Shame, shame on a conquered king.
Henry II's last words at Chinon, as recorded by Gerald of Wales, July 1189
Henry II
parents: Geoffrey Plantagenet, Count of Anjou, and the Empress Matilda
date and place of birth: 5 March 1133 at Le Mans, Maine
wife: Eleanor of Aquitaine
date of marriage: 18 May 1152 at Poitiers
children: William, Henry (the Young King), Matilda, Richard, Geoffrey, Eleanor, Joan, John
years of reign: 1154-1189
date of coronation: 19 December 1154 at Westminster Abbey
date and place of death: 6 July 1189 at Chinon Castle, Touraine
place of burial: Fontevraud Abbey, Anjou
Henry II came to the throne of a country that had spent nineteen years at war with itself. His mother, the Empress Matilda, was the only surviving legitimate child of Henry I, and her cousin Stephen of Blois had seized the crown in 1135 before she could claim it. The civil war that followed, which the chroniclers remembered as the Anarchy, left England with rival earls building castles without licence, sheriffs answering to whoever was nearest, and a Peterborough monk writing that men said openly that Christ and his saints slept. Henry was nineteen when he landed in England in 1153 to fight for his mother's cause. Stephen's son Eustace died that August, and in the Treaty of Winchester (sometimes called the Treaty of Wallingford) the tired old king adopted Henry as his heir. Stephen died in October 1154, and Henry was crowned that December.
He did not arrive as a poor claimant. Through his father he held Anjou, Maine and Touraine; through his mother, Normandy; and through his marriage in 1152 to Eleanor of Aquitaine, eleven years his senior and only eight weeks divorced from Louis VII of France, he held the great duchy of Aquitaine in the south-west. By the time of his coronation Henry ruled more of France than the French king did. Historians call the whole collection the Angevin Empire, though Henry never used the phrase, and he spent most of his reign on horseback moving between its parts. You can read more about the family name and its origins on our page on the Angevins and Plantagenets.
Restoring Order After the Anarchy
Henry's first years in England went to undoing the damage of Stephen's reign. He expelled the Flemish mercenaries Stephen had hired, ordered the demolition of the unlicensed "adulterine" castles, and took back royal lands and castles that barons had helped themselves to during the war. He recovered Northumberland, Cumberland and Westmorland from the Scots in 1157. Where Stephen had let the machinery of government rust, Henry put the Exchequer back to work, and the pipe rolls (the annual accounts of royal revenue) survive in an almost unbroken run from his reign onward.
Contemporaries described a man who could not keep still. Walter Map and Peter of Blois, both of whom served at his court, wrote of a stocky, red-haired king with bowed legs from a lifetime in the saddle, who heard mass while he signed documents, ate standing up, and wore out his household by changing his plans overnight. He spoke several languages, read Latin, and liked the company of learned men, though he preferred hunting to almost anything else.
Henry II and the Common Law
Henry's lasting achievement lies in the courts, and it outlived everything else he built. Before his reign, a free man with a grievance took it to the court of his lord, the shire or the hundred, and justice depended on local custom and local power. Henry made the king's justice available across the whole of England. The Assize of Clarendon in 1166 required juries of twelve men from each hundred to report suspected robbers, murderers and thieves to royal justices; the Assize of Northampton in 1176 extended the system and divided the country into circuits for travelling judges, the justices in eyre.
For disputes over land, Henry introduced the possessory assizes. A man thrown off his land could buy a writ of novel disseisin, and a jury of neighbours would answer one question: had he been dispossessed, unjustly and without judgement, since a fixed date? The procedure took weeks where trial by battle had taken years, and anyone who could pay for a writ could use it. The Grand Assize offered a defendant in a land case the choice of a jury instead of a duel. Out of these writs and juries, and the decisions of the judges who rode the circuits, grew the English common law: one law, common to the whole kingdom, applied by the king's courts.
Thomas Becket
The episode everyone remembers from Henry's reign began with a friendship. Thomas Becket, the son of a London merchant, became Henry's chancellor in 1155 and his closest companion. In 1162 Henry made him Archbishop of Canterbury, expecting a loyal ally at the head of the English church. Becket resigned the chancellorship, took up a hair shirt, and turned into the church's most stubborn defender.
