In the cold dawn of a rainy January day the hunting-lodge of Clarendon looked as though besieged by an army, so many were the pavilions crowded round it. If the King wished to summon his Council he could have lodged all his Bishops and lay magnates at Windsor or Winchester or Westminster; but it pleased him to make them camp here in the January rain. There was even a reasonable excuse, if someone complained of such an uncomfortable meeting-place. A magnate with a guilty conscience might fear to enter a royal castle, lest the gate be barred when he wished to leave; no one might avoid unwalled Clarendon on that excuse.
As King Henry strolled out, wrapped in a sheepskin cloak against the rain, he heard a chorus of coughs from the pavilions, and smiled to himself.
He was determined not to use force; but he could only get his way by playing on the fears of the Bishops, and if they suffered from colds in the head they would yield the quicker. They were going to yield anyway, though as yet they did not know it. That was the best stroke of all. These holy men had ridden at great inconvenience to support the Archbishop in his defiance of the King; and the Archbishop would not defy the King. He shivered with joy in his secret knowledge.
He hated Thomas, who had been his friend. He was going to humiliate him, utterly, before all England. Thomas deserved the worst that could happen to him, for he had committed the unforgivable sin; he had told Henry to his face that there was a power to which even the King of England must bow.
Henry knew he ought to bow to God. He was a Christian who heard Mass every morning. But he had been crowned King of England, and that made him responsible for the welfare of his whole realm. He had sworn to govern justly, but how could he govern justly if a large part of the population refused to be governed by him? Once he had thought that the problem might be avoided if the Archbishop of Canterbury was a friend who knew his ways; they could talk over difficulties together, and he would magnanimously permit Thomas to act from his own authority, provided Thomas did what the King required of him. Henry knew the history of his adopted country; he knew that a hundred years ago the Pope had permitted William the Conqueror to govern the Church because William did exactly what the Pope would have done in his place; he had planned to permit Thomas to do what Henry would have done.
It had worked badly, because Thomas would not spare the time to talk things over with him. That was absurd. No previous Archbishop of Canterbury had found it necessary to sit in his cathedral city all the year round, merely to administer the affairs of his Province. It was not necessary, but Thomas pretended it was; because Thomas was an actor, always standing back to look at himself, watching himself perform the functions of the great office his talents had obtained for him. There was a queer word in the New Testament, a Greek word for which St. Jerome had found no Latin equivalent: ‘hypocrite’, meaning an actor. So he had been told by Master Adelard of Bath, when Bristol was his mother’s capital and he had learned his grammar there. Thomas was an actor, a hypocrite.
He was a good actor, and a very thorough one; he played his part so carefully that he became the character he was imitating. Could hypocrisy make a bad man good? Henry considered the idea for a few minutes, without reaching a definite conclusion.
The humiliation of Thomas had been carefully planned, and now it was certain to take effect. The Pope himself opposed the Archbishop who was standing up for the rights of the Papacy. As soon as news of the quarrel at Westminster reached the Papal court at Sens Alexander had sent over Master Robert of Melun to bring the Archbishop to reason. Henry giggled to himself, thinking of Robert’s promotion to the vacant See of Hereford; it had been amusing to hear Thomas plead the cause of his old tutor, in ignorance that the retired lecturer from Paris had come to England to oppose him. Then, in the privacy of the King’s solar, Thomas had bowed to the advice of the Pope’s envoy. He had promised that next time he was asked in public he would publicly agree to the old custom of King Henry. It showed that in high politics the son of a London burgess could not compete with the great grandson of the Devil.
The beauty of it was that Thomas had no inkling that the old custom was now written down. He must suppose that after he had given his formal assent he could still haggle over particular cases. But there it would be, in black and white; and for each claim there could be adduced a precedent of sorts. After all, his grandfather had claimed all the rights of his predecessors, and if you could show that Rufus, in an access of drunken rage, had imprisoned a Bishop or hanged a clerk, that would bind Thomas – once he had sworn.
