A family at war | 20 September 2018

Poor old Henry II: once fêted as one of England’s greatest kings, he has long been neglected. Accessible books on Henry were few and far between until, like the proverbial buses, three came along in fairly rapid succession. Richard Barber’s 2015 contribution to Penguin’s Monarchs series offers a concise and excellent summary of Henry’s reign; and now we have two more appearing almost simultaneously (though both curiously omit Barber’s work).

Henry deserves the attention. As Count of Anjou, he wrested the throne of England from Stephen in 1154 after the exhausting civil war known as ‘the Anarchy’ when, a chronicle attests, ‘Christ and His angels slept’. Having prudently married Eleanor of Aquitaine two years earlier, following the annulment of her marriage to King Louis VII of France, and having retaken Northumbria from the Scots, Henry now ruled England and half of France. The origins of the Troubles in Ireland can be traced back to his reign, with the Anglo-Norman colonisation of Wexford in 1171.

This Angevin empire was the source of both his wealth and his greatest problems. The question of dividing up his lands for inheritance and deciding who of his four surviving sons (Henry the Young King, Duke Geoffrey of Brittany, Duke Richard of Anjou and John Lackland) should get what, meant that the older Henry could not rest from his tireless labours of acquisition, for his sons fought, as only families can, over the spoils of the old king’s legacy.

The revolt of 1173–74 saw Henry’s entire adult family arrayed against him: it was the ultimate crisis of his reign, after which, for the final 15 years, he maintained a constant vigilance against his sons. Even his (inexplicably) favourite, John, turned against him at the last; one chronicler wrote that when the sickly king heard of John’s betrayal he died of a broken heart.