Eleanor of Aquitaine

by Marion Meade

  Since Henry had returned to England six months earlier, he had already clashed with Becket over several of these cases, Thomas having rescued the accused from the king’s court by claiming jurisdiction. At Woodstock now, still smarting from his defeat over the sheriff’s aids, Henry brought up the case of a Bedford canon, Philip Brois, who had been accused of murdering a knight. Tried in the court of the bishop of Lincoln, Brois had cleared himself by compurgation, an ancient practice in which the accused solemnly swears his innocence while twelve oath helpers also swear a similar belief on his behalf. This was enough for the Church, since the act of perjury jeopardized one’s immortal soul; it was not enough for Henry, who felt convinced that justice had not been done and who, moreover, felt annoyed that Thomas had whisked Brois from the clutches of the common law. The meeting at Woodstock adjourned with Henry formally requesting a report on the number of capital crimes committed since 1154, paying particular attention to the crimes of the clergy. As of July 1, 1163, the fatal gauntlet had been thrown down to Thomas Becket.

  What began at Woodstock as more or less a personal feud soon threatened to escalate into a full-fledged contest between Church and State. During the summer and into the fall, the nobility scrambled to take sides in preparation for the storm that now appeared certain. At the same time, Henry’s ever-increasing fury at Becket reverberated through the royal household, and although he did not wholly neglect his other projects—later, in July, he arranged for Prince Henry to receive the homage of King Malcolm of Scotland—nevertheless, Eleanor and his family, indeed most concerns, faded into insignificance alongside his all-consuming anger. And yet he still oscillated between bouts of rage and periods of pure bewilderment, as if he were pinching himself in disbelief over what had happened. His treasured friend, the man he had been closest to during his entire life, had betrayed him. What galled him most perhaps was that he, the king who prided himself on judging men’s characters, had made a colossal mistake in the case of Thomas.

  On the first of October, after further clashes with Becket, Henry was ready to bring the warfare into the open. The royal family had moved back to Westminster, where Henry convened an assembly of his bishops and barons to settle—or so he announced—a dispute between the archbishops of Canterbury and York, who had been wrangling about the respective privileges of their two sees. However, his opening address to the convocation that morning had to do with a very different matter. As if four months had not elapsed since Woodstock, he again took up the question of criminous clerks. Before his listeners quite realized what was happening, Henry had briskly plunged into a peroration in which he demanded that “clerks seized or convicted of great crimes should be deprived of the protection of the Church and handed over to his officers.” According to his records, in the nine years of his reign, over a hundred murders, in addition to uncountable rapes, thefts, and extortions, had been committed by clerics who, because of their immunity from civil trial, had gone virtually unpunished. The Church courts, he added, failed to impose severe enough penalties to deter lawbreakers from committing further crimes. Speaking with elaborate patience, Henry was careful to stress that he had consulted his legal advisers, and they too saw no reason why all subjects should not live under the same law. Thomas, invited to the council ostensibly for the purpose of discussing his quarrel with the see of York, quickly understood that he had been tricked and, furthermore, that the king intended to force the issue.

  Now Henry directed his eyes squarely upon Becket. “My lord of Canterbury,” he challenged, “I demand that with the consent of yourself and of your fellow bishops, clerks who are caught committing crimes, or have confessed them, be degraded, deprived of all protection of the Church and handed over to my court for corporal punishment.” There was, he quickly added, no need for the Church to take alarm at his proposed remedy; it was nothing more than a return to the customs of the land when it had been ruled by his grandfather. It was, he implied, a tradition.

