Dynasty A History of Britain by Simon Schama

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 and impossibly bad King John,

and the impossibly glamorous Richard the Lionheart.

Henry II has no great monument to his reign.

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.

They had a capacity for both creation and self-destruction.

What their intelligence built, their passions destroyed.

They were called the Angevins,

named after the French-speaking province of Anjou.

At the height of their power, they were the masters of everything that counted in Christendom.

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 a civil war

that was being fought by two cousins, Stephen and Matilda,

the grandchildren of William the Conqueror.

Stephen seized the crown, but if Matilda couldn't beat him with an army, she could do so with a wedding:

one 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 -

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, Henry was 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 possibly offer.

And yet something rather surprising happened between the teenage Arthur and the mercurial Guinevere.

Something not 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 for her part Eleanor saw not just the usual feudal spur-clanking bonehead,

but beyond a stocky frame and barrel chest, someone who was an intriguing peculiarity -

the rare prince who looked right with a falcon on one hand and a book in the other.

But 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 then that Eleanor grew up, as her contemporaries put it, welcoming, vivacious,

her handsome 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 together at Westminster Abbey, King and Queen of England.

When they emerged they were the French-speaking sovereigns

of an enormous realm which stretched from the Pyrenees, through the vineyards of Gascony,

along the cod-fish-run coastal waters of Brittany, then 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, masters of the mills and rivers.

So if this was indeed springtime,

Henry and Eleanor had just got themselves the fattest and the ripest fruit.

Still, it's unlikely they ever thought of it as a true empire in the Roman sense of a single realm.

Its 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, rather, 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 thing to know what one was supposed to do about being king.

Especially king of a country so promising but so 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, for that matter, what did Huntingdonshire know of Henry Plantagenet?

Henry, of course, spoke virtually no English at all.

What he would have grasped, though, 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 was - protect the Church. Two was - preserve intact the lands of your ancestors.

Three, do justice and four, and most sweeping of all, suppress evil laws and customs.

Fulfilling one and two went without saying,

but what was surprising about Henry was that 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

for the precedence 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.

And this was especially ironic

since at the outset the Church seemed to be the strongest pillar of Henry's administration.

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

So when the Archbishop of Canterbury offered up one of its brightest proteges, Thomas Becket,

for the office of Chancellor, Henry listened, looked and gave him the job.

So who exactly was this Becket, then?

Well, for a start he was the first commoner of any kind to make a mark on British history.

And 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, wine, furs or silks coming in.

In this teeming world Becket's father strutted, owner of one of the grandest houses in Cheapside.

Becket was a real Londoner,

with a natural flair for doing what Londoners liked doing most - the getting and spending of money.

Spectacle, costume and despite his notoriously delicate gut, Becket also 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 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.

Above all, Becket was able to keep up with the relentless pace set by Henry himself.

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, some said, of growing fat, never slowed 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 of it now is this raw, ivy-covered stump of stone.

But in Henry's time the place 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.

In fact, Becket saw right through Henry's game of studied informality.

The way he avoided wearing the crown, his preference for 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'd tell his dwindling band of followers,

"Look, 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 the chancellor rode through London,

Henry pointed to the countless destitute and eyeing Thomas' gorgeous scarlet and grey miniver-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, 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.

Yet 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.

In fact, Becket's worldliness must have made him seem precisely the right kind of man

for the job Henry wanted to do, which was 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 around.

This wasn't just an academic quibble. This was a fight to the death.

There were two flash points.

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 would share 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.

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 that a mysterious transformation had taken place in Becket,

when, for instance, the Archbishop stood up in public and opposed, in the 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 -

that they assent unconditionally to what he chose to call 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.

The half-joking comments about fancy clothes that Henry had thrown Becket's way stopped being funny.

They'd become a deadly criminal accusation.

When Thomas decided to dress up for the trial in 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 die-hard 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 of 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' 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 letter smugglers with the know-how to get through the blockade Henry had 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 used 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 - 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 "traitor's 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 chafing of his secret goat-hair underwear.

For once the King was in no mood to quarrel

and agreed not only to restore Thomas to all his powers and authority,

but 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 emotions swept through him.

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

The king got off his own 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 most 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 likewise, 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 halfway, 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 either in Rouen or in England."

And 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 that I will 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 wise-guy 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.

And when he arrived home Thomas 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.

And 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.

And 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 and brought up in my household

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

To anyone who'd witnessed Henry's terrible melt-down 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 then if that's what it took, 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 about 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 Bray and Hugh de Morville

arrived in England and set off for Canterbury.

At around three, they burst into the archbishop's palace where they found Thomas with his advisers.

When the knights came in, he studiously ignored them.

Reginald FitzUrse broke the silence by saying he had an important message from the king -

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

Becket said he had no intention of being treated like a criminal. Things rapidly got ugly.

FitzUrse ominously declared 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.

And 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 here, in the north transept of the cathedral,

and 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.

They were carrying naked swords and 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.

Tough as old boots under the cowl. And 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,

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 TOLLS

It was around 4.30 in the afternoon.

The door was open. Frightened people who had come for the service gathered round the body.

But it was by no means a flock who thought Becket was 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.

And then they discovered what no-one, until 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.

So 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 that would not accept the king's justice was his own.

Because 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 had 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 did 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.

And 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, Richard and John 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 her husband'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 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 down river 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 the 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 reverie of Camelot, he had himself dripping in gold.

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

To celebrate the new reign, 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 waves of pogroms.

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

It's an irony - the king whose statue stands outside parliament

and so is supposed to personify some sort of elemental Englishness,

spent less time in this country that any other monarch.

The three lions on his coat of arms were Plantaganet 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.

But 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.

His brother 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 is tempted to 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 instead 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.

The liberties enumerated here boil down largely to tax relief for the armoured and landed classes.

But even if the Magna Carta is filled with the moans and 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 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.

So 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 had been 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 9-year-old son was proclaimed Henry III at Gloucester Cathedral, they rallied to him.

But 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?

There's much more to discover and debate on the BBC History website.

We've organised special activities round the country.

To find out more, call the History Events line on 08700 10 60 60.

Subtitles by Veronica Wells BBC Scotland - 2000

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