Henry II of England

Henry was born on March 5, 1133, at Le Mans in the county of Maine, the eldest son of Geoffrey Plantagenet, Count of Anjou, and Empress Matilda, daughter of King Henry I of England ^[1]. His grandfather died in 1135 without a surviving legitimate son, and although the old king had made his barons swear to accept Matilda as heir, the throne was seized by her cousin Stephen of Blois. The result was a long civil war in England, remembered by chroniclers as a time when Christ and his saints slept, and the young Henry grew up with a claim to a kingdom his mother could never quite win ^[2].

His education was unusually thorough for a fighting aristocrat. He spent part of his boyhood in England in the household of his uncle Robert, Earl of Gloucester, at Bristol, where he was tutored by the scholar Master Matthew, and he later studied under the noted grammarian William of Conches in Normandy ^[1]. Contemporaries described him as restless, stocky, and red haired, with grey eyes and a famously explosive temper, a man who could read documents himself and who enjoyed the company of clerks and lawyers as much as huntsmen ^[3].

At fourteen he crossed to England with a small band of mercenaries in a rash attempt to aid his mother's cause. The expedition failed, and in a strange episode King Stephen himself is reported to have paid for the boy's passage home ^[2]. In 1150 Geoffrey invested his son with the duchy of Normandy, which the count had conquered during the previous decade, and when Geoffrey died suddenly in September 1151 Henry inherited Anjou, Maine, and Touraine as well ^[1].

In May 1152 Henry made the most consequential marriage of the century. He wed Eleanor of Aquitaine, duchess of the richest territory in France, only weeks after her marriage to King Louis VII of France had been annulled ^[4]. Eleanor was roughly eleven years his senior, and the union brought Henry control of Aquitaine and Gascony, provoking the lasting hostility of the French crown. At nineteen he now held more of France than the French king himself ^[2].

Henry invaded England in January 1153 to press his claim against Stephen. Campaigning through the year brought no decisive battle, in part because the barons on both sides had lost their appetite for war, but the death of Stephen's son Eustace in August removed the main obstacle to compromise ^[2]. By the Treaty of Winchester, sealed in November 1153, Stephen recognized Henry as his adopted heir while retaining the crown for life. Stephen died on October 25, 1154, and Henry succeeded peacefully, the first undisputed accession in England since 1087 ^[1].

He was crowned at Westminster Abbey on December 19, 1154, alongside Eleanor. For anyone asking who was Henry II of England at that moment, the answer was already remarkable: a twenty one year old ruler of England, Normandy, Anjou, Maine, Touraine, and Aquitaine, master of a patchwork of lands historians would later call the Angevin Empire ^[4].

The new king's first task was to undo the damage of the Anarchy. He expelled foreign mercenaries, resumed royal castles and lands alienated under Stephen, and ordered the demolition of unlicensed baronial castles that had sprung up during the war ^[2]. The machinery of the Exchequer was revived, and by the 1160s the royal accounts, recorded on the pipe rolls, ran with a regularity unmatched elsewhere in Europe. A treatise on its workings, the Dialogue of the Exchequer, was written by his treasurer Richard fitzNigel late in the reign ^[5].

Henry's most durable work lay in law. The Assize of Clarendon in 1166 directed that juries of local men present suspected robbers, murderers, and thieves to royal justices, an early form of the grand jury ^[5]. Standardized writs allowed free men to bring property disputes into royal courts through procedures such as novel disseisin and mort d'ancestor, which used sworn local juries rather than trial by battle. Itinerant justices carried royal justice through the shires on regular eyres. Together these measures pushed litigation from feudal and local courts into the king's courts and are widely treated as the foundation of the English common law ^[6].

He also reorganized military obligation and taxation. The Cartae Baronum inquest of 1166 surveyed the knight service owed by his tenants in chief, and the Assize of Arms of 1181 required free men to keep weapons appropriate to their wealth ^[5]. Any account of Henry II of England achievements has to begin here, with an administrative and legal revolution accomplished largely through relentless personal supervision, for the king travelled constantly and courtiers complained that no one could predict where he would sleep next ^[3].

In 1162 Henry secured the election of his chancellor and close friend Thomas Becket as archbishop of Canterbury, expecting a compliant partner in his plans to bring the church's courts under tighter royal control. Becket instead resigned the chancellorship and became an uncompromising defender of clerical privilege ^[7]. The quarrel crystallized around criminous clerks, clergy accused of serious crimes whom Henry wished handed to lay courts for punishment after conviction in church courts.

