Henry II of England

• 1. Introduction

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  Henry II of England got his nickname from his clothes. Chroniclers called him Curtmantle, after the short Angevin cloak he preferred to the longer robes of a king. They described a stocky, red-haired, freckled man with a large head, whose legs had bowed from a lifetime on horseback. He was often scruffily dressed, and he ruled England from 1154 until his death in 1189. Yet he did not rule England alone, and England was not even the heart of his power. This documentary asks how the eldest son of a count of Anjou came to wear a crown at all. It asks why a man who made his friend an archbishop ended up blamed for that friend's murder in a cathedral. And it asks why the king who built one of the largest realms in medieval Europe spent his final years fighting his own children.

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• 2. Winning a Crown

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  Henry was born at Le Mans on the 5th of March 1133, the eldest child of the Empress Matilda and her second husband, Geoffrey Plantagenet, Count of Anjou. Matilda was the legitimate daughter of Henry I of England, and her first husband had been the Holy Roman Emperor Henry V. After her father died in 1135, the nobles who had pledged to support her claim let her cousin Stephen of Blois take the crown instead. A long civil war followed, which historians call the Anarchy. Geoffrey attacked Normandy but stayed out of the English fighting, leaving it to Matilda and her half-brother Robert, Earl of Gloucester.

  Henry's education took him across the Channel. From about the age of seven he studied in Anjou under a noted grammarian, Peter of Saintes. In late 1142 his father sent the nine-year-old to Bristol, the centre of opposition to Stephen in the south-west. Geoffrey was under criticism from Matilda's supporters for refusing to join the war, and the boy's presence eased that pressure. In Robert's household Henry lived beside Robert's son Roger of Worcester and was taught by a master named Matthew. The canons of St Augustine's in Bristol also taught him, and he remembered them fondly in later life. By 1143 or 1144 he was back in Anjou, studying under another famous scholar, William of Conches.

  At fourteen, in 1147, Henry sailed to England with his household and a few mercenaries and struck into Wiltshire. The raid caused panic but achieved little. He could not pay his men, and neither his mother nor his uncle would help him. It was King Stephen who settled the wages and let the boy go home with dignity. In 1149 Henry tried again, planning a northern alliance with his great-uncle King David I of Scotland and with Ranulf of Chester. The plan was to attack York. It collapsed when Stephen marched north. The king who blocked Henry at York was the same man who had paid his mercenaries two years before.

  The year after, in 1150, Geoffrey made his son Duke of Normandy. Louis VII of France, home from the Second Crusade in 1149, feared the growth of Angevin power, and he backed Stephen's son Eustace as the rightful heir to the duchy. Peace came in August 1151 through the mediation of Bernard of Clairvaux. Henry did homage to Louis for Normandy and handed over the disputed Norman Vexin, and Louis recognised him as duke. Geoffrey died in September 1151.

  Then came the marriage that changed the map. Eleanor was Duchess of Aquitaine, a land in the south of France, and was seen as beautiful, lively and controversial. She had given Louis no sons, and he had the marriage annulled on grounds of blood kinship. Eight weeks later, on the 18th of May, nineteen-year-old Henry married Eleanor, who was a decade older than him. Louis took it as an insult, because a holder of a French fiefdom had wed without her lord's consent. The couple were also related, just as Eleanor and Louis had been. Henry now held a far larger share of France than the French king did. Louis assembled a coalition that included Stephen and Eustace, and Henry's own younger brother Geoffrey rose in revolt. Henry avoided open battle, pillaged the Vexin and captured the castle of Montsoreau, and Louis fell ill and withdrew.

  In early 1153 Henry returned to England with a small army of mercenaries, probably paid for with borrowed money. Ranulf of Chester and Hugh Bigod backed him in the north and east. The decisive confrontation came in July, when the two armies faced each other across the Thames at Wallingford. Barons on both sides had no appetite for battle, and clergy brokered a truce that annoyed both leaders. Soon afterwards Eustace fell ill and died, removing the obvious rival. In November, in Winchester Cathedral, Stephen named Henry his adopted son and successor, and the two sealed the treaty with a kiss of peace. Stephen died on the 25th of October 1154. Henry landed on the 8th of December and was crowned with Eleanor at Westminster Abbey on the 19th of December, wearing one of the imperial crowns his mother had brought back from Germany. Over the next few years his brothers Geoffrey and William and Stephen's son William all died, leaving him with no close rival.

