Henry II & The Angevin Empire

An Angevin Empire – Eleanor of Aquitaine – The Art of Courtly Love – France, Scotland, & Wales – Prince Diarmait & The Conquest of Ireland – The Synod of Cashel – Henry II: The Lion of Justice – The Assize of Clarendon – “12 Good Men” & Common Law – A Pestilential Priest – The Rebellion of 1173 – Brothers, Barons, and a Lion – Family Feuds: The Tipping Point

Henry FitzEmpress took the regal name Henry II on 19 December 1154 when he was crowned at Westminster Abbey. Medieval writers capture Henry’s physical essence. He had the red hair common with the Plantagenets, gray eyes that would become bloodshot in anger, a harsh and cracked voice, and a round, freckled face. He didn’t care for fancy clothes, and he was said to have had the appearance of a lion. Peter of Blois tells us, “The lord king has been red-haired so far, except that the coming of old age and gray hair has altered that color somewhat. His height is medium, so that neither does he appear great among the small, nor yet does he seem small among the great. His head is spherical… his eyes are full, guileless, and dove-like when he is at peace, gleaming like fire when his temper is aroused, and in bursts of passion they flash like lightning. As to his hair he is in no danger of baldness, but his head has been closely shaved. He has a broad, square, lion-like face. Curved legs, a horseman’s shins, broad chest, and a boxer’s arms all announce him as a man strong, agile and bold… he never sits, unless riding a horse or eating… In a single day, if necessary, he can run through four or five day-marches and, thus foiling the plots of his enemies, frequently mocks their plots with surprise sudden arrivals… Always are in his hands bow, sword, spear and arrow, unless he be in council or in books.” Peter points out that Henry’s legs were bowed, likely due to how much time he spent on horseback. Henry, unlike previous kings, preferred to be always on the move. He was known for riding hither and thither, making frequent visits to all his domains throughout England and France. While many kings could rule a lifetime without visiting all of their domains, Henry made it a point to visit them all, and he took great care to pay attention to all that they needed. As a Plantagenet he was prone to anger, and he was rumored to lie on the floor and chew at the rushes when enraged (which, because he was not slow to anger, was often). 

In one fell swoop this great grandson of William the Conqueror turned the fractured, war-weary country of England into the beating heart of the Angevin Empire—an empire that, much to Henry’s delight, went above and beyond the Norman Empire of his great grandfather. Though Henry II was sovereign over England alone, he ruled—as a vassal to the King of France—numerous other territories: the French lands of Maine and Anjou were his by birthright, Normandy was his via his mother the Empress Matilda, and he had become the Duke of Aquitaine in 1152 (and gained control of Gascony) by way of marriage to Eleanor. These last two areas—Aquitaine and Gascony—were known for their wealthy markets and top quality vineyards, and by possessing them Henry was a top tier French vassal. Though indeed a vassal to King Louis VII of France, no one could deny that Henry II, by virtue of all his acquisitions, was now more powerful than the French king himself! In addition to England, he now ruled western France from northernmost Normandy down to the Pyrenees, more than any monarch since the days of the Carolingian Empire. This, of course, was a bone of contention between him and Louis VII; but a more personal friction between them was Henry’s marriage to Eleanor of Aquitaine, who had previously been the French king’s wife; she and Henry had married only eight weeks after she and Louis divorced.

