House of Plantagenet


The House of Plantagenet was a royal house which originated in the French county of Anjou. The name Plantagenet is used by modern historians to identify four distinct royal houses: the Angevins, who were also counts of Anjou; the main line of the Plantagenets following the loss of Anjou; and the Houses of Lancaster and York, two of the Plantagenets' cadet branches. The family held the English throne from 1154, with the accession of Henry II, until 1485, when Richard III died in battle.
England was transformed under the Plantagenets, although only partly intentionally. The Plantagenet kings were often forced to negotiate compromises such as Magna Carta, which constrained royal power in return for financial and military support. The king was no longer just the most powerful man in the nation, holding the prerogative of judgement, feudal tribute and warfare, but had defined duties to the realm, underpinned by a sophisticated justice system. By the end of the reign of Edward III, the Plantagenets developed a new identity including adopting the language of the ordinary peopleMiddle Englishas the language of governance. This is one of the reasons that the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography considers Edward III as culturally the first English Plantagenet ruler.
In the 15th century, the Plantagenets were defeated in the Hundred Years' War and beset with social, political and economic problems. Popular revolts were commonplace, triggered by the denial of numerous freedoms. English nobles raised private armies, engaged in private feuds and openly defied Henry VI. The rivalry between the House of Plantagenet's two cadet branches of York and Lancaster brought about the Wars of the Roses, a decades-long fight for the English succession. It culminated in the Battle of Bosworth Field in 1485, when the reign of the Plantagenets and the English Middle Ages both met their end with the death of King Richard III. Henry VII, a Lancastrian, became king of England; five months later he married Elizabeth of York, thus ending the Wars of the Roses and giving rise to the Tudor dynasty. The Tudors worked to centralise English royal power, which allowed them to avoid some of the problems that had plagued the last Plantagenet rulers. The resulting stability allowed for the English Renaissance and the advent of early modern Britain. Every monarch of England, and later the United Kingdom, from Henry VII to the present is a descendant of the Plantagenets.

Terminology

''Plantagenet''

In the 15th century, near the end of the dynastic line, Richard of York, 3rd Duke of York, adopted Plantagenet as his family name. 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 the common broom, a bright yellow flowering plant, called genista in medieval Latin, as the source of the nickname.
It is uncertain why Richard of York 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. It was only in the late 17th century that it passed into common usage among historians.

''Angevins''

is French for "of Anjou". The three Angevin kings were the 12th-century Geoffrey of Anjou's son, Henry II, and grandsons Richard I and John. Noble houses were regularly denominated by a territory or place of birth, eg., House of Normandy, House of Wessex. "Angevin" can also refer to the period of history in which they reigned. Many historians identify the Angevins as a distinct English royal house. "Angevin" is also used in reference to any sovereign or government derived from Anjou. As a noun, it refers to any native of Anjou or an Angevin ruler, and specifically to other counts and dukes of Anjou, including the ancestors of the three kings who formed the English royal house; their cousins, who held the crown of Jerusalem; and to unrelated members of the French royal family who were later granted the titles and formed different dynasties, such as the Capetian House of Anjou and the Valois House of Anjou. Consequently, there is disagreement between those who consider John's son, Henry III, to be the first Plantagenet monarch, and those who do not distinguish between Angevins and Plantagenets and therefore consider the first Plantagenet to be Henry II.
The term "Angevin Empire" was coined by Kate Norgate in 1887. There was no known contemporary collective name for all of the territories under the rule of the Angevin Kings of England. This led to 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". The "Empire" portion of "Angevin Empire" has been controversial, especially as these territories were not subject to any unified laws or systems of governance, and each retained its own laws, traditions, and feudal relationships. In 1986, a convention of historians concluded that there had not been an Angevin state, and therefore no "Angevin Empire", but that the term espace Plantagenet was acceptable. Nonetheless, historians have continued to use "Angevin Empire".

