A prudent yet wicked English king like Rufus stayed at home in spite of the Pope's scoldings, and grabbed as much as he could of the property of his neighbours who went upon the crusade.
Henry I, 1100–1135.When Robert came back he found that he had lost another chance. Rufus had been shot in the year 1100, while hunting in the New Forest, and his youngest brother Henry had seized the crown of England. Of course Robert rebelled, and the great barons, both of England and Normandy, with him. But, equally of course, Henry and his faithful Englishmen made short work of every rebellion. English chroniclers called Henry I the ‘Lion of Justice’, and it was not a bad name for him. Though cruel and selfish, he was a much more respectable character than Rufus, and he kept order splendidly. He was a man of learning, which till then had been unusual in royal families. ‘An unlearned king,’ he used to say, ‘is a crowned ass.’ Only one of his successors, before the eighteenth century, was wholly unlearned, and that was Edward Il, who came to a bad end. Henry endeared himself to his Englishmen by marrying the last princess of the old Saxon race, Edith, daughter of Queen Margaret of Scotland, who was the great-great-granddaughter of Ethelred the Unready. Among Henry's courtiers and servants we often find the names of Englishmen as well as Normans, though all the highest places in the Church were still held by Normans or by men of mixed race. Well able to fight, and quite ready to do so when it was necessary, Henry, like other clever Kings, avoided all unnecessary wars, and got on well with the Scottish and sometimes even with the French kings.
But his only son was drowned in the wreck of the