a young Eleanor of Aquitaine

Eleanor, the daughter of William X, Duke of Aquitaine, had married Louis VII in 1137, but from the get-go they didn’t get along: the French king had a monkish disposition while Eleanor was flamboyant and sensual. Louis VII desperately needed a male heir to his throne, so he insisted that Eleanor accompany him on the Second Crusade; no one knew how long it would last, and Louis wanted to maximize his time and squeeze out some heirs. He and his wife had been having some troubles, and those troubles only intensified on crusade: not only did she embarrass him by ordering her entourage to dress like Amazonians, she also partied hard (too hard for Louis’ pious tastes), and it was even rumored that she had an incestuous affair while in the Holy Land. The icing on the cake was that she hadn’t bore him any heirs, so she was failing in her ultimate purpose. When the two of them returned to France, Louis VII deliberated with the pope and had their marriage annulled on the grounds that they were too closely related. While in practice they were seeking divorce, divorce was unlawful in the eyes of the Church, so they covered it up as an annulment. The divorce finalized in 1151, and Eleanor returned to her duchy in Aquitaine. Aquitaine was a highly-prized piece of land, so she knew she’d be having suitors bargaining for her—and her dowry. She made the first move, however, and sought out Henry of Anjou, who was twelve years younger than her. She and Henry were married in 1152, much to the chagrin of the king. Rumors began to fly that she and Henry had been lovers while she was married to Louis VII, and it was also rumored that she had been Henry’s father’s mistress. Eleanor would bear Henry eight children, including four sons who survived infancy; from oldest to youngest, they were: Henry (b. 1155), Richard (b. 1157), Geoffrey (b. 1158), and John (b. 1166). Henry had two illegitimate sons who lived beyond infancy: William, the 3rd Earl of Salisbury (b. 1176) and Geoffrey (b. 1152), who would become the Archbishop of York. Eleanor, being a sensuous and (likely) unfaithful creature herself, may have turned her eyes from Henry’s infidelity; but when Henry placed the infant future archbishop in the royal nursery, she was furious. Henry refused to back down, and a rift opened between them—and the rift would only grow, nurtured by Henry’s open and flamboyant love affair with his favorite mistress Rosamund Clifford. It isn’t surprising that while Henry spent most of his time traveling throughout his domains, Eleanor spent the majority of her time holding a gaudy court at Poitiers, the capital city of Aquitaine, and her sons, often joining her in court, came to favor her over their father. Her lavish, no-holds-barred court became the subject of legend and lore, and would be idolized by the trabadours of the duchy. It was in her court that the medieval subject of “Courtly Love” developed. Andreas Capellanus, a writer under her patronage, reworked Ovid’s writings on love into a book called The Art of Courtly Love. Here men were instructed on how to please and seduce women, no matter their station; but when Capellanus writes of the love of a noble for a peasant, he sanctions rape: “Do not hesitate to take what you seek and to embrace her by force.” In a period dominated by arranged marriage, courtly love opened the door to a world of legal flirtation. 

As King of England, Henry II would expand his Anglo-French domains, strengthen England’s royal administration, and enhance England’s judicial systems in ways that continue today; but towards the end of his reign, his reputation as a great king would be smeared by the murder of the Archbishop of Canterbury and betrayal from wife and sons. His first mission was to restore order to England in the aftermath of the Shipwreck: he moved hard and fast, crushing unruly barons, restoring strong government, and overthrowing the late Stephen’s reforms. Within two years he had demolished the rogue castles and brought England’s nobility to heel. Any further castles needed royal permission to be built, and to deal with nobles who might refuse to fulfill their feudal duties in support to the king, he made scutage—exemption from military service for a monetary payment, theoretically to be used to hire mercenaries—a permanent facet of England’s feudal system. The Assize of Arms in 1181 obligated all free men with property to possess arms so that they would be equipped to serve the king whenever they were summoned. Having pacified England and restored order to his realm, Henry then moved to expand that realm through both diplomacy and conquest. He married off his three daughters, gaining political power with the Holy Roman Empire, Castile in Iberia, and Sicily in the Mediterranean. In 1157 Henry received homage from Malcolm IV of Scotland, who had succeeded Henry’s great uncle David I, and brought Northumbraland, Cumberland, and Westmorland back into the English fold. That same year he invaded Wales and received homage without bringing any additional land under English sovereignty. In 1159 he unsuccessfully campaigned in France to assert Eleanor’s claim to the County of Toulouse; failing with swords, he turned to the pen and negotiated the marriage of Louis VII’s two-year-old daughter Margaret (by the French king’s second wife) to his five-year-old eldest son Henry (henceforth known as “Young Henry”). A prime motivator in the marriage was Henry’s eagerness to gain the Vexin, a territory that had been contested between England and France since the days of the Norman Conquest, and it was a significant part of Margaret’s dowry. 

