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  • England, 1154, nearly a century after the Battle of Hastings.

  • The country has been torn apart by a savage civil war.

  • William the Conqueror was long dead.

  • For 30 years, his grandchildren had been locked

  • in a life or death struggle for the crown of England.

  • The realm was in ruins.

  • And then there appeared a young king, brave and charismatic,

  • who stopped the anarchy. His name was Henry,

  • and he would become the greatest of all our medieval kings.

  • He should be as well-known to us as Henry VIII or Elizabeth I,

  • but if he is remembered at all today

  • it is as the king who ordered the Murder in the Cathedral

  • or as the father of the much more famous, impossibly bad King John

  • and the impossibly glamorous Richard the Lionheart.

  • Henry II has no great monument to his name.

  • No horseback statue of him stands outside Westminster,

  • yet he made an indelible mark on our country.

  • The father of the Common Law. The godfather of the English state.

  • But Henry was cursed, brought down by the Church, his children,

  • and most of all by his queen, the older, beautiful,

  • all-powerful Eleanor of Aquitaine.

  • This is the story of Henry II and his family.

  • In all of British history, there has never been anything quite like it.

  • Henry II, his wife Eleanor and their children Richard and John

  • were the most astonishing of all the family firms

  • to have run the enterprise of Britain.

  • They did so with a furious energy

  • that either entranced or appalled their subjects.

  • Like many family firms, they had a capacity

  • for both creation and self-destruction.

  • What their intelligence built, their passions destroyed.

  • They were called the Angevins, after the French-speaking province of Anjou.

  • At the height of their power,

  • they were masters of all that counted in Christendom.

  • Their England was the linchpin of an empire that stretched

  • from the Scottish borders to the Pyrenees.

  • Much bigger than France itself.

  • Not since the Romans, and never again,

  • has England been quite so European.

  • The dynasty had its roots in the civil war

  • that was being fought between two cousins, Stephen and Matilda,

  • the grandchildren of William the Conqueror.

  • Stephen seized the crown, but that wasn't the end of it,

  • for if Matilda couldn't beat him with an army,

  • she could beat him with a wedding,

  • a wedding that would found a dynasty

  • and reduce Stephen's ambitions to dust.

  • In 1128, Matilda married Geoffrey of Anjou,

  • nicknamed "Plantagenet", because he wore

  • a sprig of yellow broom or Planta Genista in his hat.

  • His family emblem was three lions.

  • Along with his money, power and territory

  • Geoffrey gave Matilda something even more important - a son, Henry.

  • As the boy Henry grew up, it became apparent

  • that from his mother he'd inherited steely single-mindedness,

  • lots of physical courage and a phenomenally foul temper.

  • From his father he'd got instinctive charm

  • and knife-sharp political and military intelligence.

  • But the quality that anyone who ever met Henry

  • most vividly remembered about him,

  • the overflowing tank of energy

  • that made him the most hyperactive king in British history,

  • this was all his own.

  • This was the age of chivalry, when the myth of Arthur and Camelot

  • was at its most popular.

  • Right from the start, he was being groomed by his ambitious parents

  • to take England away from Stephen, to become a new King Arthur.

  • And to do this, of course, he would need a Guinevere.

  • As it happened, the perfect candidate had just become available -

  • Eleanor of Aquitaine.

  • But the match was a gamble. He was 19, she was pushing 30.

  • He was relatively inexperienced,

  • Eleanor had seen as much of the ways of the world as it could offer.

  • And yet something rather surprising happened

  • between the teenage Arthur and the mercurial Guinevere,

  • something that wasn't supposed to happen in a marriage of political convenience.

  • The parties actually fancied each other.

  • Henry found himself at the altar in 1152, beside an older woman

  • described as a graceful, dark-eyed beauty,

  • disconcertingly articulate, strong-minded and jocular.

  • Hardly the veiled damsel in the tower.

  • One likes to think that Eleanor saw

  • not just the usual spur-clanking bonehead,

  • but beyond a stocky frame and barrel chest, an intriguing peculiarity;

  • the rare prince who looked right with a falcon on one hand

  • and a book in the other.

  • It was Eleanor's homeland, Aquitaine, that was the greatest prize.

  • A vast stretch of land between Anjou and the Pyrenees.

  • A place where wine-steeped Latin culture

  • had been polished anew by Provencal sensuality.

  • Its capital, here in Poitiers, the home of troubadours and courtly love.

  • No wonder Eleanor grew up, as her contemporaries put it...

