Henry I

Henry I was the youngest of William the Conqueror's three sons. He succeeded to the English throne after the death of the Conqueror's second son, William Rufus, who died while hunting. The eldest son, Robert was once again passed over for the English crown, on this occasion because of his absence. At the time, Robert was in Sicily, returning from the First Crusade.

Upon his father's death the Conqeror's major landholdings - England and Normandy - were divided up between the elder two sons, while Henry received a cash payment. He used the money he received from his father to buy a significant landholding in western Normandy from his eldest brother, Robert, who had been named as the Duke of Normandy in the division.

Henry's first marriage was to an heir of the ancient English royal house. In 1100, he married Edith, the daughter of the King of Scotland, whose wife was the daughter of Edward the Exile and the sister of Edgar the Aetheling, and who therefore had plenty of the blood of the Saxon kings in her veins. Edith was a good strong Saxon name, but good strong Saxons weren't exactly flovaour of the month in Norman England, so Edith adopted the much less English name Matilda upon her marriage to Henry.

Henry's only legitimate son, named William as one would expect, was born in 1103. Edith/Matilda and Henry also had a daughter, named, unsurprisingly, Matilda in 1102. Despite Henry marrying again after Edith/Matilda's death in 1118, this appears to have been the sum total of his legitimate offspring. To compensate for this, however, Henry is the record-holder for the English king with the largest number of recognised illegitimate offspring with 25 or so on the record.

In 1120, however, tragedy struck Henry's family, when William along with a couple of Henry's illegitimate children were killed when the ship they were travelling on sunk during a crossing of the Channel. This left Henry with just one surviving legitimate child, his daughter Matilda, who was married to the Holy Roman Emperor, and resident in Germany. With Edith/Matilda already dead, and Henry not yet remarried, the succession was precarious at best. Henry immediately stepped forth to do his national duty and married again but, despite Henry's good personal record in siring offspring, and the fact that his new wife Adeliza later produced some 7 children by her second marriage, not children resulted from this marriage. The final result, however, was that Henry was left without a clear heir.

When Matilda's husband died, Henry believed that he had struck upon a solution. He recalled Matilda to England, and had his senior barons swear to accept her as their sovereign upon his death. However, despite the promises which Henry had extracted from the Barons, his nephew Stephen eventually succeeded to the throne. Henry died on the first of December 1135 whilst hunting in the Vexin, a disputed region on the borders between Normandy and France. Unlike his brother William's death, their appear to have been no suspicious circumstances surrounding his death, and as Henry was by that stage well into his sixties, his death can have come as no real surprise to anybody, except perhaps for himself.

timnfromoz

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