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Geoffrey’s side that Henry became a keen rider. He spent hours on horseback following his father about Anjou and Normandy, learning to gallop at what would become legendary speed. (In later years, Henry’s legs would be bowed from the shape of the ever-present saddle between them.)
    And Geoffrey must also have taught his son much about the conduct of business and war in a treacherous land. Twelfth-century French politics was violent, changeable and rough, and Geoffrey was an adept player. The land was divided into loose and shifting territories that owed little or no allegiance to any central authority, ruled across large swathes by noblemen who were little more than warlords.
    As he watched his tenacious father grind his way through a conquest of Normandy, Henry learned that political survival was a game of forestalling shifts of power, managing volatile relations between one’s friends and enemies, and appealing to the right allies at the right time in order to further territorial objectives. In such a bewildering business, only the most devious survived.
    In this game of feudal lordship, Henry knew that he had one potentially huge advantage. He was the son of an empress, with a claim to the English throne. France contained many powerful dukes and counts, but only two kings: the king of England and the king of France. To be a major force on the Continent, and to stand up to the new French king Louis VII who had succeeded to the throne in 1137. Henry knew that he must be more than just another powerful count or duke. He was first and foremost ‘Henry, son of the daughter of King Henry [I] and right heir of England and Normandy’.
    When he arrived in England in 1149 the young Henry’s first task was to establish himself as a credible successor to the empress’s cause. It was all very well having royal blood: he now needed the recognitionof his peers. Here, the long days in the saddle paid off, as Henry rode north to be invested with knighthood by his uncle, King David of Scotland.
    He was girded in Carlisle on Whit Sunday 1149. And now, sporting the belt of knighthood, Henry decided to show England that he had the martial valour to match. On his way back south he attempted an attack on York. This was unsuccessful, and Henry had to flee to the Channel, harried all the way by royal attacks. The sixteen-year-old knight made his way to the south-west, relieved an attack on Devizes by Stephen’s son Eustace, and skipped back to Normandy. If it was not an entirely fruitful mission, it had a good deal more impact than anything seen from his family in England since 1141.
    In 1149 and 1150, Henry was emerging as a man of destiny. He was gathering political gravity. In 1150 his father invested him formally as duke of Normandy – a title Henry had already been affecting for some months. And in August 1151, Duke Henry performed homage to King Louis VII of France for Normandy: a ceremonial and manifestly public declaration of his ducal right and dignity.
    Then, in September, Geoffrey Plantagenet died. He was thirty-nine years old. According to John of Marmoutier, Geoffrey was returning from a royal council when he was taken ‘severely ill with a fever at Château-du-Loir. [He] collapsed on a couch. Then, looking into the future of his land and his people with the spirit of prophecy, he forbade Henry his heir to introduce the customs of Normandy or England into his own county, nor the reverse.’ Then: ‘the death of so great a prince having been foretold by a comet, his body returned from earth to heaven.’
    It was an abrupt end to a highly eventful career. And it left the whole fate of the Angevin cause resting squarely on the shoulders of Geoffrey’s eldest son. The eighteen-year-old Henry duke of Normandy still had far to go if he wanted to realize the ambitions of his parents. The fight would be hard. But the rewards that it promised were almost beyond imagination.

A Scandalous Wife
    On 18 May 1152, at the cathedral in