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• 3. The Man and His Court

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  Ralph of Diceto records that in 1176 famine struck Anjou and Maine, and that Henry emptied his private stores to relieve the poor. Early in his reign he also ordered that shipwrecked people be treated well, with heavy penalties for anyone who plundered their goods. This sits oddly beside the rest of the portrait. Chroniclers spoke of a piercing stare, of bullying, of sudden bursts of temper, and of sullen refusals to speak at all. Some of the outbursts may have been staged for effect. He was not vindictive, and he could be witty and eloquent in argument, with an astonishing memory. Henry was said to understand many languages, including English, though he spoke only Latin and French.

  Hunting was his passion. He preferred the solitude of the chase, or a book in his chamber, to tournaments and troubadours. As the years passed he grew more cautious and gave more energy to judicial and administrative work, though he stayed impulsive to the end. He was probably the first king of England to use a heraldic design, a signet ring engraved with a leopard or a lion. Later generations altered the design into the royal arms of England. The historian John Gillingham describes the ring of smaller lords Henry worked to win back around his core lands as a "protective ring".

  His household was probably the largest royal court in Europe, and chroniclers watched it closely. It held nobles and bishops, knights and clerks, servants, prostitutes, horses and hunting dogs. At its centre were his familiares regis, a small circle of trusted confidants who drove government initiatives and filled the gaps between official offices. The court mixed hunting and drinking with cosmopolitan literary talk. Its manner was formal, perhaps because Henry was making up for his sudden rise from the son of a count. He opposed tournaments, probably because crowds of armed knights posed a risk in peacetime. Gillingham called the whole enterprise "a family firm".

  The family at its core was complicated. Matilda shaped his early life and kept her influence for years. Henry trusted Eleanor to run England for several years after 1154 and later left her to govern Aquitaine. Eventually the marriage broke down. Historians point to his steady interference in Aquitaine, to his acceptance of homage from Raymond of Toulouse in 1173 in place of Eleanor, and to his harsh temper. Henry and Eleanor had eight legitimate children: five sons named William, Young Henry, Richard, Geoffrey and John, and three daughters named Matilda, Eleanor and Joan. Henry also kept long-term mistresses, among them Annabel de Balliol and Rosamund Clifford, and had illegitimate children. Two of these, another Geoffrey and a William, became Archbishop of York and Earl of Salisbury. Historians have blamed inherited traits, poor parenting and the clash of personalities for the family's feuds. Matthew Strickland argues that Henry made sensible efforts to manage the tensions, and that if he had died younger the succession might have gone far more smoothly.

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• 4. Government, Coin and Law

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  Henry held more of France than any ruler since the Carolingians of the 9th century. Add his holdings in England, Wales, Scotland and later parts of Ireland, and historians call the result the Angevin Empire. It had no coherent structure. It was a loose network of family ties and lands, each with its own customs. Henry travelled constantly, and the historian John Edward Austin Jolliffe calls the result a "government of the roads and roadsides". Messengers kept him in touch with every domain. In his absence, seneschals and justiciars governed, with local officials beneath them. Many decisions still waited for the king himself, and petitioners crowded around him. Sometimes his court became a magnum concilium, or great council, though it is unclear how freely the barons and bishops could oppose him.

  Patronage was Henry's lever. He was skilled at finding and keeping capable officials, many in the Church, and most of his preferred clerics became bishops and archbishops. Meanwhile the number of English earldoms shrank, closing off advancement for traditional barons. His anger could also be turned into policy. The phrase ira et malevolentia, "anger and ill-will", described his power to ruin particular barons or clergy. Like his grandfather, he promoted minor nobles without wealth of their own, called new men, and by the 1180s they dominated English administration. In Normandy he drew advisers from the bishops and shaped the nobility through arranged marriages and the handling of inheritances. In Anjou he governed through officials called prévôts and seneschals. In Aquitaine ducal authority stayed weak, though it grew thanks largely to Richard's efforts in the late 1170s.

