Crown & Country: A History of England Through the Monarchy

by Starkey, David

  The pallium arrived in England in August 1162 and Becket received it barefoot and prostrate in Canterbury Cathedral. The extravagance of the gesture was characteristic of a man whose theatricality matched, if it did not outdo, Henry’s own. It spoke, of course, of Becket’s reverence for the papal office. But it also betokened something much more personal. For Becket treated the pallium, which, as was customary, had been blessed by the pope himself, as a calling, even as a laying on of hands. With its receipt, he felt, the stain of his appointment had started to be wiped away. Like Peter, he had been called to be a fisher of men; like the disciple, he would renounce wealth and family and friends. And he would start by renouncing his king.

  Immediately after the ceremony at Canterbury, he resigned the chancellorship, proffering as his excuse that he was ‘insufficient for one office let alone two’. Henry, who had just obtained a dispensation for him to continue to hold the chancellorship, was taken utterly by surprise and could hide neither his disappointment nor his pique. If he could not have an archbishop as chancellor, he resolved, he would not have a chancellor at all. Instead, so long as Becket lived, the office was left unfilled and its duties discharged by a vice-chancellor, Geoffrey Ridel, who had already acted as deputy to Becket. But Henry decided to make Becket suffer as well and insisted that he resign the archdeaconry of Canterbury, which was the most valuable non-episcopal appointment in the English Church, in Ridel’s favour.

  It was the beginning of a dangerous game of tit-for-tat.

  But even more important for Becket and the English Church as a whole was the General Council of the Church which the exiled Pope Alexander III summoned to meet at Tours in the Loire valley in May 1163.

  English kings had traditionally exercised a jealous control over the attendance of their bishops at General Councils. But Henry, despite his mounting disappointment with Becket, was in an expansive mood. Following his successful meeting with Alexander at Déols, he was confident of the political cooperation of the papacy and he waved through the attendance of his bishops at the council.

  The council turned out to be a life-changing experience for Becket and his fellow bishops – and a political disaster for Henry. Its sessions took place ‘with much pomp’ and debated and passed a radically reforming set of canons: no cleric was to appoint a salaried deputy to perform his office; or to involve himself in usury or lending at interest; or to leave a monastery to study law or medicine.

  Bearing in mind his own past, none of this should have made comfortable listening for Becket, the former lawyer and man of affairs. Even before he entered the royal service, he had been a great pluralist, with many more ecclesiastical offices than he could possibly perform himself. As a young man too he had been in the service of his kinsman, the great London merchant Osbert Huitdeniers. Osbert was a banker and, it is safe to assume, did not lend money free of charge. A different character might have drawn the lesson of humility from the contrast between his own earlier behaviour and the standards which he now joined in imposing on his fellow clergy.

  But that was not Becket’s style. Instead, Becket seems to have decided that the right way to atone for his previous failings was to espouse the new rulings with unbending rigour. This exposed him, then and now, to the charge of hypocrisy. But Becket brushed that off, as he did all criticism, and carried on regardless.

  And it was not only Becket. For Henry had allowed more or less the whole bench of bishops to attend the Council of Tours. It is difficult, I think, to overestimate the consequences. Hitherto, the effective ban on bishops travelling abroad had kept the English Church significantly isolated from Continental turmoil in Church–state relations which had culminated in the Emperor Henry IV’s submission to Pope Gregory VII. But now the attendance of the English bishops in a body at the Council of Tours exposed them directly to the full blast of the Continental movement for Church reform.

  It proved a brisk and bracing air. They were able to see how far English custom departed from what was now ecclesiastical best practice. And they were strengthened in their determination to do something about it. But at least as important was the effect of Tours on their esprit de corps. Meeting with their fellow bishops and without the watchful eye of the king or his justiciar, they developed a novel sense of confidence and collegiality. This meant that Becket, to his surprise as much as Henry’s, was able to face the king in the forthcoming storm with a united bench of bishops behind him.

