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Count of Poitiers (Poitou)Henry II (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. 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. Prior to coming to the throne he already controlled Normandy and Anjou on the continent; his marriage to Eleanor of Aquitaine on May 18, 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. In August 1152, Henry, previously occupied in fighting Eleanor's ex-husband Louis VII of France and his allies, 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 (Poitou), was born in 1153. 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. 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. Henry had appointed Becket to the archbishopric precisely because he wanted to avoid conflict. 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 dissention 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: "Who will rid me of this turbulent 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 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.) Henry's first son, William, Count of Poitiers (Poitou), had died in infancy. In 1170, Henry and Eleanor's fifteen-year-old son, Henry, was crowned king, 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, Richard, Geoffrey, John, Matilda, Eleanor, and Joan. Henry's attempts to wrest control of her lands from Eleanor (and from her heir Richard) led to confrontations between Henry on the one side and his wife and legitimate sons on the other. Henry's notorious liaison with Rosamund Clifford, the "fair Rosamund" of legend, probably began in 1165 during one of his Welsh campaigns and continued until her death in 1176. However, it was not until 1174, at around the time of his break with Eleanor, that Henry acknowledged Rosamund as his mistress. Almost simultaneously he began negotiating the annulment of his marriage and marry Alys, daughter of King Louis VII of France and already betrothed to Henry's son Richard. Henry's affair with Alys continued for some years, and, unlike Rosamund Clifford, Alys allegedly gave birth to one of Henry's illegitimate children. Henry also had a number of illegitimate children by various women, and Eleanor had several of those children reared in the royal nursery with her own children; some remained members of the household in adulthood. Among them were William de Longespee, 3rd Earl of Salisbury, whose mother was Ida, Countess of Norfolk; Geoffrey, Archbishop of York, son of a woman named Ykenai; Morgan, Bishop of Durham; and Matilda, Abbess of Barking. Henry II's attempt to divide his titles amongst his sons but keep the power associated with them provoked them into trying to take control of the lands assigned to them (see Revolt of 1173-1174), which amounted to treason, at least in Henry's eyes. Gerald of Wales reports that when King Henry gave the kiss of peace to his son Richard, he said softly, "May the Lord never permit me to die until I have taken due vengeance upon you." When Henry's legitimate sons rebelled against him, they often had the help of King Louis VII of France. Henry the Young King died in 1183. A horse trampled to death another son, Geoffrey, Duke of Brittany (1158-1186). Henry's third son, Richard the Lionheart (1157-1199), with the assistance of Philip II Augustus of France, attacked and defeated Henry on July 4, 1189; Henry died at the Chateau Chinon on July 6, 1189, and lies entombed in Fontevraud Abbey, near Chinon and Saumur in the Anjou Region of present-day France. Henry's illegitimate son Geoffrey, Archbishop of York also stood by him the whole time and alone among his sons attended on Henry's deathbed. Richard the Lionheart then became king of England. He was followed by King John, the youngest son of Henry II, laying aside the claims of Geoffrey's children Arthur of Brittany and Eleanor. Appearance Peter of Blois left a description of Henry II in 1177: "...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... 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." Another contemporary, Gerald of Wales, described him thus: "A man of reddish, freckled complexion, with a large, round head, grey eyes that glowed fiercely and grew bloodshot in anger, a fiery countenance and a harsh, cracked voice. His neck was poked forward slightly from his shoulders, his chest was broad and square, his arms strong and powerful. His body was stocky, with a pronounced tendency toward fatness, due to nature rather than self-indulgence -- which he tempered with exercise." Fiction The treasons associated with the royal and ducal successions formed the main theme of the play The Lion in Winter, which also served as the basis of a 1968 film starring Peter O'Toole and Katharine Hepburn. In 2003, the film was remade as a mini-series with Patrick Stewart and Glenn Close in the leading roles. Henry II and his sons King Richard and King John also provided the subjects of the BBC2 television series The Devil's Crown. The 1978 book of the same title was written by Richard Barber and published as a guide to the broadcast series, which starred Brian Cox as Henry and Jane Lapotaire as Eleanor. "Book of the Civilized Man" is a poem believed to have been written in Henry's court and is the first "book of manners" or "courtesy book" in English history, representing the start of a new awakening to etiquette and decorum in English culture. http://en.wikipedia.org Another version: Henry II, Henry