Crown & Country: A History of England Through the Monarchy

by Starkey, David

  II

  ‘Lo! to fight and to judge: that is the task of a king.’ While Henry was fighting in France (or, as he preferred, achieving the aims of war by the means of diplomacy), he was judging in England – either in person on his occasional visits or by proxy through his representatives.

  Henry was as serious and hands-on in the business of justice as he was in most other aspects of kingship. He chose his judges with care and held them to account for their stewardship. What most kept them on their toes was the fact that Henry was at least as good a lawyer as they. He was, writes the great legal historian Frederic William Maitland, ‘quite competent to criticize minutely the wording of a charter, to frame a new clause and to give his vice-chancellor a lesson in conveyancing’.

  And he could impose his justice even when he wasn’t there in person, thanks to his innovations in the law, which became a sort of mirror reflecting and multiplying royal authority. The main writing office was known as the Chancery, and it issued a multiplicity of ‘writs’ – that is, standardized royal orders. The writ itself was written out on a slip of parchment and then authenticated by attaching the great seal. The seal was deliberately large and impressive and it carried the king’s image to the furthest corner of his dominions. It also makes an important point about the nature of kingship. On the front the king is seated, as a lawgiver and judge. On the reverse he is mounted and armed as the warrior-defender of his people.

  In the course of Henry’s reign, writs were developed to deal with all the most common legal problems of the king’s subjects. They were mass-produced by Chancery clerks and they were available, for a fee, to every freeman. Previously, the king’s justice had depended on the king’s actual presence; now with the writ, the seal and the magic of writing, the king and his justice could be everywhere, for everybody.

  For two decades England had been weak. But now the crown was worn by a man whose personality matched the pretensions of the position. Henry overawed and faced down opponents at every turn, high and low, at home and abroad. One contemporary observed: ‘He is a great, indeed the greatest of monarchs for he has no superior of whom he stands in awe, nor subject who may resist him.’

  In all of this activity, whether in fighting or in judging, Henry’s principal agent and adviser in these early years was his chancellor, Thomas Becket. They had, contemporaries noted wonderingly, ‘but one heart and one mind’. It went even beyond their personal relationship, close though it was. For Becket was the only one of Henry’s ministers whose power was as extensive as the king’s own. The responsibility of the treasurer, for example, was limited to England. But Becket’s Chancery issued Henry’s orders throughout all his dominions. And the chancellor himself, like the king his master (except that some unkind tongues said that it was Becket who was the real master), seemed to be everywhere and to do everything.

  In 1156, for example, Becket was an itinerant judge in three counties; in 1158, Becket, as we have seen, had gone to the Paris summit with Louis VII ahead of Henry, to prepare the ground and smooth the way. Later in the year, he was again justice itinerant in England. In 1159, he was the key figure, after Henry himself, in the Toulouse campaign: he organized the heavy taxation needed to finance it (which fell especially heavily on the Church); he commanded a troop of hand-picked knights and was the foremost in every fight. As the supreme mark of trust, he was given responsibility for the upbringing of the king’s son and heir Henry, and in 1162 returned from Normandy to England with him, charged with the task of getting the magnates to agree to his nomination as heir.

  He succeeded in this as in everything else.

  When, therefore, Thomas’s former patron, Archbishop Theobald, died in 1161, Becket was the obvious candidate to replace him. Theobald had ‘hoped and prayed’ that he would be his successor. More to the point, Henry had determined on it as well.

  Becket was aghast and begged to be excused: he could not both fulfil his duties to the Church as archbishop and retain Henry’s affection, he explained. Henry was insistent. Only the Empress Matilda, who had had personal experience of an earlier transformation, when the imperial chancellor had been made archbishop, counselled against the promotion. But her fears were ignored and Becket’s were overcome. ‘I acquiesced’, he explained later, ‘more for love [of Henry] than for the love of God.’

  The elevation of the royal favourite was triumphant. He was elected unanimously on 23 May; the royal assent was signified by Becket’s ward, the young Prince Henry; he was ordained priest on 2 June and the following day was consecrated archbishop by Bishop Henry of Winchester in a spectacular ceremony.

  Who would be proved right: Henry or his mother Matilda? It did not take Henry long to find out.

  III

  Henry had high hopes for his friend in his new office, though not, perhaps, quite as high as Becket had for himself. As archbishop and chancellor – for Henry took it for granted that Becket would continue in his old position as well – Becket would be supreme in both Church and state. His place in each would add lustre to the other and both would lend a reflected glory to Henry himself. For only the greatest of kings could confidently employ such an omnipotent and omnicompetent minister. Indeed, among contemporary rulers only one other had a chancellor-archbishop, the Emperor Frederick Barbarossa.

  How better to reinforce Henry’s own claims to quasi-imperial status?

  But, above all, Becket’s appointment was intended to play a central part in Henry’s grand political strategy. This centred on his seven-year-old son and heir, Henry. Becket, as the king’s best friend and alter ego, had already been heavily involved in the upbringing of his son. Now, as chancellor-archbishop, he would – Henry intended – finish what he had begun: he would crown the young Henry as king in his father’s lifetime and head up a subordinate administration that would rule England in his name.

