Henry II of England

Henry II, the first Plantagenet king of England, reigned from 1154 to 1189 over a collection of lands stretching from the Scottish border to the Pyrenees, later called the Angevin Empire. A restless and forceful ruler, he rebuilt royal government after years of civil war and expanded royal justice in ways often seen as the foundation of English common law. His reign was also marked by the murder of Thomas Becket and by repeated rebellions of his own sons.

Henry was born at Le Mans on 5 March 1133, the eldest son of Geoffrey Plantagenet, Count of Anjou, and the Empress Matilda, daughter of Henry I of England. When Henry I died in 1135, Matilda's cousin Stephen of Blois took the English crown, and a long civil war followed.

His father made him Duke of Normandy in 1150, and on Geoffrey's death in 1151 he inherited Anjou, Maine and Touraine. On 18 May 1152, aged nineteen, he married Eleanor of Aquitaine eight weeks after her marriage to Louis VII of France had been annulled, gaining her vast duchy and infuriating Louis. In 1153 Henry returned to England, and after a standoff at Wallingford, Stephen accepted him as heir under the Treaty of Winchester. Stephen died in October 1154, and Henry and Eleanor were crowned at Westminster Abbey on 19 December.

Henry set out to recover the rights his grandfather had held. He pulled down unlicensed castles, restored the exchequer and reformed the coinage in 1158, and forced the king of Scots to hand back northern English lands in 1157. His campaigns in Wales were less successful; he narrowly escaped death at Ewloe in 1157, and a great invasion in 1165 was turned back, after which he adopted a more conciliatory policy.

From the 1160s Henry greatly widened the reach of royal courts in England. He sent travelling justices around the counties, organised as the General Eyre from about 1176, and made much wider use of local juries. Historians debate how much he personally designed these reforms, but they produced a more unified legal system, described at the end of his reign in the legal handbook known as Glanvill.

In 1162 Henry made his chancellor and friend Thomas Becket archbishop of Canterbury, expecting a pliant ally. Instead Becket resisted the king, above all over whether clergy accused of crimes could be tried in royal courts, and fled to France after the Constitutions of Clarendon of 1164. A reconciliation in 1170 quickly broke down, and on 29 December 1170 four knights killed Becket in his cathedral at Canterbury, after Henry, according to Edward Grim, raged that his men let a low-born clerk defy him. The murder shocked Europe; Becket was soon venerated as a martyr, and Henry did penance.

In October 1171 Henry crossed to Ireland, where Anglo-Norman adventurers had carved out lands; both they and some Irish lords submitted to him, and he built castles to secure the new territory. In 1173 his sons Henry the Young King, Richard and Geoffrey, backed by Louis VII, the king of Scots and the count of Flanders, rose against him, and Eleanor, who supported them, was captured and held for the rest of his life. Henry defeated the rebels by 1174 and offered them lenient terms.

Disputes over the succession never ended. The Young King died in 1183 and Geoffrey in 1186, and the new French king, Philip II, skilfully set Henry's sons against him. After the fall of Jerusalem in 1187 Henry promised to go on crusade, but in 1188 Richard did homage to Philip, and in 1189 the two attacked Henry, who was by then seriously ill. Forced into complete surrender, and told that his favourite son John had also deserted him, he died at Chinon on 6 July 1189 and was buried at Fontevraud. His empire largely collapsed under John, but his legal and administrative changes endured.

Our 1200 map shows the Kingdom of England and the Angevin lands in France shortly after his death, alongside the Kingdom of France.