  • (MEDIEVAL FRENCH) ...welcoming, vivacious,

  • her head perhaps turned by all those lovelorn lyrics

  • of knights enslaved by beauties and bent on besieging their virtue.

  • So this is what Eleanor brought to the match:

  • Grandeur, territory, wealth - a lot of wealth -

  • and the glamour of Aquitaine.

  • No wonder Henry thought that with this marriage he'd got,

  • well, pretty much everything.

  • Everything that is, except the crown of England.

  • In 1153, Henry Plantagenet crossed the Channel.

  • His father, Geoffrey, had already taken Normandy from Stephen,

  • so now it was up to Henry to take England.

  • Faced with an exhausted nation and defecting barons, Stephen caved in.

  • A deal was struck. Stephen would be allowed to die on the throne

  • on condition he named Henry as his heir.

  • Within a year, Stephen was dead

  • and Eleanor and Henry were crowned at Westminster Abbey,

  • King and Queen of England.

  • When they emerged from the vivats and incense,

  • they were the French-speaking sovereigns of an enormous realm

  • which stretched from the Pyrenees through to the vineyards of Gascony,

  • along the cod-fish run coastal waters of Brittany,

  • over the Channel to England, along the length and breadth

  • of the country to the Welsh borders and the windy moors

  • of Cumbria and Northumbria.

  • And it was a perfect time to come into this colossal inheritance.

  • For the mid-12th century really was the springtime of the Middle Ages.

  • Literacy and learning were spreading

  • from the cathedral schools in Paris and Canterbury.

  • Monasteries were being founded at a record pace,

  • and although they were supposed to be purged of worldliness,

  • before long they were the engines of economic power,

  • producers of wool, master of the mills and rivers.

  • So if this was indeed springtime, Henry and Eleanor

  • had just got themselves the fattest and the ripest fruit.

  • It's unlikely they ever thought of it as a true empire

  • in the Roman sense of a single realm.

  • Its many regions were treated separately, according to their customs.

  • While Westminster was increasingly at the heart of administration,

  • Rouen in Normandy, Chinon in Anjou

  • and Poitiers in Aquitaine were just as important.

  • It was the greatest and grandest family estate in all Christendom.

  • That surely was enough to be going on with.

  • It was one thing to stand around counting off one's possessions.

  • It was quite another to know what to do about being king.

  • Especially king of a country so promising but peculiar as England,

  • with all its Anglo-Saxon names and institutions

  • like shire, courts, writs and sheriffs.

  • What did Henry Plantagenet know of Huntingdonshire,

  • or what did Huntingdonshire know of Henry Plantagenet?

  • Henry of course spoke virtually no English at all.

  • What he would have grasped, if only from his coronation oaths,

  • was that kings of England were supposed to be both judge and warlord.

  • In fact, the coronation oath, preserved intact from Edward the Confessor,

  • who was increasingly being held up as some sort of ideal monarch,

  • pretty much spelled out the job description of the king of England.

  • One - protect the Church.

  • Two - preserve intact the lands of your ancestors.

  • Three - do justice.

  • Four - most sweeping of all,

  • suppress evil laws and customs.

  • Fulfilling one and two went without saying.

  • But what was surprising about Henry was he took

  • vows three and four just as seriously.

  • Before Henry, justice was, "Do what I want, I'm the king."

  • By the end of Henry's reign, getting the king's justice

  • didn't depend on the king being there in person.

  • Henry had established permanent, professional courts,

  • sitting at Westminster or touring the counties,

  • acting reliably in his name.

  • Now law became, "Listen to what my judges have to say."

  • By 1180, those judges could consult England's first legal textbook

  • full of precedents on which to base their decisions.

  • The law now had its own kind of majesty.

  • It was vow number one though, the protection of the Church,

  • which quite unpredictably would cause Henry II the greatest grief.

  • It was to provoke a kind of spiritual civil war,

  • in its way every bit as unsettling as the feudal civil war,

  • and which in its most dreadful hour

  • would end with bloodshed in the Cathedral.

  • This was especially ironic since at the outset it seemed to be the Church

  • that was the strongest pillar of Henry's administration.

  • Its literate clerics initiated him into the mysteries of governing England.

  • When the Archbishop of Canterbury offered one of his brightest proteges,

  • Thomas Becket, for the office of Chancellor,

  • Henry listened, looked and gave him the job.

  • So who exactly was this Becket?

  • He was the first commoner of any kind

  • to make a mark on British history.

