Angevin kings of England
The Angevins were a royal house of French origin that ruled England and Ireland and in France in the 12th and early 13th centuries; its monarchs were Henry II, Richard I and John. Henry II won control of a vast assemblage of lands in western Europe that would last for 80 years and would retrospectively be referred to as the Angevin Empire. As a political entity this was structurally different from the preceding Norman and subsequent Plantagenet realms. Geoffrey of Anjou became Duke of Normandy in 1144 and died in 1151. In 1152, his heir, Henry, added Aquitaine by virtue of his marriage to Eleanor of Aquitaine. Henry also inherited the claim of his mother, Empress Matilda, the daughter of King Henry I of England and Matilda of Scotland, to the English throne, to which Henry II succeeded in 1154 following the death of Matilda's cousin Stephen.
In 1189, Henry was succeeded by his third son, Richard, whose reputation for martial prowess won him the epithet "Cœur de Lion" or "Lionheart". He was born and raised in England but spent very little time there during his adult life, perhaps as little as six months. Despite this Richard remains an enduring iconic figure both in England and in France, and is one of very few kings of England remembered by his nickname as opposed to regnal number.
When Richard died, his brother John – Henry's fifth and last surviving son – took the throne. In 1204, John lost many of the Angevins' continental territories, including Anjou, to the French crown. He and his successors were still recognized as dukes of Aquitaine. The loss of Anjou, for which the dynasty is named, and other French fiefs made John the last of the Angevin kings of England. However, there is no agreement among historians. Some make no distinction between Angevins and Plantagenets while considering Henry II as the first Plantagenet king. From John, the dynasty continued on the throne of England and unbroken in the senior male line until the reign of Richard II before dividing into two competing cadet branches, the House of Lancaster and the House of York. In the 17th century, historians would use the term "Plantagenet" when describing the house.
Terminology
Angevin
The adjective Angevin is especially used in English history to refer to the kings who were also counts of Anjoubeginning with Henry IIdescended from Geoffrey and Matilda; their characteristics, descendants and the period of history which they covered from the mid-twelfth to early-thirteenth centuries. In addition, it is also used pertaining to Anjou, or any sovereign, government derived from this. As a noun, it is used for any native of Anjou or Angevin ruler. As such, Angevin is also used for other counts and dukes of Anjou; including the three kings' ancestors, their cousins who held the crown of Jerusalem and unrelated later members of the French royal family who were granted the titles to form different dynasties amongst which were the Capetian House of Anjou and the Valois House of Anjou.Angevin Empire
The term "Angevin Empire" was coined in 1887 by Kate Norgate. As far as it is known, there was no contemporary name for this assemblage of territories, which were referred toif at allby clumsy circumlocutions such as our kingdom and everything subject to our rule whatever it may be or the whole of the kingdom which had belonged to his father. Whereas the Angevin part of this term has proved uncontentious, the empire portion has proved controversial. In 1986, a convention of historical specialists concluded that there had been no Angevin state and no empire but the term espace Plantagenet was acceptable.''Plantagenet''
, adopted Plantagenet as his family name in the 15th century. Plantegenest had been a 12th-century nickname for his ancestor Geoffrey, Count of Anjou and Duke of Normandy. One of many popular theories suggests the blossom of common broom, a bright yellow flowering plant, genista in medieval Latin, as the source of the nickname.It is uncertain why Richard chose this specific name, although, during the Wars of the Roses, it emphasised Richard's status as Geoffrey's patrilineal descendant. The retrospective usage of the name for all of Geoffrey's male-line descendants was popular during the subsequent Tudor dynasty, perhaps encouraged by the further legitimacy it gave to Richard's great-grandson, Henry VIII. In the late 17th century, this name passed into common usage among historians.
Origins
The Angevins descend from Geoffrey II, Count of Gâtinais and Ermengarde of Anjou. In 1060 this couple inherited, via cognatic kinship, the county of Anjou from an older line dating from 870 and a noble called Ingelger. The marriage of Count Geoffrey to Matilda, the only surviving legitimate child of Henry I of England, was part of a struggle for power during the tenth and eleventh centuries among the lords of Normandy, Brittany, Poitou, Blois, Maine and the kings of France. It was from this marriage that Geoffrey's son, Henry, inherited the claims to England, Normandy and Anjou that marks the beginning of the Angevin and Plantagenet dynasties. This was the third attempt by Geoffrey's father Fulk V to build a political alliance with Normandy. The first was by marrying his daughter Matilda to Henry's heir William Adelin, who drowned in the wreck of the White Ship. Fulk then married his daughter Sibylla to William Clito, heir to Henry's older brother Robert Curthose, but Henry had the marriage annulled to avoid strengthening William's rival claim to his lands.Inheritance custom and Angevin practice
As society became more prosperous and stable in the 11th century, inheritance customs developed that allowed daughters to succeed to principalities as well as landed estates. The twelfth-century chronicler Ralph de Diceto noted that the counts of Anjou extended their dominion over their neighbours by marriage rather than conquest. The marriage of Geoffrey to the daughter of a king occurred in this context. It is unknown whether King Henry intended to make Geoffrey his heir, but it is known that the threat presented by William Clito's rival claim to the duchy of Normandy made his negotiating position very weak. Even so, it is probable that, should the marriage be childless, King Henry would have attempted to be succeeded by one of his Norman kinsmen such as Theobald II, Count of Champagne, or Stephen of Blois, who in the event did seize King Henry's English crown. King Henry's great relief in 1133 at the birth of a son to the couple, described as "the heir to the Kingdom", is understandable in the light of this situation. Following this, the birth of a second son raised the question of whether custom would be followed with the maternal inheritance passing to first born and the paternal inheritance going to his brother, Geoffrey.According to William of Newburgh, writing in the 1190s, the plan failed because of Geoffrey's early death in 1151. The dying Geoffrey decided that Henry would have the paternal and maternal inheritances while he needed the resources to overcome Stephen, and left instructions that his body would not be buried until Henry swore an oath that, once England and Normandy were secured, the younger Geoffrey would have Anjou. Henry's brother Geoffrey died in 1158, too soon to receive Anjou, but not before being installed count in Nantes after Henry aided a rebellion by its citizens against their previous lord.
