by Simon Schama
The last meeting between Thomas and Henry took place at Chaumont-sur-Loire, where Henry let off a little steam (though without ever blowing a gasket) at Becket’s impolitic lack of magnanimity. ‘Why don’t you [ever] do what I want?’ one chronicler records him as complaining. ‘For if you did, I would entrust everything to you.’ No response ensued. One imagines a sigh. ‘Well, go in peace,’ said the king. ‘I will follow you as soon as I can and we will meet either in Rouen or England.’ To which Thomas replied: ‘Something tells me, my lord, as I leave you on these terms that I shall never see you again in this life.’ ‘Do you take me for a traitor then?’ said Henry. ‘Heaven forbid,’ answered Becket.
The archbishop did not have to wait long for his forebodings to be realized. When his ship, bearing the archiepiscopal cross, came into the harbour at Sandwich in Kent in the first week of December 1170 a great throng prostrated themselves in front of Becket. But as soon as he stood, for the first time in six years on English soil, Becket was confronted, as if he were a criminal, by three royal officials, in full coats of mail and conspicuously armed. One of them was Ranulf de Broc, the ‘steward’ of Becket’s seized estates. The sheriff of Kent, Gervase of Cornhill, roundly denounced the archbishop for coming not to make peace but to start a fire in the kingdom, to uncrown the young Henry and to punish the bishops and barons who had stood by their sovereign. It must have been immediately clear to Becket that he faced a coalition of all those who now felt threatened by his return. His response was not to reassure them. Those who had been excommunicated could, he said, be pardoned only by the pope. While technically true, this was disingenuous. It had been Becket who had decided on the sentences, and everyone knew that if he so recommended, the pope would be only to eager to revoke them.
But Becket did not so choose. There was already something ominously mystical about his manner. When Canterbury came into sight, he got off his horse, took off his boots and walked barefoot the rest of the way through anthem-singing crowds of ecstatic devotees. Much of December was spent attempting to get the terms of the Fréteval agreement duly executed, but when he tried to get de Broc to restore Saltwood Castle, what he got instead was an archiepiscopal packhorse with its tail chopped off, sent bleeding back to Canterbury. The English clergy acted with similar coldness and trepidation. Henry the Younger refused to see Becket, and reports went to Henry II in which the archbishop was described as being consumed by a desire for retribution, as being impatient to de-throne the young Henry and as parading about England with a private army. The truth was that, after the frightening encounter at Sandwich, Becket had a small armed entourage – no more than five – to protect him. But it was also true that he was deaf to appeals to be reconciled with the royalist bishops. On Christmas Day 1170 he did exactly what he had said he would do: he hurled the candles to the stone floor of Canterbury Cathedral and shouted the dread anathema against Foliot and Roger of Pont l’Évêque for their part in crowning the young Henry: ‘May they be damned by Jesus Christ.’
But the bishops were not in hell. They were at Henry II’s court near Bayeux, delivering venomous reports into Henry’s ears about Becket’s incorrigibly treasonous arrogance. On the same day that Becket pronounced the anathema, Henry raised his reddened neck from the pillow of his sickbed and let out a roar of rage, the kind of sound that had knights turning to water inside their chain mail. It was not ‘will no one rid me of this turbulent priest?’ but the much more alarming outcry: ‘What miserable drones and traitors have I nourished and brought up in my household who allow their lord to be treated with such shameful contempt by a low-born cleric!’ To anyone present, the king’s outburst could mean only one thing: that he wanted the interminable, insufferable Becket problem to go away. Not necessarily as in six feet under. But if that’s what it took, so be it.
The four knights who would kill Becket had no doubt about Henry’s meaning, and they rushed to the Normandy coast to take ship for Kent. But even had they not done so, Becket was now in grave peril, for Henry had mobilized an official mission to order the archbishop to desist from recrimination or suffer the consequences.