  • The possibility that someone like Becket, a merchant's son,

  • with an impoverished Norman knight clanking around in the family closet,

  • could end up as the king's best friend,

  • said something about the possibility of the great swarming city itself.

  • At the heart of the emerging capital was the great church of St Paul,

  • and around it, upriver from the grim pile of the Conqueror's Tower,

  • were wharves thick with ships loaded with wool going out,

  • wines, furs or silks coming in.

  • In this teeming world, Becket's father strutted,

  • owner of one of the grandest houses in Cheapside.

  • The truth is Becket was a real Londoner,

  • with a natural flair for doing what Londoners like doing most -

  • the getting and spending of money,

  • spectacle, costume and, despite his notoriously delicate gut,

  • Becket seems to have enjoyed good food and drink.

  • He was street smart and he was book smart.

  • In short, from the get go, Becket was a big league performer.

  • He was a player.

  • They were in a way, a match of opposites.

  • Becket was older by a decade and, as Chancellor,

  • willing to deal with the administrative detail that bored the king.

  • Becket was tall, self-contained, his forehead creased with frown lines.

  • The king was square-shaped, packed with hectic passion,

  • a real Plantagenet powerhouse.

  • Becket was able to keep up with the relentless pace set by Henry.

  • Medieval courts were itinerant affairs,

  • travelling 20 - 30 miles a day,

  • eating in a royal forest or by the roadside.

  • But Henry, who made a fetish of exercise

  • out of a fear of growing fat, never seemed to slow down,

  • barely arriving at one of his palaces before chasing off again.

  • Clarendon Palace was the most magnificent hunting lodge in England.

  • All that's left now is this raw, ivy-covered stump of stone.

  • In Henry's time, it would have been full

  • of courtiers and dogs and hawks and horses.

  • That's the way the king liked it -

  • a kind of scruffy power to his entertainment.

  • Becket saw right through Henry's game of studied informality,

  • his avoidance of wearing the crown, his ordinary riding clothes.

  • Becket knew that when Henry extended the hand of friendship,

  • he was capable of following it by frosty withdrawals of affection,

  • unpredictable explosions of carpet biting, incendiary fury.

  • It was this pseudo-sibling relationship

  • that gave Becket the confidence later on

  • to treat the king as a virtual equal

  • with catastrophic results for all concerned.

  • Time and again he would tell his dwindling band of followers,

  • "I know this looks bad but trust me.

  • "I know the way this man operates."

  • Even in the early days, beneath the jesting, there was,

  • if Thomas looked for it, a kind of ominous tension.

  • When, for example, the king and Chancellor rode through London,

  • Henry pointed to the countless destitute,

  • and, eyeing Thomas's gorgeous scarlet and grey minever-edged cloak,

  • let it be known "How charitable it would be

  • "to clothe the poor man's nakedness."

  • "Well, yes," said Becket, "You should attend to it right away."

  • "Oh, no, no, no, you should have the credit," insisted the king,

  • pulling at Becket's cape.

  • An undignified tug of war then followed,

  • with both men trying to pull the capes off each other.

  • At last the Chancellor had no alternative

  • but to allow the king to overcome him and give his cape to the poor man.

  • If Henry suspected Thomas of getting above himself -

  • and if he did, he wasn't alone -

  • it didn't get in the way of Becket coming to mind

  • for the top job in the country,

  • the newly-vacated post of Archbishop of Canterbury.

  • Becket's worldliness must have made him seem precisely the right man

  • for the job Henry wanted to do - to put the Church in its place.

  • Monarchs had long taken it for granted

  • that they were directly anointed by God, safely above the Church.

  • But the Popes of this period begged to differ.

  • Kings, they said, reported to Popes, not the other way round.

  • This wasn't just an academic quibble.

  • This was a fight to the death.

  • There were two flashpoints.

  • The first was whether law-breaking clergymen

  • could be judged in the king's courts like everyone else.

  • The second was whether bishops had the power

  • to excommunicate royal officials.

  • By making Becket Archbishop of Canterbury,

  • Henry believed he could depend on someone who shared his view

  • of the subordinate relationship of Church to State.

  • The king was in for a shock.

  • At the beginning at least, there seemed to be

  • a good deal of the old Becket about the new Becket.

  • The array of fancy foods

  • and company of young cosmopolitan scholars remained.

  • But all was not how it appeared.

  • Becket ate none of the feast

  • and beneath his grand garments he may well have begun to wear

  • the hair shirt found later on his murdered body.

  • When the king began to realise a mysterious transformation

  • had taken place in Becket - when, for instance,

  • the Archbishop stood up in public and opposed, in most militant language,

  • the king's demand for a new tax on the Church -

  • Henry Plantagenet went altogether ballistic.