In 1166 Henry saw a route to bring Ireland into the English fold. Shortly after his coronation he had sent a delegation to Pope Adrian IV and requested permission to invade Ireland. Henry was likely hoping to conquer Ireland and give it to his younger brother William, but the Church no doubt wanted to dominate the Irish church and stamp out its non-Catholic practices. The invasion ground to nothing when his younger brother died. But in 1166, a minor Irish prince named Diarmait Mac Murchada was expelled from Ireland by its High King. Diarmait made his way to Aquitaine and sought help from Henry. Henry promised his aid and in 1169 allowed an expedition of barons from South Wales to establish Anglo-Norman primacy in Leister. Diarmait gave his daughter Aoife to Richard and made Richard heir to the Irish kingdom. In 1171 Henry traveled across the Irish Sea and declared himself Lord of Ireland. The Irish princes gave him their allegiance, and Henry named his son John heir to Ireland (rather than Richard). This began eight hundred years of English lordship over Ireland, and Diarmait is still remembered by the Irish today as a national traitor. In 1172 the Synod of Cashel declared that Roman Catholicism was the only religious practice permitted in Ireland. By that year all the British Isles and Ireland had submitted to Henry II, the first English king to receive the whole submission of wider Britain. 

Closer to home Henry received the nickname “The Lion of Justice” because of his sweeping judicial reforms. Anglo-Saxon England had two courts of justice: the hundred, a division of the shire that settled petty offenses, and the shire courts, which were shire-wide and presided over by the appointed sheriff. After the Norman Conquest, courts of the manor and of the honour (complexes of estates) were added to the judicial machinery. Over all these courts was the king’s right to establish his own Royal Magistrate courts for important cases and to hear, either in person or through his ministers, any appeals. In the days of Henry, if there was significant doubt as to whether or not the accused was guilty, the person’s doubt wasn’t settled by a jury of peers but by trial by ordeal, in which the accused underwent certain physical tests. Trial by ordeal was based on judicium Dei, the premise that if the accused were innocent, God would perform a miracle on their behalf. Such trials went as far back as ancient Mesopotamian times, but England’s practice likely derived from the Franks. The two main types of trial by ordeal were trial by fire and trial by water. As an example of the former, if the accused could hold a red-hot poker without being burned, he would be deemed innocent; as an example of the latter, the accused would have their hands thrust into a pot of boiling water, and if their hands weren’t healed after three days, they were deemed guilty. Though trial by ordeal would be legal until 1819, Henry moved to phase out this archaic method of justice with the Assize of Clarendon in 1166. According to this document, twelve “lawful” men of every hundred, and four of every village, would act as jury, declaring under oath whether any local man was a robber or murderer. Trials for the accused were reserved to the king’s itinerant justices (or “justices in eyre”, a judicial appointment created after the Norman Conquest). These itinerant justices, traveling throughout England and hearing cases in place of the king, were to rely on the testimony of a jury of “twelve good men.” The jury—dubbed a “sworn inquest”—was tasked with determining whether there was enough evidence for an indictment in criminal cases (this is the origin of the Grand Jury). Henry’s system of “12 Good Men” would last until 1215, during the reign of his son John, when the Church condemned it; after 1215 a small (or petty) jury would be tasked with deciding the guilt or innocent of the accused (these smaller juries continue in use today). Any trial of the accused was reserved for the itinerant justices, and prisons for those awaiting trial were built at the expense of the royal treasury. To strengthen the crown at the expense of the barons, Henry decreed that itinerant justices superseded baronial courts (those led by barons); because most people preferred to be tried by a jury of their peers, barons lost significant power in settling disputes in their fiefs. As England’s judicial system conformed to Henry’s changes, the itinerant justices heaped up a body of decisions that could be used as precedents for similar cases; the outflow of this was the development of “common law” (common in that it applied to the whole realm and was distinct from local customs and traditions). To bolster common law and to promote uniformity in the judicial system, Henry authorized the first written legal textbook for England. 