Origin

The later counts of Anjou, including the Plantagenets, descended from Geoffrey II, Count of Gâtinais, and his wife Ermengarde of Anjou. In 1060, the couple inherited the title via cognatic kinship from an Angevin family that was descended from a noble named Ingelger, whose recorded history dates from 870.
During the 10th and 11th centuries, power struggles occurred between rulers in northern and western France, including those of Anjou, Normandy, Brittany, Poitou, Blois and Maine, and the kings of France. In the early 12th century, Geoffrey of Anjou married Empress Matilda, King Henry I's only surviving legitimate child and heir to the English throne from the House of Normandy. As a result of this marriage, Geoffrey's son Henry II inherited the English throne as well as Norman and Angevin titles, thus marking the beginning of the Angevin and Plantagenet dynasties.
The marriage was the third attempt of Geoffrey's father, Fulk V, Count of Anjou, to build a political alliance with Normandy. He first espoused his daughter, Matilda, to William Adelin, Henry I's heir. After William drowned in the wreck of the White Ship, Fulk married another of his daughters, Sibylla, to William Clito, son of Henry I's older brother, Robert Curthose. Henry I had the marriage annulled to avoid strengthening William's rival claim to Normandy. Finally Fulk achieved his goal through the marriage of Geoffrey and Matilda. Fulk then passed his titles to Geoffrey and became King of Jerusalem.

Angevin kings

Arrival in England

When Henry II was born in 1133, his maternal grandfather, Henry I, was reportedly delighted, saying that the boy was "the heir to the kingdom". The birth reduced the risk that the King's realm would pass to his son-in-law's family, which was possible if the marriage of Matilda and Geoffrey ended childless. The birth of a second son, also named Geoffrey, increased the likelihood of partible inheritance following French custom, in which Henry would receive the English maternal inheritance and Geoffrey the Angevin paternal inheritance. This would separate the realms of England and Anjou.
In order to secure an orderly succession, Geoffrey and Matilda sought more power from Henry I, but quarrelled with him after the king refused to give them power that might be used against him. When he died in December 1135, the couple were in Anjou, allowing Matilda's cousin Stephen to seize the crown of England. Stephen's contested accession initiated the widespread civil unrest later called the Anarchy.
Count Geoffrey had little interest in England. Instead he commenced a ten-year war for the duchy of Normandy, but it became clear that to bring this conflict to a successful conclusion, Stephen would need to be challenged in England. In 1139, Matilda and her half-brother, Robert, invaded England. From the age of nine, Henry was repeatedly sent to England to be the male figurehead of the campaigns, since it became apparent that he would become king if England were conquered. In 1141, Stephen was captured at the Battle of Lincoln and later exchanged for Robert, who had also been captured. Geoffrey continued the conquest of Normandy and, in 1150, transferred the duchy to Henry while retaining the primary role in the duchy's government.
Three events allowed the Angevins' successful termination of the conflict:
  • Count Geoffrey died in 1151 before finalising the division of his realm between Henry and Henry's younger brother Geoffrey, who would have inherited Anjou. According to William of Newburgh, who wrote in the 1190s, Count Geoffrey decided that Henry would receive England and Anjou for as long as he needed the resources for the conflict against Stephen. Count Geoffrey instructed that his body should not be buried until Henry swore an oath that the young Geoffrey would receive Anjou when England and Normandy were secured. W. L. Warren cast doubt on this account on the grounds that it was written later, based on a single contemporary source, it would be questionable that either Geoffrey or Henry would consider such an oath binding and it would break the inheritance practice of the time. The young Geoffrey died in 1158, before receiving Anjou, but he had become count of Nantes when the citizens of Nantes rebelled against their ruler. Henry had supported the rebellion.
  • Louis VII of France was granted an annulment of his marriage to Eleanor of Aquitaine on 18 March 1152, and she married Henry on 18 May 1152. Consequently, the Angevins acquired the Duchy of Aquitaine.
  • Stephen's wife and elder son, Eustace, died in 1153, leading to the Treaty of Wallingford. The treaty agreed to the peace offer that Matilda had rejected in 1142, recognised Henry as Stephen's heir, guaranteed Stephen's second son William his father's estates and allowed Stephen to be king for life. Stephen died soon afterwards, and Henry acceded to the throne in late 1154.