  • Nothing made him more enraged than a friendship, as he saw it, betrayed.

  • It all came to a head here at Clarendon, early in 1164,

  • when Henry summoned a special council of the princes of the Church

  • and the most important nobles of the realm.

  • There he asked - well, actually, he demanded -

  • they assent unconditionally to what he called the "customs of the realm."

  • Becket was no idiot. He knew exactly what this meant -

  • royal control over the clergy.

  • He'd seen it coming for months and had been urging his bishops

  • to resist it at all costs.

  • After endless prevarication, in the end Becket refused the king's demands,

  • ordering total resistance,

  • a position from which he'd never budge.

  • The king now moved the way he liked best, through the law.

  • In October, 1164, Becket was brought to trial at Northampton,

  • accused - and this was the killer -

  • of improper use of funds when he'd been Chancellor.

  • So all those half-joking comments about fancy clothes

  • that Henry had thrown Becket's way now stopped being funny.

  • They'd become a deadly criminal accusation.

  • When Thomas decided to dress up for the trial

  • in his full Archbishop's rig and carry a huge silver cross,

  • Jesus-like, his greatest rival, the Bishop of London,

  • tried to seize it from him, but Becket's grip was like iron.

  • "A fool he was, a fool he'll always be,"

  • was the Bishop's comment on this performance.

  • The trial broke up with Becket storming out.

  • "Perjurer, traitor!" Yelled Henry's barons.

  • "Whoremongers, bastards!" Replied the Archbishop.

  • Convicted on the charges, Becket knew he was in dire peril

  • and fled on the nearest horse.

  • He must have thought he was running for his life.

  • Becket and a small group of diehard followers

  • landed on the Flemish coast.

  • They were broke, demoralised, prostrate with exhaustion

  • and flooded with the grim realisation of what they'd done.

  • They'd made themselves outlaws for Christ.

  • This is where Becket's little family of God ended up,

  • the Cistercian Abbey at Pontigny, about 100 miles south east of Paris.

  • Built in sparkling white limestone,

  • it seemed a stunning advertisement for purity,

  • a perfect match for Thomas's temperament.

  • But this was no monkish retreat.

  • It pretty soon became apparent that what Becket had established here

  • was a real government-in-exile.

  • He had his own pan-European intelligence network.

  • He had his own letter smugglers with the know-how

  • to get through the blockade Henry imposed on communication.

  • And he had his own versatile propaganda department.

  • But most of all, Becket had his own unwavering sense of self-righteousness.

  • Pretty soon, though, Henry began to use his own formidable power

  • to turn the screws on Becket's supporters.

  • There were arraignments and arrests,

  • terrifyingly sudden summary evictions,

  • the seizure of land and property.

  • Anyone who so much as thought about saying a good word for the traitor Archbishop

  • risked, at the very least, deportation.

  • Messengers caught carrying his mail were thrown into prison.

  • Innocent relatives, incriminated by family association,

  • were turned into exiles themselves.

  • It took two painful years of back and forth diplomacy

  • and increasingly impatient signals from the Pope

  • to arrange even talks about talks.

  • After a series of abortive reconciliations in 1170,

  • it looked as though peace might finally break out.

  • The location was to be a meadow surrounded by woods

  • near the village of Freteval - "A beautiful place," remarked one observer.

  • Only later did he find out that the locals called it "Traitors Meadow."

  • Henry and Thomas rode out to each other

  • and the king took off his hat in salutation.

  • The two of them then embraced and sat for hours talking,

  • the Archbishop's posterior mortified by the chaffing

  • of his secret goat-hair underwear.

  • For once, the king was in no mood to quarrel,

  • and agreed to restore Thomas to all his powers and authority,

  • and also to treat those who were Becket's enemies as his own.

  • When it was all over and Becket had got everything he wanted,

  • a dam broke and a tearful wave of emotion swept through him.

  • Becket dismounted and flung himself in front of the king's horse.

  • The king got off his mount and walked over to his old friend,

  • who'd become his bitterest enemy, and bodily lifted him up,

  • put one foot in the stirrup and hoisted Becket back into the saddle.

  • They then rode over together to the end of the field to the royal tent,

  • where the king announced that henceforth they were finally reconciled

  • and that he would now be a most kind and generous lord.

  • After the peace was publicly announced,

  • Henry asked Thomas to ride with the court awhile,

  • but Becket declined.

  • This turned out to be mistake number one.

