Geoffrey the Fair, count of Anjou, was the first of his line to bear the surname Plantagenet, an epithet he gained from the sprig of broom (genêt) he wore in his hat. He became count of Anjou in 1129 after his father, Fulk V, had gone to Jerusalem.

Geoffrey was a clever man, thought handsome by contemporaries. He was tall, graceful and strong, with a fair and ruddy countenance and sharp eyes. Well educated, he gloried in recalling the deeds of his ancestors and played up to the chivalric ideal. Yet he was also cold and cruel. His career as count was in large measure dominated by the pursuit of his wife Matilda's inheritance of Normandy and England, although he imposed limits on his participation: he was single-minded in his determination to conquer Normandy, Anjou's great enemy, but gave no help in England.

Geoffrey and Matilda had been married in 1129 when he was 15 and she was 26. Like so many marriages of the time, it was an arranged match, planned by Henry I, Matilda's father, to detach Anjou from a hostile coalition of northern French opponents and to assist Matilda's chances of suceeding him in Normandy and England. Her first marriage had been to the German emperor, Henry V, who had died in 1125. She had been despatched to Germany at the age of 12 and brought back to her father's court 12 years later, in 1126, as his sole surviving legitimate child.

From the start she despised her adolescent second husband as her social inferior and she seems never to have warmed to him.

Geoffrey equally disliked Matilda, yet both were tough and calculating, able to exploit their loveless marriage for mutual political gain. They produced the children necessary for the continuation of their lines, then went their separate ways, never deviating from personal political ambitions.

Matilda alienated all whom she ought to have wooed when she ruled England for a short period in 1141-42. During that brief episode of victory she refused to stand to greet her two chief supporters, her uncle, King David of Scotland, and her half-brother, Earl Robert of Gloucester, and greatly angered them. She also insisted on levying an unreasonably heavy tax from the citizend of London, and turned their loyalty and co-operation into hatred and resistance; she was forced to flee from the city. Driven by an iron will to gain what she regarded as her inheritance, her personality was one of the chief obstacles to the success of her cause.

Haughty, hard and inflexible, she was criticized by contemporaries for her lack of feminine qualities. The enduring image of her is of a daughter who was at war with her father, Henry I, when he died and who made no effort at reconciliation in his last hours. But she was handsome and brave, a powerful woman in an age dominated by men, and could inspire great loyalty in others -- if not in her husband.