The House of Plantagenet was a royal house which originated in the French county of Anjou. The family held the English throne from 1154, with the accession of Henry II, until 1485, when Richard III died in battle. The first three Plantagenet kings of England ruled extensive territories in France and are sometimes called the Angevins to distinguish them from their successors (although the term Angevin is sometimes used to refer to the entire dynasty). After the deposing of Richard II in 1399, two cadet branches of the Plantagenets ruled England: the houses of Lancaster and York.
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 (r. 1327–1377), the Plantagenets developed a new identity, including adopting the language of the ordinary people, Middle English, as 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 death of King Richard III ended both the reign of the Plantagenets and the English Middle Ages. Henry VII, a Lancastrian through the maternal line, 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 made possible 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 (or Plante Genest) 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 ("gold") 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 (1455–1487) 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" and can refer to inhabitants of that region or any of a number of royal houses that descended from the counts or dukes of Anjou. In the 12th century, angevin also referred to the currency used in the continental territories of the king of England, equivalent to English sterling. The term is used by some historians to refer to the first three kings of England from the Plantagenet dynasty: Henry II (), son of Geoffrey of Anjou, and his two sons Richard I () and John (). Sometimes, however, Angevin is used to refer to the entire Plantagenet royal house.See the various usages in ; ; ; ; John lost Anjou and most of his other French territories, making England, rather than France, the center of gravity of the realm.
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 (French for "Plantagenet area") was acceptable. Nonetheless, historians have continued to use "Angevin Empire".For instance, and
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 (who would become Henry II) on 18 May 1152. Consequently, the Angevins acquired the Duchy of Aquitaine. Stephen's wife, Matilda of Boulogne, and elder son, Eustace, both died in 1153, leading to the Treaty of Wallingford. The treaty agreed to the peace offer that Empress 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.
Angevin zenith Of Henry's siblings, William and Geoffrey died unmarried and childless, but the tempestuous marriage of Henry and Eleanor, who already had two daughters (Marie and Alix) through her first marriage to King Louis, produced eight children in thirteen years: Henry the Young King (1155–1183) Matilda, Duchess of Saxony (1156–1189) — married Henry the Lion, Duke of Bavaria. The eldest amongst the couple's children, Richenza, is probably the daughter English chroniclers call Matilda, who was left in Normandy with her grandparents in 1185 and married firstly to Geoffrey, count of Perche, and secondly to Enguerrand de Coucy. The eldest son, Henry, became duke of Saxony and count palatine of the Rhine. His brother Otto was nominated by his uncle Richard I as earl of York and count of Poitiers before being elected emperor in opposition to the Hohenstaufen candidate. Otto was crowned in Rome but he was later excommunicated and declared deposed. Childless, Otto lost power following the defeat of the Welf and Angevin forces at the Battle of Bouvines. The youngest child, William of Winchester, married Princess Helena of Denmark. Their only son, also called Otto, was the sole male heir of his uncle Henry. The ducal house of Brunswick-Lüneburg and the British royal house of Windsor both descend from him. Richard I, King of England (1157–1199). He had no legitimate offspring, but is thought to have had two illegitimate sons, of whom little is known, called Fulk and Philip, Lord of Cognac. Geoffrey II, Duke of Brittany (1158–1186) – married Constance, daughter of Duke Conan IV of Brittany and became duke of Brittany by right of his wife. The couple's son, Arthur I, Duke of Brittany, was a competitor to his uncle John for the Angevin succession and disappeared mysteriously as an adolescent in 1203.