  • The king had wanted to catch the moment, hold it a little longer.

  • His good mood could vanish as quickly as his bad temper could reappear.

  • Mistake number two was much worse.

  • As the king had pardoned Becket's closest followers,

  • someone suggested that Thomas might like to forgive those

  • who had stayed loyal to the king.

  • "It's not the same," said Becket.

  • And it was this fanatical inability to meet half way,

  • to let bygones be bygones,

  • that proved to be Becket's fatal error.

  • The last meeting between the king and Becket

  • took place on the banks of the River Loire.

  • And in a mood of sad friendliness the king says to Becket,

  • "You know, if only you could do what I tell you to do,

  • "I'd entrust you with everything."

  • No reply and one imagines a long pause, a sigh,

  • a shrug of the shoulders and the king goes on,

  • "Well, go in peace and we shall meet in Rouen or in England."

  • Then another pause and Becket comes out with something absolutely amazing.

  • He says, "My Lord, if we part on these terms,

  • "we shall not meet again in this life."

  • And the royal temper flares up and Henry says,

  • "Why, do you take me for a traitor?"

  • Meaning, "Do you suppose I'll abandon you

  • "when I've given you my protection?"

  • And Becket looks at the king and says, "Heaven forbid."

  • And I think, as he allowed that parting shot,

  • so full of pained sincerity and wiseguy irony,

  • Becket must have made the sign of the cross.

  • Thomas Becket's ship came into the harbour at Sandwich,

  • probably on the morning of December 1st, 1170,

  • and was greeted not only by a throng of poor people

  • but by three royal officials armed to the teeth.

  • As the stones of Canterbury came into sight,

  • he got off his horse, took off his boots and walked barefoot

  • the rest of the way through anthem-singing crowds of devotees.

  • When he arrived home, Becket did what he said he would do

  • to all those who had opposed him during his six years of exile.

  • Shouting the dreaded curse, "May they be damned by Jesus Christ,"

  • he excommunicated them.

  • But the bishops were not in hell.

  • They were at Henry's court near Bayeux,

  • pouring venomous reports in the king's ear

  • about Becket's impossible, virtually treasonous arrogance.

  • Henry, who typically seemed to have forgotten about the promises at Freteval,

  • raised his head from his pillow and let out a roar

  • of Plantagenet anathema.

  • It was not, "Will no one rid me of this turbulent priest?"

  • But a much more alarming outcry.

  • "What miserable drones and traitors have I nourished in my household,

  • "who let their Lord be treated with such shameful contempt by a low-born cleric?"

  • To anyone who had witnessed Henry's terrible meltdown,

  • or had even heard about it, his words could only mean one thing:

  • That he wanted the interminable, insufferable Becket problem to go away.

  • Not go away as in six feet under perhaps,

  • but if that's what it took, then so be it.

  • He was after all a traitor and, well, what happens to traitors?

  • The four knights who would kill Becket had no doubt what Henry had in mind,

  • and rushed to Normandy to take a ship to Kent.

  • Dawn the next day, December 29th, 1170, Becket's last.

  • Reginald fitzUrse, William de Tracy, Robert le Bret and Hugh de Morville

  • arrived in England and set off for Canterbury.

  • At around three, they burst into the Archbishop's palace

  • and found Thomas with his advisors.

  • When the knights came in, he studiously ignored them.

  • FitzUrse broke the silence, saying he'd an important message from the king

  • that Becket should go to Winchester and give an account of his conduct.

  • Becket said he'd no intention of being treated like a criminal.

  • Things rapidly got ugly,

  • fitzUrse ominously declaring that Becket was no longer

  • under the king's peace.

  • Ought Becket to have temporised,

  • to have made an escape while there was still time?

  • "My mind is made up," he told his follower John of Salisbury,

  • "I know exactly what I have to do."

  • "Please God, you have chosen well," replied John.

  • Instead of bolting, Thomas proceeded to the Cathedral for vespers.

  • He made sure the door was open to receive the congregation.

  • He had chosen his place. He had written in his mind

  • his last and greatest performance.

  • They caught up with him in the north transept of the Cathedral.

  • Becket must have seen right away that they meant business,

  • because they were got up in the standard kit of terrorist thugs -

  • face and head covered, chain mail, of course.

  • Carrying naked swords, they were shouting, "Where is the traitor?"

  • Becket replied, "Here I am,

  • "no traitor to the king, but a priest of God."

  • The Archbishop seemed calm, but no one else was.

  • His attendants, all except two,

  • disappeared into the shadows of the church.

