The teenage invader whose wages were paid by the king he attacked
At fourteen, Henry Plantagenet landed in England with a few mercenaries to fight King Stephen, ran out of money and could not get home. Stephen himself settled the bill. Six years later Stephen named him heir, and Henry went on to rule from the Scottish border to the Pyrenees while laying foundations for English common law.
Henry was born at Le Mans on 5 March 1133, first child of the Empress Matilda and her husband Geoffrey Plantagenet, who ruled Anjou. Matilda was a daughter of England's Henry I. When Stephen of Blois took the English crown in 1135 despite oaths backing Matilda, a long civil war known as the Anarchy followed. Young Henry was schooled by noted scholars including William of Conches and spent a formative year in Bristol, the Angevin stronghold. His failed 1147 raid ended only when Stephen, for reasons still unclear, covered his unpaid troops.
Territory then piled up quickly. His father made him Duke of Normandy in 1150; in 1151 he inherited Anjou, Maine and Touraine; marriage to Eleanor of Aquitaine added her vast duchy. A campaign in England in 1153 produced the Treaty of Wallingford, under which Stephen accepted Henry as successor, and he became king in 1154. The lands he held, later dubbed the Angevin Empire, made him more powerful in France than his nominal overlord, Louis VII, with whom he waged decades of what has been called a cold war.
Chroniclers describe a stocky, bow-legged, freckled redhead, scruffy in dress and nicknamed Curtmantle for his short cloak. He had a piercing stare and a famous temper, yet could be witty, preferred books and hunting to tournaments, and emptied his own stores to feed the poor during a famine in 1176. His struggle to control the English Church turned his old friend Thomas Becket, Archbishop of Canterbury, into an adversary, a feud that ended with Becket's murder in 1170.
Family proved his undoing. Henry and Eleanor had eight children, and their sons, egged on by Louis and later Philip II, chafed for land. The Great Revolt of 1173 united Young Henry, Richard, Geoffrey and Eleanor against him; he crushed it. In 1189 Richard sided with Philip, and an ailing Henry, weakened by a bleeding ulcer, was beaten and withdrew to Chinon, dying on 6 July. His empire crumbled under John, but his legal reforms endured.
Source: Henry II of England