  The England he took over in 1154 was battered. Fighting had devastated many regions, though others were untouched. Unauthorised "adulterine" castles had gone up as lords' bases, royal forest law had collapsed in large areas, and the crown had little control over the mints. Calculations from incomplete pipe rolls suggest royal income fell by 46 per cent between 1129-30 and 1155-56. Henry presented himself as the true heir of Henry I and described Stephen's nineteen years as chaos. He also made a point of listening to counsel, unlike his mother. Because he spent six and a half of his first eight years in France, much of this rebuilding was done at a distance.

  Money was the engine. Henry borrowed far more than earlier English kings, first from moneylenders in Rouen and later from Jewish and Flemish lenders. With the capable Richard FitzNeal he reformed the currency in 1158, putting his own name on English coins for the first time and sharply cutting the number of licensed moneyers. In 1180 came a wholesale reform, with royal officials taking direct control of the mints. The new Short Cross penny was struck at only ten mints. His average exchequer income rose from around £18,000 in the early reign to around £22,000 after 1166. More coin circulated, and after 1180 trade and inflation both rose over the long term.

  The law was his most lasting field. Henry greatly expanded royal justice, and the Treatise of Glanvill, an early legal handbook, summed up the result at the end of his reign. Scholars doubt that he had a grand design or personally invented many of the procedures. He did care about justice and chose good administrators to carry out the reforms. After the disorder of Stephen's reign there were endless land disputes, and in 1163 he returned to England to reform the royal courts, sending travelling justices to the north and the Midlands. After 1166 his Westminster exchequer court began hearing wider civil cases. The Assize of Clarendon in 1166 introduced new actions for wrongful dispossession of land, inheritance rights and widows' rights. Probably in 1176 he created the General Eyre, sending royal justices to every county. Juries entered petty assizes from around 1176 and grand assizes from 1179. Trial by combat and trial by ordeal continued, but royal power grew steadily.

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• 5. Cold War With Louis

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  Around 1160 Henry did something that infuriated the French king. At the time Henry had custody of Young Henry and Margaret, Louis VII's daughter, and he bullied several papal legates into marrying the children, aged five and three. He then seized the Vexin. That move broke the spirit of the peace treaty of 1160, and it was one of many clashes between two men who spent decades circling one another. The historian Jean Dunbabin compares the situation to the 20th-century Cold War, with its constant meetings and rising military tension. Henry had more resources than Louis, especially after taking England. Louis tried to hold the moral high ground, played up his own reputation as a crusader and spread rumours about Henry's temper.

  Toulouse was another battleground. Henry hoped to claim it on Eleanor's behalf and, encouraged by her, allied with Raymond Berenguer IV of Barcelona, then threatened to invade in 1159. Louis married his sister Constance to Count Raymond V of Toulouse. When Henry marched in, believing Louis had approved, he found the French king visiting Raymond in the city. Henry would not attack his own feudal lord. He ravaged the surrounding county, took castles and seized Quercy. The chronicler William of Newburgh called the ensuing conflict a "forty years' war". Pressure on Raymond continued through the 1160s, and in February 1173 Raymond finally gave public homage to Henry and his heirs.

  Brittany was handled differently. After Conan III died in 1148 and civil war broke out, Henry claimed overlordship on the strength of Henry I's old rights. At first he governed through proxies and backed Conan IV, whose English ties made him easy to influence. When Henry's brother Geoffrey died in 1158, Henry annexed Nantes himself. In 1166 he invaded Brittany to punish local barons and forced Conan IV to abdicate in favour of his daughter Constance, who was betrothed to Henry's son Geoffrey. Medieval law made the arrangement unusual, since Conan might have had sons to inherit.