The unity of Henry's assemblage of domains was largely dependent on the ruling family, influencing the opinion of most historians that this instability made it unlikely to endure. The French custom of partible inheritance at the time would lead to political fragmentation. Indeed, if Henry II's sons Henry the Young King and Geoffrey of Brittany had not died young, the inheritance of 1189 would have been fundamentally altered. Henry and Richard both planned for partition on their deaths while attempting to provide overriding sovereignty to hold the lands together. For example, in 1173 and 1183, Henry tried to force Richard to acknowledge allegiance to his older brother for the duchy of Aquitaine, and later Richard would confiscate Ireland from John. This was complicated by the Angevins being subjects of the kings of France, who felt these feudal rights of homage and the right of allegiance more legally belonged to them. This was particularly true when the wardship of Geoffrey's son Arthur and lordship of Brittany was contended between 1202 and 1204. Upon the Young King's death in 1183, Richard became heir in chief, but refused to give up Aquitaine to give John an inheritance. More by accident than design this meant that, while Richard inherited the patrimony, John would become lord of Ireland and Arthur would be duke of Brittany. By the mid-thirteenth century, there was a clear unified patrimony and Plantagenet empire but this cannot be called an Angevin Empire as by this date Anjou and most of the continental lands had been lost.
Arrival in England
Henry I of England named his daughter Matilda heir; but when he died in 1135 Matilda was far from England in Anjou or Maine, while her cousin Stephen was closer in Boulogne, giving him the advantage he needed to race to England and have himself crowned and anointed king of England. Matilda's husband Geoffrey, though he had little interest in England, commenced a long struggle for the duchy of Normandy. To create a second front, Matilda landed in England during 1139 to challenge Stephen, instigating the civil war known as the Anarchy. In 1141, she captured Stephen at the battle of Lincoln, prompting the collapse of his support. While Geoffrey pushed on with the conquest of Normandy over the next four years, Matilda threw away her position through arrogance and inability to be magnanimous in victory. She was even forced to release Stephen in a hostage exchange for her half-brother Robert, 1st Earl of Gloucester, allowing Stephen to resume control of much of England. Geoffrey never visited England to offer practical assistance, but instead sent Henry as a male figureheadbeginning in 1142 when Henry was only 9with a view that if England was conquered it would be Henry that would become king. In 1150, Geoffrey also transferred the title of Duke of Normandy to Henry but retained the dominant role in governance. Three fortuitous events allowed Henry to finally bring the conflict to a successful conclusion:- In 1151, Count Geoffrey died before having time to complete his plan to divide his inheritance between his sons Henry and Geoffrey, who would have received England and Anjou respectively.
- Louis VII of France divorced Eleanor of Aquitaine whom Henry quickly married, greatly increasing his resources and power with the acquisition of Duchy of Aquitaine.
- In 1153, Stephen's son Eustace died. The disheartened Stephen, who had also recently been widowed, gave up the fight and, with the Treaty of Wallingford, repeated the peace offer that Matilda had rejected in 1142: Stephen would be king for life, Henry his successor, preserving Stephen's second son William's rights to his family estates. Stephen did not live long and so Henry inherited in late 1154.
In 1171, Henry invaded Ireland to assert his overlordship following alarm at the success of knights that he had allowed to recruit soldiers in England and Wales, who had assumed the role of colonisers and accrued autonomous power, including Strongbow. Pope Adrian IV had given Henry a papal blessing to expand his power into Ireland to reform the Irish church. Originally, this would have allowed some territory to be granted to Henry's brother, William, but other matters had distracted Henry and William was now dead. Instead, Henry's designs were made plain when he gave the lordship of Ireland to his youngest son, John.
In 1172, Henry II tried to give his landless youngest son John a wedding gift of the three castles of Chinon, Loudun and Mirebeau. This angered the 18-year-old Young King, who had yet to receive any lands from his father, and prompted a rebellion by Henry II's wife and three eldest sons. Louis VII supported the rebellion to destabilise Henry II. William the Lion and other subjects of Henry II also joined the revolt and it took 18 months for Henry to force the rebels to submit to his authority. In Le Mans in 1182, Henry II gathered his children to plan a partible inheritance in which his eldest son would inherit England, Normandy and Anjou; Richard the Duchy of Aquitaine; Geoffrey Brittany, and John Ireland. This degenerated into further conflict. The younger Henry rebelled again before he died of dysentery and, in 1186, Geoffrey died after a tournament accident. In 1189, Richard and Philip II of France took advantage of Henry's failing health and forced him to accept humiliating peace terms, including naming Richard as his sole heir. Two days later, the old king died, defeated and miserable in the knowledge that even his favoured son John had rebelled. This fate was seen as the price he paid for the murder of Beckett.