Henry, though vigorously attacked, with great resolution maintained the rights of his crown with regard to investitures, whilst he saw the Emperor, who claimed a right of investing the Pope himself, subdued by the thunder of the Vatican. His chief opposition was within his own kingdom. Anselm, Archbishop of Canterbury, a man of unblamable life, and of learning for his time, but blindly attached to the rights of the Church, real or supposed, refused to consecrate those who received investitures from the king. The parties appealed to Rome. Rome, unwilling either to recede from her pretensions or to provoke a powerful monarch, gives a dubious answer. Meanwhile the contest grows hotter. Anselm is obliged to quit the kingdom, but is still inflexible. At last, the king, who, from the delicate situation of his affairs in the beginning of his reign, had been obliged to temporize for a long time, by his usual prudent mixture of management with force obliged the Pope to a temperament which seemed extremely judicious. The king received homage and fealty from his vassal; the investiture, as it was generally understood to relate to spiritual jurisdiction, was given up, and on this equal bottom peace was established. The secret of the Pope's moderation was this: he was at that juncture close pressed by the Emperor, and it might be highly dangerous to contend with two such enemies at once; and he was much more ready to yield to Henry, who had no reciprocal demands on him, than to the Emperor, who had many and just ones, and to whom he could not yield any one point without giving up an infinite number of others very material and interesting.
As the king extricated himself happily from so great an affair, so all the other difficulties of his reign only exercised, without endangering him. The efforts of France in favor of the son of Robert were late, desultory, and therefore unsuccessful. That youth, endued with equal virtue and more prudence than his father, after exerting many useless acts of unfortunate bravery, fell in battle, and freed Henry from all disturbance on the side of France. The incursions of the Welsh in this reign only gave him an opportunity of confining that people within narrower bounds. At home he was well obeyed by his subjects; abroad he dignified his family by splendid alliances. His daughter Matilda he married to the Emperor. But his private fortunes did not flow with so even a course as his public affairs. His only son, William, with a natural daughter, and many of the flower of the young nobility, perished at sea between Normandy and England. From that fatal accident the king was never seen to smile. He sought in vain from a second marriage to provide a male successor; but when he saw all prospect of this at an end, he called a great council of his barons and prelates. His daughter Matilda, after the decease of the Emperor, he had given in marriage to Geoffrey Plantagenet, Count of Anjou. As she was his only remaining issue, he caused her to be acknowledged as his successor by the great council; he enforced this acknowledgment by solemn oaths of fealty,--a sanction which he weakened rather than confirmed by frequent repetition: vainly imagining that on his death any ties would bind to the respect of a succession so little respected by himself, and by the violation of which he had procured his crown. Having taken these measures in favor of his daughter, he died in Normandy, but in a good old age, and in the thirty-sixth year of a prosperous reign.