The Angevins were the first of the Plantagenet kings. Their name comes from the French county of Anjou (whose emblem was the broom, planta genista). The first Angevin king was Henry II (reigned AD 1154-89), William I’s great-grandson and son of Geoffrey, Count of Anjou. Henry’s realm, the Angevin Empire, encompassed England, Normandy, Anjou, Aquitaine, Brittany, Poitou, Gascony, Wales and Ireland.

Henry was able and energetic and one of the most powerful monarchs in Europe. He spent years defending his French territories against the growing power of the king of France. The last twenty years of his life, however, were blighted by quarrels with his sons and his wife over the partition of the Empire, which were never resolved.

Henry’s son, Richard I ‘The Lionheart’, (reigned 1189-99) managed by diplomatic and military skill to hold his father’s inheritance in spite of years spent crusading in the Holy Land. The last Angevin king was Richard’s brother John (reigned 1199-1215). Tactless and militarily inept, by 1205, John had lost all the Angevin territories across the Channel except Gascony to Philip II of France. John’s son Henry III (reigned 1216-72) was never able to get them back.