It all began on December 19th

December 19th is a day of great significance to those of us who are fascinated by the Plantagenets in general and the Angevins in particular, for on this date in 1154, the twenty-one year old Henry Fitz Empress, Duke of Normandy and Count of Anjou, and his thirty year old pregnant wife, Eleanor, Duchess of Aquitaine, were crowned in Westminster Abbey. The dynasty they founded would endure for three hundred years and today they and their Devil’s Brood continue to cast a royal spell. That had to be such a happy day for them. When Christ and his Saints Slept, page 738.
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Ranulf had no regrets about what he was leaving behind. After nineteen years of fighting over the English throne, he had no doubts whatsoever that the most dangerous quarry was neither wild boar nor wolf. No hunt was so hazardous as the pursuit of power. Fortunately, his nephew Harry was a skilled huntsman, one of the best he’d ever seen.
He glanced back once. Henry and Eleanor were still out in the snow-blanketed bailey. They waved as Ranulf turned, and that was to be the memory he would carry into Wales: the two of them, standing together in the bright winter sunlight, smiling, sure that the world, like the English crown, was theirs for the taking.
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