Within the first fifteen years of his reign, Henry had stretched England’s borders beyond anything seen before and overhauled the judicial system to make it more uniform. One would think his popularity would be soaring, for even today he is remembered as one of England’s greatest kings. But in the muck of history, Henry’s popularity in the early 1170s was despairingly low. The English people distrusted him not because they didn’t approve of his conquests or changes in the judicial system; no, they distrusted him because he had carried his desires for judicial reform too far, infringing on the rights of the church—an infringement that would culminate in blood and brains splattered in the Canterbury Cathedral. Henry’s early judicial reforms, largely aimed at restoring order in England, were supported by his friend and chancellor, Thomas Becket. Becket, the son of a wealthy London merchant of Norman blood and known for his extravagant living and worldly tastes, was a crucial ally in Henry’s shakeup of the government. In his efforts to promote justice throughout England, Henry—like his predecessors—opposed the existence of separate courts: ecclesiastical courts for the clergy and secular courts for everyone else. About one in six of the English population were clergymen, and because they answered to the Church before answering to the king, they enjoyed lenient punishments for any crimes they committed (Henry would claim that over a hundred murders from the days of the Shipwreck had wiggled free of justice by being tried by ecclesiastical rather than secular courts). Desiring one common court to judge all of his subjects, Henry chafed against the Church—but Becket had his back. When Theobald, the Archbishop of Canterbury, died in 1161, Henry had a stroke of genius: he would put Becket, his close friend and staunch supporter of secular reforms, in the English church’s seat of power. In May 1162 Becket became the Archbishop of Canterbury, and the wider English church was furious—Becket, after all, wasn’t even a priest! It wasn’t long before Becket found himself torn between the church on one side and his friend on the other; but wanting to prove to his detractors that he had the mettle for the position, he resigned the chancellorship—which he had held in tandem with the archbishopric—and started challenging Henry’s wishes. His opponents in the church began to back off, and Henry started questioning his decision: not only had he lost an excellent chancellor, but now he had a very capable opponent sitting in the heart of the English church. 

Undaunted, in 1164 Henry unveiled the Constitutions of Clarendon, an assize of sixteen constitutions which purported to reassert the ancestral rights of the king regarding (among other things) clerical immunity, the custody of vacant sees, excommunication, the appointments of bishops, and appeals to Rome. Henry argued that the Constitutions were nothing more than a rollback to the state of English law during the days of King Henry I, but in truth the Constitutions widely expanded royal jurisdiction in civil and church law. If the Constitutions were approved, secular courts would have jurisdiction over the ecclesiastical courts, thus bringing a single common law over all of England. Though Henry’s Constitutions had popular support, Becket refused to ratify the proposals, and the Archbishop of York concurred with his Canterbury compatriot in refusing to accept the terms. Becket’s refusal to ratify the Constitutions struck more than a nerve in the king, and the Archbishop widely fled to Louis VII in France to escape Henry’s wrath. Henry pushed ahead with his reforms, but the English people—many of whom put great stock in the Church—began to turn against him. When Henry wanted to have Young Henry crowned as his successor, he traveled to Normandy in 1169 to talk it over with Becket (Becket, as Archbishop of Canterbury, was tasked with officiating the ordeal). The two of them wound up in yet another fight, and Becket stormed off, excommunicating some of Henry’s followers. Henry figured that if Becket refused to officiate, he’d just have to find someone else; so he turned to the Archbishop of York. The northern Archbishop officiated, and when Becket received word of it he was incensed. Becket decided to play his trump card: Pope Alexander III. The pope, however, was hesitant to get too involved: as a result of a disputed papal election in 1159, Alexander III (the winner) was faced with a disgruntled antipope who had the support of Frederick Barbarossa in the Holy Roman Empire. Henry had supported (and continued to support) Alexander III as pope, but he wasn’t shy about threatening to shift his allegiance to the antipope if Alexander III got too touchy. Becket, as a fan of excommunication, wanted Alexander III to excommunicate Henry, but the pope settled for laying an edict on England. Under the edict the English church couldn’t perform the public rites of sacred acts. Though nowhere near as dire as excommunication, an interdict stopped weddings, baptisms, church services, and a whole slew of other church-related functions (remember that in medieval England the church had its fingers in virtually everything). Henry didn’t feel this was enough to shift his allegiance to the antipope, a move that would further exacerbate his already crumbling popularity with the English populace, so he gritted his teeth and agreed that Becket could return to England in safety.

