Henry, sixteen years old and burning with ambition, landed on the shores of Devon on 13 April 1149. It was his third visit to the fractured realm that he would have heard his mother tell him time after time was his by birthright. He had seen the country in its bleakest hours: a war zone in which empress and king chased each other from town to town and castle to castle, burning property and terrorizing the common people in their quest to grind one another into the bloodstained soil. But his mother, who had carried the fight against Stephen for so long, was gone into retirement. Henry, on the verge of manhood, had come to announce his leadership of the Angevin cause in England.
This was not Henry’s home. He understood the English language, although he did not speak it. Yet he was no stranger to England. In 1142, aged nine, Henry had been brought briefly to the English front as a figurehead to his mother’s campaign. He had arrived in the dark days, shortly before Matilda’s great escape from the snowy wastes of Oxford. He stayed under the tutelage of his uncle Robert earl of Gloucester as England settled into its vicious stalemate. Henry spent fifteen months studying in Bristol, meeting the famous astronomer, mathematician and Scholastic philosopher Adelard of Bath, who dedicated to the young man a treatise on the astrolabe. Then from 1144, for reasons as much of safety as of political pragmatism, Henry had returned to his father, to help him secure his position as duke of Normandy.
Henry was a strange-looking young man. His blood was a rich broth of Norman, Saxon and Plantagenet strains. He could switch in seconds from bluff good humour to fierce anger. From his father, he had inherited his auburn complexion and tireless energy; from his maternal grandfather a powerful domineering streak and the nose for an opportunity. Gerald of Wales, a writer well familiar with the Plantagenet family, left a vivid description of Henry later in life:
Henry II was a man of reddish, freckled complexion, with a large, round head, grey eyes that glowed fiercely and grew bloodshot in anger, a fiery countenance and a harsh, cracked voice. His neck was thrust forward slightly from his shoulders, his chest was broad and square, his arms strong and powerful. His body was stocky, with a pronounced tendency toward fatness, due to nature rather than self-indulgence – which he tempered with exercise. For in eating and drinking he was moderate and sparing …
From the earliest age, Henry was conspicuously brave, albeit rather reckless. When he had made his second visit to England, in 1147, it had been not to study but to fight. Although he was only thirteen he had managed to hire a small band of mercenaries to accompany him across the Channel, where he attempted to assist his mother’s war effort. The arrival of this wild teenager had briefly terrified England: rumours spread that he had come with thousands of troops and boundless treasure. The truth had been closer to farce: Henry the teenager had barely been able to afford to pay his hired soldiers, who deserted him within weeks of arrival. (‘Weakened by sloth and idleness, overcome by poverty and want, they abandoned the noble youth,’ wrote William of Newburgh.) Ignoring the rumours, Stephen’s reaction to Henry’s teenage invasion was more amused than intimidated: in order to bring the rather embarrassing episode to a close, the king had paid off Henry’s mercenaries for him and sent him packing back to Normandy.
Still, from those early teenage days there had been promise in Henry’s recklessness. That the thirteen-year-old Henry had the gall to attempt a solo invasion of England – no matter how poorly executed – is testament to his valuable time spent at his father’s side on campaign in Normandy. Geoffrey Plantagenet had involved his son in government since at least 1144, when he witnessed his father’s charters in Angers. He had watched how a long-term military campaign played out amid the complex, fractured politics of the French mainland. He knew then that he was being groomed as duke of Normandy, and it may also have been suggested to him that he would be count of Anjou too.
It must have been during his days at Geoffrey’s side that Henry became a keen rider. He spent hours on horseback following his father about Anjou and Normandy, learning to gallop at what would become legendary speed. (In later years, Henry’s legs would be bowed from the shape of the ever-present saddle between them.)
And Geoffrey must also have taught his son much about the conduct of business and war in a treacherous land. Twelfth-century French politics was violent, changeable and rough, and Geoffrey was an adept player. The land was divided into loose and shifting territories that owed little or no allegiance to any central authority, ruled across large swathes by noblemen who were little more than warlords.
As he watched his tenacious father grind his way through a conquest of Normandy, Henry learned that political survival was a game of forestalling shifts of power, managing volatile relations between one’s friends and enemies, and appealing to the right allies at the right time in order to further territorial objectives. In such a bewildering business, only the most devious survived.
In this game of feudal lordship, Henry knew that he had one potentially huge advantage. He was the son of an empress, with a claim to the English throne. France contained many powerful dukes and counts, but only two kings: the king of England and the king of France. To be a major force on the Continent, and to stand up to the new French king Louis VII who had succeeded to the throne in 1137. Henry knew that he must be more than just another powerful count or duke. He was first and foremost ‘Henry, son of the daughter of King Henry [I] and right heir of England and Normandy’.
When he arrived in England in 1149 the young Henry’s first task was to establish himself as a credible successor to the empress’s cause. It was all very well having royal blood: he now needed the recognition of his peers. Here, the long days in the saddle paid off, as Henry rode north to be invested with knighthood by his uncle, King David of Scotland.
He was girded in Carlisle on Whit Sunday 1149. And now, sporting the belt of knighthood, Henry decided to show England that he had the martial valour to match. On his way back south he attempted an attack on York. This was unsuccessful, and Henry had to flee to the Channel, harried all the way by royal attacks. The sixteen-year-old knight made his way to the south-west, relieved an attack on Devizes by Stephen’s son Eustace, and skipped back to Normandy. If it was not an entirely fruitful mission, it had a good deal more impact than anything seen from his family in England since 1141.
In 1149 and 1150, Henry was emerging as a man of destiny. He was gathering political gravity. In 1150 his father invested him formally as duke of Normandy – a title Henry had already been affecting for some months. And in August 1151, Duke Henry performed homage to King Louis VII of France for Normandy: a ceremonial and manifestly public declaration of his ducal right and dignity.
Then, in September, Geoffrey Plantagenet died. He was thirty-nine years old. According to John of Marmoutier, Geoffrey was returning from a royal council when he was taken ‘severely ill with a fever at Château-du-Loir. [He] collapsed on a couch. Then, looking into the future of his land and his people with the spirit of prophecy, he forbade Henry his heir to introduce the customs of Normandy or England into his own county, nor the reverse.’ Then: ‘the death of so great a prince having been foretold by a comet, his body returned from earth to heaven.’
It was an abrupt end to a highly eventful career. And it left the whole fate of the Angevin cause resting squarely on the shoulders of Geoffrey’s eldest son. The eighteen-year-old Henry duke of Normandy still had far to go if he wanted to realize the ambitions of his parents. The fight would be hard. But the rewards that it promised were almost beyond imagination.