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- Henry was an energetic and sometimes ruthless ruler, driven by a desire to restore the lands and privileges of his royal grandfather, Henry I.
Ruled as Count of Anjou, Count of Maine, Duke of Normandy, Duke of Aquitaine, Count of Nantes, King of England (1154–89) and Lord of Ireland; at various times, he also controlled Wales, Scotland and Brittany.
Henry was the s/o Geoffrey of Anjou and Matilda, daughter of Henry I of England. He became actively involved by the age of 14 in his mother's efforts to claim the throne of England, then occupied by Stephen of Blois, and was made Duke of Normandy at 17. He inherited Anjou in 1151 and shortly afterwards married Eleanor of Aquitaine, whose marriage to Louis VII of France had recently been annulled.
Stephen agreed to a peace treaty after Henry's military expedition to England in 1153: Henry inherited the kingdom on Stephen's death a year later.
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Henry was suffering from a bleeding ulcer that would ultimately prove fatal. He made a forced march north to Alençon, from where he could escape into the safety of Normandy. Suddenly, however, Henry turned back south towards Anjou, against the advice of his officials. The weather was extremely hot, the King was increasingly ill and he appears to have wanted to die peacefully in Anjou rather than fight yet another campaign. Henry evaded the enemy forces on his way south and collapsed in his castle at Chinon. Philip and Richard were making good progress, not least because it was now obvious that Henry was dying and that Richard would be the next king, and the pair offered negotiations. They met at Ballan, where Henry, only just able to remain seated on his horse, agreed to a complete surrender: he would do homage to Philip; he would give up Alice to a guardian and she would marry Richard at the end of the coming crusade; he would recognise Richard as his heir; he would pay Philip compensation, and key castles would be given to Philip as a guarantee.
Henry was carried back to Chinon on a litter, where he was informed that John had publicly sided with Richard in the conflict. This desertion proved the final shock and he finally collapsed into a fever, only coming to for a few moments during which he gave confession. Henry died on 6 July 1189, aged 56; the King had wished to be interred at Grandmont Abbey in the Limousin, but the hot weather made transporting his body impractical and he was instead buried at the nearby Fontevraud Abbey.
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Henry was not a popular king and few expressed much grief on news of his death. Writing in the 1190s, William of Newburgh commented that "in his own time he was hated by almost everyone"; he was widely criticized by his own contemporaries, even within his own court. Many of the changes Henry introduced during his long rule, however, had major long-term consequences. His legal changes are generally considered to have laid the basis for English Common Law, with the Exchequer court a forerunner of the later Common Bench at Westminster. Henry's itinerant justices also influenced his contemporaries' legal reforms: Philip Augustus' creation of itinerant bailli, for example, clearly drew on the Henrician model. Henry's intervention in Brittany, Wales and Scotland also had a significant long-term impact on the development of their societies and governmental systems. [1]
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Old Dead Relatives
1133 - 1189 (56 years)