the murder of Thomas Becket

Thus Becket returned to England, but it wasn’t long before the Archbishop got back on the excommunication bandwagon, lashing out at his opponents in the church (many of whom happened to be Henry’s supporters). Henry, bedridden in France by a crippling albeit temporary illness, raised his head at the news and lamented, in words that have traveled down through the corridors of history, “Will no one rid me of this pestilential priest?!” Four of his knights—Reginald Fitzurse, Hugh de Moreville, William de Tracy, and Richard la Breton—took his exasperated outburst as an order. They crossed the Channel, traveled to Canterbury, and on 29 December 1170 they entered the Cathedral and found Becket near the stairs to the crypt. The knights called him a traitor to the king and demanded that he leave with them. Becket refused. “I am no traitor,” he told them, “I’m a priest of God.” One of the priests replied by striking him with the flat part of his sword, and the other three priests launched into the fray, stabbing him to death and beating his brains onto the stairs. Admiring their handiwork, one of the knights grinned and said, “Let’s go. This fellow will not be getting up again.” Henry wept when he heard the news in France, and for the rest of his life he would regret the death of a man who “in happier times… had been a friend.” As a result of the murder, Henry lost all standing in the wider western world, fell out of favor with the Church, and his popularity with his subjects reached an all-time low. Though Henry would soon perform penance and regain the support of his subjects, enough damage had been done that his political scheming to gain lordship over the ecclesiastical courts came to nothing: the Compromise of Avranches in 1172 removed almost all remaining secular jurisdiction over the clergy. In 1173 Alexander III would declare Thomas Becket a saint.

Henry’s hold on England in the wake of Becket’s murder was tenuous, and in a flash he would face revolts from every side—and especially from within his own household. His legitimate sons favored their mother over their father, and they were often at odds among themselves. In accordance with the feudal custom of primogeniture, Young Henry had been crowned as Henry’s successor by the Archbishop of York in 1170. Henry didn’t want to leave his younger sons destitute, so he was constantly trying to find a way to endow them with lands without openly favoring one over the others. His youngest son John was his personal favorite, but as the youngest he didn’t have any land (hence his nickname, John “Lack-Land”). In 1173 Henry tried to negotiate a marriage for John, but the potential father-in-law wanted John to have some land before agreeing to the marriage. This was a reasonable request, so Henry went ahead and plucked three castles from Anjou, at Geoffrey’s expense, and transferred them to John. Geoffrey, of course, wasn’t pleased, and Young Henry took his side. Soon Richard and Eleanor were openly opposed to the settlement, as well. But Young Henry made unnecessary waves when, instead of having Geoffrey’s back, he cut around him and made his own grab for Anjou, insisting that he receive England, Normandy, or Anjou to rule in his own right (though crowned successor, and called the Young King, it was nothing more than a title; he had no real power). Having managed to offend all his family members, Young Henry fled to France and sheltered with his father-in-law Louis VII. The French king had Young Henry’s ear and convinced him to openly rebel against his father. When he decided on the course of revolt, it didn’t take much for Richard, Geoffrey, and their mother to join in. Henry’s popularity among the English barons was so low—not only because of the recent murder of Becket but also because of his judicial reforms which weakened their power—that many of them were ready to join Henry’s sons in rebellion. In the Rebellion of 1173 Henry faced a slew of enemies: his own children and wife, restless and unhappy barons, Louis VII, and the new King of Scotland. Henry didn’t despair: he girded his loins and got ready to fight. He crossed the Channel to Normandy and snuffed out the seeds of rebellion in the duchy. During his one-year absence, skirmishes between the rebels and the royalists (Henry’s supporters) raged. After pacifying Normandy, Henry quickly returned to England, traveled to Canterbury, and won back popular support by doing public penance for the murder of Becket on 12 July 1174. Each bishop present at his penance gave him five hits with a rod, and then the eighty monks of Canterbury delivered three hits each. Henry, bruised and bleeding, presented gifts to Becket’s shrine and held a vigil at the late archbishop’s tomb. He then gathered his forces and marched north to face off with King David I of Scotland’s successor, William “the Lion.” The Lion was no match for Henry: he was captured at the Battle of Alnwick. Englishmen viewed Henry’s victory at Alnwick as a sign of a restoration of divine favor, and his popularity began to climb. He would dominate southern Scotland, extending his sovereign control to Solway Firth, and in 1174 he released William of Scotland on condition of his submission to Henry as overlord and his agreement to tax the Scots to pay for English garrisons in southern Scotland. Within a matter of weeks after victory at Alnwick, Henry suppressed the baronial revolt in England and had his rebellious sons submitting to him. He pardoned his sons but was harsher with Eleanor, who had been captured in France dressed as a man (a disguise she had used on her journey in 1152 to propose to Henry). He locked her away in a series of castles, and she would remain imprisoned—albeit in a luxurious imprisonment—for the next sixteen years.