The camp was stirring. Soon the Bishops would be hurrying through their Masses, to eat breakfast before the meeting opened. Henry who had already begun working, had finished his bread dipped in wine, as much as the greatest glutton allowed himself before dinner, the first real meal of the day. It would undermine the resistance of these clerks if he opened the Council early, interrupting their breakfast. He went back to his cosy bedchamber, to don his robes of state. As a rule King Henry dressed very shabbily, but he knew the value of an impressive appearance; on great occasions his robes of state were as splendid as gold thread and English embroidery could make them.
Three days later King Henry once more went out to sniff the dawn. He was not feeling well, and he hoped the cold air would revive him. His eyes were bloodshot, looking out on a world filled with floating specks; his neck felt twice its normal thickness; he ached all over, and a disordered liver had given him a raging thirst; yet he dared not drink for fear of apoplexy. For three days he had surrendered to the luxury of a royal Angevin rage, which was as exhausting as fighting a battle.
All the same, though the physicians warned him that his lack of self-control endangered his health, this outburst had been profitable as well as enjoyable. Thomas, after breaking his pledged word to assent to the old custom, was now weakening under pressure from his colleagues. It was a waste of time trying to frighten Thomas himself, though Henry could not forgo the pleasure of attempting it; but the Bishop of Norwich was genuinely afraid of any form of violence, and the Bishop of Salisbury had a guilty conscience, which reproached him for his old treasons in the days of King Stephen. The Bishops must bring their leader to heel. If not, he might proceed to extremes; he had not finally made up his mind. It would probably cost him his throne, but it might be worth losing a throne to see William of Norwich scream with terror as the executioner’s knife grubbed for his genitals. If he himself did not know whether he might not in the end mutilate or hang these silly old men, then they could not know either. They would feel afraid, and they would be right to feel afraid.
Yielding to overpowering rage was as exciting as galloping over rough country on a bolting horse. Anger impelled him to kill, while common sense strove to hold him back; in the end he did as common sense advised, but meanwhile the struggle had the exhilaration of danger overcome. It was more enjoyable than the stimulus of heavy drinking, but with the same kind of dangerous joy.
It was difficult to keep his rage at the appropriate heat, for events were falling out as he would have ordered them had he been omnipotent; no one blessed with such amazing luck could continue to feel angry. Thomas had lost his head, to put himself completely in the wrong. Soon, when the fears of his colleagues compelled him to yield, he would be exposed to the derision of all Christendom as a cantankerous fool who could neither give way gracefully nor maintain his quarrel with firmness. An Archbishop who floundered so clumsily could never hurt him.
The happy result was entirely due to his skilful shift of position at the last moment. Before the Council opened, the Pope, and every responsible statesman who wished to avoid a breach in the Papalist ranks, had put pressure on Thomas to agree to the old custom. But everyone, except the King himself, was thinking of relations between England and Rome, the question which had caused friction since the days of the Conqueror. The right of appeal to the Roman Curia, the right to attend a papal Council without first seeking leave from the King, the right of a Metropolitan to receive his pallium from that one of the rival Po
pes whom he considered the true successor of St. Peter, these were the rights which had led to disputes between Lanfranc and the Conqueror, between every King of England and his Archbishops, until even the timid Theobald had been sent into exile. No one had given a thought to the problem of clerks accused of grave crimes; that had remained an open question, too unimportant for a serious quarrel.
But the version of the old custom he had reduced to writing dealt almost entirely with the problem of ‘criminous clerks’. Of course he dared not claim that they should be tried and sentenced in the ordinary courts; he might as well introduce the worship of Mahound as claim that there was no legal difference between clerks and laity. His vassals would rebel if he tried anything like that. He had only proposed that clerks who had been found guilty in the Church courts should be sent to the King’s court for punishment. That seemed fair, on the face of it, as the lay magnates had at once agreed.
