HENRY II (1133–1189), king of England, was the eldest child of Matilda, daughter of Henry I, and Geoffrey Plantagenet (1113–1150), count of Anjou. Geoffrey represented a family which in two centuries grew from the defenders of the Angevin march against Bretons and northmen into the lords of three important counties, Anjou, Touraine, and Maine, and from dependence on the ducal house of France into rivalry with the ducal house of Normandy, and thus at last with the royal house of England, and it was for the purpose of extinguishing this rivalry, and providing England and Normandy, after Henry I's death, with a sovereign in whom the blood of the hitherto hostile races should be united, that Matilda (whose first husband, the Emperor Henry V, had left her a childless widow) was married to the Angevin count in 1128. Geoffrey was then scarce fifteen—ten years younger than his wife—and it was not till 1133 that their first child was born, at Le Mans on Mid-Lent Sunday, 5 March (‘Acta Pontif. Cenomann.’ c. 36, in Mabillon, Vet. Analecta, p. 322). From his very birth, says a writer of the time, ‘many peoples looked to him as their future master;’ and the most important part of his destiny was indicated in the name by which he was baptised, and the surname by which he was commonly described, ‘Henry FitzEmpress.’ He was before all things King Henry's grandson and chosen successor, destined by Henry to continue his work of building up a strong government in England. The English witan were at once made to swear him fealty as his grandfather's heir; and the first two years of his life were chiefly spent with his mother at her father's court in Normandy. The king's death (December 1135), however, set the Norman and English barons free to repudiate an engagement made under compulsion to a child not yet three years old, the child too of a woman whom they scarcely knew, and of a man whom they hated with all the accumulated force of the hate that parted Anjou from Normandy; and Matilda found her son's heritage, on both sides of the sea, wrested from her by her cousin Stephen. Through the ten years of war that followed, the boy's education went on where and how it could. His earliest tutor was one Master Peter of Saintes, ‘learned above all his contemporaries in the science of verse,’ who took charge of him by his father's desire (Anon. Chron., Rer. Gall. Scriptt. xii. 120), probably after his mother went to England in 1139. In 1142 his uncle Earl Robert of Gloucester brought him over to join her, and for the next four years he was ‘imbued with letters and instructed in good manners beseeming a youth of his rank,’ by a certain Matthew in Robert's house at Bristol. In 1147 he rejoined his father, who had now conquered Normandy. Shortly after Matilda's return next year both she and Geoffrey seem to have made over to their son the claims which they had been holding in trust for him on both sides of the sea (Chron. S. Albin. a. 1149; Hist. Pontif., in Pertz, Mon. Germ. Hist. xx. 532, 533). In 1149 he ventured upon an expedition to England, and was knighted at Carlisle on Whitsunday by his great-uncle, David king of Scots; in the summer of 1151 he received from King Louis of France the investiture both of Normandy and of his father's hereditary dominions; and in September Geoffrey's death left him sole master of them all. To these territories,