  Becket and his fellow bishops came back from Tours in the early summer. A few weeks later, Henry, who had recently returned to England after an absence of over four years, encountered Becket at a council held on 1 July 1163 at Woodstock. They immediately came to blows. The issue was a payment known as the sheriff ’s aid. Hitherto the payment had formed a perquisite of the sheriff; Henry was determined that it should be paid directly to the Exchequer instead. Becket set himself with equal determination to resist the change and the two exchanged high words.

  Henry realized that he had been abandoned by the man whom he had made great and who had stood by his side. But he pulled back from the brink of all-out conflict. Was he trying to preserve a necessary working relationship? Or was he keeping his powder dry for the real issue?

  This was not long in coming. Immediately after his return to England, Henry was bombarded with a series of disturbing reports from his justices. They, according to William of Newburgh, ‘intimated … to the king … that many crimes against public order, such as thefts, rapes and murders, were repeatedly committed by the clergy’.

  The justices spoke out of frustration, and perhaps dented professional pride, since the clergy’s exemption from lay justice meant that they got off, in effect, scot free: instead of the mutilation or execution that would be visited on a layman, they faced penance or unfrocking at worst. Shock statistics were also produced to bring the matter home. ‘During his reign’, Henry was told to his face, ‘more than a hundred murders had been committed by the clergy in England alone.’

  The tactic worked. Outraged by the offence both to his sense of justice and his royal dignity committed by thugs in cassocks, Henry decided that something must be done. Becket, on the other hand, was equally determined that clerical exemption from lay justice must be preserved to the last jot and tittle.

  He had found the perfect last ditch to die in.

  The issue of ‘criminous clerks’ was a long-standing one. Such aberrant individuals have always existed and – to the delight of popular Sunday newspapers – still do. And the reaction of the Church was and is the same: to prefer silence to exposure and the dignity and standing of Church and clergy to the welfare of the victims or abstract notions of justice. Now the issue is child abuse; in the twelfth century it was violence. It was a more violent age; the relative number of clergy was much higher and many were in secular employment and lived essentially secular lives. They had wives and children; wore ordinary dress; and, like Chancellor Becket himself, were as handy with weapons as the next man.

  What to do with such men when passions or violence spilled over into criminal acts had been in dispute since the Conquest, when William the Conqueror had introduced Church courts and canon law into England: the Church wished to protect its own; the king to do justice and vindicate his sovereignty. Where should the balance fall?

  Becket pursued a double policy. In a series of high-profile cases, he stoutly defended the privileges of the Church. But he also tried to show that the Church was able to impose appropriate penalties: a priest from the diocese of Salisbury, who was unable to exonerate himself from a charge of murder, was committed to strict confinement in a monastery; a canon of Bedford, who was controversially acquitted by a Church court of murdering a knight, was banished; while a clerk of London, who stole a chalice, was branded. But, though well meant, Becket’s actions only added fuel to the flames: not only were the sentences unknown at canon law; they also trespassed flagrantly on the royal monopoly on criminal justice.

  A more systematic solution would have t
o be found. Henry chose his moment with care. In October, the body of his sainted predecessor, Edward the Confessor, was solemnly reinterred in Westminster Abbey by Becket. Henry used this ceremony in honour of a royal saint to convene an old-fashioned council of the Church, summoned and presided over by himself as a Christian king.

  Henry began by repeating his complaints over ‘criminous clerks’. Then, when the bishops failed to offer concessions, he went on the attack. Would they submit to the ‘ancient customs’ of the realm, he demanded. These ancient customs were studiously vague. But Henry, with his lawyer’s mind, reduced them to two principal components. The first was the Conqueror’s determination to insulate the English Church from the most aggressive papal claims. The second was his own insistence that criminous clerks should be subjected to his own, criminal justice.

  The bishops, led by Becket, stalled by saying that they could only accept the ancient customs ‘saving their order’. This sounds like conditional acceptance. In fact, since the ancient customs, as Henry understood them, were contrary to the new canon law, it was a flat refusal.

