HENRY IL, surnamed Fitz-Empress, was the eldest son of Geoffrey Plantagenet (so named from a sprig of broom—in Latio ptanta gesista, in French plants he used to wear in his cap), earl of Anjou, and of Matilda, daughter of Henry I., king of England, whose first husband had been the Emperor Henry V. [ HENRY 1.] He was born at Le Mans, the capital of his father's dominions, in March 1133. In the struggle between Stephen and Matilda for the English crown [STEruzsi]. Matilda's husband, Geoffrey, bad by the year 1141 reduced nearly the whole of Normandy, and his infant son Henry had been acknowledged by the majority of the nobility of that country as their legitimate duke. In Juno of the following year Matilda's great sup porter, her bletard half-brother Robert, earl of Gloucester, passed over• to Normandy, and returned to England in December, bringing Prince Henry along with him, together with a small body of troops, obtained from the earl his father. Hero the boy remained for nearly five years shut up for safety in the strong castle of Bristol, where his education was superintended by his uncle Gloucester, who was distin guished for his scholarship and love of letters. lie returned to his father, iu Normandy, about Whitsuntide 1147. In ]]49 however, being now sixteen years of age, he recrossed the seas, and, at an inter view held on Whitsuntide in Carlisle with his uncle David I. of Scotland, received from that prince the honour of knighthood, and concerted measures with him and his other friends for recovering his grandfather's throne. He returned to Normandy in the beginning of the following year, and was a few months afterwards, with the consent of his father, formally invested with that dukedom by Louis VII. of France, the portion of the country called the Vexiu being ceded to Louis as the price of his consent to such arrangement. By the death of his father, on the 10th of September 1151, Henry became earl of Anjou, Touraine, and Maine. On Whit-Sunday of the year following, within six weeks after she had been divorced from her first husband, King Louis of France, be married Eleanor, in her own right countess of Poitou and duchess of Guienne or Aquitaine, an alliance which made him master of all the western coast of France, with the exception only of Brittany, from the Somme to the Pyrenees. Soon after this Henry sailed for England at the bead of a small but well appointed force. He and Stephen having advanced, the one from the west, the other from the came in sight of each other at Walling ford, and in an interview which they had there, standing on opposite sides of the Thames, Agreed to a truce. The death of Eustaco, Stephen's eldest eon, having removed the chief obstacle to a perma nent arrangement between the two competitors, a peace was finally adjusted in a great council held at Winchester on the 7th of November 1153, in which Stephen, adopting Henry for his eon, appointed him his successor, and gave the kingdom of England, after his own death, to him and his hairs for ever. The death of Stephen, on the 25th of October 1154, made Henry, in conformity with this agreement, king of England without opposition.
The commencement of the reign of Henry Ii. is reckoned from his coronation at Westminster along with his queen, 19th December 1154.
His first proceedings were strikingly indicative of the system of combined energy and policy which continued to characterise his government. Ile dismissed the foreign troops which Stephen had brought into the kingdom; razed to the ground nearly all the numerous castles that had been erected throughout the country by the barons in the preceding twenty years of anarchy ; and resumed with remorse less determination all the lands that had been alienated from the crown since the death of Henry I., the grants only excepted that had been made to the church and to William, the seoond son of Stephen. This last act of rigour, the most daring upon which he adventured, was undertaken with the express concurrence of the great council or assembly of the immediate tenants of the crown. lie next proceeded to settle the aucceseion, and for that purpose n great council was assembled at Wallingford, soon after Easter 1155, which ordained that after his death the crown should descend to his eldest son William, now in his third year, and in case of the death of William (which in fact took place the following year), to his younger brother lIonry, who was as yet only a few months old. Oaths of fealty were
at the same time taken to both the young princes. It was in another council, or parliament, as some writer', call it, held at London after these arrangements had been made, that Henry, in conformity with the now established practice, granted a short charter, confirming, for himself and his heirs, to the clergy, the nobility, and the commoualty, all the rights, liberties, and customs (' cousuetudiues') which had been conceded by his grandfather Henry L His presence was now called for across the seas by the attempt of his younger brother Geoffrey to wrest from him his paternal inherit ance of Anjou, Tournine, and Maine, on the pretence, as stated by some authorities, that the will of their father had directed that Henry should resign these earldoms as soon as he should have obtained possession of the English crown. After a very short contest Geoffrey was forced to give up his claim in exchange for a pension of 1000 English and 2000 Angevin crowns, which he enjoyed little more than a year. He died in 1158 at Nantes, the inhabitants of which city had chosen him for their governor, in consequence of which circumstance the place was immediately claimed by Henry, as having devolved to him as his brother's heir. Partly by force, partly by management, Henry succeeded in acquiriog through this claim first the virtual and eventually the actual possession of the whole of Brittany ; the only portion of territory that was wanting to complete his sovereignty over all the western coast of France, and indeed over nearly the entire half of that kingdom. Conan, the hereditary count or duke of Brit tany, who was also earl of Richmond in England, was now in the first instance induced, or compelled, to sign a treaty by which he bequeathed the country after his death to his daughter Constantia, an iufaut, whom he affianced to Henry's youngest eon Geoffrey. At the same time the neutrality of Louis of Franco was secured by another arrange ment, according to which it was agreed that Henry's eldest son, William, should marry that king's infant daughter, Margaret (her mother was Constance of Castile, whom Louis had married after his separation from Eleanor), three castles in the Vexin being made over along with the princess as her dower. Henry had already recovered from the young Malcolm 1V. of Scotland the northern counties which had been taken possession of by his predecessor David /., and the erasion of which in perpetuity had beeu one of Henry's engagements with his uncle in 1149; he had also driven back the Welsh from those parts of the English territory which they had seized during the reign of Stephen, and even, as it would appear, compelled the princes of North and South Wake to acknowledge him as their feudal superior. His next attempt was upon the great French earldom of Toulouse, which he claimed in right of his wife Eleanor, whose grandfather William, duke of Aquitaine, had married l'hilippa, the only child of William, the fourth earl of Toulouse. He was hero opposed both by Raymond de St. Gilles, the descendant of a brother of earl William, lin whose lino the principality had descended for nearly a hundred years, and by Louis of France, whose sister had married Raymond, and to whom, besides, the progressive aggrandisemeut of his ambitious vassal was every day becoming a subject of moro serious alarm. Henry's expedition to France in support of this claim is memorable for the introduction of the practice of commuting the military service of the vassals of the crown for a payment in money, an innovation the credit of which is attributed to Themes k Becket, recently elevated to the place of chancellor of the kingdom. The contest which ensued was suspended by a peace iu May 1160, by which Henry was allowed to retain n few places he had conquered in Toulouse; and although it soon broke out anew, it was after a few months put an end to by a second peace, concluded in 1162 by the mediation of pope Alexander III.