expedition, for he did not appear at the diet of Verona in 1238; and it is not improbable that he disliked the betrothal of his nephew Hermann to the emperor’s daughter Margaret. At all events, when the projected marriage had been broken off the landgrave publicly showed his loyalty to the emperor in 1239 in opposition to a plan formed by various princes to elect an anti-king. Henry, whose attitude at this time was very important to Frederick, was probably kept loyal by the influence which his brother Conrad, grand-master of the Teutonic Order, exercised over him, for after the death of this brother in 1241 Henry’s loyalty again wavered, and he was himself mentioned as a possible anti-king. Frederick’s visit to Germany in 1242 was successful in preventing this step for a time, and in May of that year the landgrave was appointed administrator of Germany for King Conrad; and by the death of his nephew in this year he became the nominal, as well as the actual, ruler of Thuringia. Again he contemplated deserting the cause of Frederick, and in April 1246 Pope Innocent IV. wrote to the German princes advising them to choose Henry as their king in place of Frederick who had just been declared deposed. Acting on these instructions, Henry was elected at Veitshöchheim on the 22nd of May 1246, and owing to the part played by the spiritual princes in this election was called the Pfaffenkönig, or parsons’ king. Collecting an army, he defeated King Conrad near Frankfort on the 5th of August 1246, and then, after holding a diet at Nuremberg, undertook the siege of Ulm. But he was soon compelled to give up this enterprise, and returning to Thuringia died at the Wartburg on the 17th of February 1247. Henry married Gertrude, sister of Frederick II., duke of Austria, but left no children, and on his death the male line of his family became extinct.
See F. Reuss, Die Wahl Heinrich Raspes (Lüdenscheid, 1878); A. Rübesamen, Landgraf Heinrich Raspe von Thüringen (Halle, 1885); F. W. Schirrmacher, Die letzten Hohenstaufen (Göttingen, 1871); E. Winkelmann, Kaiser Friedrich II. (Leipzig, 1889), and T. Knochenhauer, Geschichte Thüringens zur Zeit des ersten Landgrafenhauses (Gotha, 1871).
HENRY (c. 1174–1216), emperor of Romania, or Constantinople,
was a younger son of Baldwin, count of Flanders and
Hainaut (d. 1195). Having joined the Fourth Crusade about 1201,
he distinguished himself at the siege of Constantinople in 1204
and elsewhere, and soon became prominent among the princes
of the new Latin empire of Constantinople. When his brother,
the emperor Baldwin I., was captured at the battle of Adrianople
in April 1205, Henry was chosen regent of the empire, succeeding
to the throne when the news of Baldwin’s death arrived. He
was crowned on the 20th of August 1205. Henry was a wise
ruler, whose reign was largely passed in successful struggles
with the Bulgarians and with his rival, Theodore Lascaris I.,
emperor of Nicaea. Henry appears to have been brave but not
cruel, and tolerant but not weak; possessing “the superior
courage to oppose, in a superstitious age, the pride and avarice
of the clergy.” The emperor died, poisoned, it is said, by his
Greek wife, on the 11th of June 1216.
See Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, vol. vi. (ed. J. B. Bury, 1898).
HENRY I. (1068–1135), king of England, nicknamed Beauclerk, the fourth and youngest son of William I. by his queen
Matilda of Flanders, was born in 1068 on English soil. Of his
life before 1086, when he was solemnly knighted by his father
at Westminster, we know little. He was his mother’s favourite,
and she bequeathed to him her English estates, which, however,
he was not permitted to hold in his father’s lifetime. Henry
received a good education, of which in later life he was proud;
he is credited with the saying that an unlettered king is only a
crowned ass. His attainments included Latin, which he could
both read and write; he knew something of the English laws
and language, and it may have been from an interest in natural
history that he collected, during his reign, the Woodstock
menagerie which was the admiration of his subjects. But
from 1087 his life was one of action and vicissitudes which left
him little leisure. Receiving, under the Conqueror’s last dispositions,
a legacy of five thousand pounds of silver, but no land,
he traded upon the pecuniary needs of Duke Robert of Normandy,
from whom he purchased, for the small sum of £3000, the
district of the Cotentin. He negotiated with Rufus to obtain
the possession of their mother’s inheritance, but only incurred
thereby the suspicions of the duke, who threw him into prison.