Of Anjou, Henry Plantagenet, Henry Fitzempress , or Henry Curtmantle (Short Mantle) Duke of Normandy (from 1150), Count of Anjou (from 1151), Duke of Aquitaine (from 1152), and King of England (from 1154), who greatly expanded his Anglo-French domains and strengthened the royal administration in England. His quarrels with Thomas Becket, archbishop of Canterbury, and with members of his family (his wife, Eleanor of Aquitaine, and such sons as Richard the Lion-Heart and John Lackland) ultimately brought about his defeat. After receiving a good literary education, part of it in England, Henry became Duke of Normandy in 1150 and count of Anjou on the death of his father, Geoffrey Plantagenet, in 1151. Although the claim of his mother, Matilda, daughter of Henry I, to the English crown had been set aside by her cousin, King Stephen, in 1152, Henry advanced his fortunes by marrying the beautiful and talented Eleanor, recently divorced from King Louis VII of France, who brought with her hand the lordship of Aquitaine. Henry invaded England in 1153, and King Stephen agreed to accept him as coadjutor and heir. When Stephen died the following year Henry succeeded without opposition, thus becoming lord of territories stretching from Scotland to the Pyrenees. The young king lacked visible majesty. Of stocky build, with freckled face, close-cut tawny hair, and gray eyes, he dressed carelessly and grew to be bulky; but his personality commanded attention and drew men to his service. He could be a good companion, with ready repartee in a jostling crowd, but he displayed at times the ungovernable temper of a furious animal and could be heartless and ruthless when necessary. Restless, impetuous, always on the move, regardless of the convenience of others, he was at ease with scholars, and his administrative decrees were the work of a cool realist. In his long reign of 34 years he spent an aggregate of only 14 in England. His career may be considered in three aspects: the defense and enlargement of his dominions, the involvement in two lengthy and disastrous personal quarrels, and his lasting administrative and judicial reforms. His territories are often called the Angevin Empire. This is a misnomer, for Henry's sovereignty rested upon various titles, and there was no institutional or legal bond between different regions. Some, indeed, were under the feudal overlordship of the king of France. By conquest, through diplomacy, and through the marriages of two of his sons, he gained acknowledged possession of what is now the west of France from the northernmost part of Normandy to the Pyrenees, near Carcassonne. During his reign, the dynastic marriages of three daughters gave him political influence in Germany, Castile, and Sicily. His continental dominions brought him into contact with Louis VII of France, the German emperor Frederick I (Barbarossa), and, for much of the reign, Pope Alexander III. With Louis the relationship was ambiguous. Henry had taken Louis's former wife and her rich heritage. He subsequently acquired the Vexin in Normandy by the premature marriage of his son Henry to Louis's daughter, and during much of his reign he was attempting to outfight or outwit the French king, who, for his part, gave shelter and comfort to Henry's enemy, Thomas Becket, the archbishop of Canterbury. The feud with Louis implied friendly relations with Germany, where Henry was helped by his mother's first marriage to the emperor Henry V but hindered by Frederick's maintenance of an antipope, the outcome of a disputed papal election in 1159. Louis supported Alexander III, whose case was strong, and Henry became arbiter of European opinion. Though acknowledging Alexander, he continued throughout the Becket controversy to threaten transference of allegiance to Frederick's antipope, thus impeding Alexander's freedom of action. Early in his reign Henry obtained from Malcolm III of Scotland homage and the restoration of Northumberland, Cumberland, and Westmorland, and later in the reign (1174) homage was exacted from William the Lion, Malcolm's brother and successor. In 1157 Henry invaded Wales and received homage, though without conquest. In Ireland, reputedly bestowed upon him by Pope Adrian IV, Henry allowed an expedition of barons from South Wales to establish Anglo-Norman supremacy in Leinster (1169), which the King himself extended in 1171. His remarkable achievements were impaired, however, by the stresses caused by a dispute with Becket and by discords in his own family. The quarrel with Becket, Henry's trusted and successful chancellor (1154-62), broke out soon after Becket's election to the archbishopric of Canterbury (May 1162; see Becket, Saint Thomas). It led to a complete severance of relations and to the Archbishop's voluntary exile. Besides disrupting the public life of the church, this situation embroiled Henry with Louis VII and Alexander III; and, though it seemingly did little to hamper Henry's activities, the time and service spent in negotiations and embassies was considerable, and the tragic denouement in Becket's murder earned for Henry a good deal of damaging opprobrium. More dangerous were the domestic quarrels, which thwarted Henry's plans and even endangered his life and which finally brought him down in sorrow and shame. Throughout his adult life Henry's sexual morality was lax; but his relations with Eleanor, 11 years his senior, were for long tolerably