  Finally, and almost as an afterthought against these high matters of dynastic policy, Archbishop Becket would be able to take the English Church in hand on Henry II’s behalf as well. For Henry II’s was not the only monarchy in England. There was another power in the land: the Church. The Church was a state within a state: it had its own language, Latin; its own system of law, known as ‘canon’ law; its own property, which extended to upwards of a fifth of the land in England; its own symbols of power in the churches, cathedrals and monasteries, which are still among our most impressive structures. Above all, it had its own personnel and its own organization, which paralleled the machinery of royal government.

  Indeed, England would not have been England without the English Church and the king could not have ruled England without its cooperation either. The landed wealth of the bishops and abbots made their appointments important sources of royal patronage. The king also looked to the leading clergy as councillors, advisers and administrators. Nor was the king the only one: indeed, the services of the clergy were needed by all levels of secular society. For the Church had more or less a monopoly on learning and the teaching of Latin, which, following the post-Conquest abandonment of Anglo-Saxon as a written language, had become the language of both government and public and private administration.

  So all jobs that we would still call ‘clerical’ were filled by clergymen. They were the lawyers, accountants, dons, secretaries, doctors and mere pen-pushers. And they were everywhere: one in six of the population were in some form or other of holy orders. This raised awkward questions of demarcation. What happened when a cleric committed a crime against the king’s peace? Who should try a case between a clergyman and a layman? Who had jurisdiction over Church property? Where, in short, did the king’s justice stop and the Church’s begin?

  These questions were further complicated by the fact that the Church was not only a state within a state. It was also, since it embraced all western Europe, above and beyond the state as well – just as the power of the pope was beyond and arguably above that of the king. And the more vigorously reform was pressed and the sharper the line that was drawn between
the spiritual and the temporal, the more scope there was for a clash between the claims of pope and king.

  In the Old Testament, kings were the chosen and anointed of God; in the New, Jesus enjoined his followers to ‘render unto Caesar the things that are Caesar’s, and to God the things that are God’s’. This seemed clear enough. But, above and beyond the general rule, the papal monarchy had a special claim to divine sanction. For had not Christ himself given St Peter, who was believed to have been the first pope, ‘the keys of the kingdom of heaven’?

  In the Middle Ages almost no one doubted that this text gave the pope a universal spiritual authority. And it extended to kings and emperors as much as to the merest peasant. In particular, it meant that if a king sinned, the pope could chastise him like any other errant Christian. In extreme cases he could excommunicate him: that is, exclude him, more or less permanently, from the Christian community. He could also, as a further sanction, lay his territories under ‘interdict’, which had the effect of depriving, not only the miscreant king, but all his subjects of the minis-trations of Holy Church.

  The result in Continental Europe and the German Empire in particular was a clash on an epic scale. It culminated in 1077, when the Holy Roman Emperor Henry IV was compelled to make his way through the snows of an Alpine winter to Canossa, there to prostrate himself as a penitent at the feet of the indomitable Hildebrand, who reigned as Pope Gregory VII.

  Neither Normandy nor England experienced anything like that. For William I, despite his ostentatious piety, was unwilling to yield an inch to the papacy. He used it when it was necessary or convenient to do so, most importantly to sanction his claim to England. But all this was achieved by about 1072. Thereafter William’s concern was to insulate his dominions from Roman interference. He flatly refused the pope’s demand for homage; no pope was to be recognized nor any papal letters received without his permission; no legislation was to be proposed in a council of the English Church without his agreement; and no baron excommunicated without his consent. And he imposed a ban on bishops going to Rome, even when they had been specifically summoned by the pope. The effect was to neutralize each and every weapon in the papal armoury.

  But not even the Conqueror could insulate England entirely, and under his successors there were eddies and echoes of the great European conflict. During the civil war, in particular, the Church, like most other forces in society, moved to assert itself against a weakened crown. The attack was led by Bishop Henry of Winchester. At first sight he seems an unlikely champion. Opulent, magnificent, as at home in armour as in pontificals and with an adventurous artistic taste that extended to importing ancient Classical statues from Rome to decorate his palace at Winchester, Bishop Henry was nevertheless zealous in the defence of clerical rights and privileges.

  The result was that the power of the Church reached its zenith in the years of the Anarchy. Stephen had been put on the throne by churchmen and had his title confirmed by the pope. In return he was prepared to grant whatever the Church asked – in effect complete autonomy against royal authority. Stephen was also quick to reconsider. His failure to observe the excessive clerical privileges provided Bishop Henry with his main justification for deserting his brother’s cause. And it was at the council of Winchester, which followed Stephen’s defeat, that Bishop Henry’s claims for clerical supremacy became most extravagant, with his assertion that the Church not merely crowned the king but actually chose him.

  Not even Becket himself could have claimed more.

  After Bishop Henry’s fall from grace at Rome, the leadership of the English Church passed to Theodore, archbishop of Canterbury. He was a man of very different character from Bishop Henry: the latter was lordly, the former austere and devout. But that did not stop Theodore from being a better politician and a much superior diplomat.