In 1090 the prince vindicated his loyalty by suppressing, on
Robert’s behalf, a revolt of the citizens of Rouen which Rufus
had fomented. But when his elder brothers were reconciled
in the next year they combined to evict Henry from the
Cotentin. He dissembled his resentment for a time, and lived
for nearly two years in the French Vexin in great poverty. He
then accepted from the citizens of Domfront an invitation to
defend them against Robert of Bellême; and subsequently,
coming to an agreement with Rufus, assisted the king in making
war on their elder brother Robert. When Robert’s departure
for the First Crusade left Normandy in the hands of Rufus
(1096) Henry took service under the latter, and he was in
the royal hunting train on the day of Rufus’s death (August 2nd,
1100). Had Robert been in Normandy the claim of Henry to
the English crown might have been effectually opposed. But
Robert only returned to the duchy a month after Henry’s
coronation. In the meantime the new king, by issuing his
famous charter, by recalling Anselm, and by choosing the
Anglo-Scottish princess Edith-Matilda, daughter of Malcolm III.,
king of the Scots, as his future queen, had cemented that alliance
with the church and with the native English which was the
foundation of his greatness. Anselm preached in his favour,
English levies marched under the royal banner both to repel
Robert’s invasion (1101) and to crush the revolt of the Montgomeries
headed by Robert of Bellême (1102). The alliance
of crown and church was subsequently imperilled by the question
of Investitures (1103–1106). Henry was sharply criticized for
his ingratitude to Anselm (q.v.), in spite of the marked respect
which he showed to the archbishop. At this juncture a sentence
of excommunication would have been a dangerous blow to Henry’s
power in England. But the king’s diplomatic skill enabled him
to satisfy the church without surrendering any rights of consequence
(1106); and he skilfully threw the blame of his previous
conduct upon his counsellor, Robert of Meulan. Although the
Peterborough Chronicle accuses Henry of oppression in his
early years, the nation soon learned to regard him with respect.
William of Malmesbury, about 1125, already treats Tinchebrai
(1106) as an English victory and the revenge for Hastings.
Henry was disliked but feared by the baronage, towards whom
he showed gross bad faith in his disregard of his coronation
promises. In 1110 he banished the more conspicuous malcontents,
and from that date was safe against the plots of his
English feudatories.
With Normandy he had more trouble, and the military skill which he had displayed at Tinchebrai was more than once put to the test against Norman rebels. His Norman, like his English administration, was popular with the non-feudal classes, but doubtless oppressive towards the barons. The latter had abandoned the cause of Duke Robert, who remained a prisoner in England till his death (1134); but they embraced that of Robert’s son William the Clito, whom Henry in a fit of generosity had allowed to go free after Tinchebrai. The Norman conspiracies of 1112, 1118, and 1123–24 were all formed in the Clito’s interest. Both France and Anjou supported this pretender’s cause from time to time; he was always a thorn in Henry’s side till his untimely death at Alost (1128), but more especially after the catastrophe of the White Ship (1120) deprived the king of his only lawful son. But Henry emerged from these complications with enhanced prestige. His campaigns had been uneventful, his chief victory (Brémule, 1119) was little more than a skirmish. But he had held his own as a general, and as a diplomatist he had shown surpassing skill. The chief triumphs of his foreign policy were the marriage of his daughter Matilda to the emperor Henry V. (1114) which saved Normandy in 1124; the detachment of the pope, Calixtus II., from the side of France and the Clito (1119), and the Angevin marriages which he arranged for his son William Aetheling (1119) and for
