The Monarchs

The Monarchs: Henry II (1154-1189) - The Ruthless King

The most powerful ruler in Europe of his day, founder of the Plantagenets and of English common law - and remembered above all for a murder he probably did not order. He mastered everything except his own family.

Henry II was arguably the most powerful ruler in Europe in his day, and one of the most consequential kings England ever had — and he is remembered, above all, for a murder he probably did not order. The killing of Thomas Becket in Canterbury Cathedral in 1170 has so dominated his reputation that it obscures the rest: a reign of ferocious energy and lasting achievement that founded a dynasty, forged an empire stretching from Scotland to the Pyrenees, and reshaped English law so profoundly that its effects are still with us today.

He was the first of the Plantagenets, the dynasty that would rule England for over three hundred years, and he was a whirlwind of a man — restless, brilliant, short-tempered, and never still. He built the framework of English common law, the ancestor of legal systems across the English-speaking world. He also destroyed himself, in the end, in a long and bitter war with his own wife and sons. Henry II is a study in the paradox of overwhelming power: he could master almost anything except his own family, and it was his family that broke him.

Key Facts

Reigned: October 25, 1154 to July 6, 1189
Born: March 5, 1133 at Le Mans, France
Parents: Geoffrey Plantagenet, Count of Anjou, and the Empress Matilda
Married: Eleanor of Aquitaine, 1152 — the most powerful heiress in Europe
The first Plantagenet king and ruler of the vast Angevin Empire
Founder of English common law and the jury system's ancestor
Died: July 6, 1189 at Chinon, France; buried at Fontevraud Abbey

The End of the Anarchy

Henry came to the throne as the man who ended a nightmare. The reign of his predecessor, King Stephen, had collapsed into nineteen years of ruinous civil war — the period known as the Anarchy — as Stephen and Henry's own mother, the Empress Matilda, fought for the crown. England had been torn apart, its government shattered, its barons running wild, in a conflict the chroniclers described as a time when Christ and his saints slept.

Henry was Matilda's son and heir to her claim, and after years of struggle a settlement was reached: Stephen would reign for his lifetime, but Henry would succeed him. When Stephen died in 1154, Henry took the throne at twenty-one, and he set about restoring order with a furious energy that never let up. He demolished the illegal castles that barons had thrown up during the anarchy, restored royal authority, reclaimed crown lands, and re-established the machinery of government. Within a few years, the chaos was gone and England had a functioning state again. It was a remarkable feat of reconstruction, and it announced the arrival of a king of exceptional force.

Henry II, first of the Plantagenet kings, in a later engraving

The Angevin Empire

Henry ruled far more than England. Through a combination of inheritance and the most brilliant marriage of the age, he assembled a collection of territories so vast that historians call it the Angevin Empire. From his father he had Anjou, Maine, and Touraine; from his mother, the claim to England and Normandy; and in 1152, in a coup that stunned Europe, he married Eleanor of Aquitaine.

Eleanor was extraordinary — beautiful, formidable, and the greatest heiress in Christendom, ruler of the vast duchy of Aquitaine in southwestern France. She had until weeks earlier been Queen of France, married to Louis VII; when that marriage was annulled, the nineteen-year-old Henry married her within eight weeks, acquiring her enormous lands and infuriating the French king he had just outmaneuvered. The result was that Henry, as King of England, controlled more of France than the King of France did — a dominion stretching from the Scottish border to the Pyrenees. He was the mightiest ruler in Western Europe, and he spent his reign in perpetual motion, crossing and recrossing his territories at a speed that exhausted everyone around him, holding the whole sprawling empire together by sheer personal will.

The Reform of the Law

Henry's most enduring achievement was not his empire, which did not long survive him, but his transformation of English law — which survives to this day. He was passionately interested in justice and government, and he used royal power to build a system of law that applied across the whole kingdom, administered by the crown rather than by local lords: a common law.

He sent royal justices on regular circuits throughout the country to hear cases, bringing the king's justice to every corner of the realm. He developed standardized legal procedures and writs that allowed ordinary subjects to seek royal justice. And he expanded the use of juries — groups of local men sworn to give truthful verdicts — laying the foundations of the jury system that remains central to English and American law. The reforms made justice more consistent, more accessible, and more firmly under royal control, and they were so successful and so foundational that English common law, and its descendants across the English-speaking world, trace their origins directly to Henry II's reign. It is one of the most significant and lasting legacies of any English king, and it is far less famous than the murder that overshadowed it.

Becket

The defining tragedy of Henry's reign was his catastrophic quarrel with Thomas Becket. Becket had been Henry's friend and his brilliant Chancellor — the two men were genuinely close, worldly companions who hunted and caroused together. In 1162, Henry made Becket Archbishop of Canterbury, expecting to have a loyal ally at the head of the English Church who would help him bring it under royal control.

It was the greatest miscalculation of his life. On becoming archbishop, Becket underwent a transformation, abandoning his worldly life and becoming a fierce, uncompromising defender of the rights and independence of the Church against the crown. The two former friends became bitter enemies, locked in a long struggle over the boundary between royal and ecclesiastical power — above all over whether clergymen who committed crimes should be tried by the king's courts or the Church's. The quarrel grew personal and venomous. Becket fled into exile, excommunicated Henry's supporters, and defied the king at every turn.