Only that foolish Thomas had refused to swear to these new customs, such an improvement on the old custom which had in fact been enforced by his grandfather. He had made the technical point, only apparent to a pettifogging ecclesiastical lawyer, that the new system would punish clerks twice for one offence; they would first be deprived of their orders, and then mutilated by the King’s hangman. In a sense that was true, if loss of orders could be regarded as a punishment. Most laymen did not so regard it, but that was not an argument you could use to an archbishop.
Nevertheless, the new proposal had broken the united front of the Church party, and Henry knew that very soon the extremists must give way. To the lay magnates the important thing was that in future criminous clerks would forfeit their chattels to the King. All sensible laymen favoured a scheme which would increase the revenue the King drew from the Church; less would be demanded from the laity. The Bishops as a body probably thought it wrong in principle that anyone who had been a clerk should suffer on the secular gallows. But Bishops as a class are not thieves or assassins; the new customs would not affect them personally. They would not embark on a dangerous struggle with the lay power just to make life easier for a few debauched scholars or runaway novices, who had taken to a life of crime because they were unfitted for the clerical state.
At this moment the more dignified Bishops were probably begging Thomas to give way, though they would stand by him until he did so; and Salisbury and Norwich would be squealing with unworthy fear. It was the third day of the deadlock, and more than once Henry had wondered whether to offer some small concession to get the negotiations on the move once more. But he was bound to win. His only difficulty would be to work up a convincing rage before the Council met; that was hard, when he was on the brink of success.
A few hours later he sat crowned on his throne, in the timber hall of that meagre little hunting-lodge. By meditating on the double-dealing of his old comrade Thomas he had worked himself into a rage never surpassed by any Angevin son of the Devil. There was a man who owed all to the royal favour, an unemployed and unemployable scholar, son of a poor burgess of Cheapside: the King had snatched him from his undignified trade to make him one of the greatest magnates of the realm. (At this point the Devil his ancestor reminded Henry that Thomas had attained the archdeaconry of Canterbury by his own merit, without royal influence; the reminder that his picture was false made the King angrier than ever.) It was Henry alone who had made him Archbishop, and he had done it only because he thought he was rewarding a faithful supporter. Thomas had cheated him as soon as he was safely consecrated. All that flaunting in public as a holy man, the ostentatious riding out to confirm great throngs, the attendance at monastic office in the Cathedral, had been a scheme to build up his own influence in opposition to his lord’s. Thomas was making himself a rival to the King. There was no room for two Kings in England, as all would agree who remembered the civil war. When ordinary decent Norman gentlemen understood what Thomas was at they would desert him, and when he was deserted he would give way. If he remained obstinate there would be nothing for it but to risk excommunication by killing him; his power was greater than King Stephen’s had ever been, and he might be able to keep his throne until he came to an arrangement with the Pope. Or, better still, the Archbishop might be murdered by loyal vassals, without orders. It would be necessary to condemn the murder, and punish the murderers. But they could be rewarded later, when the world began to forget.
He was daydreaming. Worse, the thought of what might one day happen to Thomas had brought a smile to his lips. He must build up his rage, or the submission might be postponed indefinitely. He turned to the lay magnates who stirred uneasily in the semi-circle of seats round his throne; they would have sat all day in the saddle without complaint, but they were becoming dreadfully bored with this long Council.
‘My lords,’ he said in a low, grumbling voice, ‘do you remember my poor brother William? Doesn’t the anniversary of his death fall about this time? Let us say a prayer for his soul.’
‘Remembering also the Archbishop in our prayers?’ put in Hamelin de Warenne, another of the King’s bastard brothers.
All caught the allusion. Thomas had forbidden William’s rich marriage; his reason had been the repugnance of the bride, a reason which did not appeal to men who thought women should marry as their lords directed. William, who was said to have died of disappointment, had their sympathy.
