During the declining years of Robert II., Queen Constance exercised an increasing influence. She wished to set aside the young king, Henry of Burgundy, the natural heir, in favour of his younger brother Robert. But the old king insisted on the rights of the first-born, and civil war broke out between the brothers, though before long they united their arms against their father. When King Robert died, the contest was renewed; but finally Henry secured the throne for himself, and pacified his younger brother by the grant of Burgundy, which thus went permanently back to a separate line of rulers. Henry I.’s inauspicious beginning lost some ground to the monarchy, which under him perhaps attained its lowest point of power. But Henry, if not very wise, was brave and active. Though his resources prevented any great expeditions, he strove by a series of petty fights and sieges to protect his frontiers against two of the strongest and most disloyal of his vassals—the Count of Blois, and the Duke of Normandy. In neither case was he successful. Odo II., after a long struggle, was able to establish his power on a firm basis, both in Champagne and Blois. But after Odo’s death in 1037, Henry managed to absorb some of his fiefs in the royal domain, and scored a considerable triumph by transferring Touraine from the overpowerful house of Blois to Geoffrey Martel, Count of Anjou. The young duke, William of Normandy, who owed his throne to the support of Henry, which had secured the defeat of the rebel barons at Val-ès-Dunes, soon grew so powerful as to excite the apprehensions of his overlord. In an unlucky hour, Henry broke the tradition of friendship that had so long united Rouen and Paris. He twice invaded Normandy, but on both occasions the future conqueror of England proved more than a match for him. In 1054 Henry was defeated at Mortemer, and again, in 1058, at Varaville. Another difficulty in the way of the monarchy was the fact that Henry married late, and his health was already breaking up when the eldest son, borne to him by his wife Anne of Russia, was still a child. Nevertheless, in 1059, Henry procured the coronation of his seven-year-old son Philip at Reims, and the great gathering of magnates from all parts of France that attended the ceremony showed that the succession to the throne was still an event of national interest. Yet with all his weakness, Henry I. held firm to the ancient traditions of the Frankish monarchy. When the reforming Pope Leo IX. held his synod of Reims to denounce simony, Henry was so jealous of the Pope that he prevented the French prelates from attending it. He watched with alarm the results of the absorption of Lorraine and the kingdom of Arles in the Empire, and boldly wrote to Henry III., claiming by hereditary right the palace at Aachen, possessed by his ancestors, and all the Lotharingian kingdom kept from its rightful owners by the tyranny of the German king.