The end came at Christmas 1170. Henry, in one of the towering rages for which he was famous, is said to have burst out with words to the effect of asking who would rid him of this turbulent priest. He almost certainly did not mean it as a literal command — it was the fury of a frustrated man. But four of his knights took him at his word. They rode to Canterbury and, on December 29, 1170, cut Becket down in his own cathedral, hacking him to death before the altar. It was an act of shocking sacrilege that horrified all of Christendom.

The martyrdom of Thomas Becket in Canterbury Cathedral, 1170 - the event that overshadowed Henry’s whole reign

The Aftermath and the Penance

The murder was a disaster for Henry. Becket was almost instantly hailed as a martyr; miracles were reported at his tomb, pilgrims flocked to Canterbury in their thousands, and within three years the murdered archbishop was canonized as a saint. Henry, though he denied ordering the killing, bore the moral responsibility in the eyes of the world, and the scandal threatened his authority everywhere.

In 1174, Henry performed one of the most dramatic acts of royal penance in history. He walked barefoot through the streets of Canterbury to Becket's tomb, dressed as a penitent, and there submitted to being whipped by the monks of the cathedral, publicly humbling himself before the shrine of the man his knights had killed. It was a calculated as well as a genuine act — a way of drawing a line under the scandal and reconciling himself with the Church — and it worked. But the shrine of St Thomas Becket became the most important place of pilgrimage in England for the next three and a half centuries, until Henry VIII destroyed it, and the murder in the cathedral remained the single most famous event of Henry II's reign, immortalized centuries later in T. S. Eliot's play Murder in the Cathedral.

The War with His Family

Henry mastered his barons, his church, and half of France, but he could not master his own family, and it destroyed him. His marriage to Eleanor of Aquitaine, so brilliant at its start, soured into bitter estrangement, and their sons — raised to expect power and given titles but denied real authority by a father who would not loosen his grip — grew resentful and rebellious.

In 1173, the sons rose in a great revolt against their father, and, astonishingly, their mother Eleanor supported them. Henry crushed the rebellion, but he never trusted his family again; he imprisoned Eleanor, keeping her in confinement for the next sixteen years. Yet the peace was hollow. The sons continued to scheme and rebel, playing off against their father and against each other, often in alliance with the King of France, who was delighted to stir up trouble within the Angevin dynasty.

The end was wretched. In 1189, Henry's favorite son John — the one child he had trusted — joined his brother Richard and the French king in a final rebellion. When Henry, old, ill, and defeated, was shown the list of those who had turned against him and saw John's name on it, the fight went out of him. He died at Chinon days later, on July 6, 1189, reportedly murmuring shame, shame on a conquered king. The mightiest ruler in Europe died broken by his own children.

Legacy

Henry II's legacy is a study in what endures and what does not. The vast Angevin Empire he assembled began to unravel almost at once; his son Richard spent it on crusade, and his son John lost most of it to France within fifteen years of Henry's death. The empire was a personal creation, and it could not outlast the extraordinary man who held it together.

But his transformation of English law proved permanent, and it may be his greatest monument — more lasting than any empire. The common law he built, the itinerant justice, the expanding role of the jury, the writs that gave subjects access to royal courts: these became the foundations of English law, and through it of the legal systems of the United States, Canada, Australia, and much of the world. Hundreds of millions of people today live under legal traditions that descend from the reforms of a twelfth-century king. He also founded the Plantagenet dynasty that would rule England until 1485 and shape the entire medieval history of the country.

He was a great king by any measure — energetic, intelligent, effective, a builder of institutions that outlived him by centuries. He was also a hard, ruthless man whose rages and whose refusal to share power destroyed his friendship with Becket and his relationship with his own family, and who died alone and defeated by his sons. The murder in the cathedral has fixed him in memory as the king who killed a saint. The truer measure of him is the law he built, which quietly governs the lives of more people, seven centuries on, than Becket's shrine ever drew to Canterbury.

Places Connected to Henry II

Canterbury Cathedral. The site of Becket's murder, marked to this day; the great shrine that drew medieval pilgrims is gone, destroyed by Henry VIII, but the spot of the martyrdom remains a place of quiet power.
Fontevraud Abbey, Loire Valley, France. Henry's burial place, where his painted tomb effigy lies beside those of Eleanor of Aquitaine and their son Richard the Lionheart — the most evocative Angevin site anywhere.
Dover Castle, Kent. Vastly rebuilt by Henry into one of the mightiest fortresses in England, the key to the kingdom.
Chinon, France. The castle in the Loire where he died in 1189, defeated by his sons.
Clarendon Palace, Wiltshire. Where Henry issued the Constitutions of Clarendon, his attempt to define royal power over the Church that helped spark the Becket quarrel. Ruins survive.
The Royal Courts of Justice, London. The modern home of a legal system whose common-law foundations Henry laid.