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HENRY II FITZEMPRESS (1150-1189)


Two marriages, the first his mother the Empress Matilda to Geoffrey of Anjou, the second Henry’s to Eleanor of Aquitaine extended the Duke of Normandy’s control to over half of modern day France.

When Henry became Duke on reaching 16, his father gave the French King control of all the Norman Vexin to act as a sweetener to accept the young man. It was during these negotiations that that Henry met the King’s wife Eleanor who as Duchess of Aquitaine held lands from Poitou to Gascony.

They had been married for 14 years and had two daughters but the King wanted a son and despite Eleanor only being thirty he wanted to be free to marry again. On 21 March 1152 he finally convinced four French Bishops to annul the marriage. Eleanor was quite a catch for any ambitious noble and to return to Poiters she had to be very careful. She narrowly avoided being captured by Theobald the future Count of Blois but Geoffrey the younger brother of Henry had laid an ambush for her at the Port des Piles, a crossing point in the Loire Valley.

Geoffrey had fallen out with his brother when their father had died the previous September. Henry had given an oral promise to his father to give Geoffrey the lands of Anjou but he refused to do so on his death, the body remaining unburied while the arguing had gone on. Eleanor was warned and avoided Geoffrey by heading south and crossing the river Vienne. She met Henry at Poitiers and on Whit Sunday they were married at the cathedral of St Pierre.

Despite being eleven years older than Henry their marriage was to produce five sons and three daughters but this was to be a mixed blessing. In 1173 his eldest son Henry Curthose was eighteen and despite being crowned as heir had no land to control directly. He fell out with his father and at Chinon slipped away to join the French King Philip II in Paris to be followed by his brothers Richard and Geoffrey. When Eleanor was caught disguised as a man also trying to escape she was to be treated as a prisoner by her husband for the rest of their marriage being kept for over a decade at desolate Old Sarum. The resulting war was to poison Henry’s attitude to his family apart from that towards his favourite youngest son John, for at his palace of Winchester he had a painting of an eagle with 3 chicks sitting on it’s outstretched wings with a fourth perched on it’s head waiting to peck out it’s eyes.

On the death of King Stephen in 1153 Henry also became King of England and throughout his reign was determined to restore the rights lost since his grandfather Henry I’s day. He wanted the Vexin back from Louis and in the summer of 1158 he sent his Chancellor Thomas Becket to Paris to negotiate a deal whereby the land would be returned as a dowry for the marriage between the King’s daughter Margaret and the Duke’s son Henry Curthose, even though the pair of them were only toddlers at the time. Becket was sent to impress the French arriving in a cavalcade led by 250 footmen and eight wagons each guarded by a chained mastiff and drawn by five horses each carrying a monkey on its back. If a mere Chancellor could travel in such style imagine the power of the Duke himself, must have thought the French.

Thomas to lived in style while Henry preferred the outdoors. Often after a days hunt he would ride straight into Becket’s dining hall and jump off his horse and over the table to seat himself next to his chancellor and demand to be fed. He liked to puncture his friend’s pride, and a famous tale tells how when they were out riding together, they came across a beggar. ‘Wouldn’t it be an act of charity to give him a thick warm cloak’ said the Duke. Becket agreed and the King responded by saying that he should have the credit for it and grabbed Becket’s coat off his back and threw it to the poor man.

There was another side to Henry’s nature, however, a very violent temper. When talk of the Scottish King William the Lion upset him he was said to have ‘flung his cap from his head, pulled off his belt, threw off his cloak and clothes and sat on a couch chewing pieces of straw’.

When his campaign to take control of Toulouse failed when disease decimated his army Thomas who had supported the scheme took much of the blame. When the Archbishop of Canterbury died in April 1161 the was seen as a good chance to remove his Chancellor to a new role. Things only got worse. Thomas fell out with Henry very quickly and things came to a head at Clarendon in the New Forest when the Duke attempted to make the clergy more liable to the state’s laws. As it is estimated that one in every six people at this time were employed by the church it effected a lot of people.

Thomas ended up in exile in France for the next six years with the pride on both sides refusing to back down. When he finally returned in December 1170 Thomas had not changed his stubbornness and immediately excommunicated the Archbishop of York and the bishops of Salisbury and London for their role in crowning Curthose as Henry’s successor.

Whether Henry responded by asking ‘will no one rid me of this turbulent priest’ when he heard about this at his Christmas court at Bures his reaction must have been sufficiently strong to encourage four Knights to cross the channel and face Becket one afternoon in Canterbury Cathedral. They tried to force him to return with them to face the Duke or to return into exile and finally they simply hit him on the crown of the head with their swords and killed him.

The news filled the Duke with remorse as it did in 1183 when Curthose rebelled again raiding churches in the Dordogne to finance a failing revolt. After stealing the church of Rocamadour’s holy relics he was struck down with a fever only travelling as far as Martel where he died in a property by the town square which can still be seen today.

The new heir Richard was far more militarily minded and when he joined forces with the French king Philip II in June 1189 they quickly overran Anjou. Henry had been ill for the last six months and no longer had a stomach for a fight. He met them at Ballan near the Loire to hear their terms but when embracing Richard to give him the kiss of peace, however, he growled ‘may the lord spare me until I have taken vengeance on you’.

He returned to Chinon and asked for all Richard’s supporters to be read out. The first name on the list was John’s his youngest and favourite son. He could hear no more and died in delirium soon after on 6 July 1189. When Richard arrived he knelt by hid father and offered a small prayer. When he rose it is said blood began to flow from his father’s nose and did not stop until he had left.