The King was satisfied. He had reminded the magnates that Thomas was not only a bad servant to the crown; he was capable of interfering in the private lives of great vassals. As they recounted his misdeeds they worked up a rage equal to the King’s.
This was the third day they had spent sitting in Council, awaiting the Archbishop. Even for the winning side this was a most tiresome Parliament. There was nothing they could do to hasten a conclusion, save send envoys to the other hall at the far end of the ramshackle hunting-lodge where the Bishops were gathered round their obstinate leader.
At last, about midday, there came an interruption of their nagging boredom. The Prior of the Temple bustled in.
The chief of the Templars in England was an obvious intermediary between lay magnates and Bishops; himself a knight, he was also a clerk, and the wide estates he ruled for his Order gave him a place among the magnates. For three days he had been scuttling up and down the long passages of Clarendon, carrying messages.
He ran to the dais, to whisper excitedly; instead of standing at the door to shout at the top of his voice, as he would have done if he had been entrusted with a formal message. This was odd, and the Council craned to hear.
‘The Archbishop is on his way,’ he gasped out. ‘Suddenly he got up, without a word to anyone, and asked if the King were still in his hall. I ran on to warn you. Look, here he is.’
Thomas towered in the doorway, haggard and hollow-eyed. Over his Augustinian gown and surplice he wore cope and pallium, but they were in the sombre purple of Advent, a month past. He was bareheaded, his tall skull climbing through a fringe of hair now grey; but his black bushy eyebrows and beak of a nose were as fierce and commanding as ever. He gazed round the assembly in dead silence, his gaunt bloodshot eyes searching the face of every man present; the King received the same sweeping glance, neither more nor less than his neighbours. Then he walked proudly forward, but with such a rigid stiffness of leg that Henry looked for him to faint. Behind him Herbert of Bosham wrestled with an enormous book, but otherwise he was unattended.
At the foot of the dais he made a stiff little bow, as though greeting an equal; and signalled to Herbert to hold the book open before him. Those magnates who knew their letters could distinguish the gold and red capitals, ‘Initium Evangelii Secundum Sanctum Matthaeum‘, sprawled round a great purple Angel. With his hand on the open page Thomas spoke into the waiting silence.
‘I, Thomas, Archbishop and Legate, swear by the holy Word of God that I will observe the ancient custom of the realm, as that custom was observed during the reign of King Henry the grandfather of King Henry now reigning.’
In the
hush which followed Thomas made another little bob to the throne; then he stalked out. All eyes followed him, and it seemed an anticlimax when the other Bishops, who had entered unobserved while their leader held all attention, came forward one by one to take oath on the same book.
Except for the oath, not a word was spoken; only King Henry made a rude sound with his lips as the last Bishop, Walter of Rochester, turned away at the close of the ceremony.
In the palace at Canterbury there was a cramped little solar at the back of the hall, the only place where the Archbishop could talk in complete privacy. On a wet and cold March evening Thomas sat there, hunched over a brazier of charcoal. Nowadays he was never warm, though he wore more clothes than ordinary men. Across the fire Prior Robert of Merton sat decorously upright on a stool, his hands folded in his lap; but in that private place they might talk as equals.
‘You had better hear my confession before Matins,’ the Archbishop began. ‘I have received a direct order from the Holy See, commanding me once more to say Mass daily.’
‘I am glad to hear it. It is for your confessor to say when you have sinned. I told you you were too scrupulous.’
‘The Pope agrees with you,’ Thomas answered bitterly. ‘My suspension is not lifted, because the Curia will not admit that I was ever suspended. The Pope writes a friendly, unofficial letter, begging me to make up my quarrel with the King because it interferes with certain developments of papal policy; in a postscript he tells me not to be silly. I know that what I did was not right, and the Pope says I have done no wrong. I suppose my actions are as blameless as those of any other idiot. I have perjured myself, I have sworn away the liberty of the Church in England. But it’s only poor Tom, what he does can never be serious.’
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