At Saltwood Castle (where Ranulf de Broc was still enjoying Becket’s venison) de Broc met with the four knights on 28 December. As much as they despised the low-born, jumped-up Becket, their idea was to arrest, not kill him. But they planned the raid on Canterbury as if it were a small-scale military assault. At dawn the next day, 29 December 1170, Reginald fitzUrse, William de Tracy, Richard le Bret and Hugh de Morville, all of whom had drunk heavily the previous night and may still have been fortifying their resolution, gathered a platoon of twelve more knights and set off for Canterbury. At three they burst into the archbishop’s palace, where they found Thomas with his advisers after dinner. When he studiously ignored the interruption, fitzUrse announced he had an important message from the king: that Becket should go forthwith to Winchester to young Henry and give an account of his conduct. Becket replied that he had no intention of being treated like a criminal. The exchanges got ugly, quickly. FitzUrse declared that Becket was no longer under the king’s peace and arrested two of the archbishop’s own knights.
At this point Becket might still have temporized, if only to buy time, but he told his follower, John of Salisbury: ‘My mind is made up. I know exactly what I have to do?’ ‘Please God,’ responded John, obviously unconvinced, ‘you have chosen well.’ Instead of escaping to fight another day, as he had at Northampton in 1166, Becket proceeded calmly to the cathedral for vespers, his cross carried before him. Instead of bolting the door, he made sure to open it to receive the congregation. If he was to die, it would be in the sight of his flock. But before they could enter the church in any numbers, the knights caught up with Becket in the north transept. Becket must have known what they intended since they had now dressed themselves in the standard gear of terrorism: their heads and most of their faces were covered. Naked swords glimmered in the candlelight, and there were axes to smash in resisting doors. They were shouting, ‘Where is the traito?’ ‘Here I am,’ said Becket. ‘No traitor but a priest of God. What do you want?’
He was defenceless. All but two of his attendants had disappeared into the shadows of the church. Even now Reginald fitzUrse still thought he could apprehend Becket and attempted to strong-arm him on to William de Tracy’s back and carry him off. But the fifty-two-year-old Becket was a cockney, a street-fighter and as tough as old boots under the cowl, and when he stood his ground, he became physically, as well as theologically, immovable. In extremis, his Cheapside lingo came back. ‘PIMP, PIMP,’ he yelled at fitzUrse, who must suddenly have felt impotent, ridiculous. A sense of ridicule is itself dangerous; a burst adrenaline-pump. Down went a sword, cutting the arm of Edward Grim, Becket’s attendant, and then slicing through the top of the archbishop’s head. The crown hung by a thread of flesh as Becket sank to the floor, murmuring rather lengthily (according to his hagiographers): ‘For the name of Jesus and the protection of the Church, I am ready to embrace death.’ The coup de grâce followed. Another slash severed the head completely, striking so hard that the blade broke in two on the stones. To finish the job, a third warrior stood on the severed neck, stuck the point of his sword into the open cavity of his skull, scooped out the brains and spread them about the floor. ‘Let’s be off, knights,’ he shouted. ‘This fellow won’t be up again.’
It was around four thirty in the afternoon. The cathedral door was still open. Frightened people who had come for vespers now emerged from the darkness, some of them gathering about the body. But it was not a flock that unanimously regarded what they saw as a martyrdom. The chroniclers even describe some of the aspersions that were voiced: ‘He wanted to be a king; so let him be one.’ But then it all changed. Becket’s chamberlain tenderly reattached the bloody crown to his head using a strip of material torn from his own shirt. The monks and priests began to prepare the body for burial – the departing knights had ordered them to do this unless they wanted the corpse thrown on a dunghill – and as
they went about their business they discovered what no one had, until that moment, known: the hair shirt close to Thomas’s body, with the lice moving busily through the fibres. Becket the entertainer had been Becket the self-mortifier; Becket the proud had also been Becket the humble.
He was allowed to lie, washed in his own blood. Over the bespattered body were laid the archiepiscopal garments. By chance, in the crypt, a tomb had been prepared for another person’s burial. Down into its receiving coldness went Becket, arrayed in the full rig: alb, pall, chrismatic, mitre, stole and maniple; on top, tunicle, dalmatic, chasuble, pallium, chalice, glove and ring. He had always thought that kit mattered, had Becket.