harmonious, and, between 1153 and 1167, she bore him eight children. Of these, the four sons who survived infancy-Henry, Geoffrey, Richard, and John-repaid his genuine affection with resentment toward their father and discord among themselves. None was blameless, but the cause of the quarrels was principally Henry's policy of dividing his dominions among his sons while reserving real authority for himself. In 1170 he crowned his eldest son, Henry, as co-regent with himself; but in fact the young king had no powers and resented his nonentity, and in 1173 he opposed his father's proposal to find territories for the favoured John (Lackland) at the expense of Geoffrey. Richard joined the protest of the others and was supported by Eleanor. There was a general revolt of the baronage in England and Normandy, supported by Louis VII in France and William the Lion in Scotland. Henry's prestige was at a low ebb after the murder of Becket and recent taxation, but he reacted energetically, settled matters in Normandy and Brittany, and crossed to England, where fighting had continued for a year. On July 12, 1174, he did public penance at Canterbury. The next day the King of Scots was taken at Alnwick, and three weeks later Henry had suppressed the rebellion in England. His sons were pardoned, but Eleanor was kept in custody until her husband died. A second rebellion flared up in 1181 with a quarrel between his sons Henry and Richard over the government of Aquitaine, but young Henry died in 1183. In 1184 Richard quarrelled with John, who had been ordered to take Aquitaine off his hands. Matters were eased by the death of Geoffrey (1186), but the King's attempt to find an inheritance for John led to a coalition against him of Richard and the young Philip II Augustus, who had succeeded his father, Louis VII, as king of France. Henry was defeated and forced to give way, and news that John also had joined his enemies hastened the King's death near Tours in 1189. In striking contrast to the checkered pattern of Henry's wars and schemes, his governance of England displays a careful and successful adaptation of means to a single end-the control of a realm served by the best administration in Europe. This success was obscured for contemporaries and later historians by the varied and often dramatic interest of political and personal events, and not until the 19th century-when the study of the public records began and when legal history was illuminated by the British jurist Frederic William Maitland and his followers-did the administrative genius of Henry and his servants appear in its true light. At the beginning of his reign Henry found England in disorder, with royal authority ruined by civil war and the violence of feudal magnates. His first task was to crush the unruly elements and restore firm government, using the existing institutions of government, with which the Anglo-Norman monarchy was well provided. Among these was the King's council of barons, with its inner group of ministers who were both judges and accountants and who sat at the Exchequer, into which the taxes and dues of the shires were paid by the King's local representative, the sheriff (shire-reeve). The council contained an unusually able group of men-some of them were great barons, such as Richard de Lucy and Robert de Beaumont, earl of Leicester; others included civil servants, such as Nigel, bishop of Ely, Richard Fitzneale, and his son, Richard of Ilchester. Henry took a personal interest in the technique of the Exchequer, which was described at length for posterity in the celebrated Dialogus de scaccario, whose composition seemed to Maitland “one of the most wonderful things of Henry's wonderful reign.” How far these royal servants were responsible for the innovations of the reign cannot be known, though the development in practice continued steadily, even during the King's long absences abroad. In the early months of the reign the King, using his energetic and versatile chancellor Becket, beat down the recalcitrant barons and their castles and began to restore order to the country and to the various forms of justice. It was thus, a few years later, that he came into conflict with the bishops, then led by Becket, over the alleged right of clerics to be tried for crime by an ecclesiastical court. A result of this was the celebrated collection of decrees-the Constitutions of Clarendon (1164)-which professed to reassert the ancestral rights of the King over the church in such matters as clerical immunity, appointment of bishops, custody of vacant sees, excommunication, and appeals to Rome. The Archbishop, after an initial compliance, refused to accept these, and they were throughout the controversy a block to an agreement. The quarrel touched what was to be the King's chief concern-the country's judicial system. Anglo-Saxon England had two courts of justice-that of the hundred, a division of the shire, for petty offenses, and that of the shire, presided over by the sheriff. The feudal regime introduced by the Normans added courts of the manor and of the honour (a complex of estates). Above all stood the royal right to set up courts for important pleas and to hear, either in person or through his ministers, any appeal. Arrest was a local responsibility, usually hard upon a flagrant crime. A doubt of guilt was settled by ordeal by battle; the accused in the shire underwent tests held to reveal God's judgment. Two