practical acknowledgement of the right of the Apostolic Curia to act as the supreme court of appeal in ecclesiastical causes, like the Curia Regis in secular matters. In a word, the settlement indicated plainly that the system of William and Lanfranc was doomed to break down before long. It broke down utterly when Anselm and Henry were gone; the complications of legatine intervention, avoided only by careful management in Henry’s later years, led to the most important results in the next reign; and when the slumbering feud of sceptre and crozier broke out again, the difference between the cool Norman temper and the fiery blood of Anjou, between the saintly self-effacement of Anselm and the lofty self-assertion of Thomas, was only one of the causes which gave it such an increase of virulence as brought to nought the endeavours of king and primate to tread in the steps of those whom they professed to have taken for their examples.

Of more direct and wide-reaching importance, but less easy to trace, is the working of Henry’s policy in the temporal government of England. Like his Church policy, with which it was in strict accord, it was grounded upon definite and consistent principles. At the outset of his reign circumstances had at once compelled the king to throw himself upon the support of his English subjects and enabled him to find in them his surest source of strength. Personally, his sympathies were not a whit more English or less despotic than those of his predecessor; but, unlike Rufus, he fairly accepted his position with all its consequences so far as he understood them, and throughout his reign he never altogether forsook the standpoint which he had taken at its beginning. That standpoint, as expressed in his coronation-charter, was “the law of King Eadward as amended by King William.” In other words, Henry pledged himself to carry out his father’s system of compromise and amalgamation, to take up and continue his father’s work; and as soon as his hands were free he set himself to fulfil the pledge. But the scheme whose first outlines had been sketched by the Conqueror’s master-hand had to be wrought out under conditions which had changed considerably since his death and were changing yet farther every day. The great ecclesiastical question was only the first and most prominent among a crowd of social and political problems whose shadows William had at the utmost only seen dimly looming in the future, but which confronted Henry as present facts that he must grapple with as best he could. At their theoretical, systematic solution he made little or no attempt; the time was not yet ripe, nor was he the man for such work. He was neither a great legislator nor an original political thinker, but a clear-headed, sagacious, practical man of business. Such a man was precisely the ruler needed at the moment. His reign is not one of the marked eras of English history; compared with the age which had gone before and that which came after it, the age of Henry I. looks almost like a “day of small things.” That very phrase, which seems so aptly to describe its outward aspect, warns us not to despise or pass it over lightly. It is just one of those periods of transition without which the marked eras would never be. Henry’s mission was to prepare the way for the work of his grandson by completing that of his father.