by Dan Jones
The archbishop denounced the snare Henry had closed around him, but he was caught in the lie of his position – browbeaten by the king to accept royal policy upon the Church, he had placed the Church in a position of unprecedented submission, and proven himself to be what he supposed everyone must all along have thought him: a royal patsy.
Tormented, Becket suspended himself from priestly duties. He imposed penance and wrote to the pope admitting what he had done and begging absolution. He was, said Herbert of Bosham, ‘unusually disquieted and gloomy’. Great salty sobs racked his body as he bewailed his unfitness for office in the light of his secular past. His wild attempts to prove himself to his spiritual peers, to God and to himself had come to nothing. He had wholly lost the king’s goodwill, political support and friendship, but he had not gained the favour of a greater lord: ‘I clearly see myself worthy to be abandoned by God and removed from the holy seat in which I was placed,’ he cried. Panicking, and further demonstrating his defective political judgement, he wrote to Henry’s enemy Louis VII for support, and in the summer attempted unsuccessfully to flee to France.
Henry, meanwhile, was in vindictive mood. In the autumn he summoned Becket to a council of the magnates in Northampton castle. On 6 October 1164 Henry’s archbishop and former friend was accused of embezzlement committed during his term as chancellor. Becket again appealed to the pope. So did Henry. He aimed to have the archbishop deposed and denounced his appeal, for malicious effect, as being in breach of the Constitutions of Clarendon.
Faced with crimes against the Crown and against his own soul, Becket panicked. As judicial proceedings against him at Northampton were coming to a head, he declared that he refused to hear judgement pronounced, turned on his heel and walked out of the room. He managed to flee the castle and the next morning, as rain lashed from a leaden sky, the disgraced and sodden archbishop tramped from the town, with just four men to accompany him. He escaped England on 2 November 1164, when a desperate and dangerous Channel crossing in a small boat put him ashore in Flanders to seek refuge with the king of France. He would not return to England for almost five long years.
Succession Planning
Becket slipped out of England in a state of dejection, which very quickly gave way to fury. He made his home on French soil, at Pontigny Abbey. There he sat in wrathful indignation: gnashing his teeth, writing letters of protest to the pope and making a lot of noise to anyone who would listen. He punished himself with a furious asceticism, as his companion Edward Grim recorded:
From this time content with eating vegetables and coarser feasts and removing lighter things, he furtively withdrew certain delicacies from himself … He would also lower himself into the stream which ran between the workshops of the monastery [i.e. Pontigny] where he would remain for longer than human fragility can take. The extent of bodily torment inflicted by the extreme cold in his efforts to purge himself of the stings of desire that seemed to dwell in him, was revealed by his consequent illness … he developed an abscess which festered as far as the inside of his throat, and grew into an ulcer. He suffered for a long time in this agony, with much trouble and sorrow, until after the extraction of two teeth he eventually recovered.
Letters written by Becket while he was staying at Pontigny betrayed a sense of high indignation that turned, the longer his exile lasted, into declamations of his own righteousness. He wrote long salvos against Henry II’s key ministers, in particular the justiciar Richard de Lucy and Jocelin de Balliol, principal authors of the Constitutions of Clarendon. On Whit Sunday 1166, at Vézelay, he preached a furious sermon pronouncing sentences of excommunication against a host of his enemies in England.
Yet his bark was much worse than his bite. Henry took a sporadic interest in Becket, but he was occupied constantly with a broad range of concerns across his different territories. As time passed, the affair with his archbishop became merely irksome. Henry just got on with things. He turned over the responsibilities of chancellor (albeit not the title) to Geoffrey Ridel. The new man was pointedly given Becket’s old post of archdeacon of Canterbury. Henry continued to wage his attritional border wars against Louis and various of his own rebellious vassals. He threw himself into the conquest of Brittany, built alliances on the eastern and southern fringes of the Plantagenet dominions, from the Alps to the Norman kingdom of Sicily, coped with rebellions in Aquitaine and pushed back French aggression around the fringes of Normandy. Despite the tirades that erupted from Becket’s pen, the king of England, duke of Normandy and Aquitaine and count of Anjou had better things to worry about in the late 1160s than his priggish former chancellor, eating vegetables in the backwaters of France.