At Clarendon in January 1164 the king demanded written assent to the Constitutions of Clarendon, sixteen clauses defining royal customs over the church, including restrictions on appeals to Rome ^[7]. Becket first accepted, then repudiated them. Prosecuted on other charges at Northampton later that year, he fled to France and spent six years in exile while popes and the French king attempted mediation. A fragile reconciliation in July 1170 allowed his return, but Becket promptly punished the bishops who had participated in the coronation of Henry's eldest son that June ^[1].

When news of these censures reached Henry in Normandy, his angry outburst was taken literally by four of his knights. They crossed to England and cut Becket down in Canterbury Cathedral on December 29, 1170 ^[7]. The murder appalled Europe. Becket was canonized in 1173, Canterbury became one of Christendom's great pilgrimage sites, and in 1174 Henry did public penance at the martyr's tomb, walking barefoot through the city and submitting to a beating by the monks ^[2]. By the Compromise of Avranches in 1172 he moderated, though he did not abandon, his claims over the church.

Henry and Eleanor had eight children, including five sons: William, who died young, Henry, Richard, Geoffrey, and John ^[4]. The king planned to divide his lands among them, crowning young Henry as junior king in 1170, assigning Aquitaine to Richard and Brittany to Geoffrey, while John, the youngest, at first received nothing and was nicknamed Lackland. The sons were given titles but little real power, and their frustration proved combustible.

In 1173 the Young King fled to the French court and raised a coalition against his father that included his brothers Richard and Geoffrey, their mother Eleanor, King Louis VII, King William the Lion of Scotland, and rebel barons in England and Normandy ^[8]. The war of 1173 to 1174 was the greatest crisis of the reign, yet Henry crushed it on every front. William the Lion was captured at Alnwick in July 1174, the day after Henry's penance at Canterbury, a coincidence contemporaries read as the martyr's forgiveness ^[2]. Eleanor was held in confinement in England for the rest of the reign, mostly at Salisbury and other royal residences ^[4].

Henry's power also expanded at its edges. He invaded Ireland in 1171 and received the submission of Irish kings and of the Anglo Norman adventurers who had preceded him, beginning eight centuries of English involvement there, and the Treaty of Windsor with Rory O'Connor followed in 1175 ^[1]. By the Treaty of Falaise the captive Scottish king acknowledged Henry's overlordship. Diplomatic marriages tied his daughters Matilda, Eleanor, and Joan to the rulers of Saxony, Castile, and Sicily ^[8].

The last decade brought little rest. The Young King rebelled again in 1183, this time against Richard in Aquitaine as much as against his father, and died of dysentery that June at Martel ^[8]. Geoffrey of Brittany died in 1186 after an accident at a tournament in Paris. The succession now lay between Richard, the acknowledged heir, and John, whom the aging king plainly favoured, and the suspicion that Henry meant to disinherit him drove Richard toward the new French king, the cold and capable Philip II Augustus ^[2].

In 1188 Richard did homage to Philip, and in 1189 the two invaded Henry's continental heartland. Sick and outmaneuvered, the king was chased from Le Mans, his birthplace, and forced to accept humiliating terms at Ballan near Tours in early July ^[8]. Chroniclers recorded that when he saw the list of those who had joined his enemies, the first name was that of John, the son for whom he had risked everything.

Henry II died at Chinon Castle on the Loire on July 6, 1189, two days after his surrender, aged fifty six ^[1]. He was buried at the abbey of Fontevraud in Anjou, where his effigy still lies beside those of Eleanor of Aquitaine and Richard I. Richard succeeded to all his father's lands without opposition ^[4].

Few medieval kings left a deeper institutional mark. The procedures Henry's justices developed, returnable writs, trial juries in civil disputes, presenting juries in criminal matters, and a permanent corps of royal judges, grew directly into the common law systems of England and, much later, of many countries shaped by English rule ^[6]. The legal treatise attributed to his justiciar Ranulf de Glanvill, composed near the end of the reign, is the first systematic account of that law ^[5]. Students searching for basic Henry II of England facts usually meet him first as the king who made law a routine royal service available for purchase by ordinary free litigants.

His empire proved less durable than his courts. The Angevin dominions depended on the king's ceaseless travel and on personal lordship rather than institutions, and within fifteen years of his death his son John had lost Normandy, Anjou, and Maine to Philip Augustus ^[8]. The Becket quarrel gave European culture one of its most retold stories, from medieval hagiography to modern drama and film, and it fixed an image of Henry as the king who could master everything except his own temper and his own family ^[7].

Modern historians, drawing on the exceptional records his government produced, generally rank him among the most able rulers of the English Middle Ages. Any serious Henry II of England biography must balance the lawgiver against the flawed father, the penitent of Canterbury against the ruthless politician, and that tension is precisely what keeps his reign a subject of active scholarship more than eight centuries on ^[3].