by Dan Jones
Whenever [the king] goes out he is seized by the crowd and pulled and pushed hither and thither; he is assaulted by shouts and roughly handled; yet he listens to all with patience and seemingly without anger; until hustled beyond bearing he silently retreats to some place of quiet.
At the heart of such a throng, the king required a large and sophisticated system of household servants, clerks, diplomats and administrators. It was this sort of loose organization over which Becket presided. Like the great royal servants of centuries to come – Henry VIII’s chief minister Thomas Wolsey, or Elizabeth I’s patient secretary William Cecil – Becket spared a charismatic monarch the strain of day-to-day government, and turned grand visions into reality.
Becket reached the height of his power around 1160, when he was just past forty, and the king approaching twenty-seven. The chancellor was a tall, pleasant-looking man with carefully learned manners and cultivated skills in courtly conversation. His rise to power, wealth and glory had been extraordinary. He had enjoyed a good education at Merton priory in Sussex and a London grammar school – perhaps St Paul’s. But his progress through life was cut short when his father’s business premises burned down. He spent two years studying in Paris during his early twenties, but never completed the full education in canon and civil law that distinguished any ambitious young medieval man of letters. All his life he would overcompensate for the sense of inferiority that lingered.
What Becket lacked in intellectual finesse, he made up for with ambition. As well as chancellor, he was archdeacon of Canterbury: an important position in the English Church. He accumulated rich benefices everywhere from Kent to Yorkshire, and kept a fine and luxurious household in London, to which several magnates sent their sons for education.
With his height, pale skin, dark hair and long nose, the chancellor could not have cut a more opposite figure to the short and red-haired king, with his raw energy and an ease in company more inborn than acquired. Becket set great store by values that meant very little to the king, but that were essential to maintaining the dignity of kingship. According to Becket’s biographer Fitzstephen, the chancellor ‘hardly ever dined without the company of sundry earls and bishops’. He kept a fine table, with delicate foods served in fine vessels of gold and silver. He enjoyed all the lordly pageantry that bored the king, and Henry allowed him to carry it out in his stead.
Indeed, the king seems to have enjoyed the almost comical contrast between himself and Becket, and made great fun of his friend. Fitzstephen recorded a famous story of Becket and Henry riding together through the wintry streets of London early in their friendship. The king pointed out a poor beggar shivering in the cold, and remarked to his chancellor that it would be a fine thing to give him a thick, warm cloak. When Becket agreed that this would indeed be charitable, Henry grabbed him and forcibly ripped the fine scarlet and grey cape from his back, before presenting it to the bewildered beggar. Becket’s natural pomposity did not allow him to share in the hilarity caused among the royal attendants. But Henry always insisted on pricking his friend’s pride when he could. He was known to ride into the chancellor’s dinner hall, jump from his horse and sit down to eat. The experience must have grated on Becket as much as it amused the king. Yet despite the irritations and the torments, Becket was Henry’s friend, trusted servant and confidant.
Most importantly, the king saw Becket as the bridge between two worlds: Crown and Church. All over Europe during the twelfth century, kings and secular lords were struggling with popes over the question of jurisdiction and authority. There were frequent clashes over matters including the right to perform coronations, the right to appeal to papal rather than royal courts, the rights of bishops to leave the country to attend conferences and the rights of kings to divorce their wives. Virtually every king in Europe had been or would be threatened with Interdict (a sentence banning most Church services and sacraments throughout a realm) or personal excommunication. Pope Eugene III had attempted to impose both penalties on King Stephen. And Frederick I Barbarossa – the Hohenstaufen prince who had been elected Holy Roman Emperor, and the only king in Europe with more extensive territories than Henry himself – was excommunicated in 1160 for failing to recognize the authority of Pope Alexander III.