  Even so, it was not a tradition that anyone remembered, and in fact, there is no evidence that Henry I had ever carried out any such procedure with lawless clerks. In the deathly silence that followed, Thomas and his bishops withdrew to consult among themselves. None of them had ever expected Henry to go quite so far, and some, frightened, argued that crimes of the clergy, more reprehensible by virtue of their order, should therefore be punished more harshly than the crimes of ordinary laymen. Thomas pointed out, however, that double punishment ran contrary to canon law: “God does not judge twice for the same offense.” After further discussion, they agreed that the king had attacked the freedom of the Church and that they must not yield to his demand. Filing back into the hall, Thomas stepped before the king. He stood tall and proud in his costly archbishopric robes, his once handsome face now pale from fasting, and looked down his long nose at Henry. “The customs of Holy Church are fully set forth in the canons and decrees of the Fathers,” his voice rang out. “It is not fitting for you, my lord king, to demand, nor for us to grant anything that goes beyond these, nor ought we to consent to any innovation. We ought to humbly obey the old laws, not establish new ones.”

  He was not demanding anything of the kind, Henry retorted with belligerence. He was only asking that the customs observed in the time of his grandfather be observed in his. And furthermore, he added cuttingly, there were holier and better archbishops than Becket in those days who never raised any controversy about them with the king.

  Thomas answered without flinching. “What was done by former kings ought not to be called customs but abuses, and whatever practices were observed that ran against the laws laid down in the canons was done out of fear of kings.” He continued to inveigh grimly against “such depraved practices,” concluding that Henry would always find the clergy “obedient and ready to accord with your will and pleasure in everything that we can possibly consent to, saving our order.”

  Henry, his temper having grown progressively shorter as the day wore on, began to swear at Becket. “By the eyes of God!” he roared, “let me hear no word of your order! I demand absolute and express agreement to my customs.” Rounding on the bishops, he asked each one in turn if he were willing to observe the customs of the realm, and all but one echoed Becket; they would obey the king in all things “saving our order.” By shifting his ground from the abuses of criminal clerks to a general acceptance of what he called the ancient customs, Henry undoubtedly forced the bishops to make this reservation, “saving our order,” to protect themselves, but his change of emphasis would prove to be a mistake. The behavior of some clerks was already a national scandal, and an impartial contemporary observer such as William of Newburgh, himself a cleric, deplored those bishops who were “more concerned with defending the liberties and dignities of the clergy than they were with correcting and restraining their vices, and they thought they were doing a service to God and the Church by protecting criminous clerks from public punishment.” Henry’s original desire to secure the peace and order of his realm, which is what he meant by “observing the ancient customs,” soon became lost in semantics.

  The whole day passed in argument, and now it was growing dark. Once again Henry turned to Becket. Puffing with anger, the king demanded that he and the other bishops take an oath to observe the customs “in good faith,” without any reservation whatsoever. He wanted a clear answer. Thomas made a last effort to pacify him. “My lord king,” he said soothingly, “we have already sworn fealty to you by our life and limbs and earthly honor, saving our order, and in that earthly honor were included all the customs of the kingdom.” No oath they could take now would be more binding.

  Suddenly Henry rose and bounded out of the hall without a parting word, without even waiting for the customary blessing of the bishops, leaving behind a confused hush. Before daybreak the next morning he sent a messenger to Becket dispossessing him of the manors of Berkhampstead and Eye, which he had held since his chancellorship, and also removing Prince Henry from his tutelage. This done, he left Wes
tminster without speaking to the prelates. What might have been a difficult but reasonable discussion on how best to deal with criminal clerks had now been blown out of all proportion, the issues forgotten in the clash of personalities. Even though Eleanor disliked Thomas, even though his recent problems had failed to call forth her sympathy, she still must have watched uneasily the extreme emotional reaction these encounters drew from her husband. For the first time since she had known him, he was allowing personal feelings to direct his actions. She had seen him rage and roll on the floor chewing straw, but this hostility, the result of emotions that ran even deeper than anyone had suspected, was something else. Betrayal was not, evidently, a situation that Henry could handle, although what in his background would have accounted for it is uncertain. Before her eyes, he was regressing from a clearheaded executive to a small boy wreaking vengeance on everything in sight. Nor was it easy to understand Thomas, his unyielding obstinacy, his determination to prove himself as powerful as the king. He knew that Henry did not restrain his anger, either in public or in private. What did he hope to gain by pushing the king?

