members of the royal household to murder Becket in
December 1170. Henry was obliged to retreat publicly.
Even tually he salvaged much of what he had originally
sought, though in a less provocative form. There are
parallels to this in other aspects of his career.
All who resented his dominance sought to profi t from
the setback to his reputation in the wake of Becket’s
martyrdom. In 1173—74 Louis VII of France orga-
nized a coalition of Henry’s opponents, both internal
and external, in a deter mined attempt to unseat him
by insurrection and invasion. Henry, sustained by the
loyalty of his servants and by popu lar support, survived
triumphantly. He exacted no revenge, save upon his
headstrong wife, who remained in close confi ne ment for
the rest of his life, for having conspired with her former
husband Louis to replace Henry with their malleable
eldest son, the young king Henry. His victory persuaded
most barons that their future lay in cooperating with
the king to secure his patronage instead of striving for
autonomy.
Whether Henry intended the formation of an “An-
gevin Empire” is debatable. His initial aggressiveness
suggested ex pansionist aims, but there are clear signs
that he came to de test the wasteful futility of warfare and
limited his objectives to internal order. His intervention
in Ireland (1171) seems to have been a reluctant response
to the need to control Anglo-Norman adventurers. He
was content to secure amicable re lations with the Irish,
as with the Welsh and the Scots. He intended to partition
his dominions among his sons; it was his successors who
sought to consolidate a unitary control that collapsed
before a resurgent French monarchy. Henry’s rule had,
however, demonstrated how to make authority respected
and how to harness it to effective government.
In the kingdom of England there was, in Henry’s
reign, a transformation in the processes of government
and in the meth ods of administering justice. It rested
essentially on three linked developments. First, the
decision to rest responsibility for bringing criminal
prosecutions not on offi cial prosecutors but on local
communities through “juries of presentment” (the ori-
gins of the grand jury). Second, the supervision of the
operations of local government by investigative teams of
justices, who carried royal government into the shires,
empowered but also limited by the terms of a carefully
framed commission. Third, the offer of the new and
much swifter methods of righting civil wrongs by means
of common-form writs that set in motion standardized
procedures and rested decisions on questions of fact
put to juries under the supervision of royal justices who
could put the power of the crown behind enforcement.
The fl ood of business that ensued prompted the de-
velopment of central courts of justice and a quest for
more ra tional and sophisticated methods in all aspects
of administra tion. In essence Henry and his advisers had
found a solution to the age-old problem of how to deploy
royal authority ef fectively without putting too much
discretionary power into the hands of subordinates. A
less welcome consequence was the enhanced power of
the crown to discriminate against in dividuals who were
out of favor. A necessary corrective to overweening
royal government was eventually to be found in Magna
Carta, but it is signifi cant that there was no attempt in
the Great Charter to reverse the trends that Henry II had
fostered, that the closer integration of central and local
gov ernment was accepted and the development of the
common law welcomed.
See also Eleanor of Aquitaine; John; Richard I;
Becket, ThomasFurther Reading
Gillingham, John. The Angevin Empire. London: Arnold, 1984;
Turner, Ralph V. “The Problem of Survival for the Angevin
‘Empire’: Henry II’s and His Sons’ Visions versus Late
Twelfth-Century Realities.” American Historical Renew 100
(1995): 78–96.
Warren, W.L. The Governance of Norman and Angevin England,
1086–1272. London: Arnold, 1987 [differs in interpretation
from Gillingham’s study].
Warren, W.L. Henry II. Rev. ed. London: Methuen, 1991.
W.L. WarrenHENRY III (1028/1046–1056)
Henry III, son of the Emperor Conrad II (d. 1039)
and Queen Gisela, daughter of Duke Hermann II of
Swabia, was born on October 28, 1017 and died at age
39 on October 5, 1056. Made duke of Bavaria at age
ten, Henry was elevated by his father and the German
magnates to the kingship of Germany in the following
year (1028). He shared the throne with his father until
Conrad’s death in 1039. In 1036, as part of a move to
secure the northern frontiers of the empire and perhaps
control the Saxon nobility, Henry married his fi rst wife,
Kunigunde, daughter of King Cnut of Denmark. Their
daughter Beatrix (d. 1060) later became abbess of the
Ottonian foundation of Quedlinburg. Kunigunde died
in 1038.
The year before his father’s death, Henry had also
obtained the kingship of Burgundy and duchy of Swabia,
the latter of which he held until 1045.
In 1043, after assuming sole kingship of Germany in
1039, he married his second wife, Agnes of Poitou (d.
1077), daughter of Duke William V of Aquitaine, with
whom he had three daughters and a son. One daughter,
Adelheid (d. 1095), became another abbess of Quedlin-
burg; the other two, Mathilda (d. 1060) and Judith
(Sophia, d. 1092/1096), were married, respectively, to
Rudolf of Rheinfelden and King Salamo of Hungary and
later King Wladyslaw of Poland. Crowned Holy RomanHENRY II