Henry II, the Laughing King

Abstract

Chapter 5 explores how Henry II used laughter to exercise power indirectly, and how contemporary writers exploited this to comment on the changing direction of English government. Henry laughed while negotiating political compromises, wittily forced enemies into compliance, and joked while overturning operations of the law. He especially laughed and joked when he felt that abstract ideas of authority had produced injustices he wanted to overturn. By joking, Henry could supplement the mechanisms of government, reinforcing his charismatic authority without explicitly undermining official procedure. Some court writers thus amplified the king’s laughter as a way of critiquing government by code and bureaucracy. Referencing both the intellectual discourses that dignified joking as a truth-telling device, and the narrative tropes that imagined laughter as a mouthpiece for divine authority, these writers created an image that covertly reinstated the sublime authority of royal charisma at variance with the direction of contemporaneous governmental change.