Henry II was a short, stocky, bad tempered ranga who married the wealthiest and most desirable heiress in Europe. At the height of his powers he liked to brag that his empire rivalled Charlemagne’s and yet he died alone, after losing a war against his own sons. Along the way he presided over the beginnings of the modern jury system, the murder of the Archbishop of Canterbury and the invention of the umbrella.

Henry II was the son of Geoffrey of Anjou, known as Geoffrey the Handsome and also nicknamed Plantagenet because he wore a sprig of the native Angevian flower, Planta Genesta, in his hat. Henry’s mother, Matilda, was the only surviving child of Henry I. After Henry I died she inherited Normandy and attempted to claim the throne of England, but the English barons, horrified by the idea of an arrogant powerful monarch being in possession of a vagina, crowned instead, her cousin Stephen. Matilda, with unwomanly stubbornness, refused to give in to her inferior genitals and thus begun twenty years of crushing civil war in England. Warfare in the middle ages was mostly based on the idea that whoever sacks the most towns and slaughters the most peasants wins. Stephen had Henry I’s well stocked treasury behind him, Matilda had an endless supply of French mercenaries eager for pillaging fun in the rich English towns. No one could win such an unevenly even war, so everyone lost as all the economic and administrative growth of Henry I’s reign disintegrated and England descended into a state of utter anarchy.

Henry II, meanwhile, was living in Normandy, it being too dangerous to have a child who actually mattered growing up in England. When he was fourteen he got bored with waiting for the war to end, so he bundled a group of mercenaries into a boat and set off to invade England. They had a merry time burning some of the smaller villages, but without the manpower and weapons to take any towns he quickly ran out of money. His parents were so cross with this idiotically adolescent rebellion that they refused him any more pocket money. So, having no one else to turn to, he sent a messenger to Stephen asking for money to pay off his soldiers and to cover their passage back to Normandy. Because fourteen year olds making war on defenceless villagers is hilarious, Stephen had a good chuckle and sent him the money he asked for.

Six years later so many of the serfs were dead or displaced that England was losing the ability to feed itself. Stephen and Matilda, of course, were not experiencing any personal hunger, but most of their senior commanders had been killed in the fighting, so they were finally forced to call a truce. Stephen agreed to make Henry his heir, Matilda agreed to stop trying to put her wrongly shaped genitals on the throne and everyone went home happy. Luckily for England Stephen died before anyone could change their mind and Henry became King of England when he was twenty-one.

Eleanor of Aquitaine, Henry II’s future wife, was the heiress to the Duchy of Aquitaine, at the time a region larger than France. In the middle ages noble women had several functions. They could be married off in the endless treaties between warring nobles, they could produce children to carry on the endless wars between nobles whose treaties had broken down, they could be a convenient way of transferring property between men, and, if they were both beautiful and fertile, they could be displayed as an indication of their owner husband’s virility. Eleanor, being young, astonishingly beautiful and richer than any woman in Europe was therefore a considerable prize in the mediaeval marriage market.

When Eleanor’s father died, leaving all his wealth to Eleanor and her guardianship to the King of France (Louis the Fat), she was betrothed to his heir, (Louis the Young) within hours.

Until his older brother was killed by a runaway pig, Louis the Young had spent years training to be a monk. Timid, monkish Louis was not a suitable husband for Eleanor, who was passionate, headstrong and had not been taught proper womanly submission by her indulgent father. Hard as it may be to believe, a beautiful woman who refused to play a proper woman’s role attracted opprobrium, most of which took the form of slut shaming and rumours of Eleanor’s sexual misdemeanors swirled around Europe. Putative lovers included, among many others, her own uncle and Geoffrey of Anjou.

Henry and Eleanor first met in Paris in 1151 when Geoffrey and Henry were summoned by Louis to squabble with him over a meaningless strip of land on the French–Norman border. Geoffrey, who arrived looking for a fight and a bit of fun, spent most of his time drinking and insulting Louis’ clerics. Henry’s movements are not reported, but after two weeks Geoffrey suddenly and inexplicably capitulated to all Louis’ demands and he and Henry left Paris in a tearing hurry.