In September 1167 the Empress Matilda fell ill and died. She was sixty-five. During the first thirteen years of Henry’s reign she had proven a source of wise advice and a useful sounding board for policy – particularly towards the Holy Roman Empire where she had spent her youth. On occasion she could play her part as the grande dame of Normandy, and she was approached with requests for counsel and mediation from the great men of Europe, including Louis VII, who acknowledged her authority in the affairs of Rouen. She had shown her foresight by urging Henry not to promote Becket to Canterbury in 1162, and she was still playing stateswoman a few months before her death, attempting to reconcile her son with Louis, as hostilities between the two kings mounted.
Matilda died surrounded by the monks of Bec, among whom she had lived during her long retirement. The brothers sewed her body into an oxhide and laid her to rest with lavish ceremony. It was just reward for the magnificent treasures she had showered upon their abbey church: the two heavy gold crowns from Germany; portable altars made from marble and silver; and her own magnificent, gold-trimmed imperial cape. She died as she had lived, the daughter, wife and mother of three magnificent Henrys: King Henry I of England, Henry V the Holy Roman Emperor and Henry Plantagenet, the great overlord, who threatened to eclipse them all. Although two of her sons had predeceased her – Geoffrey in 1158 and William in 1164 – she left a generation of grandchildren poised one day to rule together over the whole of Europe.
Matilda’s death marked the passing of a generation. In 1168 Robert earl of Leicester also died. His defection to Henry’s side in 1153 had marked a vital moment in the struggle to take the English Crown, and since 1154 he had served as co-justiciar of England. One by one, the veterans of the civil war were passing, but as they did so, Henry’s ambitions were maturing. His confidence was at its height. According to John of Salisbury, in 1168 Henry exclaimed that ‘now at last he had secured the authority of his grandfather [i.e. Henry I] who was king in his own land, papal legate, patriarch, emperor and everything he wished’. He had his family, his kingdom, his security. It was time to think of the future.
Eleanor gave birth to her last surviving child in 1167. The boy was named John, and he brought the number of Plantagenet children to seven: four boys and three girls. Eleanor was forty-three at the time of John’s birth, but the significance of this reproductive feat was matched by her political achievement, for through these seven children, Henry could begin to unfold the roots of his dynasty across Europe. Their futures were quite literally the future of the Plantagenet empire, and the arrangements made for them would shape much of the Western world for the rest of the century.
The highest concern for Henry in the late 1160s was to establish a stable relationship with an increasingly belligerent Louis VII. In August 1165 the French king’s third wife, Adèle of Champagne, finally produced a son: Philip. This long-awaited arrival of an heir to the house of Capet was greeted with jubilation in the streets of Paris, and a weight was lifted from Louis’s shoulders. But if Philip’s birth was a relief, it was also a catalyst. The French king was concerned for the future, and had grown nervous at the thought that he would hand to his son a royal inheritance sharply diminished in its territorial scope and the prestige of its lordship. He began to look for ways to discomfit the English king wherever he could. (Harbouring B
ecket was one such move.) Tit-for-tat military exchanges escalated in the border regions between their territories, and Louis had begun to encourage dissent among Henry’s more troublesome subjects: the king of Scots, the Welsh princes dispossessed in 1157, and the Bretons who squirmed under Henry’s aggressive conquest of their duchy. Louis’s role as a focus for opposition to Henry’s continental lordship was not lost on the barons of Aquitaine, led by the count of Angoulême and the count of La Marche, both of whom flirted with the possibility of transferring their allegiance from the English king to the French.
All this required Henry to make his plans for the future with sensitivity and a degree of empathy towards his Capetian rival.