As the 1160s dawned, Henry was aware that his ambitions for governing England would find disfavour with the papacy and the Church in England. He felt that his rights as king of England were prejudiced by an over-powerful Church, which he was determined to bring into line. Building his empire was, for Henry, not just a matter of expanding borders. It was about defining and deepening the rights and powers of kingship within the realm. He did not wish to create total secular dominion over the Church, or to rule as king and priest combined. But he certainly wished to be exact about his royal rights within his own land, and to defend them.
On 18 April 1161 Archbishop Theobald died in his palace in Canterbury, after a long illness. He had lived past the grand old age of seventy, and had reigned as archbishop since being appointed by King Stephen in 1138. When the news reached Henry, he saw an opportunity. He had plans for the future that would require a pliable archbishop in the seat of Canterbury. Chief among them was his aim to have his eldest son Henry crowned as king designate. This was something that Theobald had explicitly refused to do for King Stephen when Eustace was alive. Henry also wished to begin a process of redefining the boundaries of rights held by Church and Crown. This would require careful management, with an ally rather than an enemy as primate of the English Church.
To Henry, therefore, Becket seemed the ideal candidate to replace Theobald. Frederick Barbarossa used archbishop-chancellors – of Mainz and Cologne – to rule Germany and Italy. Henry resolved to do the same. Yet to many in the English Church, including the monks of Canterbury Cathedral who claimed the right to elect the archbishop, Becket’s candidacy was a travesty. To them, he was unfit for office on numerous grounds. He was essentially a secular figure. He had a second-rate academic background. He was no lawyer and certainly no theologian. He was a clear partisan of the Crown. And he had treated the Canterbury monks themselves ungraciously during his service for Theobald. And the monks were not alone. Henry’s mother, the Empress Matilda, who kept up a keen interest in her son’s political career from her retirement in Rouen, also wrote to discourage Henry strongly from promoting his friend to archbishop.
None of this swayed Henry. The advantages of appointing Becket as a chancellor-archbishop far outweighed the laments that would rise from Canterbury. Long-term, Henry wished to pass the kingdom of England to his eldest son, with Becket as his mentor and regent. The boy was approaching the age of seven, at which it was customary for young noblemen to leave their mother’s household and begin their education for manhood. In 1162 the king planned to put young Henry under Becket’s tutelage. All the better that this should be in the household of an archbishop. Thus on 2 June 1161 Becket was ordained a priest. The next day he was consecrated archbishop.
In Henry’s mind Becket’s elevation was a great triumph, but very soon it turned out that there was a major flaw in his strategy. The flaw was Becket himself.
Despite all the titles, gifts and fortune lavished on him by the king, Becket felt deeply inadequate as archbishop. Part of the explanation lay in the fact that the English primate was almost always a monk. But for his first months as archbishop Becket was marked very clearly as an outside agent in the See by his pale, non-monastic dress. It induced in him a form of status anxiety. Having spent a lifetime learning how to be a great secular chancellor, Becket was now parachuted into a world where everything he stood for was despised. He was ill-educated, non-monastic and instantly disliked for his royal associations. He felt a painful need to prove himself worthy both to his new flock and to God himself. And this prompted, underneath his worldly garb, a sudden and violent change of outlook and attitude that would catastrophically reshape his relationship with Henry.
Almost as soon as he became archbishop, Becket began to d
istance himself from royal policy. His very first action was to resign the chancellorship, protesting that he was ‘unfit for one office, let alone two’. This was the most elementary rejection of the whole purpose of his translation. He then picked a fight over Church lands with several lay magnates, including the earl of Hertford and William, Lord Eynsford, another Kentish landowner. He declared the day of his own consecration a new feast day – that of the Holy Trinity. And he sent a flurry of requests to Pope Alexander III, asking to strengthen the authority of Canterbury over the rival archbishopric of York. The royal agent became – almost overnight – an opponent. Henry had expected him to grease the cogs of royal policy within Church ranks. Instead, he was jamming bony fingers into them. Becket confounded all the king’s hopes, and became for the rest of his life a pompous, disagreeable and obstreperous distraction from Henry’s every effort at smooth governance.