  • But the 52-year old Becket was, remember, a cockney,

  • a street fighter, as tough as old boots under the cowl.

  • When he stood rooted to the spot, he became physically,

  • as well as theologically, the immovable object.

  • At such times the kind of talk he'd picked up in his Cheapside childhood

  • came back to him - ripe and abusive.

  • "Whoremonger," he yelled at fitzUrse,

  • who must suddenly have felt ridiculous clanking around in all that armour.

  • What do you do when you can't stand feeling ridiculous any longer?

  • Whoosh goes the adrenaline, bang goes the gun - or in this case the sword.

  • Down through Becket's attendant's arm,

  • then slicing through the top of the Archbishop's head.

  • The crown hung by a thread of flesh as Becket sank to the floor,

  • murmuring, according to his chroniclers,

  • "For the name of Jesus and the protection of the Church,

  • "I'm ready to embrace death."

  • Then, thank God, came the coup de grace.

  • Another mailed arm, another downward slash to the head,

  • so hard that the sword blade broke in two on the stones.

  • To finish the job, a third warrior stood on the Archbishop's neck,

  • stuck the end of his sword into the open cavity of his skull,

  • scooped out the brains and spread them on the floor.

  • "Let's be off," he said. "This fellow won't be getting up again."

  • (BELL CHIMES)

  • It was around 4.30 in the afternoon.

  • The door was open, frightened people who'd come for the service

  • gathered round the body.

  • It was by no means a flock who thought Becket a saint.

  • "He wanted to be a king." Said one. "Now let him be one."

  • But then it all changed.

  • Becket's chamberlain reattached the bleeding scalp to his head

  • with a strip of material torn from his own shirt

  • and the monks began to prepare Becket's body for burial.

  • Then they discovered what no one, till that moment, had known -

  • the hair shirt, with lice crawling busily in it.

  • Thomas the immovable had been Thomas the self-mortifier,

  • Thomas the humble.

  • They let him lie, washed in his own blood,

  • and over the clotting body laid the archiepiscopal garments.

  • By chance there was a marble sarcophagus

  • ready for someone else's burial here in the crypt,

  • and a space to lower it into.

  • Down went Becket, arrayed in the full rig,

  • the dalmatic, the pallium, the cope, the chasuble, the orb and the ring.

  • He'd always thought kit mattered, had Thomas Becket.

  • And for just what exactly had Becket laid down -

  • some would say thrown away - his life?

  • Some fantastic notion, already out of date,

  • that the Church could lay down the law to the State?

  • All our modern instincts seem to say, "Oh, come on!

  • "Look at Henry and you find reality.

  • "The guardian of the common law, the engineer of government,

  • "the smasher of anarchy."

  • And you'd be quite wrong.

  • Becket, headstrong, infuriating, over the top,

  • theatrical Becket, made a huge difference.

  • His view of the Church lasted. The Angevin empire did not.

  • The actual murderers got off pretty lightly,

  • hiding out in Yorkshire, excommunicated, told to go on crusade.

  • But the real judgement, Henry reserved for himself -

  • and the verdict was guilty as charged.

  • In 1174, he made a pilgrimage to Canterbury,

  • where Becket's blood was said to work miracles.

  • Over the last miles, Henry walked barefoot in a hair shirt,

  • as Becket had done four years earlier.

  • At the tomb, he confessed his sins and was whipped by the monks.

  • However tough his punishment, though, the blood would never wash away.

  • Henry, the hero of the Common Law, will always be remembered

  • as the biggest of England's crowned criminals.

  • The murderer in the Cathedral.

  • Henry II would rule for another 20 years,

  • long enough to see his embryonic legal system

  • grow into a thriving network of courts.

  • Up and down the land, these new courts were to settle

  • not just the usual disputes of blood and mayhem

  • but all manner of painful rows over inheritances,

  • estates and properties.

  • How ironic then that the only family

  • who would not accept the king's justice was his own.

  • If there was one person who was likely to think of the king

  • not as judge but as transgressor, it was his wife.

  • It had been 20 years since Henry and Eleanor had been partners,

  • in bed and in government.

  • Since then, Eleanor had had to suffer

  • the humiliation of a string of mistresses.

  • What tormented her was not Becket's shrine,

  • but the shrine Henry built to his favourite mistress, Rosamund Clifford.

  • Betrayed and alienated, Eleanor turned her formidable energy and intellect

  • to the business of getting her just desserts through her children.

  • She was now determined to do everything she could

  • to make them feel their father was robbing them

  • of their rightful power and dignity.