  The result was stalemate and both sides appealed to Pope Alexander III: Henry to have the ‘ancient customs’ confirmed; Becket to have them annulled. But the pope counselled compromise. At the beginning of December, Becket, assured that Henry only required his assent by word of mouth, agreed. Scenting victory, Henry immediately raised the stakes. He summoned a council at Clarendon in January 1164 and browbeat Becket into repeating his oral assurance in front of the entire assembly. Then, characteristically, he ordered the ancient customs to be set down in writing. The following day, the obviously pre-prepared text of the Constitutions of Clarendon was produced.

  The Constitutions are one of the great texts of English history. They express an overarching vision of a Church subordinate to the crown in all, save matters of belief, and they work out its implications in minute, lawerly detail. As in Clause 3, which lays down the procedure for dealing with criminous clerks. After conviction in the Church courts, they should first be unfrocked and then handed over to the secular courts for punishment as ordinary criminals.

  The Constitutions were the antithesis of everything that Becket believed in. For Becket espoused the contrary vision – based on an extreme clericalist reading of the biblical text ‘touch not mine anointed’ – which saw the Church as not only independent of the state but manifestly superior to it.

  But, under Henry’s intense pressure, Becket swore to the Constitutions. As did the rest of the bishops. Henry, it seemed, had won – as he usually did.

  Becket, for his part, believed that he had sinned by swearing to the Constitutions. Soon he repudiated the submission on the grounds it had been extorted under duress. Henry now tightened the screw by accusing the archbishop of embezzlement during his time as chancellor. In fear for his life Becket fled abroad.

  V

  From his haven in France, Becket continued to defy Henry by making ever more grandiose claims for the independence and authority of the Church. He was also pursuing diplomatic negotiations as enthusiastically as he had when in power – only this time it was with Henry’s enemies.

  And there was an added danger. In order to shore up the succession to the crown, Henry wanted his son Henry crowned king of England immediately, during his own lifetime. But with the archbishop on the run and the clergy hostile this was no easy task. The right to anoint a king belonged to the archbishop of Canterbury. To get his way Henry made the archbishop of York perform the coronation. But was it legitimate? There was also the larger question of Becket’s own position. Becket on the loose and abroad was more dangerous, Henry felt, than Becket at home. He was undoing Henry’s foreign alliances. He was also a magnet for dissent in England, which was now coming from within Henry’s own family. So a compromise was patched up and Becket returned to England.

  And what a return! At Christmas 1170 word reached Henry that Becket, who had learned nothing and forgotten nothing, was up to his old tricks. The archbishop, his enemies insinuated to the king, was careering round the country armed with knights and he was excommunicating bishops who were loyal to Henry. Something snapped and there resulted one of those famous Plantagenet rages. ‘Will no one rid me of this turbulent priest?’ the king exclaimed, or words to that effect. Henry had said such things before and nothing much had happened. But this time four royal knights took the king at his word and they rode furiously to Canterbury to bring Becket to account – whatever that might mean.

  On 29 December the four knights – Reginald fitzUrse, William de Traci, Hugh of Morville and Richard Brito – arrived at Canterbury Cathedral. The other clergy begged Becket to flee while there was time. But he refused, deciding to make a final stand. It was fitzUrse who struck the first blow, taking off the side of Becket’s head. Still denouncing his assailants, the archbishop fell to the pavement of his cathedral and the others piled in. Moments later Becket lay dead.

  When he heard the news Henry plunged into an agony of grief, hiding himself away for three whole days so that his friends feared for his life. Was it personal grief for the death of his one-time friend? Or horror at what had been done in his name? In either case the king’s response fully matched the enormity of the deed. For Christendom was stunned by the murder of an archbishop in his own cathedral on the orders of his own king. And letters rained down upon the pope, even from Henry’s own family, demanding that he proceed, with all the awful powers of the Church, against this sacrilegious king who was worse than a Nero or a Judas.

  Meanwhile, Becket’s ghost, growing more powerful year by year, served as the perfect cover for resistance or rebellion against the murderer king.