  Not long after that, Henry made his last peaceful overture toward his one-time friend. Meeting Thomas in a Northampton meadow on horseback, he spoke freely and plaintively: “Have I not raised you from poverty and lowliness to the pinnacle of honour and rank? And even that seemed little enough to me until I also made you father of the kingdom, placing you even above myself. How is it then that all these proofs of my love for you, which everyone knows, you have so soon blotted from your mind, so that you are not only ungrateful but oppose me in everything?” One feels, thinly disguised in those words, Henry’s fantasy that something—a word, an embrace, a look—would restore their friendship. Whatever his hopes, he was not prepared for Thomas’s rebuff.

  The archbishop spoke very distinctly. “I have not forgotten your favors, my lord, favors which are not yours alone for God deigned to confer them on me through you.” With that he went on at length to explain that when his duty to king conflicted with his duty to God, he had no choice but to obey the latter. His defense was turning into a lecture, and when he warned that “we must obey God rather than men,” Henry would hear no more. “I don’t want a sermon from you,” he interrupted curtly. “Aren’t you the son of a peasant of mine?”

  “It is true that I am not descended from a long line of kings, but then neither was Blessed Peter, on whom the Lord bestowed the keys of the kingdom of heaven and dominion over the whole Church.”

  “That is true,” Henry returned, “but he died for his Lord.”

  It was not meant as a threat, but Thomas, interestingly enough, seems to have interpreted it as one, for he answered gravely, “I too will die for my Lord when the time comes.”

  Again Thomas refused to omit those three exasperating words “saving my order” from his oath, and despite Henry’s pleas and threats, they parted silently, neither having yielded an inch.

  Eleanor and Henry celebrated Christmas of 1163 at the manor of Berkhampstead, one of the residences recently retrieved from Becket, and to indicate that it was to be particularly festive, the royal plate had been fetched from Winchester especially for the occasion. Ironically, Berkhampstead was more resplendent than most of the royal manors, because Thomas had spent large sums on its repair and redecoration. However, the Christmas festivities seemed oddly at variance with the real moods of the king and queen. The holiday, one of the most disturbing Eleanor had spent with Henry, was marked by cold rains, intrigue, negotiations, and ugliness. Henry’s childish insistence on holding Christmas court at Berkhampstead, an obvious attempt to further humiliate Becket, indicated a pettiness of spirit, the more so because recent developments had given him every reason to believe that he had won his struggle with Becket. When the dispute had reached the ears of Pope Alexander, he had sent letters and messengers to Becket advising him to submit to the king and obey the laws of the land. Admittedly in a difficult position because he needed Henry’s support in his battle against the antipope, Alexander nevertheless could not see that Henry had explicitly proposed anything directly contrary to the teachings of the Church. In fact, he had asked Henry for assurances on that point. To Alexander, the quarrel appeared simple: Thomas in open defiance had injured the king’s royal dignity, and obviously Henry would lose face if he allowed himself to be beaten by the archbishop. To salve the king’s pride. Thomas must omit the words “saving my order,” and then there would be peace. In fact, Henry had assured the pope that he would drop any further mention of the customs. As a result, Thomas had given way and, in December, had met with Henry at Woodstock, where he humbly made his submission, swearing to observe the customs of the realm in good faith. But the killing game had not yet ended. Immediately upon hearing Thomas’s recantation over the obnoxious salve ordine meo, he sprung his trap. Since Thomas had publicly defied him, an act of private submission would not suffice; the archbishop must repeat in public, in the presence of the Great Council, the oath he had just made privately. Under the circumstances, Becket could not refuse.

