Henry II is one of those monarchs for whom my introduction came through the movies. In this case it was the film version of James Goldman’s play The Lion in Winter, which had a stacked cast that included Katherine Hepburn (who won an Oscar for her portrayal of Eleanor of Aquitaine) and Anthony Hopkins and Timothy Dalton, both equally impossibly young. Yet it’s Peter O’Toole’s performance that stands out the most for me, and it’s his face that my mind conjures up whenever I think of the king.
Whether that will remain true once I’m done reading the available biographies of him remains to be seen. The selection of available lives about him is the greatest in number since that of his great-grandfather, William I, and promises to take up an equal amount of time. I’ve decided to start with Richard Barber 1964 book Henry Plantagenet: A Biography of Henry II. Though it’s not the oldest of the modern biographies, it looked especially intriguing given that Barber went on to write the volume about Henry for the Penguin Monarchs series, and I wanted to read the two of them in succession to consider how Barber’s judgments about Henry may have changed over time.
Once I complete Barber’s books, I’m going to turn to W. L. Warren’s biography of Henry for the English Monarchs series. This is one that I have seen referenced practically everywhere, which I usually take as a good measure of the book’s stature. It will be particularly interesting to see how his interpretation compares with that of Barber’s as the latter’s biographies bookend Warren’s study of the king.
After that I plan on reading Louis Francis Salzman’s biography of Henry II. As the oldest of the biographies I’ll be reading about Henry, it will be interesting to see how he interprets the monarch absent the recent scholarship and popular images that have emerged since then. I’ll follow this up with a biography by John T. Appleby, a historian who earned a reputation as a biographer of English kings. This is the first of his books that I’ve read, and it will help me determine whether I should read any more if the number of options for future ones requires me to be more selective.
Finally, I plan on concluding my examination with a pair of recent studies. Based on their titles, both appear to offer more targeted studies of Henry’s life and reign than the aforementioned works. The first of these, by John Hosler, is a study of Henry’s military career, which is a perspective that seems unusual enough to warrant assessing. If the title of the other one, by Claudia Gold, is any indication, it examines Henry’s life through a selection of key moments in it. This approach contributes to why I’m saving it for last, as if my reading of her approach is correct, I’m interested in seeing the merits it offers from the more traditional chronological method and the different insights that it yields on its subject.