All language subtitles for A.History.of.Britain.03of15.Dynasty.DivX5-AC3.www.MVGroup.org

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.