When Henry Plantagenet came to the English throne in 1154 as Henry II, it had been eighty-eight years since the Norman invaders had overthrown the Saxon dynasty. Against a background of inherited power and unrelieved intrigue, Richard Barber set his biography of the first great English King. Henry Plantagenet is the history of both a man and a nation in the making. Claiming the English throne through his mother, Henry succeeded King Stephen in 1154. Through his father Henry already ruled half the area of present-day France. The long struggle to restore royal authority, which had withered under Stephen's reign, led Henry into conflict with the church, embodied by Thomas Becket, whom Henry himself had made Archbishop of Canterbury in 1162. This famous battle between friends ended with a formal agreement on the fundamental powers of chuch and state. It also ended with the murder of Becket in 1170, for which Henry was indirectly responsible.