Whatever the psychological cause of Becket’s transformation, it was seen by contemporaries as a near-Damascene conversion. The anonymous Battle Abbey chronicler unsurprisingly viewed it as a sort of glorious skin-shedding: a spiritual transformation wrought by his elevation in status.
In him, as the common proverb has it, ‘honours changed conduct’, but not, as with the conduct of nearly all men, for the worse, but day to day for the better. For he put off the old man who is created according to the world, and strove to put on the new man who is created according to God.
Even William of Newburgh, a writer generally unsympathetic to Becket, was impressed:
Soon weighing up by pious and wise consideration what the burden of such a great honour might be, he was thus immediately changed in habit and manner, as one might say ‘This is the hand of God’ and ‘This is the transformation of the hand of the Almighty’.
Becket’s switch from loyal Crown enforcer to prickly defender of Church rights happened with almost bewildering swiftness. Henry tolerated his friend’s exasperating behaviour from afar. Until the autumn of 1162 he was too preoccupied with Norman affairs to concentrate on England. But once he returned from the Continent in January 1163 he was determined to push through a series of legal and governmental reforms that he felt were entirely essential to improve law and order. The programme of reforms that Henry aimed at introducing to England in 1164 is now known as the Constitutions of Clarendon. The sixteen-point document is one of the most famous in English constitutional history.
The Constitutions were Henry’s attempt to draw a clear line between the blurred jurisdictions of Church and royal authority. This was an area of bitter dispute, but the issue on which he chose to attack was that of criminous clerks.
Perhaps one in six Englishmen in the late twelfth century was technically a clergyman. While most were not and never would be priests, there were plenty in minor orders, or who had entered the Church for education and left to work for lay masters. Many parish priests were poorly educated and barely literate. Their lives would not have differed much from those of ordinary peasants. But clerical status bestowed great advantage if one fell foul of the law. The Church demanded the right to discipline criminous clerks – those clergymen who stole, raped, maimed or killed. But punishments were considerably lighter under canon law. The Church could neither inflict trial by ordeal, nor mutilate or execute the guilty. This allowed what was perceived by Henry to be a shameful number of crimes to go unpunished. To the king’s mind, hawkish as it was about his royal rights, for criminous clerks to shelter beneath the broad cassock of the canon law was an egregious abuse, and one that he was not prepared to tolerate. It jarred with the spirit of his broadest aim as king: to restore the strong arm of kingship to its standing in his grandfather’s day.
To reduce a labyrinthine dispute to simple terms: Henry wanted criminous clerks tried in ecclesiastical courts to be stripped of their orders and returned to the secular powers for bodily punishment. This did not technically create a hierarchy of courts, but it brought churchmen who committed crimes into what Henry thought was their rightful place of punishment. Becket, meanwhile, desired to resist every perceived intrusion into the Church’s rights, at whatever political cost.
At the council of Woodstock in the summer of 1163, Becket quarrelled with the king over the payment of the ‘sheriff’s aid’. This was a form of taxation, which was traditionally paid by landowners directly to their local sheriff, to aid him in his peacekeeping duties in the county. Henry now wished to draw this revenue directly into the exchequer, earning a windfall tax for the Crown, bringing a large source of revenue under central supervision, and implicitly reminding the whole of England that it was from the wellspring of the king’s direct authority that all other political power flowed. To put it another way, this was an accounting reform with political significance. It was probably not a wildly important issue to anyone but the sheriffs themselves, and Thomas Becket, but the archbishop, cast in his self-appointed new role of scrutineer of the Crown’s reform programme, objected to it. He informed the king that ‘it does not become your excellence to deflect something that belongs to another to your use’, and added that the realm would not be ‘forced by law’. This so infuriated Henry that he swore a great oath. According to Edward Grim, a contemporary who wrote a biography of Becket, Henry shouted at his archbishop: ‘By God’s eyes! It shall be given as revenue and entered in the royal rolls: and it is not fit that you should gainsay it, for no one would oppose your men against your will.’