The dispute came to a head over "criminous clerks." Anyone in holy orders, from a bishop down to a clerk who could read a psalm, could claim trial in the church courts, which could not sentence a man to death or mutilation. William of Newburgh reported that the king was told of more than a hundred murders committed by clerics since his accession. In the Constitutions of Clarendon of 1164 he set out what he called the ancient customs of the realm, including the rule that a clerk convicted in a church court should be handed to the royal courts for punishment. Becket first agreed and then withdrew his agreement, was tried at Northampton, and fled to France, where he spent six years in exile.
The two men patched up a peace in 1170 and Becket returned to Canterbury, but within weeks he had excommunicated the bishops who had taken part in the coronation of Henry's eldest son. The news reached Henry at Christmas in Normandy, and he flew into one of his rages. His exact words are lost; the version most people know, "will no one rid me of this turbulent priest?", comes from much later retellings (see our page on the famous quotation). Four knights, Reginald FitzUrse, Hugh de Morville, William de Tracy and Richard le Breton, took him at his word. They crossed the Channel and killed Becket in Canterbury Cathedral on 29 December 1170.
The murder horrified Christendom. The pope canonised Becket in 1173, pilgrims began arriving at his tomb within months, and Henry had to make peace with the papacy at Avranches in 1172, giving up the most contentious clauses of Clarendon. In July 1174 he walked barefoot through Canterbury to Becket's tomb and let the monks of the cathedral flog him. The next day news came that William the Lion, King of Scots, had fallen into English hands at Alnwick, and plenty of Henry's subjects drew the obvious conclusion.
Ireland
In 1169 a group of Anglo-Norman lords from Wales, led by Richard de Clare (known as Strongbow), crossed to Ireland to support the deposed King of Leinster, Diarmait Mac Murchada. Their success worried Henry, who did not want an independent Norman kingdom on his western flank. He landed at Waterford in October 1171 with a large army, took the submission of the Norman adventurers and of many Irish kings, and claimed the lordship of Ireland. It marked the start of English involvement in Ireland, which would outlast the Plantagenets by centuries.
The Rebellion of His Sons
Henry held his empire together by force of personality, and he never worked out how to share it. He had his eldest surviving son, also named Henry, crowned in 1170 as a junior king, in the French fashion, but gave him no lands and no money to go with the title. In 1173 the Young King rebelled, joined by his brothers Richard and Geoffrey, backed by Louis VII of France, the King of Scots and a number of English and Norman barons. Their mother Eleanor took their side. Henry crushed the revolt within a year and forgave his sons. He did not forgive Eleanor, who spent most of the next fifteen years under guard in England.
The pattern repeated itself for the rest of the reign. The Young King rebelled again and died of dysentery in 1183; Geoffrey died in Paris in 1186, reportedly trampled in a tournament. That left Richard, now the heir, and John, the youngest and his father's favourite. Henry's refusal to confirm Richard as his successor drove Richard into alliance with the new French king, Philip II Augustus. In 1189 the two of them overran Maine and Touraine, and a sick Henry agreed to their terms at Ballan, near Azay-le-Rideau, on 4 July. When he asked to see the list of barons who had sided against him, the first name on it was John's. Henry died at Chinon two days later.
Legacy
Henry's real legacy lay in the courts and the Exchequer. The judges, writs and juries he established kept working through Richard's long absences on crusade and through John's disasters, and the royal administration he built ran England well enough that the country barely noticed its king was gone. Within fifteen years of his death, most of his French lands had fallen to Philip Augustus. His law, meanwhile, spread with English settlers to the United States, Canada, Australia and most of the Commonwealth.
For the reigns that followed, see Richard I, King John and Magna Carta, which the barons forced on Henry's youngest son in 1215.
Link/cite this page
If you use any of the content on this page in your own work, please use the code below to cite this page as the source of the content.
Link will appear as Hanson, Marilee. "Henry II" https://englishhistory.net/middle-ages/henry-ii/, September 30, 2026