Henry II's life rose and fell like a rough sea. After winning the English throne at just 21 years old, he put England back together again after the ravages of the civil war known as The Anarchy.

He wed the beautiful and famous Eleanor of Aquitaine, and had with her 7 children who survived into adulthood - including Richard the Lionheart and the later King John.

And it was he who created the Angevin Empire.

But he was also the King who inadvertently ordered the murder of Thomas Becket, the Archbishop of Canterbury. He was the King who suffered no less than three rebellions from his sons, and the man who went to his grave knowing that his favourite, John, had finally joined them.

Henry II was a man whose energy and vitality thrust the Angevins into the international limelight, but who ultimately could not control his own family.

This is his story, and the beginnings of the famous Richard the Lionheart.

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The year is 1120 and the mood aboard The White Ship is exultant. The young lords of England and Normandy are celebrating beating the French by drinking and carousing late into the night. Among them, England's heir - William Aetheling.

But leaving for a crossing of the English Channel so late and completely half-cut, the party was about to be cut savagely short.

The outcome led to one of England's most brutal civil wars, The Anarchy, and to the rise of the Angevins and an Empire that stretched from Scotland to the borders of Spain.

Listen now to the stories of one of England's greatest dynasties, of the likes of Richard the Lionheart and King John, and cataclysmic battles in France, Scotland, Sicily and the Holy Land.

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This is it. It all comes down to this moment.

Ever since Alfred the Great had come surging out of the swamps he had been hiding in to defeat the Vikings at Edington, he and his children and grandchildren had been inexorably pushing the Vikings out of the Anglo-Saxon kingdoms.

Aethelred was soon to conquer Northumbria which had been held by the Danes for a hundred years, and England was born.

But no sooner had the new nation come screaming into the world than a massive Norse-Irish-Scottish alliance came screaming into Aethelred's new kingdom. It threatened to undo everything that had been achieved.

At Brunanburh in 937 AD the future of England would be decided.

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