the Battle of Alnwick 1174

The king had faced enemies on every front and prevailed, a marvelous achievement that showed his dominion wouldn’t easily be broken. Henry’s domestic troubles, however, were far from over. After a brief breathing space of about half a decade, the simmering resentment and quarrels of his sons reached another breaking point. In 1181 Richard built a castle on what Young Henry claimed to be his territory; Henry tried to resolve the matter by having Richard pay homage to Young Henry, but Richard refused. Their quarrel sparked outright rebellion in 1182, and Geoffrey took Young Henry’s side. Richard’s Aquitaine plunged into bloodshed, but the revolt came to a sudden conclusion with Young Henry died of the “bloody flux” (known to us as dysentery) in 1183. Richard, as the second oldest, became heir to the throne of England. In the wake of Young Henry’s death, Henry wanted to re-divide certain segments of the Angevin Empire among Richard and John: Richard would receive Anjou, Maine, Normandy, and England, and John would receive Aquitaine. Richard, jealous for the rich markets and prosperous vineyards of Aquitaine, refused. Henry tasked his youngest sons John and Geoffrey with forcing Richard, by force of arms, to relinquish Aquitaine; but Richard was too strong. Henry cursed and summoned all three of them to England to settle the matter in council, but their deliberations went nowhere. Irked at Richard’s disobedience and ungratefulness, Henry decided he wanted his youngest (and favorite) son John to be heir to the throne. Richard, however, was Eleanor’s favorite. Geoffrey, left out of the melee, jumped into the fray, making a bid for the throne against both his parents’ wishes, but his part of the drama ended in 1186 when he was trampled by a horse at a jousting tournament in France. Henry backed off from making John heir, but he still wanted to ensure that John, still landless, had territory of his own. Richard, refusing to budge, forged an alliance with the new king in France, Philip II (known as “Philip Augustus”). 

While Henry lie sick at his birthplace of Le Mans, Richard and Philip Augustus led a joint attack on the city. Henry ordered the southern suburbs to be ravaged by fire to impede their advance, but the winds changed and his birthplace burned. Henry managed to escape to a hillside where, with tears in his eyes, he watched the town become nothing but smoldering cinders. He raged at God in a fit of classic Plantagenet anger, and a conference was arranged near the city of Tours to try and settle the matter. Henry was at a distinct disadvantage against Richard and the French king, and he was compelled to accept Richard’s terms. When forced to give Richard a kiss of peace, he whispered in his ear, “God grant that I die not until I have avenged myself on thee.” Henry’s only request in the conference was to be given a list of all those who had rebelled against him, and while trying to recuperate from his illness at the Chateau de Chinon, his favorite residence, he received the list of his detractors. The first name on the list struck him like a hammer in the chest: it was the name of his favorite son, John. The king was crushed at the betrayal, and he told his bastard son Geoffrey, the only of his sons to be present at his death, “You are my true son. All the others are the bastards.” Henry II’s illness was worsened by a perforated ulcer, and he took his last breath on 6 July 1189, aged 56. His son Richard, having secured his ascension to the throne by the conference at Tours, would become the next King of England.