Henry II ruled an empire from the Scottish border to the Pyrenees (1154–1189), rebuilt royal government and the common law after the Anarchy, destroyed his friend Becket, and was destroyed in turn by his own sons.
Henry II was twenty-one when the treaty ending the Anarchy made him king of England, already duke of Normandy, count of Anjou, and — by his marriage to Eleanor of Aquitaine — master of half of France. For thirty-five years he ran that sprawling inheritance at a famous, furious pace.
His legal reforms — itinerant justices, standard writs, juries of presentment — laid the foundations of the English common law. His attempt to master the church broke on Thomas Becket's martyrdom in 1170; his attempt to master his family broke on the rebellions of his sons, the last of which killed him.
Henry was born at Le Mans in 1133 to the Empress Matilda, Henry I's disinherited heiress, and Geoffrey Plantagenet of Anjou. His boyhood was the civil war: shipped to England at nine as a figurehead for his mother's cause, leading a comic-opera mercenary raid at fourteen that his enemy King Stephen ended up paying to send home.
The luck of 1151–1153 transformed him: his father's death gave him Anjou, his marriage to the newly divorced Eleanor of Aquitaine gave him the south, and Stephen's heir Eustace died just as Henry's final English campaign forced the treaty of Winchester. He was crowned in December 1154, the first undisputed succession in England in half a century.
An unusual number of eyewitnesses described Henry, and they agree: a barrel-chested, bow-legged, grey-eyed man in perpetual motion, careless of dress, never sitting even at Mass, wearing out courtiers who complained — as Peter of Blois memorably did — of a court that moved like an army and ate like one. He had a trained lawyer's memory, spoke several languages, and preferred maps and books to tournaments.
The Angevin temper was his signature flaw. Contemporaries traded stories of the king rolling on the floor gnawing rushes in rage, and the four knights who killed Becket were launched by exactly such an outburst. Gerald of Wales, who hated him with a courtier's intimacy, still granted him mercy in victory and steadiness in disaster; his deepest failure, all sources agree, was that he could delegate nothing — least of all power to his own sons, whose rebellions were the price of his grip.
Henry's first decade was reconstruction: the Anarchy's unlicensed castles razed, mercenaries expelled, the exchequer restored, and royal justice pushed back into the shires. The assizes of Clarendon (1166) and Northampton (1176) set juries of local men to present criminals to travelling royal justices; standardised writs made the king's court the default forum for land disputes; and "novel disseisin" and its sister actions gave every free tenant quick royal remedy against dispossession.
The Becket quarrel grew from the same drive. The Constitutions of Clarendon (1164) claimed for royal courts the criminal punishment of clergy and control of appeals to Rome; his former chancellor and friend, now archbishop, resisted to exile and back, and on 29 December 1170 four of Henry's knights, taking the king's rage at face value, cut Becket down in his own cathedral. The murder forced Henry to public penance at Canterbury in 1174 and cost him the Constitutions' letter, though royal power over the church kept most of their substance.
Henry crowned his eldest son the "Young King" in 1170 but gave him no real power, and in 1173–74 the Young King, Richard, Geoffrey, Eleanor herself, the kings of France and Scotland, and half the baronage came at him at once. He won everywhere — capturing the Scottish king at Alnwick the very week he did penance at Canterbury — and imprisoned Eleanor for the next fifteen years.
The sons kept coming. The Young King died in revolt in 1183; Geoffrey died in 1186; and in 1188–89 Richard, fearing disinheritance in favour of John, allied with Philip II of France and broke the old king's power in Maine and Touraine. Henry accepted terms at Ballan on 4 July 1189, asked for the list of the conspirators, and — the story runs — found John's name at its head. He died at Chinon two days later, muttering, in the chroniclers' telling, "shame, shame on a conquered king".
The common law is Henry's monument: the machinery of writs, juries, and itinerant justices he built proved so useful that it survived every later constitutional convulsion, and its descendants govern much of the world today. In that respect no medieval English king matters more.
The empire died faster than the law. Richard mortgaged it for crusade and ransom; John lost Normandy and Anjou within fifteen years of Henry's death, a collapse sealed at Bouvines. What endured of the Angevin state was exactly the part built in England — the governed kingdom, not the dynastic agglomeration.