Within months, Eleanor’s inability to keep her mouth shut or give Louis a son got too much for the French government and her increasingly strident demands for a marriage annulment were finally granted. Eight weeks later, to Louis’ intense but impotent rage, she married Henry, eleven years her junior, and bestowed upon him all her worldly possessions.

Thus, at the age of twenty-one, Henry had inherited Anjou and Normandy, won England and married Aquitaine. He ruled over more of France than the French King, had taken his wife and, to add injury to insult, proceeded to have eight children with her, five of them sons.

The nascent legal system set up in England by Henry I had been virtually wiped out by the anarchy of Stephen’s reign, what few legal processes still existed were based on old local laws and differing feudal customs. Trial by ordeal or combat were accepted practices; more commonly, wrong doers were set upon by their neighbours and summarily punished according to the mood and amount of ale consumed. Court records are full of accounts of people falling to their deaths from horses, bridges, roofs and the fists of their fellows because of drunkenness. Contemporary letters by visiting Frenchmen make frequent, snippily superior references to the “immoderate drinking of fools” in England.

In the middle ages there was no concept of nationhood. Loyalty was given, or more commonly sold, to individual lords. Henry’s empire was vast by the standards of his time, but was also in a constant state of uproar, as various vassals declared war on each other, or joined together to declare war on him. England, after twenty years of civil war, was too exhausted for any more fighting, but the French are never too tired to stage a good riot. Henry spent most of his reign galloping from one end of France to the other, razing castles, sacking villages and speaking sternly to his recalcitrant vassals. This constant movement made central administration difficult to fix in the King’s person. In much the same way that modern politicians give broad directions to the public service and then go gallivanting off for press conferences and question time, Henry left much of the day to day running of government to administrators, while he attended to the chopping-up-peasants-and-burning-towns part of government. Peace in England made it the most stable place from which to administer the empire and Henry quickly reinstated the administrative institutions first set up by his grandfather Henry I. Bureaucracy (from the French word bureau or writing desk) increased as written documents became, for the first time, an essential element of government.

Peace also brought prosperity and innovation. As well as the invention of the umbrella, England’s first windmills and church spires were erected during Henry’s reign. Hundreds of new towns and markets sprang up as farming resumed and travel became safe again. All this was good for Henry because it meant more tax revenue to fund his battles in France. But national taxation requires a national treasury, standardised accounting practices and nationwide records of revenue. These, in turn, require literate staff for their administration. The church was the only provider of education, so most bureaucrats of the time were clerics, giving the church a powerful voice in the government of England.

Henry II, like his grandfather, was fascinated by the law and the amount of extra revenue he could accumulate by standardizing fines for misdemeanors. As well as reinstating Henry I’s King’s Justices, he drew on old Anglo Saxon traditions to develop the first royally sanctioned trials by jury. During his reign the King’s Bench at Westminster became a permanent court fixture, staffed by professional judges appointed by the king. These judges would also travel around the country hearing cases and then gather together at Westminster to compare their decisions. The doctrine of precedent, where judges are bound by preceding decisions by other judges, started at these meetings and was strengthened by the growth of literacy among the judiciary - England’s first legal textbooks codifying legal precedents was published in 1180.

Henry’s obsession with the law and his absolute power over it was the source of the most infamous act of his reign. The feudal barons and townsmen were too diminished by the civil wars and too eager for the profits of peace to put up much of a fight against his legal reforms. The church, however, had plenty of fight left. It declared that it was not subject to Henry’s laws, which meant that any person who could claim to be a member of the clergy could only be tried in ecclesiastical courts. The lines between laymen and the clergy were not always clear and anyone even slightly connected to the church could evade the writ of the King’s Law. The church didn’t apply capital punishment, so it was the court of choice for murderers and rapists. Any fines exacted went into church coffers not the King’s, so the church was piously keen to extend its jurisdiction as far as possible.