But the archbishop faced him down. ‘By the reverence of the eyes by which you have sworn, my lord king, there shall be given from all my lands or from the property of the church not a penny.’ This was especially stubborn behaviour from Becket, considering that he had very little personally to lose from the sheriff’s aid reform. But it showed just how determined he was to prove himself in his new position.
Relations between the former friends deteriorated further through the summer. The issue of criminous clerks would not disappear. Henry had heard from his advisers that in the nine years since his coronation more than 100 murders and an untold number of other crimes had been committed by clerks who had gone unpunished by the royal courts. Although Becket tried to ward Henry off making any fundamental changes in the courts’ jurisdictions by having several criminous clerks banished, branded or imprisoned for life, it was not enough to convince the king that the matter could be left alone. On 1 October 1163 Henry summoned the spiritual magnates of the realm to a royal council at Westminster. He addressed his audience, demanding that they obey him over criminous clerks and observe the ancient customs of the realm. A heated legal debate broke out, in which royal and canon lawyers contested for supremacy. After some time, Henry asked the bishops to recognize that a criminous clerk, once found guilty in the Church courts, should be surrendered to the royal courts for bodily punishment. And if they would not, he demanded, then they must explain whether or not they were prepared to abide by any of the ‘customs of England’.
The issue was ballooning, thanks to Henry’s single-mindedness and Becket’s obstinacy. Led by Becket, the bishops at Woodstock answered that they would observe England’s customs ‘saving their order’ – a non-answer that reserved the right to observe canon law above the laws of kings.
Henry was needled. ‘In heated mood [the king] left London without notice, and with all his business unfinished and lawsuits left hanging,’ wrote Becket’s close companion and biographer Herbert of Bosham. The next morning Henry demanded that Becket must return all the castles granted to him during his chancellorship and removed his son from Becket’s care. Born from frustration, it was a spiteful gesture that tore the heart out of a decade-long friendship. Becket was doing the opposite of everything he had been parachuted into Canterbury to achieve. Henry’s view, later expressed in person to Becket in a failed rapprochement at Northampton, was that the archbishop ought to stop preaching and remember that he owed everything to royal favour. ‘Were you not the son of one of my villeins?’ he asked Becket. ‘You adhere and rely too much on the manner
of your ascent.’ It was a piercing remark.
The breach at Westminster left bad feeling on both sides. Both men appealed to Pope Alexander. The pope, however, had troubles of his own and was in exile from Rome. His quarrel with a secular lord – in this case Frederick Barbarossa – had resulted in papal schism. An anti-pope, Victor IV, sat at Rome. Alexander gently urged Becket to cooperate, as later did Gilbert Foliot, bishop of London, and Roger, archbishop of York, several cardinals and the respected Cistercian abbot Philip of Aumone. In November, according to Roger of Pontigny, ‘the archbishop, swayed by the advice of the lord pope and the cardinals and the words of this abbot and the others who came with him’, agreed to submit to the king. He did so privately at Oxford. Apparently triumphant, Henry summoned a great council to his hunting lodge and palace at Clarendon, towards the end of January 1164. He intended Becket’s humiliation to be public and complete. Becket was uneasy and evasive, but was manipulated, through a series of tantrums and dark threats from Henry, into declaring before the assembled magnates – barons, officials and bishops – that he would uphold all the laws and customs of the realm, without condition.
Henry then sprang a trap. Rather than accepting this moral victory, he pressed home his advantage and drove for binding, unambiguous supremacy. On 29 January, the Constitutions of Clarendon were issued as a chirograph – a written form of lawmaking that implied permanence and universality. A copy of the Constitutions was handed to Becket, a copy kept for the king, and a third copy filed in the royal archives for posterity.
Becket was appalled. The document listed sixteen points, comprising the ‘customs’ to which he had apparently assented the previous day. These included Henry’s desired scheme for criminous clerks, a limitation on appeals to the papacy above the king’s authority, and several broad statements asserting the primacy of royal courts over the Church’s.