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country in its bleakest hours: a war zone in which empress and king chased each other from town to town and castle to castle, burning property and terrorizing the common people in their quest to grind one another into the bloodstained soil. But his mother, who had carried the fight against Stephen for so long, was gone into retirement. Henry, on the verge of manhood, had come to announce his leadership of the Angevin cause in England.
    This was not Henry’s home. He understood the English language, although he did not speak it. Yet he was no stranger to England. In 1142, aged nine, Henry had been brought briefly to the English front as a figurehead to his mother’s campaign. He had arrived in the dark days, shortly before Matilda’s great escape from the snowy wastes of Oxford. He stayed under the tutelage of his uncle Robert earl of Gloucester as England settled into its vicious stalemate. Henry spent fifteen months studying in Bristol, meeting the famous astronomer, mathematician and Scholastic philosopher Adelard of Bath, who dedicated to the young man a treatise on the astrolabe. Then from 1144, for reasons as much of safety as of political pragmatism, Henry had returned to his father, to help him secure his position as duke of Normandy.
    Henry was a strange-looking young man. His blood was a rich broth of Norman, Saxon and Plantagenet strains. He could switch in seconds from bluff good humour to fierce anger. From his father, hehad inherited his auburn complexion and tireless energy; from his maternal grandfather a powerful domineering streak and the nose for an opportunity. Gerald of Wales, a writer well familiar with the Plantagenet family, left a vivid description of Henry later in life:
Henry II was a man of reddish, freckled complexion, with a large, round head, grey eyes that glowed fiercely and grew bloodshot in anger, a fiery countenance and a harsh, cracked voice. His neck was thrust forward slightly from his shoulders, his chest was broad and square, his arms strong and powerful. His body was stocky, with a pronounced tendency toward fatness, due to nature rather than self-indulgence – which he tempered with exercise. For in eating and drinking he was moderate and sparing …
    From the earliest age, Henry was conspicuously brave, albeit rather reckless. When he had made his second visit to England, in 1147, it had been not to study but to fight. Although he was only thirteen he had managed to hire a small band of mercenaries to accompany him across the Channel, where he attempted to assist his mother’s war effort. The arrival of this wild teenager had briefly terrified England: rumours spread that he had come with thousands of troops and boundless treasure. The truth had been closer to farce: Henry the teenager had barely been able to afford to pay his hired soldiers, who deserted him within weeks of arrival. (‘Weakened by sloth and idleness, overcome by poverty and want, they abandoned the noble youth,’ wrote William of Newburgh.) Ignoring the rumours, Stephen’s reaction to Henry’s teenage invasion was more amused than intimidated: in order to bring the rather embarrassing episode to a close, the king had paid off Henry’s mercenaries for him and sent him packing back to Normandy.
    Still, from those early teenage days there had been promise in Henry’s recklessness. That the thirteen-year-old Henry had the gall to attempt a solo invasion of England – no matter how poorly executed – is testament to his valuable time spent at his father’s side on campaign in Normandy. Geoffrey Plantagenet had involved his son ingovernment since at least 1144, when he witnessed his father’s charters in Angers. He had watched how a long-term military campaign played out amid the complex, fractured politics of the French mainland. He knew then that he was being groomed as duke of Normandy, and it may also have been suggested to him that he would be count of Anjou too.
    It must have been during his days at