  Open war between the kings came in 1167, after a trivial quarrel over how money for the Crusader states of the Levant should be collected. Louis allied with the Welsh, Scots and Bretons and attacked Normandy. Henry struck at Chaumont-sur-Epte, where Louis kept his main military arsenal, and burned the town to the ground. Louis abandoned his allies and made a private truce. Two years later, at peace talks in Montmirail in 1169, Henry's sons did homage to Louis for their future inheritances in France, and Henry planned to divide his empire. Young Henry would receive England and Normandy, Richard would take Aquitaine, and Geoffrey would take Brittany. Richard was also betrothed to Louis's young daughter Alys. Louis, though, saw only a temporary gain, and straight after the conference he began stirring up tension among Henry's sons.

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• 6. Wales and Ireland

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  At the Battle of Ewloe in 1157, Henry's royal standard was dropped in the fighting, and the king himself narrowly escaped capture or death at Welsh hands. It was the worst blow of his first expedition into Wales. Earlier setbacks had included a naval attack on Gwynedd's coast that was overwhelmed, and an ambush by Owain Gwynedd near Hawarden. Even so, by the end of 1157 Henry had recovered Tegeingl for himself and Iâl for his ally Madog ap Maredudd of Powys, and he had imposed English overlordship on Gwynedd. The next year Rhys ap Gruffudd of Deheubarth formally submitted, and returned some of his conquests.

  The peace did not last. In 1162 Rhys retook Llandovery Castle, and in 1163 Henry led a second force that penetrated deep into Rhys's kingdom and held him in custody in England for some weeks. The third expedition was a disaster. Henry paid for a thoroughly prepared force that combined troops from France and Scotland, a fleet from Dublin and infantry trained for mountain fighting. The size of the threat united Powys, Gwynedd and Deheubarth, and in 1165 their combined army forced him to turn back at the Battle of Crogen. In fury he ordered twenty-two Welsh hostages blinded at Shrewsbury and abandoned the expedition. Rhys then took Cardigan and Cilgerran, and Owain captured Basingwerk and Rhuddlan.

  Henry changed course. He began to withdraw support for the Marcher Lords after 1165 and confirmed Rhys's right to the lands he had won. Rhys even sent some of the troops who had beaten Henry to fight in his wars on the continent. Many Welsh who had supported the Normans in the north-east went into exile in Lancashire. Marcher Lords who could no longer expand in Wales turned their ambitions overseas, to Ireland.

  In the 1160s the King of Leinster, Diarmait Mac Murchada, was deposed by the High King, Ruaidrí Ua Conchobair. Diarmait asked Henry for help in 1167, and Henry allowed him to recruit mercenaries within the empire. Diarmait gathered Anglo-Norman and Flemish fighters from the Welsh Marches, among them Richard de Clare, 2nd Earl of Pembroke. They won back Leinster, but Diarmait died in 1171 and de Clare claimed it for himself. Henry saw a danger, since Marcher nobles might carve out independent lands beyond his reach. Pope Adrian IV had authorised an English invasion on the nominal grounds of reorganising the Irish church. Henry crossed south Wales, then sailed from Pembroke to Ireland in October 1171. Irish and Anglo-Norman leaders in the south and east accepted his rule, and de Clare held Leinster as a fief of the English king. Henry also built castles, since Anglo-Norman military technology gave them an advantage over Irish forces. In 1175 the Treaty of Windsor recognised Ruaidrí as High King under Henry. That failed, and at a conference in Oxford in 1177 Henry set up a system of local fiefs of his own.

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• 7. Becket and the Church

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  When Theobald of Bec, Archbishop of Canterbury, died in 1161, Henry saw a chance to tighten his hold on the English Church. In 1162 he named his chancellor, Thomas Becket, to the post. The historian Thomas M. Jones suggests Henry thought an old friend, weakened within the Church by his past service to the crown, would have to rely on royal support. Both Henry's mother and his wife seem to have had doubts. The plan backfired at once, because Becket changed his way of life, cut his ties with the king and presented himself as a defender of Church rights.

  The central quarrel concerned clergy who committed secular crimes. Henry said English custom let the king judge them, while Becket insisted only church courts could. In January 1164 Henry forced through the Constitutions of Clarendon. Becket gave in under heavy pressure, then changed his position soon afterwards. The dispute grew personal, with Henry bearing grudges and Becket, in the view of the historian Josiah Cox Russell, vain and excessively political. Becket fled to France in 1164 and sought shelter with Louis VII. Pope Alexander III backed Becket in principle but needed Henry's help against the Holy Roman Emperor Frederick I, so he pushed for negotiation.

