Royal FamilY: the Children of Henry II and Eleanor of Aquitaine

Large families were a plus for royalty and nobility in the Medieval era.  Infant and child mortality was high and whether or not a child survived to adulthood was a matter of luck.  Sons who survived could hope to inherit some or all of their family's domains, but would also serve as commanders, governors or in whatever other position was needed.  Daughters were vital for forging marriage alliances through marriage.  Nor was being illegitimate necessarily a bar to advancement.  The illegitimate son of a king still bore royal blood and could inherit land or titles.  King's daughters by unofficial unions could also hope to marry well.  To that end, many Plantagenet kings had large families, both official and otherwise, who in turn had large families, which makes for plenty of drama and intrigue. The children of Henry II and Eleanor of Aquitaine, who are somewhat familiar from the movie The Lion in Winter, are a case in point.

Eleanor had been married before, to Louis VII of France.  She had two daughters by him, Marie and Alix.  When Louis and Eleanor divorced, Louis kept custody of the girls, though they maintained a relationship with their mother.  Then Eleanor married Henry, and the childbearing began in earnest.  Their first son William IX, Count of Poitiers, died as a toddler (1153-1156).  The other children lived to grow up, including. Henry the Young King (1155-1183); Matilda, Duchess of Saxony and Bavaria (1156-1189); Richard I the Lionheart (1157-1199); Geoffrey II, Duke of Brittany (1158-1186); Eleanor, Queen of Castile (1162-1214); Joanna, Queen of Sicily (1165-1199); and John, King of England (1166-1216).  Three Kings, two queens, a Duchess, a Duke, and a Count.  Henry was intended as his father's heir, taking England, Normandy and Anjou, which is why he was crowned a junior king in his father's lifetime.  This didn't sit too well with Richard and Geoffrey.  Richard was heir to his mother's domains, including Aquitaine and Poitou, but he also wanted his father's inheritance.  So did Geoffrey, who was Duke of Brittany by right of his wife.  John, who would have to be content with land in Ireland if he got anything at all, was hurt at being left out.  Henry, Richard and Geoffrey started a civil war that turned into a rebellion against their own father.  It was in this atmosphere that Henry called his Christmas court at Chinon in 1183 as depicted in the movie.

An often-told story about Henry II is that he once showed a visitor a tapestry or a mural in the Palace of Winchester that showed an adult eagle being cannibalized by its own offspring.  Henry explained that his own sons would do the same to him and he died fighting Richard.  But for all their squabbling, the Plantagenet siblings would stand together against a common foe.  Richard bailed his sister Joanna out of her dispute over her dowry with her husband's successor, Tancred of Sicily.  After the Crusade, he was trying to reach the safety of the domains of his brother-in-law, Henry the Lion of Saxony, when fate in the form of Leopold of Austria got in the way.  Eleanor, who would survive all but two of her children, had to rally support for Richard during his absence on crusade, while keeping John at bay.  It makes for good movies and novels but would have been a hazardous life for anyone who aroused the ire of the power couple of the age or their brood of ravenous eaglets.
 

Empire: Plantagenet Domain at its Height

When we say the Plantagenets had an empire, it's a relative term.  In comparison to Rome or even Napoleon Bonaparte, they may have been small potatoes.  But in their heyday (1154-1249), they were one of the more powerful monarchies in Europe.

The Plantagenets started out as counts of Anjou, a small county in the lower Loire Valley, France based on the town of Angers.  It's from this county that the early Plantagenets get their other common historical name, Angevins.  Geoffrey, Count of Anjou (1113-1151) and father of Henry II (1133-1189), had a claim to the English throne through his wife, known as Empress Matilda (1102-1167).  However, at the time, England was considered a backwater.  The territory that was worth anything lay on the European continent and there were only two ways to get that real estate in one's possession, marriage and conquest.  Henry II was capable of both, securing his claims to England and marrying the wealthiest heiress of her day, Eleanor, Duchess of Aquitaine (1122-1204) in her own right.  That brought a large swath of Southern and Coastal France into the Plantagenet dominions.  Though Eleanor was Duchess of Acquitaine, it was understood under the conventions of the time that her husband and sons would take the lion's share of ruling it for her, a bone of constant contention between Eleanor and her husband.

From here, Henry II steadily acquired yet more French countryside, including the valuable seaport of Calais, which the English managed to hold until the reign of Mary Tudor (1553-58).  Thus, at its height, the Angevin Empire stretched from the Pyrenees to the border of Scotland (and maybe into Scotland, from the standpoint of any right-thinking Plantagenet King, just ask Edward I, 1239-1307), as well as most of Ireland.  Though he'd been crowned in London in an elaborate ceremony, for the time and given Henry's low tolerance level of fuss, he spent little time in London.  The capitals of the empire were Henry's native Anger and Chinon in 1183, which is where the Lion in Winter shows the family at its reality-show finest, squabbling over who would rule what at Henry's death.  In those days, it wasn't a guarantee that the eldest child, who was Geoffrey (1158-1186) at this point, would get everything.  Eleanor wanted Richard (1157-1199) to have Aquitaine and neither parent was willing to give John (1166-1216) very much other than Ireland, maybe.

In the end, John inherited the lot after his elder brothers Henry (the Young King, 1155-1183), Geoffrey and Richard died.  Then, he lived up to his nickname of John Lackland.  The 1214 Battle of Bouvines brought the loss of Normandy and the Plantagenet home county of Anjou.  In the 1429 Treaty of Paris, John's son Henry III (1207-1272) would be forced to relinquish all title to Anjou, Poitou, Maine and Normandy.  Bits and pieces of territory fell away over the years.  And they never got it back, keeping only Calais and the area around that city known as the Pale, though they would spend an entire war known as the Hundred Years War (1337-1453) trying.  Finally, Calais was lost (1558) but in a peculiar twist of history, the Kings of England continued to title themselves King of England, Ireland and France, the Stuart (1603-1714) dynasty placing the most emphasis on this title.  It wasn't until the time of the French Revolution (1789-1799) that George III, otherwise not known for his grip on reality, finally recognized the obvious and quit claiming France.  An empire that had once contained the modern countries of Belgium, portions of France, Guernsey, Ireland, Jersey, and the United Kingdom was over at last, hundreds of years after it had really crumbled.