Geoffrey of Anjou marries Empress Matilda

June 17, 1128

Henry I married his widowed daughter to a fourteen-year-old Angevin count whose yellow broom sprig gave his house the name Plantagenet. Matilda was twenty-five and furious. Their eldest son Henry would inherit an empire stretching from the Pyrenees to Scotland. The marriage was stormy from the start; the couple separated repeatedly, and Matilda regarded her young husband with the contempt of a former empress for a provincial count.