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 the widowed empress Matilda (1129) after her brother's death. This latter match, though unpopular in England and Normandy, was a fatal blow to the designs of Louis VI., and prepared the way for the expansion of English power beyond the Loire. After 1124 the disaffection of Normandy was crushed. The severity with which Henry treated the last rebels was regarded as a blot upon his fame; but the only case of merely vindictive punishment was that of the poet Luke de la Barre, who was sentenced to lose his eyes for a lampoon upon the king, and only escaped the sentence by committing suicide.
Henry's English government was severe and grasping; but he "kept good peace" and honourably distinguished himself among contemporary statesmen in an age when administrative reform was in the air. He spent more time in Normandy than in England. But he showed admirable judgment in his choice of subordinates; Robert of Meulan, who died in 1118, and Roger of Salisbury, who survived his master, were statesmen of no common order; and Henry was free from the mania of attending in person to every detail, which was the besetting sin of medieval sovereigns. As a legislator Henry was conservative. He issued few ordinances; the unofficial compilation known as the _Leges Henrici_ shows that, like the Conqueror, he made it his ideal to maintain the "law of Edward." His itinerant justices were not altogether a novelty in England or Normandy. It is characteristic of the man that the exchequer should be the chief institution created in his reign. The eulogies of the last _Peterborough Chronicle_ on his government were written after the anarchy of Stephen's reign had invested his predecessor's "good peace" with the glamour of a golden age. Henry was respected and not tyrannous. He showed a lofty indifference to criticism such as that of Eadmer in the _Historia novorum_, which was published early in the reign. He showed, on some occasions, great deference to the opinions of the magnates. But dark stories, some certainly unfounded, were told of his prison-houses. Men thought him more cruel and more despotic than he actually was.