The power players
Five leading figures in the battle for England
Henry’s holy nemesis Thomas Becket (1119/20–1170)
Thomas Becket had been Henry II’s friend and ally as chancellor of England, a man who had risen through brilliant political talent. But when the king made him archbishop of Canterbury in 1162, their relationship soured. In disputes over the relative powers of church and state, the king and archbishop rapidly fell to irreconcilable conflict, and Becket fled into exile in France. When Henry II wanted his son to be crowned in 1170, Becket was not there to do it, and the king deprived the archbishop of Canterbury’s proper privileges in having a group of bishops perform the ceremony without him.
When Becket agreed to return to Canterbury in 1170, he immediately reissued the commands and excommunications to which Henry had so objected; Henry burst out in rage at the news, and four of his knights rode to arrest the archbishop. Finding him proud and angry at Canterbury’s high altar, they struck him down and killed him in the cathedral.
The hard-pressed father Henry II (1133–89)
A great- grandson of William the Conqueror, Henry II was one of the most successful English kings of the age. His mother, Matilda, had been Henry I’s designated successor, and when her cousin Stephen seized the throne on the old king’s death, it led to the long civil war known as the Anarchy.
Henry married Eleanor of Aquitaine, and in 1154, when Stephen died, he became king of England: he was now effective overlord of lands from Scotland to the Pyrenees. He was only 21, and for the rest of his life he governed his vast dominions with energy and skill, choosing talented and loyal men to serve him. However, he had three adult, ambitious sons to contend with, besides uneasy relations with the kings of France and Scotland. This war was the greatest crisis of his reign.
The king without a kingdom Henry the Young King (1155–83)
Henry II’s handsome, courtly son had been crowned as his father’s recognised heir at the age of 15, but he grew up frustrated by his lack of independence and real power. He constantly ran up debts far beyond his limited income, spending lavishly on feasting and tournaments, and supporting the ambitious young knights who flocked to his glamorous court.
In 1173, aged 18, the Young King demanded that his father give him a province to govern. Married to Princess Margaret of France, he looked to his father-in-law Louis VII for support of his grievances, and the French king was only too happy to encourage him and his brothers in rebellion. He died in 1183, once again in conflict with his father. Chivalrous knights mourned the loss of his generous support; historians then and now have been more critical.
Henry’s right-hand man Richard de Lucy (died 1179)
Richard de Lucy, leader of Henry II’s loyal forces in England, was likely in his sixties and said to be the most powerful man in the kingdom. He’d served Henry II throughout his reign, and King Stephen before him. He had seen a far worse civil war, and helped bring it to an end, being named in the peace treaty of 1153. De Lucy clashed with Thomas Becket over the years: the archbishop twice excommunicated him. Yet his loyalty to the king never wavered. He endowed a monastery in 1178, dedicated to the Virgin and St Thomas of Canterbury – no doubt in recognition of Thomas’s miraculous aid in 1174. He retired to the monastery to end his life in piety and died there the following year.
The scourge of the north William the Lion of Scotland (c1143–1214)
William I was crowned king of Scots in 1165 and earned the nickname the ‘Lion of justice’, consolidating the state and its laws with the judgments of his court. The kings of Scotland claimed Northumberland as their right to hold from the kings of England and the Young King promised the region to William to persuade him to join the war. His troops ravaged the north of England but his invasion was fatally hampered by his failure to capture the major castles.
After his capture by Henry II, William re- established his authority in Scotland, and despite constant challenges until his death 40 years later, he sustained the royal line and its possessions intact for his son. The 20th- century historian Geoffrey Barrow once commented that “William upheld for nearly 50 years the proposition, self- evident neither to contemporaries nor to modern English historians, that there was such a thing as the kingdom of Scotland and that he was in charge of it”.