Description

Personality

Likes: intellectual pursuits (history, government); the battlefield; his wife and heirs.

Dislikes: the uneducated, 'feminine' men, fiction books.

Fears: the deaths of his children. He is always desirous of more children. Above all, he cannot bear the thought of House Damian losing the crown.

Skills/Talents: Henry keeps his counselors only as a formality. They have rarely persuaded him from his course of action. For numbers, the king is a genius, and he manages the accounts of his household, and of his kingdom, with ease. Books are like water to him and he drinks them in a single gulp, but only those which give him knowledge and insight - fiction is irritating, a waste of fine paper. On the battlefield, he is of admirable talent, though age and injury has made him slower than he once was. Although he would not say so, he is aware that he is second to his eldest son in skill.

Weaknesses: so convinced of the surety of his wisdom and learning, he cannot bear a conflicting opinion, taking it as a personal affront (unless presented in a way that he does not even notice it is a challenge, but more an apology of having thought differently - the way his counselors have learned to persuade him); so fearful of his strong emotions, and love for his children, that he restrains all behind a cold, kingly wall of expectation and emotionlessness (with the exception of his wife, in private.)

General Personality: short-tempered and scholarly by nature, the king has a heart that runs wild with passions. He learned to control them early in his youth. The gruff, unfeeling face he shows to most is the cover of a very emotional man - one who is disturbed by the depths of his emotions. His wife and children are the prize of his heart, but he would dare not coddle his daughter and sons, lest they face the brutal world of war and politics unprepared. Power has let brutality seep into his short temper and he cannot abide dissent or the questioning of his (usually wise) judgment. All refusals of his ideas must be couched in polite, apologetic terms.

History

Henry's earliest memory was of his father's face, elderly and scarred, looming above him like a thundercloud. His childhood was one spent in perpetually swinging moods of terror and happiness. His mother, her husband's third Queen, was a young, high-spirited woman of House Brookhaven who meddled in politics and spoiled her son as much as the King terrorized him with demands of weapons training and formal education. In his youth, he hated his father; with age, he revered his memory and credited him with making him into the strong, wise man he became. It was a parenting style he adopted towards his eldest.

In his childhood, Henry bore a startling resemblance to his youngest son, Raban: kind of heart, inclined to daydream and quietly absorb the knowledge of his tutors, he was well-liked by the people of the castle. But they were traits that his father could not stand in a future King and so they were systematically beaten out of Henry through various means: exposure to warfare from an early age and the insistence that a King could not be governed by his heart. When his mother died, the last of Henry's childhood was at an end. He became cold, withdrawn, and calculative. When his father told him of a betrothal to the Lady Morgana, whom he had never met, his angry response was to take a mistress from his mother's former ladies-in-waiting. They were married just before the old King's death and, to make a clean start of things, Henry put his pregnant mistress aside.

Until, in a terrible labor just a week after Lionel's birth, Morgana was delivered of a stillborn son. The midwives were not sure she could carry another child. The decision was made to take Lionel and pass him off as Morgana's. The objections of the former mistress were not considered.

As the years passed, Morgana's supposed infertility was proven false with the birth of their daughter and another son, but the secret remained. Although his children may have believed otherwise, Henry genuinely loved them beneath his cold exterior. But that did not put him above using them as pawns for his ambitions. Unfortunately, his plans have met with several complications...