  • The sons rose to the bait, and what a bunch they were,

  • Henry and Eleanor's four sons.

  • There was young Henry, officially the next king of England,

  • but in reality still having to apply to his father for pocket money.

  • He rebelled, only to end up dying of dysentery.

  • Then there was Geoffrey, as bright and devious

  • as his namesake grandfather, given Brittany,

  • but then trampled to death by a horse.

  • This left Richard Coeur de Lion, the Lionheart,

  • physically brave, chivalrous and brutally ambitious.

  • And the youngest, John. Vindictive, self-serving,

  • but undoubtedly clever.

  • Henry saw in him perhaps the only prince

  • who could properly inherit the government.

  • Between them they managed to undo, in their own spectacular ways,

  • not only the prospects of the kingdom, but, in the space of 15 years,

  • the entire empire their father had so skilfully constructed.

  • It was on Richard that Eleanor pinned her hopes.

  • She was even prepared to go as far as to encourage an alliance

  • between Richard and Henry's bitterest enemy, the king of France.

  • So, in 1189, Richard declared war on his father.

  • This time, Henry faced defeat,

  • forced to watch as his barons defected to Richard.

  • The beleaguered Henry had no choice but to negotiate

  • and agree terms which humbled him before his own son.

  • To onlookers, he appeared to embrace Richard in a kiss of peace.

  • What he really said was, "God spare me long enough

  • "to take revenge on you."

  • When the king asked to see the names of all those who had joined Richard,

  • to his horror, the first on the list was his beloved son, John.

  • Faced with this ultimate treachery, Henry read no more.

  • He died two days later in his castle at Chinon,

  • some chroniclers say of a broken heart.

  • The only child at his deathbed was one of his illegitimate sons.

  • "The others," he said, with Lear-like bitterness,

  • "are the real bastards."

  • A barge took his body downriver to Fontevrault Abbey.

  • When Richard finally viewed the tomb,

  • it is said that blood poured from the nostrils of the corpse.

  • In fact, when Henry II died here at Chinon in 1189,

  • hardly anyone mourned.

  • It seems that most people were off breaking open bottles

  • to celebrate the accession of his son, Richard,

  • the darling of popular folklore and legend.

  • From the very beginning, then,

  • Coeur de Lion had won the public relations battle with his father.

  • He was already the superstar of a dynasty.

  • To prove it, to show that the old regime had passed,

  • that a new glamour had arrived,

  • Richard put on a show-stopping coronation.

  • As if in a reverie of Camelot, he had himself dripping in gold -

  • a golden sword, golden spurs, a golden canopy over his head.

  • To celebrate, the Jews of London presented Richard with a special gift,

  • a gesture that was immediately interpreted by the populace as a sinister plot,

  • and which triggered a general massacre.

  • Richard of Devizes in his chronicle was the first to use the word "holocaustum"

  • to describe the mass murder of England's Jews.

  • To his credit, King Richard made strong efforts

  • to forbid this first wave of pogroms.

  • The problem was he was never around to enforce things.

  • Ironically, the king whose statue stands outside Parliament

  • and who's therefore supposed to personify some sort of elemental Englishness,

  • spent less time in his country than any other monarch.

  • The three lions on his coat of arms were Plantagenet lions.

  • The Cross of St George stood for Aquitaine, not England.

  • Eager to do God's work, Richard vanished to the Holy Land.

  • John immediately set himself up as a rival,

  • creating a virtual state within a state,

  • complete with his own court and mercenary army.

  • In 1192, when news arrived of Richard's capture

  • on his way back from the Crusade, John quickly declared

  • his brother dead and himself king.

  • Eleanor was torn to pieces by this fratricidal struggle.

  • She'd been bred to do what Angevins do best,

  • to preside over government, to manipulate politics.

  • Now she was paralysed by the tragedy of her own family.

  • In desperation, she turned to the Holy Father,

  • to whom she wrote an extraordinary letter.

  • I, Eleanor, Queen of England, unhappy mother,

  • pitied by no one, have arrived at this miserable old age.

  • Two sons lie in dust and their unhappy mother is tortured by their memory.

  • King Richard is in irons.

  • His brother John ravages the kingdom with fire and sword.

  • I know not which side to take.

  • If I leave England, I abandon the kingdom of my son John,

  • torn by civil war.

  • If I stay, I may never see the dearly beloved face

  • of my son Richard again.

  • There was nothing the Pope could do about her plight.

  • Money, however, could do the trick.

