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Henry II of England

Henry II of England (5 March 1133 – 6 July 1189) ruled as Count of Anjou, Duke of Normandy, and as King of England (1154–1189) and, at various times, controlled parts of Wales, Scotland, eastern Ireland, and western France. His sobriquets include "Curt Mantle" (because of the practical short cloaks he wore), "Fitz Empress", and sometimes "The Lion of Justice", which had also applied to his grandfather Henry I. He ranks as the first of the Plantagenet or Angevin Kings. Following the disputed reign of King Stephen, Henry's reign saw efficient consolidation. Henry II has acquired a reputation as one of England's greatest medieval kings.

Biography

Prior to coming to the throne he already controlled Normandy and Anjou on the continent; his marriage to Eleanor of Aquitaine on 18 May 1152 added her holdings to his, including Touraine, Aquitaine, and Gascony. He thus effectively became more powerful than the king of France — with an empire (the Angevin Empire) that stretched from the Solway Firth almost to the Mediterranean and from the Somme to the Pyrenees. As king, he would make Ireland a part of his vast domain. He also maintained lively communication with the Emperor of Byzantium Manuel I Comnenus.

Life before accession

He was born on 5 March 1133 at Le Mans to the Empress Matilda and her second husband, Geoffrey the Fair, Count of Anjou. Brought up in Anjou, he visited England in 1149 to help his mother in her disputed claim to the English throne. He married Eleanor of Aquitaine on 18 May 1152, but from May to August he was occupied in fighting Eleanor's ex-husband Louis VII of France and his allies. In August Henry rushed back to her, and they spent several months together. Around the end of November 1152 they parted: Henry went to spend some weeks with his mother and then sailed for England, arriving on 6 January 1153. Some historians believe that the couple's first child, William, Count of Poitiers, was born in 1153.

Civil and legal reform - struggle with the barons

During Stephen's reign the barons had subverted the state of affairs to undermine the monarch's grip on the realm; Henry II saw it as his first task to reverse this shift in power. For example, Henry had castles which the barons had built without authorisation during Stephen's reign torn down, and scutage, a fee paid by vassals in lieu of military service, became by 1159 a central feature of the king's military system. Record keeping improved dramatically in order to streamline this taxation.

Henry II established courts in various parts of England, and first instituted the royal practice of granting magistrates the power to render legal decisions on a wide range of civil matters in the name of the Crown. His reign saw the production of the first written legal textbook, providing the basis of today's "Common Law". By the Assize of Clarendon (1166), trial by jury became the norm. Since the Norman Conquest jury trials had been largely replaced by trial by ordeal and "wager of battel" (which English law did not abolish until 1819). Provision of justice and landed security was further toughened in 1176 with the Assize of Northampton, a build on the earlier agreements at Clarendon. This reform proved one of Henry's major contributions to the social history of England.

Dealings with Ireland

Shortly after his coronation, Henry sent an embassy to Pope Adrian IV, another new arrival. Led by Bishop Arnold of Lisieux, the group of clerics requested from Adrian a privilege authorizing Henry to invade Ireland. Most historians agree that this was the papal bull Laudabiliter. W.L. Warren asserts that Henry acted under the influence of a "Canterbury plot;" Archbishop Theobald of Bec, John of Salisbury, and other Canterbury clergy wished to assert their hierarchical supremacy over the newly created Irish diocesan structure. Other historians have argued instead that Henry intended to secure Ireland as a lordship for his younger brother William.

Shortly thereafter, Henry's continental affairs distracted him. William died, and the English ignored Ireland. It was not until 1166 that it came to the surface again. In that year, Dermot MacMurrough, having been driven from his kingdom in Leinster, followed Henry to Aquitaine. He asked the English king to help him reassert control; Henry agreed to allow Dermot to gather supporters from among his Norman vassals. The most prominent of these was a Welsh Norman, Richard de Clare, 2nd Earl of Pembroke, nicknamed "Strongbow." In exchange for his loyalty, Dermot offered Earl Richard his daughter Aoife (Eve) in marriage and made him heir to the kingdom. The Normans quickly restored Dermot to his traditional holdings, and he even toyed with the idea of challenging for the title of Ard Ri, or High King. However, in 1171, Henry arrived from France to assert his overlordship. All of the Normans, along with many Irish princes, took oaths of homage to Henry, and he left after six months. He never returned, but he later named his young son, the future King John of England, Lord of Ireland.

The struggle with the church and Thomas Becket

As a consequence of the improvements in the legal system, the power of church courts waned. The church, not unnaturally, opposed this and found its most vehement spokesman in Thomas Becket, the Archbishop of Canterbury, formerly a close friend of Henry's and his Chancellor.

The conflict with Becket effectively began with a dispute over whether the secular courts could try clergy who had committed a secular offence. Henry attempted to subdue Becket and his fellow churchmen by making them swear to obey the "customs of the realm", but controversy ensued over what constituted these customs, and the church proved reluctant to submit. Following a heated exchange at Henry's court, Becket left England in 1164 for France to solicit in person the support of Pope Alexander III, who was in exile in France due to dissension in the college of Cardinals, and of King Louis VII of France. Due to his own precarious position, Alexander remained neutral in the debate, although Becket remained in exile loosely under the protection of Louis and Pope Alexander until 1170. After a reconciliation between Henry and Thomas in Normandy in 1170, Becket returned to England. Becket again confronted Henry, this time over the coronation of Prince Henry (see below). The much-quoted, although probably apocryphal, words of Henry II echo down the centuries: "Will no one rid me of this meddlesome priest?" Although Henry's violent rants against Becket over the years were well documented, this time four of his knights took their king literally (as he may have intended for them to do, although he later denied it) and travelled immediately to England, where they assassinated Becket in Canterbury Cathedral on December 29, 1170. As part of his penance for the death of Becket, Henry made a pilgrimage in sackcloth to his tomb (see also St. Dunstan's, Canterbury), and agreed to send money to the Crusader states in Palestine, which the Knights Hospitaller and the Knights Templar would guard until Henry arrived to make use of it on pilgrimage or crusade. Henry delayed his crusade for many years and in the end never went at all, despite a visit to him by Patriarch Heraclius of Jerusalem in 1184 and being offered the crown of the Kingdom of Jerusalem. In 1188 he levied the Saladin tithe to pay for a new crusade; the chronicler Giraldus Cambrensis suggested his death was a divine punishment for the tithe, imposed to raise money for an abortive crusade to recapture Jerusalem, which had fallen to Saladin in 1187.)

Issue

Henry's first son, William, Count of Poitiers, had died in infancy. In 1170, Henry and Eleanor's fifteen-year-old son, Henry, was crowned king (another reason for rupture with Thomas Becket, whose other bishops acquiesced to this during Becket's exile), but he never actually ruled and does not figure in the list of the monarchs of England; he became known as Henry the Young King to distinguish him from his nephew Henry III of England.

Henry and his wife, Eleanor of Aquitaine, had five sons and three daughters: William, Henry

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