Henry, King of England

Henry (1148-1214), known within his own lifetime as "Henry the Conqueror" was King of the Anglo-Normans from 1159 until his death. From 1183 onwards, he also held the title of King of the Franks, a title he claimed through the grandfather he was named for, Henry III of Francia.

Henry was an extremely succesful ruler whose reign would cast a large shadow over future western European history. He had come to the throne at the age of eleven, the elder son of King Robert II, but avoided the pitfalls of being a child monarch thanks to the political skills of his mother, Bertha of Paris. Henry began to take more and more active control of the kingdom as he grew, and by the age of fifteen he had largely come into his full power. He showed his military aptitude early on, inflicting a heavy defeat on a Northumbrian army at the Battle of Pendle in 1168, and then campaigning extensively in Wales.

With the death of his great-uncle Louis VI of Francia in 1183, Henry intervened in the indecisive Francian royal succession, and was eventually crowned King of the Franks with German support in December of that year. The German alliance was based upon the surrender of large swathes of notionally Francian territory east of Paris, and tension quickly grew over this, nearly erupting into open war in 1191. Due to Henry's capable military reputation, the Germans ultimately backed down.

Henry backed the creation of the Patriarchate of Paris and the Parisian Orthodox Church in 1197, and donated lands to the new Patriarch in 1198, hoping to create a buffer between himself and Germany and also to ensure the new religious leader remained a close ally. This gambit largely worked for Henry's reign, although the relative subordination of the Parisian Orthodox Church to the Francian monarchy did not last long after his death.

The later years of King Henry were violent ones, in which the King was busy dealing with Northumbrian attacks and expanding the royal presence in Ireland. These distractions meant that little thought was given to the matteer of Henry's succession, and the crown ultimately passed to his half-mad elder son Robert, bypassing the younger and more talented Richard. Despite Henry's other successes, this oversight led to fifty years of trouble for the next three Francian kings.