could nor would hold it for him unless he sent them help. Robert, ‘worn out with the toils of pilgrimage, and more desirous to go to bed than to go to war again,’ bade them make their own terms with Elias; ‘for,’ said he, ‘I am tired out; Normandy is enough for me; and the nobles of England are inviting me to go and be their king.’ Such an invitation had in fact been sent to him by a few barons who saw in him a tool more easily to be adapted to their purposes than the actual king, his brother Henry. Lack of means, as well as lack of energy, made him slow to act upon it; within a very short time after his return he had squandered the whole of his wife's large dowry, and was again penniless. He seems to have complained to the pope of Henry's seizure of the crown as a breach of the treaty between himself and Rufus, whereby it had been agreed that if either of them died without lawful issue the survivor should succeed him (Paschal II, Ep. lix. The passage is obscure, and evidently corrupt; but the ‘sacramentum’ which Robert is said to have accused Henry of breaking can only be the oath sworn by Rufus, not by Henry himself). In the spring of 1101 Rannulf Flambard [q. v.] escaped from the Tower, and went over sea. The duke ‘received him, set him over Normandy, and, so far as his (Robert's) laziness allowed, made use of his counsels.’ The result was the assembling at Tréport of a fleet with which Robert sailed for England. He landed on 21 July at Porchester, and marched upon Winchester; but hearing the queen was there awaiting her confinement, he declared that ‘he would be a villain who should besiege a lady in such a case,’ and turned towards London. Near Alton (Hampshire) Henry met him, but, instead of fighting, they made peace [for its terms see Henry I]. At Michaelmas Robert went home, loaded with presents from Henry. He was ‘duke only in name;’ ‘nobody thought him of any importance;’ ‘amid all the wealth of his duchy he often lacked bread;’ and it was said that the comrades of his vices more than once carried off all his clothes, and thus compelled him to stay in bed till they brought them back.
In 1102 Henry stirred him up to besiege Bellême's castle of Vignats, near Falaise. Some traitors in the duke's host fired their own quarters and fled, whereupon the rest of his troops fled likewise. In June 1103 he made another attempt to drive Bellême out of the Hiémois; Bellême, however, ‘attacked his easy-going sovereign in divers ways, and at last set upon him boldly in the highway and put him to flight.’ In the same year Robert went to England ‘to speak with the king.’ According to one account, Henry sent for him; according to another, he went of his own accord to plead for the exiled Earl of Warren; a third makes the whole affair originate in a plot of Henry's to entrap Robert. The duke crossed to Southampton with eleven knights. Robert of Meulan met him on the road to Winchester, and frightened him into throwing himself on the mercy of the queen, who promised to influence her husband in his favour if he would ‘forgive’ the yearly pension which Henry had promised him by the treaty of 1101. To this Robert agreed, and he then ventured to the court of his brother, who, whether he did or did not grant Robert's requests, lectured him soundly on his misgovernment of Normandy (cf. Ord. Vit. l. xi. c. 2; Wace, pt. iii. ll. 10585–766; Will. Malm. l. iv. c. 389, 1. v. cc. 395 and 398; Engl. Chron. a. 1103). The lecture was wasted; next year ‘the sleepy duke,’ rather than be at the trouble of fighting any longer with Bellême, granted him everything that he desired. On this Henry came to Normandy; a conference took place; Robert ceded to Henry the county of Evreux, again promised amendment, and again broke his promise. Henry came again, at the head of an army, in Lent 1105. Caen, Bayeux, Falaise, and Rouen alone remained to Robert; he wandered about almost alone, literally begging his bread; at Caen, which he had endeavoured to fortify by digging a great trench which Wace saw some seventy years later, the citizens plotted to betray town and duke both at once to the king, and the duke escaped only just in time, while the few servants who followed him were intercepted at the gate and robbed of all their baggage. In Whitsun week the brothers met at Cinteaux, near Falaise, but they could not agree. On Michaelmas eve 1106 the struggle was ended by the battle of Tinchebray [see Henry I], where Robert was taken prisoner by the king's chaplain, Galdric [q. v.] Henry sent him to England, and kept him in prison there for the rest of his life. For the story that he was released in 1107 or 1109 on condition of leaving England and Normandy for ever within forty days, that during those days he was detected plotting treason, and was recaptured and blinded, there is no authority earlier than Matthew Paris; and though the blinding is mentioned by some other thirteenth-century writers, all earlier evidence refutes the statement (see Freeman, Norman Conquest, v. 849). Even Matthew adds that Robert was supplied with every luxury, and had six knights to wait upon him. In 1119 Henry declared that he was keeping his