And for what, exactly, had he laid down or thrown away his life: a fantastic notion, already outdated by the time he became archbishop, that the Church could, in the last resort, lay down the law to the state; that kings were no better than the obedient sword-bearers for Christ? All our modern instincts assume the futility of that insistence. Henry’s world and his work is intelligible to us – the smasher of anarchy and the guardian of the common law – while Becket seems to be off in some theocratic fairyland, which was not even plausible to the pope. But this is to sell the archbishop short. For the infuriating, theatrical, arrogant Becket did make a huge difference. His view of the proper relationship between Church and state lasted. The omni-competent sovereignty of the Angevin empire did not. Until the Reformation, three centuries later, there were Church courts and the clergy could appeal to Rome against a royal verdict. While the secular power could do little to interfere with the spiritual, the great prelates of the Church – rich, powerful and literate – continued to be indispensable to effective royal government. To an extraordinary extent Plantagenet England would be run by administrator-prelates like Hubert Walter, justiciar, papal legate and Archbishop of Canterbury from 1193, and Stephen Langton, who was the Archbishop of Canterbury imposed on Henry’s youngest son, John, and virtually the architect of the Magna Carta. These were the kind of men – politically shrewd, intellectually subtle and administratively tireless – for whom Becket might have been a perfect prototype had he not become consumed with a vision of himself as a latter-day St Paul: the uncompromising prosecutor of the unrighteous.
In the days, weeks and months after the murder, power rather than piety seemed to get the upper hand. The assassins made for Yorkshire, where they lived untouched for a year. Eventually excommunicated, they were sentenced to take the Cross, and some of them died en route to the Holy Land. But Becket’s most violent enemies survived and prospered. The de Brocs became lords of a Suffolk estate; Gilbert Foliot, Bishop of London, and Roger of Pont l’Évêque. Archbishop ofYork, were absolved of blame and took part in Becket’s canonization and the care of his shrine! As for the king, aware that he was denounced throughout France, he was reported to be so prostrate with grief and horror that fears were expressed for his sanity. In 1172 the pope ordered him to take the Cross for three years as penance. He never went. But in 1174, in the midst of a terrible war launched against him by his own son Henry the Younger and his now-estranged wife, Eleanor, the king may have felt in special need of atonement. He made a pilgrimage to Canterbury, by this time the site of innumerable miracles at Becket’s shrine. ‘Canterbury water’, made rosy with droplets of Becket’s blood, was said to cure the blind and the crippled. Over the last miles Henry walked barefoot in a hair shirt (as Thomas had done four years earlier). At the tomb he fell on his face, confessed his sins and was given five lashes by each of the attending bishops. The king lay all night on the bare ground, fasting and surrounded by throngs of ordinary pilgrims. When he left Canterbury the next day, scourged and purged, he heard that one of his most powerful enemies, King William the Lion of Scotland, had been defeated and taken prisoner. Perhaps Canterbury water had worked its miracles for the king.
In November 1176 an emissary from the Byzantine emperor, Manuel Comnenus, arrived in England to see the man called ‘the greatest and most illustrious ruler of the world’. A glance at the map of Angevin power, which now extended beyond even the lands Henry had inherited on his accession, into the kingdoms of Scotland, Ireland and Wales, seemed to suggest this was not an exaggeration. But appearances can be misleading. Henry’s ‘empire’ was not a unitary state in anything like the sense that would have been understood in Constantinople. It was a shaky federation of Norman- and French-dominated colonies, the presumptive ruler of each of which, even when he had knelt in homage to Henry as his overlord and sovereign, would still be suspected, with good reason, of unreliable loyalty. The Byzantine traveller, riding from one region to another, would not have noticed very much difference. The country, from Yorkshire to the Loire, would have been dotted with grand Cistercian abbeys, under the patronage of the king or an earl. There were parish churches subject to the central control of a bishop rather than a local patron; river valleys were dominated by steeply walled castles, built increasingly of stone and mortar rather than of timber and earth. Royally chartered towns and burghs, with quarters settled by immigrant merchants and moneylenders, Flemings and Jews, were under Crown or aristocratic protection so that the licenser could enjoy the proceeds from commercial tolls. Comnenus’s emissary might also have encountered the travelling retinue of a new species of grandee – the royal official, more often than not a cleric, but with a whole cartload of scribes and clerks, carrying the king’s sealed writ and accountable to one of the great men of the court: the chief royal law officer, the justiciar or the keeper of the exchequer. At one of the larger shire towns – Lincoln or York – he may even have witnessed one of the monthly sessions of the travelling general ‘eyre’ court, in which royal judges heard cases brought to them by any freeman said to have access to the ‘common law’. And if he were mystified by this, he could have been shown a new book, possibly edited by Ranulph Glanvill, Henry’s justiciar (or chief legal officer), which anthologized the body of legal conventions and customs to which freemen who judged their rights to have been violated might have recourse in the king’s courts. The cases so heard might even be judged not by a single royally appointed arbiter but by a panel of twelve. It was not, the traveller might have gathered, even unheard of, in such disputes, for royal officers themselves to be brought to book by such means!