Henry decided that the easiest way around this was to appoint his chancellor and closest friend Thomas Becket to the Archbishopric of Canterbury and have him reform church law from within. The opposition to this was almost universal. The church didn’t want him because he was a commoner and a flamboyantly worldly politician - senior church appointments were supposed to go to devout sons of noble families, not the sons of merchants. The nobility didn’t want him because, as the King’s closest friend, he was already displacing their god-given right to all the power in the world. Thomas himself didn’t want the appointment and tried to warn the King that it wouldn’t all be submission and roses. But Henry, in the grand tradition of the-more-you-tell-me-I’m-wrong-the-more-right-I-think-I-am ignored them all and installed Thomas as the leading cleric of England.

Thomas was a human chameleon. As chancellor and King’s friend, he’d been the ultimate courtier - debonaire, politically astute, administratively excellent and a hell of a party goer. As Archbishop he was inflexible, arrogantly self righteous and immovable in his opposition to any diminishing of the church’s power.

After years of tantrums and incendiary posturing on both sides, Thomas was finally forced to flee to Europe, where he spent his time crying in the Pope’s arms and excommunicating all the English bishops who’d hurt his feelings.

Eventually a truce was negotiated that allowed Thomas to return to England in the hope that he and Henry would reconcile. Thomas, however, had other ideas and instantly set about excommunicating more of Henry’s supporters. Legend has it that on hearing this, Henry demanded of his knights, “Will no-one rid me of this turbulent priest?” but contemporary sources claim the actual words were “A curse on all the false varlets and traitors I have nursed and promoted in my household, who let their lord be mocked with such shameful contempt by a low-born priest”. Whatever the truth, he said enough to make four knights of his household decide that the fair and reasonable thing to do was to ride to Canterbury, chase Thomas to the altar and then chop the top of his head open and empty out his brains.

Even by medieval standards, chopping open the head of the Archbishop of Canterbury was taking petulance too far. Thomas’ murder and subsequent martyrdom not only tarnished Henry’s reputation forever, it also put the church in an unassailable position in the battle over legal powers.

Henry, also had other problems. His sons were growing up and, in the middle ages boys were old enough to fight in wars by the time they were in their mid teens. The King’s four sons, soaked in Angevian pride and Plantagenet arrogance and supported and encouraged by their mother, spent the last sixteen years of Henry’s reign in a state of seething rebellion. Eleanor was easy to deal with, any man worth his salt can imprison his wife for sixteen years, but sons were more difficult. Two of them died during Henry’s reign, but Richard (the Lionheart) and his younger brother John, Henry’s favourite, were never satisfied with what little power Henry was willing to give them.

Toward the end of his life Henry commisioned a mural for the walls of Winchester castle. It depicted a royal eagle beset by four eaglets. One on each wing and one on its back, tearing at their parent with beak and talons, while the fourth sat on his neck, waiting. When asked about it he said “The four eaglets are my four sons who cease not to persecute me even unto death, and the youngest, whom I now embrace with such tender affection, will some day afflict me more grievously and perilously than all the others”. Henry may not have been much of a father, but he was quite the prophet. In the last weeks of his life, Richard, allied with the King of France, defeated Henry’s armies and summoned him to treat for peace. Henry, so ill that he had to be held on his horse by his knights, was forced to humiliate himself before his son and the French King and concede to all their demands.

Returning to his sickbed he sent for John, only to be told that John had left, taking all the money he could carry, to declare his support for Richard. Henry turned his face to the wall and died later that day. His attendants stripped his body of clothes and jewelry and scarpered before Richard and John arrived to bury their father.

Within twenty years of his death his sons had destroyed his empire and lost almost all his continental lands to his old enemy, the King of France. The legal reforms and the centralized government he established, however, was so firmly entrenched in English life, that even the upheavals of the thirteenth century and the most unpopular King in England’s history could not destroy them.

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Next month in the Tribune, should you wish it dear readers, we get to the story of King John, which is lots of fun and has the Magna Carta in it.

Jane Shaw is the editor of The King’s Tribune. Follow her on twitter @JaneTribune

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