Adela of Normandy herself to not only her late husband but her sons. Adela quarrelled with her eldest son William and despite his previously being named heir-designate, she appointed his younger brother Theobald to replace him as heir in 1107. Her son Stephen moved to London in 1111 to join his uncle's court and became the favorite of his uncle King Henry I (Beauclerc). Upon Beauclerc's death in Normandy (1135), Stephen of Blois seized the English throne. He seized the English crown from the Empress Matilda, King Henry I's daughter whom the monarch had named as his successor. This started a protracted civil
English claims to the French throne usually omitted from regnal lists. English claims to the French throne From the 1340s to the 19th century, excluding two brief intervals in the 1360s and the 1420s, the kings and queens of England (and, later, of Great Britain) also claimed the throne of France. The claim dates from Edward III, who claimed the French throne in 1340 as the sororal nephew of the last direct Capetian, Charles IV. Edward and his heirs fought the Hundred Years' War to enforce this claim, and were briefly successful in the 1420s under Henry V and Henry VI, but the House of Valois,