  The result was that Theodore presided over the closest and most fruitful period of Anglo-Roman relations since the heroic, missionary days of Anglo-Saxon Christianity. Englishmen of promise went to Rome, chiefly to work in the administration of the papal curia. This encouraged the notion that contacts between England and Rome were not exceptional or alien but part of the natural course of things. Likewise, bishops and monasteries, nervous of faltering royal authority in England and the concomitant breakdown of public order, started to seek papal protection and confirmation of their possessions. Even more importantly, they (and lesser folk too) also started to appeal to the Roman court – not exceptionally but as a matter of routine.

  This change coincided with a revolution in the scope and sophistication of canon – that is, Church – law. In 1137, Gratian, a monk of Bologna, set himself to systematize canon law on the model of the great Roman imperial jurists. The result was his Decretum. It was published in 1151 and it transformed both the teaching and the practice of canon law. The effects were felt even in remote England, as Theodore brought over Vacarius, a Lombard jurist, to teach Roman and canon law to the group of bright young men he had assembled in his household.

  Theodore’s entourage – the ‘Canterbury men’, as they were known – became a self-sustaining intellectual community. They formed a university, civil-service training college and debating society rolled into one. They included young men like Thomas Becket who were on the thresholds of careers that would take them to the summit of Church and state. But, above all, they were lawyers. They argued ‘from prayers to meal time’ on points of law, on knotty theological problems, and on current affairs. And they did so ‘in the manner of pleaders in courts of law’.

  It was in Archbishop Theodore’s household, in other words, that Becket had learned to argue a case – passionately, effectively and with an unflagging enthusiasm. That never altered. All that would happen was that he changed client. He had already changed from Archbishop Theodore to King Henry. Now, although Henry did not yet realize it, he was about to change again, from his king to his Church and – he would have claimed – to his God.

  IV

  And the inadvertent agent of change, of course, was Henry himself. Henry must have discussed his plans with Becket before he made him archbishop. And they offered a glittering prospect indeed. As minister for everything, Becket had been in the king’s shadow; as both viceroy to his son and heir and papal legate in England, he would have been a virtually independent potentate.

  For the son of a rural knight turned failed urban property speculator, the temptation was well-nigh irresistible. Like the Devil with Christ, the king had offered him the rulership of the whole world (or at least of England). And, like Christ, Becket was tempted. Indeed, he admitted as much in a later letter. ‘If we had been willing’, he wrote, ‘to have been agreeable to [Henry’s] will in everything, there would have been no one, under his authority or in his kingdom, who would not have obeyed us absolutely.’ But, like Christ also, Becket eventually resisted temptation and in effect said ‘Get thee behind me, Satan’ to an astonished, hurt and increasingly angry Henry.

  Why? Had Becket undergone a religious conversion? Was he a consummate actor, throwing himself with relish into a new part? An advocate, pleading on behalf of a new client? Or was he trying to prove himself to his fellow clergy, who widely suspected him of being a royal stooge?

  Bearing in mind the state of the evidence, any and all of these explanations are possible. For the months following his appointment as archbishop are among the worst documented of Becket’s whole career. And contemporaries were as puzzled as posterity. Only direct divine intervention, they thought, could explain what had happened.

  The change in Becket may have been complete and apparently miraculous but it was by no means instantaneous. ‘After a time’, William of Newburgh writes, ‘considering piously and sagaciously the responsibility of so high an honour [as the archbishopric], he on a sudden exhibited … a change in his habit and manners.’ ‘After a time’. There appears to be a studied ambiguity in the phrase. Did William not know when it had happened? Or was it not an event at all but a process? The latter seems t
he more likely. Becket, that is, did not assume his new role, he grew into it. One thing of course was clear from the beginning: he was determined to be a great archbishop just as he had been a great chancellor. He had made the latter office; he would remake the former. But how?

  His first thoughts seem to have tended simply to a clerical grandeur. Theodore had had his household of clerks; Becket would have his dozens of clerks. He would be lavish in his hospitality and extravagant in his alms-giving. And he would carry out his duties meticulously: he spent time in his private devotions; he studied theology and he set himself to recover and augment the rights of his see.

  But, despite the outward show, there seems at first to have been a certain reticence, even self-doubt. Perhaps it was a genuine diffidence about the propriety of his appointment. For certainly his promotion to Canterbury broke every rule in the new clericalist handbook. The proper position was that no bishop should be consecrated ‘who had not been freely elected and without previous nomination by the secular power’. But, far from Becket being ‘freely elected’, each constituency that was invited to endorse his appointment was aware of overwhelming pressure from the king.

  This presented him with an awkward dilemma. How could he pose as the champion of the Church when his election was uncanonical and he owed his appointment to his royal friend and master?

  The first step towards his liberation came with his receipt of the pallium from Pope Alexander III. Normally the archbishop was required to go in person to Rome to receive the pallium – the narrow woollen stole that was the symbol of his office – directly from the hands of the pope. But Henry, solicitous as always for the welfare and convenience of his favourite and with many other things for him to do in England, arranged for Becket to receive it by proxy.