The Byzantine would have noticed, however, that this law, deemed ‘common’, was not for everyone. The vast mass of toiling villeins, bound to their land and lord, were deprived of it and were, instead, still subject to the local law of the manor. Knights and barons, descendants of the Norman colonists, could still summon an antagonist to trial by arms. And vast tracts of the country – some genuine woodland, some much more open and populated areas of the shires – had been declared ‘royal forest’, where there was another entire system of law and penalties in operation, with especially brutal sentences of mutilation and death intended to prevent the local population from touching the king’s game, working the woods or pasturing their animals, as their ancestors had done, time out of mind.
As he approached the far reaches of the Plantagenet lands, the traveller would have noticed that the writ of the king gave way to other, more local powers. At the northern margin of England, the barons of the north had been able to exploit Anglo-Scots rivalry to entrench their own autonomy from either state. For twenty years the Scottish kings played a tug-of-war game with the Angevins over their claim to Cumbria, Northumbria, Westmorland and even part of Lancashire. When they could exploit an embarrassment or weakness in England, they extracted concessions or launched military raids. But in 1157, although he himself had promised David I on his being knighted that he would uphold the Scots claim to the north, Henry II took it all back and made King Malcolm IV swallow the retrocession. In 1173, in yet another effort to reverse this, the young Scottish king, William I (later called the Lion), made the mistake of joining the side of the Angevin sons in their war against their father. When William was captured at Alnwick in 1174, Henry made sure that he arranged an elaborate humiliation. Wi
lliam was paraded as a captive, feet tied below his horse, incarcerated at William the Conqueror’s native castle of Falaise and released only on condition of his doing unequivocal formal homage to Henry, both for his Scottish kingdom ‘and any lands elsewhere’. The treaty was later abrogated in 1189 by Henry’s son and successor, Richard I, but from it derived the perennial claims of the Plantagenets that they were indeed the feudal suzerains of the Scots, an assertion that would be made with much blood and misery for all concerned.
In one of the more unnoticed ironies of Angevin-British history, the Angevin colonization of Ireland began as an answer to the Welsh problem. The difficult topography (especially the lack of anything like north–south roads) had meant that Wales remained divided in Henry’s time, much as it had been in William the Conqueror’s. With the border country occupied by opportunist Marcher barons, ‘Englishry’ was established in forbidding castles at Chepstow, Brecon and Monmouth, and the barons held the frontier as well as much of south Wales, all the way to the coast at Swansea and Gower. In return for keeping their territories free of native Welsh control, the Marcher lords were legally considered to be masters of their own lordships, unbound by royal or common law. Further west and north, pura Wallia, ‘Welshry’, was divided into three kingdoms: Gwynedd in the mountainous north, Powys in the centre and Deheubarth in the south. Every generation or so a powerful king – in Henry’s time it was Rhys ap Gruffydd – tried to unite two or more of these kingdoms and expand into the Marches. In response to one such alarm in 1165, Henry sent a massive army of knights into Wales. But Wales (as Harold Godwineson had learned a century before) was no country for mounted knights, and the army became bogged down in rain and mud. The ignominious failure of coercion cut off the Marcher lords from Angevin help and made Rhys ap Gruffydd confident enough to dictate terms to some of the most powerful of the Anglo-Norman lords of the Marches. Instead of remaining an anomaly in Wales, it was suggested, why did they not respond to appeals from the king of Leinster in Dublin, Diarmait MacMurchada (Dermot MacMurrough), for help against his own Irish rebels. Diarmait had already asked Henry II for assistance, so the extrication of the Marcher lords from Wales and their transplantation into Ireland as auxiliaries of King Diarmait seemed a neat solution for all concerned. On paper, at least, the Anglo-Normans did not come to Ireland as imperialists but as mercenaries. Needless to say, matters did not quite work out as planned.