developments had come in since William the Conqueror's day: the occasional mission of royal justices into the shires and the occasional use of a jury of local notables as fact finders in cases of land tenure. Henry's first comprehensive program was the Assize of Clarendon (1166), in which the procedure of criminal justice was established; 12 “lawful” men of every hundred, and four of every village, acting as a “jury of presentment,” were bound to declare on oath whether any local man was a robber or murderer. Trial of those accused was reserved to the King's justices, and prisons for those awaiting trial were to be erected at the King's expense. This provided a system of criminal investigation for the whole country, with a reasonable verdict probable because the firm accusation of the jury entailed exile even if the ordeal acquitted the accused. In feudal courts the trial by battle could be avoided by the establishment of a concord, or fine. This system presupposed regular visits by the King's justices on circuit (or, in the technical phrase, “on eyre”), and these tours became part of the administration of the country. The justices formed three groups: one on tour, one “on the bench” at Westminster, and one with the King when the court was out of London. Those at Westminster dealt with private pleas and cases sent up from the justices on eyre. Equally effective were the “possessory assizes.” In the feudal world, especially in times of turmoil, violent ejections and usurpations were common, with consequent vendettas and violence. Pleas brought to feudal courts could be delayed or altogether frustrated. As a remedy Henry established the possessory writ, an order from the Exchequer, directing the sheriff to convene a sworn local jury at petty assize to establish the fact of dispossession, whereupon the sheriff had to reinstate the defendant pending a subsequent trial at the grand assize to establish the rights of the case. This was the writ of Novel Disseisin (i.e., recent dispossession). This writ was returnable; if the sheriff failed to achieve reinstatement, he had to summon the defendant to appear before the King's justices and himself be present with the writ. A similar writ of Mort d'Ancestor decided whether the ancestor of a plaintiff had in fact possessed the estate, whereas that of Darrein Presentment (i.e., last presentation) decided who in fact had last presented a parson to a particular benefice. All these writs gave rapid and clear verdicts subject to later revision. The fees enriched the treasury, and recourse to the courts both extended the King's control and discouraged irregular self-help. Two other practices developed by Henry became permanent. One was scutage, the commutation of military service for a money payment; the other was the obligation, put on all free men with a property qualification by the Assize of Arms (1181), to possess arms suitable to their station. The ministers who engaged upon these reforms took a fully professional interest in the business they handled, as may be seen in Fitzneale's writing on the Exchequer and that of the chief justiciar, Ranulf de Glanville, on the laws of England; and many of the expedients adopted by the King may have been suggested by them. In any case, the long-term results were very great. By the multiplication of a class of experts in finance and law Henry did much to establish two great professions, and the location of a permanent court at Westminster and the character of its business settled for England (and for much of the English-speaking world) that common law, not Roman law, would rule the courts and that London, and not an academy, would be its principal nursery. Moreover, Henry's decrees ensured that the judge-and-jury combination would become normal and that the jury would gradually supplant ordeal and battle as being responsible for the verdict. Finally, the increasing use of scutage, and the availability of the royal courts for private suits, were effective agents in molding the feudal monarchy into a monarchical bureaucracy before the appearance of Parliament. Henry II lived in an age of biographers and letter writers of genius. John of Salisbury, Thomas Becket, Giraldus Cambrensis, Walter Map, Peter of Blois, and others knew him well and left their impressions. All agreed on his outstanding ability and striking personality and also recorded his errors and aspects of his character that appear contradictory, whereas modern historians agree upon the difficulty of reconciling its main features. Without deep religious or moral conviction, Henry nevertheless was respected by three contemporary saints, Aelred of Rievaulx, Gilbert of Sempringham, and Hugh of Lincoln. Normally an approachable and faithful friend and master, he could behave with unreasonable inhumanity. His conduct and aims were always self-centred, but he was neither a tyrant nor an odious egoist. Both as man and ruler he lacked the stamp of greatness that marked Alfred the Great and William the Conqueror. He seemed also to lack wisdom and serenity; and he had no comprehensive view of the country's interest, no ideals of kingship, no sympathetic care for his people. But if his reign is to be judged by its consequences for England, it undoubtedly stands high in importance, and Henry, as its mainspring, appears among the most notable of English kings. Encyclopædia Britannica 2006 Ultimate Reference Suite.
William B.