It was perhaps appropriate, as a memorial to his mother, that the year after the empress’s death Henry sent his eldest daughter Matilda to be married to Henry the Lion, duke of Saxony and Bavaria, thereby preserving the links between the English Crown and the German states. But with four brothers, this particular Matilda was never likely to be recalled from Germany to fight for the Plantagenet cause in England. In Henry II’s plans, that honour belonged to his eldest son and namesake. In 1162 and 1163, young Henry had already received the homage of the English barons, the Scottish king and the princes of Wales. His plan to have him crowned rex designatus had stalled thanks to the quarrel with Becket, since only an archbishop of Canterbury could crown an English king. Nevertheless, King Henry made it clear that he wished the boy to grow up to rule over the Plantagenet patrimony: England, Normandy and Anjou. Henry the younger would be the ruler and commander of the bulk of his father’s dominions.
By 1168 those dominions included the full duchy of Brittany. Through a programme of relentless military and diplomatic pressure that lasted the best part of a decade Henry II had succeeded in marrying his third son, Geoffrey, to Constance the only daughter of Conan IV, duke of Brittany. He then effectively forced the duke to abdicate.
He gave him the English earldom of Richmond for a retirement plot and in return took control of Brittany in Geoffrey’s name. When he came of age, Henry decreed, Geoffrey was to rule as duke of Brittany, holding the duchy in feudal tenure from his eldest brother, who in turn would do homage for it to the king of France. Until the boy reached maturity, Henry would rule Brittany personally.
Of the elder four children, that left just Richard. Henry’s second son was a child of the south – as attested by his name, which was more common around Poitiers than in Rouen or Chinon. Of all the children he was the closest to his mother, and it was therefore decided that he should inherit her part of the Plantagenet empire: the duchy of Aquitaine and county of Poitou. Eleanor, as she neared the end of her fertile years, harboured ambitions to return to Aquitaine and rule it as the duchess she had always been. With Richard by her side, that might be a possibility.
Aquitaine’s independence still mattered greatly to Louis, too, since he had been deprived of control of it when Eleanor had skipped his charge and married Henry in 1152. Thus, Henry proposed that Richard would hold Aquitaine directly from the French Crown, loosening its connection to the rest of Henry’s dominions. To sugar the pill, Henry also proposed marriage between Richard and Louis’s daughter Alice, who was born in 1160.
This plan was outlined to Louis at Montmirail, in Maine, in a conference held in January 1169. It was undeniably a generous settlement, both to Henry’s sons and to Louis himself. Henry might have been an assiduous empire-builder in his lifetime. Nevertheless, he showed Louis, he had no intention that the great dominions he controlled should remain fully connected in perpetuity. They were not an empire in the truest sense – territories to be conjoined for ever and ruled as one. Rather, this was a federation, the ties between whose parts could be loosened or strengthened as appropriate. Neither Aquitaine nor Brittany was to be subsumed into one great, permanent territorial bloc under the English Crown. With the partition that Henry proposed, the lasting effects of his reign would have been to unite Anjou with England and Normandy, to consolidate central power somewhat in Aquitaine and to alter the feudal relationship between Brittany and the French Crown. When Henry followed his mother into oblivion, the clock would be turned back to 1152.
This was some way from Louis’s worst fears of a perpetual Plantagenet empire which, under the English Crown, could outstrip its rival in Paris. Montmirail resulted in a truce between the kings and a new picture of future feudal relations. It provided a welcome pause. The conference had been preceded by much wearisome warfare: Henry had sent campaigns thundering through Brittany and Aquitaine in 1167 and 1168, crushing rebels stirred up against his lordship. He had also ravaged lands belonging to Louis’s vassals on the borders of Normandy and in Perche. Even in the twelfth-century world of near-constant siege and skirmish, ravaging and chivalrous plunder, hostilities had dragged on too long.
And indeed, Montmirail might under the right circumstances have led to an unprecedented period of peace and concordance between the two kings. But there was one issue that could not be solved at the negotiating tables of the great French fortress. This was the case of Thomas Becket.
Becket and Henry came face to face at Montmirail for the first time since their great breach, brought together in the spirit of peace that pervaded the whole conference. Becket came to Henry under firm diplomatic pressure to apologize and make good the damaging row that had dragged on for five years.
Unfortunately, Becket showed Henry that he had in no way changed during the five years that he had been in exile. Herbert of Bosham watched the king and his erstwhile archbishop meet.