  By 1169 Henry wanted to have Young Henry crowned King of England. That ceremony traditionally belonged to the Archbishop of Canterbury, and when talks failed Henry had the Archbishop of York perform it. The pope authorised Becket to place England under interdict. Terms were agreed in July 1170 and Becket came back in early December. Then he excommunicated three more of Henry's supporters. According to Edward Grim, an eyewitness to the murder, Henry exploded: "What miserable drones and traitors have I nourished and promoted in my household, who let their lord be treated with such shameful contempt by a low-born clerk!"

  Four knights travelled secretly to Canterbury, apparently meaning to confront Becket and, if needed, arrest him. He refused to be taken inside a church, and on the 29th of December 1170 they hacked him to death. Christian Europe was horrified, not least because it happened before an altar. Monks declared him a martyr. Louis announced a new interdict on Henry's lands, and Henry, busy elsewhere, took no action against the killers and said he could not. In May 1172 he reached a settlement with the papacy that overturned the most controversial clauses of the Constitutions of Clarendon and required him to go on crusade. He never went. He kept influencing any church case that interested him, and he put the growing cult of Becket to his own use.

  Henry's faith is hard to read. Overall he resisted papal influence, and he treated each region differently. He enjoyed good relations with the Norman bishops. He also supported Alexander III in the disputed papal election of 1159, as Louis did. He founded few new monasteries in England. Three of them, Witham Charterhouse in Somerset, Waltham Abbey in Essex and Amesbury in Wiltshire, were founded as penance for the murder, at considerable cost. In France he built and endowed hospitals, particularly for lepers, including one at Mont-Saint-Aignan dedicated to the dead archbishop. The scholar Elizabeth Hallam says his foundations accelerated dramatically after Becket's death. Before sailing, Henry would make a full confession and consult auguries on the best time to go.

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• 8. Sons Against Father

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  By 1173 Young Henry held the title of king but made no real decisions, and his father kept him chronically short of money. He had been deeply attached to Becket, his former tutor, and may have blamed his father for the murder. His brother Geoffrey was stuck in limbo. Duke Conan of Brittany had died in 1171, yet Geoffrey and Constance remained unmarried, and Geoffrey had no lands of his own. Eleanor, whose bond with her husband had fallen apart, encouraged Richard to join in. Barons unhappy with Henry's rule saw a chance to win back lost influence. The last straw was Henry's gift of three major castles belonging to Young Henry to his youngest son, John. Young Henry protested and then fled to Paris, and Richard and Geoffrey followed him.

  The Great Revolt of 1173-74 drew in France, Scotland and Flanders. Louis VII and later his son Philip II, who took the French throne in 1180, encouraged the tensions over inheritance. Henry won only through vigorous military action and talented local commanders, many of them new men chosen for loyalty and administrative skill. Young Henry and Geoffrey rebelled again in 1183, and in the course of that revolt Young Henry died of dysentery. Geoffrey died in 1186.

  Philip persuaded Richard to change sides by 1189. By then Henry was suffering from a bleeding ulcer that drained the extraordinary energy of his earlier years. Philip and Richard decisively defeated him, and he withdrew to Chinon Castle in Anjou. He died soon afterwards. Richard succeeded him, so three of his sons did end up kings: Young Henry as co-ruler, then Richard I and John as sole monarchs.

  The empire fell apart quickly under John. Yet Henry's legal reforms are generally seen as the foundation of English Common Law, and his interventions in Brittany, Wales, Ireland and Scotland shaped those societies and their governments. Chroniclers such as Gerald of Wales and William of Newburgh were sometimes critical but largely praised his achievements. In the 18th century scholars argued that Henry drove the creation of a truly English monarchy and ultimately a unified Britain. Victorian historians, caught up in the growth of their own empire, studied his with keen interest. They also criticised parts of his private life and his treatment of Becket.

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