Royal reassessment
Welcomes a biography of a Plantagenet king whose reign helped to forge a new Anglo-Norman identity
King of the North Wind: The Life of Henry II in Five Acts by Claudia Gold In a roll call of unjustly neglected English kings, Henry II, who ruled from 1154-89, would be near the top. Without the remarkable events of the 1150s, England would have become a very different place.
In the mid-12th century, William the Conqueror’s dynasty was stuttering: his sons, William Rufus and Henry I, had left no legitimate male heirs, and after Henry’s death in 1135 his daughter Matilda battled her cousin Stephen for the kingdom, in an 18-year civil war known as the Anarchy. Stephen lost Normandy to Matilda’s husband, Geoffrey of Anjou, and the Conqueror’s realm was divided again.
So history might have gone: an England cut off from the continent could have become a diminished, insular power, or been absorbed back into the Scandinavian world. Certainly, its culture, politics, law and literature would have been utterly different.
Instead, into the fray stepped Matilda and Geoffrey’s son Henry, who grew up in Anjou, and became Duke of Normandy. Taking up his mother’s battle in England, he forced Stephen to adopt him as his heir. And, in a huge political coup, he married Eleanor of Aquitaine, who brought with her the vast lordships of south-west France. When he was crowned in 1154, aged 21, Henry became overlord of territories stretching from Scotland to the Pyrenees, an empire unmatched by his contemporaries.
Henry and Eleanor’s court brought the music and poetry of the troubadours to England, where it met the vast inheritance of Old English culture. Meanwhile, Henry turned his political brain to the AngloNorman state, itself a direct inheritor of strong Anglo-Saxon governance. Advancements in law and justice followed. Henry – descended from the Anglo-Saxon royal line through his grandparents – embodied the union of Norman and English rule, a new, hybrid identity.
But as time passed, this brilliant success held the seeds of its own destruction. His sons grew to frustrated manhood while Henry was in his prime. As they jostled for power, he faced rebellion. He had an ignominious end, remembered more for his final travails – and the murder of Thomas Becket – than his early triumph.
Claudia Gold has written a fast-paced,
Henry was overlord of an empire unmatched by his contemporaries