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.