KING OF THE NORTH WIND
THE LIFE OF HENRY II IN FIVE ACTS
CLAUDIA GOLD William Collins, 397pp, £25, Oldie price £16.13 inc p&p
Henry II, the first Plantagenet king of England (1154–89), inherited England and Normandy from his grandfather and Anjou from his father, the count; through his marriage to Eleanor of Aquitaine he inherited a vast area of south-west France. ‘Claudia Gold, whose last book was a biography of George I’s mistress, has taken on quite a task with her first leap into the Middle Ages,’ wrote Dan Jones in the Sunday
Times. She ‘approaches his life in five pseudo-shakespearean acts: a gimmick, but also an effective structure allowing her colourful and sharply observed history of a tricky reign to take shape.’
The murder of his estranged friend Thomas Becket, Archbishop of Canterbury, arose because Henry arranged for his eldest son, Henry the Young King, to be crowned as co-ruler at the age of 15. Becket refused to perform the coronation rite, and when the Archbishop of York stepped into the breach, Becket excommunicated him and the younger king. Becket’s murder by some of Henry’s loyal knights soon followed. Henry’s own family rebelled against him (in alliance with the kings of Scotland and France) in the early 1170s – he defeated them and imprisoned Eleanor, instigator of the rebellion – and again, twice, in the 1180s. For Fergus Butler-gallie, in the
Times, what makes the book ‘such good, readable history is that its narrative and style owe much to Gerald [of Wales]’, a chronicler in the late 12th and early 13th centuries who ‘loved a good old bitch, sprinkling his
chronicles with acidic asides and diverting tales of tangential relevance to his main narrative’. Although ‘the tragedy of a king who started his reign a young, thrusting hero and ended it decrepit and despised is Gold’s overarching tale… there is too much glitz, too much wit, too much fun along the way for it to be just a tale of woe’. In particular, ‘the Gerald-like asides that pepper Gold’s narrative are what make it, unusually for medieval history, riotously entertaining; for instance, we learn that the unfortunate Ingeborg of Denmark was imprisoned for 20 years because King Philip of France took against her bad breath.’