The archbishop was led before the kings, with … so great a crowd surrounding him and trying to speak to him … The archbishop immediately in the first place prostrated himself at the king’s feet … But as soon as he had prostrated himself at his feet, the king immediately took hold of him and raised him up.
Standing before the king then, the archbishop began humbly and zealously to solicit royal mercy towards the Church committed to him, though, as he said, an unworthy sinner. As is the custom of the just, in the beginning of his speech he found fault with himself and attributed the Church’s great disturbance and harsh affliction solely to his own failings. And in the conclusion of his speech, he added: ‘Therefore, my lord, regarding the entire cause between you and me, I now submit myself to your mercy and judgement in the presence of our lord king of France, and the bishops and nobles and others present here.’ But to the surprise of the king, the mediators and even his own men, he added: ‘– saving God’s honour’.
This was typical Becket. He had been warned at length by the mediators at Montmirail not to add such an inflammatory limiting clause to his apology. The phrase ‘saving our order’ had been at the root of the violent arguments over the Constitutions of Clarendon in the first place, and Becket was fooling no one by amending it to ‘God’s honour’. As soon as he heard Becket’s concluding words, Henry realized that nothing whatever had changed. ‘The king took strong offence and burned with anger towards the archbishop, throwing many insults at him, condemning him a great deal, reproaching him more, inveighing against him, accusing him of being proud and haughty, forgetful of and ungrateful for the royal bounty lavished on him,’ wrote Herbert of Bosham, who noted that even the French king seemed weary of Becket’s intransigence, asking him: ‘Lord archbishop, do you wish to be more than a saint?’ The peace conference broke up with territorial plans well made, but with the estrangement between Becket and Henry II still wholly unresolved.
‘Do you wish to be more than a saint?’ These were prescient words indeed from Louis. After the failure to make peace at Montmirail, Henry and Becket tried again with another botched reconciliation at Montmartre in November 1169. This time, Henry would not offer the archbishop the kiss of peace. Becket had subsequently threatened to lay the whole of England under Interdict and worked to gain papal backing for his threats. In the context of Henry’s succession planning he was becoming more than just a nuisance.
In July 1170, Henry
decided to act boldly. Crossing to England with his eldest son and a number of Norman bishops, he travelled to Westminster Abbey and had the younger Henry anointed king – rex designatus – by the archbishop of York, Roger de Pont l’Evêque. Around ten other bishops witnessed the ceremony.
When Becket learned of the outrageous breach of his privileges, he was incensed. After a short period of uneasy peace, on 30 November 1170 Becket crossed to England with the intention of disciplining those bishops who had partaken in the improper coronation. He preached fire from the pulpit in Canterbury Cathedral on Christmas Day, excommunicating virtually everyone he could recall that had ever wronged him. Then he announced severe sentences against those who had taken part in Henry the Young King’s coronation.
Word of Becket’s provocative and unrestrained activities in England reached Henry at his Christmas court in Bures in Lower Normandy. On receiving the news he uttered a phrase now among the most infamous in history: ‘What miserable drones and traitors have I nurtured and promoted in my household who let their lord be treated with such shameful contempt by a low-born clerk!’ (This is often, incorrectly, rendered as ‘will no one rid me of this troublesome priest?’)
Within days, the archbishop had been murdered. On 29 December, four heavily armed men smashed through a side-door to Canterbury Cathedral with an axe. The archbishop of Canterbury was waiting for them inside. They were angry. He was unarmed. They tried to arrest him. He resisted. They hacked the top of his head off and mashed his brains with their boots.
The four knights who murdered Becket seem to have believed that Henry wanted them to do so. It was a belief that spread in the shocked weeks and months following Becket’s death. Henry, having recently fancied himself the greatest man in Europe and inheritor of Henry I, was suddenly a pariah. Not only the Church, but the whole of European society was outraged by the murder. It seemed likely that Pope Alexander – who refused to speak to an Englishman for a week after he received news of Becket’s death – was ready to excommunicate Henry. Fortune’s wheel turned sharply downwards. Henry’s position, built so carefully on political cunning and dynamic leadership, was suddenly exploded, thanks to a few words spoken in anger.