  • Two years and 34 tons of gold later,

  • Richard was ransomed into freedom, but his kingdom was bankrupt.

  • The cost of acting out heroic war games

  • was measured in blood as well as money.

  • Showing contempt for the defenders of the besieged castle

  • by standing in front of them without armour,

  • a lone archer's bolt found the join between Richard's neck and his shoulder.

  • The wound turned gangrenous. Within ten days, the Lionheart was dead,

  • a triumph of daredevil romance over common sense.

  • His body was laid in a tomb at the foot of his father's, in Anjou.

  • The heart of the Lionheart was taken to the great cathedral

  • at Rouen in Normandy, which seems fitting,

  • since this city was always more of a capital to Richard than London.

  • John, who succeeded him, was buried in England,

  • mostly in Worcester Cathedral, because the Monks of Craxton Abbey

  • had taken care to steal away his entrails,

  • making John in death, as he'd been in life, one could say, gutless.

  • It was as a politician that John was most obviously a wretched failure.

  • Under his father, the empire had been sustained

  • by a shrewd combination of charisma and feudal loyalty.

  • John's problem was his difficulty in believing that anyone

  • would ever be more than a fair-weather friend.

  • So he relied on blackmail and extortion,

  • threats to the barons rather than promises.

  • Assuming disloyalty, he ended up guaranteeing it.

  • So when John needed the barons most, when Normandy was threatened

  • by the French king, they weren't there for him.

  • The result was a catastrophic defeat.

  • The loss of Normandy ripped the heart out of Angevin power.

  • Whether or not there was a secret meeting at Bury St Edmunds,

  • with all the major nobles in England sworn to force John to accept reform,

  • it's certainly true that from defeat sprang rebellion.

  • At some point, the barons drafted a document

  • that went well beyond forcing John to stop being vindictive,

  • proposing a catalogue of things the king would not be allowed to do.

  • It was called Magna Carta.

  • Anyone expecting to find in it some sort of primitive constitution

  • is going to be in for a bit of a shock when they read the details,

  • because the liberties enumerated here boil down largely

  • to tax relief for the armoured and landed classes.

  • Even if the Magna Carta is filled with the belly-aching of the barons,

  • that belly-aching turned out to have profound consequences

  • for the future of England.

  • For, by putting so much weight on the authority of a common law,

  • the Angevins had stirred in the nobility

  • a dawning realisation that this was their law too.

  • A generation before, the barons couldn't have cared less

  • about the rights of men held in prison for unstated causes.

  • That was what happened to commoners.

  • But under John, bad things had happened to them -

  • land stolen, widows hounded, heirs made to disappear.

  • Now was the time to use the weapons

  • Henry II's revolution in justice had put into their hands,

  • and, by an amazing irony, the Angevins became

  • the schoolmasters of their own correction.

  • Henry II's transformation of royal justice

  • had come back to bite his own dynasty.

  • So if it isn't exactly the birth certificate of democracy,

  • it is the death certificate of despotism.

  • It spells out, for the first time, the fundamental principle

  • that the law is not simply the will or the whim of the king.

  • The law is an independent power unto itself,

  • and the king could be brought to book for violating it.

  • None of this was apparent right away.

  • Ten weeks after Magna Carta was signed,

  • it was annulled by the Pope,

  • and John went back to fighting his battles by the sword,

  • against the rebel barons and against the first successful invasion by a king of France.

  • For a few months in 1216, much of England was ruled by the Dauphin.

  • John died on campaign in Norfolk,

  • facing the windswept waters of the Wash.

  • Fighting had quickened his appetite, and he ate a meal so hearty

  • it paid him back with a fatal spasm of dysentery.

  • As for the barons of England, they had no appetite for civil war,

  • much less rule from France.

  • So when John's nine-year-old son was proclaimed Henry III

  • at Gloucester Cathedral, they rallied to him.

  • What they were rallying to was not so much a person now as a contract,

  • the understanding guaranteed by the reissue of the charter

  • that, from now on, the government of England

  • had to be accountable to the sovereignty of the law.

  • The ramshackle conglomerate of the Angevin empire

  • had fallen apart almost as quickly as it had risen,

  • but in the England to which it was reduced something solid was left,

  • something that's best measured not in masonry or mileage,

  • but in magistrates.

  • So the best thing that can be said for the Angevins

  • was that they left behind a country that didn't need them any more.

  • Why hunt for Excalibur

  • when you had something much more potent -

  • Magna Carta.

England, 1154, nearly a century after the Battle of Hastings.

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