  On January 25, 1164, the mighty of the realm assembled at the royal hunting lodge of Clarendon, near Salisbury. The benches of the hall were packed with archbishops and bishops, earls, barons, nobles, and elders, whose names the chroniclers meticulously recorded. Eleanor’s is not among them, but it is fairly certain that she was with Henry at Clarendon, and it seems unlikely that she would have missed the opportunity to see Becket brought low. Moreover, her son Henry was presiding over the council along with his father for the first time. Exactly what took place at Clarendon is far from clear. We know, however, that Henry opened the proceedings by calling upon the archbishop to swear to the customs of the realm without any qualifications—and that Thomas, after some procrastinations and excuses, refused to take the oath. At which point, Henry flew into one of his famous rages, his outraged howls sounding to one witness “like the roaring of the lion.” He swore that if Thomas did not promise to observe the customs and dignities of the kingdom, he would resort to the sword. Precisely what this last threat meant nobody was quite sure, but some remembered how Geoffrey Anjou, in a fit of Angevin rage, had ordered the bishop-elect of Seez to be castrated. Over the next three days, the heated debates continued, and Henry grew increasingly furious. At the point when the bishops had almost persuaded Thomas to submit—a purely formal act to satisfy the king’s injured honor—Henry sprung another trap. He produced a written document, undoubtedly prepared in advance, listing the laws of the land as they were observed (he said) in the time of his grandfather. Hearing the Constitutions of Clarendon read aloud, Thomas immediately realized that he had been betrayed again; in effect, the provisions placed the Church of England under the king’s control, in that civil law was to take precedence over canon law. Churchmen were forbidden to leave the realm without Henry’s permission nor were they permitted to appeal his decisions to Rome.

  After the provisions had been read aloud, Henry said, “These customs have been conceded to me. Therefore, lest any question should arise concerning them in the future or lest any new disputes should perchance come up, we will that the Archbishop put his seal to them.”

  Becket’s reaction was one of horror. “By Almighty God, never, as long as I live, will my seal be put to them!” Clutching the copy of the Constitutions that Henry had given him, he stalked from the hall without waiting for the king’s dismissal.

  The Constitutions of Clarendon stand out in the history of English common law for two reasons: It was the first time a king attempted to legislate in writing (until then the law consisted of general customs or tribal practices passed orally from one generation to the next); and, secondly, they contained the seeds of later legal innovations, such as the use of the jury of accusation for bringing to light offenses that individuals dared not denounce. Still, by putting the customs in writing and asking Thomas to sign them, Henry took their quarrel past the point of compromise. Taken in their entirety, the sixteen articles of the Cons
titutions would have destroyed the freedom of the Church of England, placing it subordinate to the king. Curiously, only one of the provisions dealt with clerical crime, the problem that had given rise to the whole controversy. So long as Henry had adhered to this issue he had remained on safe ground because Thomas’s refusal to clean house within the Church had run contrary to common sense, and Thomas knew it. Henry had never claimed the right to judge clerks in his courts; he simply asked that a cleric accused of a serious crime be first brought to the king’s court to answer for his breach of the peace. If he denied his offense and pleaded benefit of clergy, he would have the right to be tried in an ecclesiastical court. However, if convicted and degraded from his orders, then, as a layman, he would be handed back to the king’s court for an appropriate sentence, either mutilation or death. But once Henry reduced the customs to writing, including among them practices that the Church had violently opposed in the past, he lost his advantage.

  The terrifying scenes at Clarendon, the yelling and threatening, impressed one observer more than any other. Young Prince Henry, one month short of his ninth birthday, had adored Becket for his cheerful temper, his refinement and suave manners, for being everything that his rough, choleric father was not, and he had called him foster father. It is not known what type of explanations were made the previous autumn, when he had been abruptly removed from Becket’s household. Instead of being returned to Eleanor, he had been given a house and servants of his own, and perhaps Henry had painted the best possible face on these sudden changes by designating them a special honor, something the heir deserved. At Clarendon, the boy would not have understood the issues to any appreciable degree, but he could not have helped but realize that his father wished Thomas harm. In the household of Henry Plantagenet, one could not remain neutral to his quarrel with Becket, and in those drab January days, young Henry chose his father’s side. While it would have been unthinkable for the small boy to have indicated any overt support of Becket—he feared his father too much for that—he was left with an abiding hostility toward the king. In time, his affection for Becket would fade, but the dislike for his father generated at Clarendon would remain for the rest of his life.