Family History 2.22

Bigelow History: Pre-1630

 

More on Geoffrey Plantagenet

  

Geoffrey

When King Henry died, England chose Stephen as the new king, but Matilda challenged this, and while she led a rebellion in England, Geoffrey spent the next few years fighting to control his northern French dominions, and as we have seen regained Matilda's Normandy by 1144.

 

By a Treaty in 1153, it was agreed that Stephen should continue as King during his lifetime, but that he should be followed by Geoffrey and Matilda's son, Henry. This happened in 1154.

 

 In 1151, Henry had married Eleanor of Provence, who we met in a previous post. So the ancestral line of the Barcelonan counts from Bello of Carcassonne met the ancestral line of the counts of Anjou in a king of England when Henry and Eleanor's son, Edward, became king on Henry's death.

 

Meantime Henry's life is worth a fuller account.

 

Henry II

Two main issues absorbed Henry's attention in the first part of his reign. He extended his authority over the lands previously controlled by his grandfather, Henry I, so that by 1172 he was in control of England, Wales, the western half of France, and the eastern half of Ireland.

 

The second issue was the relationship between his kingdom and the Church. Henry and his former friend, Thomas Becket, Archbishop of Canterbury, struggled to gain the upper hand through the 1160s. In 1170 Becket died at the hands of a group of Henry's knights.

 

Henry's sons fought among themselves, and with their father, for the succession. By the time Henry died in 1189 only the youngest, John, was left, and the kingdom was still splintered by the continuous civil wars that had taken place.