Henry II. of England, the first of the Angevin kings, was the son of Matilda, daughter of Henry I., and her second husband, Geoffrey Plantagenet, and was born at Le Mans, March 5, 1133. His mother, assisted by her illegitimate brother the Earl of Gloucester, had carried on a bitter war against Stephen, as a usurper, from 1139 to 1148. Henry himself, unable after his uncle's death to secure any powerful following, joined his father in Normandy. At eighteen he was invested with this duchy, his mother's heritage, and within a year after became also, by his father's death, Count of Anjou; while in 1152 his marriage with Eleanor of Aquitaine, the divorced wife of Louis VII., added Poitou and Guienne to his dominions, which now embraced nearly the whole of western France. In January 1153 he landed in England; and, after his and Stephen's armies had twice been face to face, a treaty was finally agreed to in November, whereby Henry was declared the successor of Stephen, whose son Eustace had died during the negotiations. Stephen died the next year; Henry was crowned on 19th December 1154, and issued a charter confirming his grandfather's laws. He at once re-established the machinery of the exchequer, banished the foreign mercenaries, demolished the hundreds of castles erected in Stephen's reign, and recovered the royal estates. The whole of the year 1156 the king spent in France, where he was employed until July in effecting the submission of his brother, Geoffrey of Nantes. Geoffrey died in 1158, and Henry, having secured his territories, spent five years warring and organising his possessions on the Continent, whence he returned in January 1163 to enter on the disastrous quarrel with the church that fills the second period of his reign.
Henry, like his grandfather, had come to the crown after an evil time of misgovernment and of anarchy, and his fame too is that of a lawgiver, the restorer of peace and order. His object was that of all the Norman kings—to build up the royal power at the expense of the feudal barons and of the church; but his policy, while selfish in its aim, was beneficent in result, inasmuch as he was wise enough to recognise that his power could be securely founded only on the well-being of the people. From the barons themselves his reforms met at the time with little serious opposition; with the clergy he was less successful. Not only could they use their weapon of excommunication with terrible effect, but, being tried by their own courts, they were not amenable to the common laws of the realm, and were protected from the punishment due to their crimes; so that thieves and murderers, calling themselves clerks, would for a first offence escape with penances and deprivation of orders. To aid him in reducing the church to subjection to the civil power he appointed his trusted chancellor, Becket, to the see of Canterbury. This was the great mistake of his life, for with his archbishop's pall Becket put on the spirit of the high ecclesiastic, and abandoned the king's service for the pope's. Henry compelled him and the other prelates to agree to the 'Constitutions of Clarendon' (q.v.); but Becket proved a sturdy churchman, and the long and obstinate struggle between him and his monarch was only terminated by his murder (see BECKET). Henry was barely saved from excommunication by his messengers making for him an unreserved submission to the pope; but he was determined not to repeat their oath. At a later date (1174) he did penance at Becket's grave, allowing himself to be scourged by monks; but, though the 'Constitutions of Clarendon' were formally repealed, the king was ultimately successful in reducing the church to subordination in civil matters. Before Becket's death Henry had made three military expeditions into Wales, none of them, however, of any permanent effect; and, while negotiations were pending for his absolution, he organised an expedition to Ireland. The English pope, Adrian IV., had in 1155, by the famous bull Laudabiliter, given Henry authority over the entire island; and in 1167 a number of Norman-Welsh knights, having been called in to the aid of a banished king of Leinster, had gained a footing in the country. Others soon followed, among them, in 1170, Richard de Clare, afterwards nicknamed Strongbow, who married the heiress of Leinster, and in 1171 assumed rule as the Earl of Leinster. Henry was jealous of the rise of a powerful feudal baronage in Ireland, and during his stay there, from the autumn of 1171 to Easter 1172, while waiting for the arrival of the friendly legates from Rome, he secured the submission of kings and bishops, and left the power of Strongbow and the other nobles broken. For thirteen years his governors carried out his system of interference and persecution; and when in 1185 Prince John was appointed king of Ireland, he took with him a batch of Norman and French knights who pushed the soldiers of the first conquest aside. But before the end of 1186 John himself was driven from the country, and all was left in confusion.
The third period of Henry's reign is occupied with the rebellion of his sons. The eldest had died in childhood; the second, Henry, born in 1155, was crowned as his father's associate and successor in the kingdom in 1170, having been married at the age of five to the little princess Margaret of France. In 1173, incited by their jealous mother, Queen Eleanor, the prince and his brother Richard rebelled against their father, and their cause was espoused by the kings of France and Scotland. The latter, William the Lion, was ravaging the north of England with an army, when he was surprised at Alnwick, and taken prisoner, 12th July 1174. To obtain his liberty, he submitted to do homage to Henry for Scotland (see SCOTLAND; also EDWARD I.). By September 1174 Henry had defeated the great league thus formed against him, and re-established his authority in all his dominions. In the course of a second rebellion, Prince Henry died of a fever at the age of twenty-eight; and in 1185 Geoffrey, the next son, was killed in a tournament at Paris. At the end of 1188, while Henry was engaged in a war with Philip of France, Richard joined the French king; and in July, Henry, having lost the chief castles of Maine and the town of Le Mans, ill and broken in spirit, agreed to a treaty of peace, of which one of the stipulations was for an indemnity for all the followers of Richard. The sight of the name of his favourite son John in the list broke his heart; and he died at Chinon on 6th July 1189.
Upon the whole, Henry was an able and enlightened sovereign, a clear-headed, unprincipled politician, an able general. He did not use his power despotically; and such enemies as he could either win over or disable he spared. His reign was one of great legal reforms. With the exchequer the ancient office of the sheriff's was restored, the jury system was extended, circuit courts were established, and a high court of justice formed; whilst the institution of Scutage (q.v.) and the revival of the old Anglo-Saxon militia system did much to break the power of the great feudal lords. The earliest writer on English law, Ranulf de Glanvill (q.v.), was Henry's chief judiciary from 1180. He was ambitious for his children, but he used them so freely as counters in the great game of politics that he ultimately alienated whatever affection they had to give; yet, even so, he was sinned against deeply by both his wife and his sons. When not restrained by policy his temper was passionate and outrageous; and his personal vices were those of the first Henry. Fair Rosamond (see CLIFFORD) is commonly said to have had two sons by him, William Longsword, Earl of Salisbury, and Geoffrey, who became Archbishop of York, and who was faithful to him when his four legitimate sons took up arms against him. But there is no positive evidence that the former was her son; while Geoffrey's mother appears to have been a woman of degraded character, named Ykenai or Hikenai.
See Freeman; Stubbs, Constitutional History, and preface to vol. ii. of the Chronicle of Benedict of Peterborough (1867); and Mrs Green, Henry the Second, in 'Twelve English Statesmen' series (1888).