  Chapter 11

  The Curse of Anjou

  Richard I, John, Henry III

  CANTERBURY CATHEDRAL LOOMS LARGE in the Kent countryside and also in English history. After the murder of Thomas Becket it took on almost mythic status. Since then, for Henry, everything had gone wrong. All the power he had built up threatened to unravel.

  Only a grand gesture of self-abasement would exorcize the ghost that haunted the Angevin empire. In July 1174 Henry purged his soul with a fast, then walked barefoot wearing only a rough woollen shirt to Thomas’s shrine in Canterbury Cathedral. There he prostrated himself before his erstwhile enemy. Next he, Henry, king of England, submitted to a public scourging by all the clergy present: bishops, abbots and each of the monks of Canterbury took it in turns to flog him. Finally he lay all night and all day on the cold stones in front of the shrine. It was an extraordinarily untypical gesture by that proud and passionate man.

  The sight of a king humbled, especially so mighty a king, was shocking. But for the next century it would not be an uncommon sight as a line of English monarchs were forced, repeatedly, into humiliating concessions.

  I

  The penance that he performed at Canterbury, Henry calculated, was worth it if it contrived to separate Becket, the saint as he now was, from the coalition of enemies now arrayed against him. And so it proved almost immediately.

  The king awoke the following morning to hear that an invasion of England had been thwarted. As if by miracle William I, king of Scots, was captured and a great armada poised to invade England from Flanders dispersed. Henry had indeed stooped to conquer. It brought to an end a crisis unleashed by the conflict with Becket, the lowest point in Henry’s hitherto triumphant reign. For the rebels arrayed against him were his own family – Eleanor, his wife, and his three eldest sons, Henry (the Young King), Richard and Geoffrey.

  For Henry had made a decision about the future of his kingdoms. He wanted to provide for the stability of his empire. He also wanted to try to keep the peace among his teenage sons, who had clearly inherited his own ferocious temper, by dividing up his empire among them. But in practice the division of his lands proved to be a disastrous miscalculation. The problem was that his eldest son in particular had been given glittering titles but no real power. Young Henry had been crowned king of England and
in 1169 he had paid Louis VII of France (his father-in-law) homage – the ritual act of submission that English kings made for their holdings in France – for Anjou. But all this was his in name only. The young man had to watch as the mighty empire was further divided among his siblings. Richard was given Aquitaine and Geoffrey Brittany. This slight was compounded when Henry II gave the youngest son, John, three key fiefs in Anjou, his territory.

  Seeing the divisions in the English royal family, Louis VII dripped poison into the ear of young Henry. Had he not been crowned king? Was he not sole ruler of Anjou? But what, in effect, was he lord of ? Nothing. He was a gilded prisoner. And so too were his brothers, Richard and Geoffrey, whose power was equally illusory and dependent on their father. It was a matter of power and, above all, honour. The young Henry slipped away to join the French king and claim his just rewards. He had the full encouragement of his mother, Queen Eleanor, who had been plotting against her husband since the murder of Becket. Henry II had tried to divide and rule his family; instead he had united them against him. Richard and Geoffrey joined their mother and brother in revolt.

  In the face of inter-familial strife, Henry’s empire weathered the test and the king deployed his honed and doughty intelligence against his family. Eleanor was captured and imprisoned. After his grand act of abasement at Canterbury, Henry set off for Normandy full of confidence and backed by an army. The sons tasted military defeat at the hands of their all-conquering father and came to heel.

  It was a pattern which was to repeat itself for over a decade.

  Young Henry still thirsted for power, but was fobbed off by his father with an allowance and the chance to shine as a chivalric superstar. Richard, who had impressed his father during the rebellion, learned the real arts of warfare as duke of Aquitaine. There he gained a reputation as a fearsome, sometimes cruel, soldier. More than any of his brothers, he was his father’s son: resourceful, ruthless and a highly capable ruler. Geoffrey was kept under close supervision, but was eventually given control of Brittany. And John was made lord of Ireland, the emptiest title of all. He was nicknamed ‘John Lackland’ by his father.