The strangers went on to demand that he should absolve the Bishops of London and Salisbury; they shouted very rudely, but since now they knew they would get an answer they presently fell silent to hear it.
‘Those Bishops are my subjects, and I can absolve them,’ said Thomas with a frowning countenance. ‘I have already promised to absolve them, when they have fallen at my feet and admitted their fault. But to absolve them now, before they have expressed repentance, would be to imply that my sentence was unjust. On the contrary, it was completely righteous and justified, for they had disobeyed their Metropolitan. You gentlemen know the obligation of a vassal to his lord. You will understand that disobedience is always a serious fault. Again, if you think I am exceeding my powers, ask the Bishops themselves. They will admit the justice of my stand.’
‘Never mind that,’ shouted the leader of the strangers. ‘This is England, where King Henry rules, and we are his men. We demand that you absolve the loyal Bishops, because the King wills it and for no other reason.’
‘King Henry rules the knights of England, but I rule the Bishops. In this matter I cannot please the King; though I am his friend, and anxious to serve him.’
‘Absolve the Bishops!’ they all shouted together. The leader added: ‘If you refuse it will be the worse for you,’ and another called: ‘Remember the Bishop of Seez. King Henry is as good as man as his father.’
‘Even if I had been open to persuasion, you must see that I cannot yield to threats,’ answered Thomas. ‘If you bear a letter from King Henry I will examine it tomorrow, in my chamber. But if you have come without credentials I must ask you to leave at once. I do not turn away travellers. If you seek hospitality my steward will supply your wants. But you have not behaved as guests in my hall should behave.’
‘We are not your guests, and we will not taste your food. You have half an hour to change your mind. Then the King will be served, no matter what the cost.’
The leader was as stern and dignified as Thomas, speaking formally as though summoning a castle to surrender; but one of his followers, as they strode out, drew his hand across his throat with an unseemly noise.
Within the hall there was a moment of awed silence, and then a clamour as every clerk spoke at once. With an anxious frown Prior Robert turned on his lord. ‘Those ruffians mean what they say. You must leave immediately. I suspect they plan to bind you, and carry you before King Henry like a pig tied up for market.’
‘I know knights, for I was one myself not so long ago,’ answered Thomas. ‘King Henry is too careful of the law to have ordered them to murder me unjudged. If they try to take me captive I shall resist, though without shedding blood. More likely they are only drunk and a little excited. Let us send out some sensible layman to see what they are doing. A layman, because they are in the mood to insult any clerk. Ah, there is my steward. Sir William, will you go into the courtyard and see what our visitors are up to? Come back and tell me, here.’
‘I still think you should leave,’ said Prior Robert, while William fitzStephen called in terror; ‘My lord, get away at once.’
Grim of Cambridge stood up with a puzzled frown on his face. ‘Will someone explain what is going on?’ he asked in careful Latin. ‘I can’t understand Frenchmen when they talk so rapidly. If these men are threatening our Archbishop we must tell the sheriff. The law will protect him.’
No one had leisure to explain. Thomas still sat in his high seat, his face expressionless and his hands on his knees, as a Bishop sits on his throne in his cathedral. He was too angry to be afraid. Once heathen Danes had martyred an Archbishop of Canterbury, but it was unthinkable that baptised Christians, knights bound by the obligations of chivalry, should offer violence to the Primate of All England, here in his own hall.
He was the only unmoved member of the company. The servants gathered in an anxious group by the door leading to the cloister; the clerks moved from table to table, talking in whispers and glancing nervously at the main door, bound with iron straps and studded with iron nails, which was the only opening from the hall to the outer world. That door was wide open, for the convenience of the poor of Canterbury; a monk stood ready to close it at a signal from the Archbishop; but the Archbishop sat in dignified calm.
Sir William fitzNigel hurried in, running the length of the hall to throw himself on his knees before the high seat. ‘My lord,’ he gasped, ‘the knights are arming in the courtyard. They have with them a rabble from the brigands of Saltwood; I saw Robert de Broc and Hugh of Horsea. You must escape, this very minute, before they murder you.’
‘If King Henry wants to murder me he will do it wherever I may be. I shall wait here, so that the crime is done openly, before witnesses.’
‘Then, my lord,’ the words came tumbling out of the steward’s mouth in a frenzy of panic, yet he kept to the legal forms engraved in the mind of every Norman official, ‘I take these clerks to witness that I hereby diffidate from your service. I am your vassal no longer. In England no man is bound to follow his lord against the King. I shall serve King Henry, who is the lord of this world.’
‘Your oath was not lent, Sir William, it was given. But I release you. Go in peace.’
Sir William stumbled through the open door, and Grim called after him: ‘There goes the only coward in Canterbury. I am glad he is a Norman.’
FitzStephen and Prior Robert laid hold of the Archbishop’s mantle, tugging at him to get up. ‘They mean to kill you,’ they shouted together. ‘You will be guilty of suicide if you go on sitting there. If you won’t think of yourself remember King Henry, who was once your friend! Will you let him stain his soul with murder? It’s too late to fly to the Young King, or to the sheriff at Dover. Tonight these men can do what they like. Hide in the Abbey till help comes!’
There was sense in the proposal, as Thomas admitted in the privacy of his own mind. Evidently these strangers were not acting on the express orders of King Henry; or they would have produced a sealed document, or some token, as a warrant of authority. Within a few hours the sheriff of Kent could bring his posse comitatus to enforce the peace, or if he neglected his duty the young King could reach Canterbury from London in a long day. It should be easy to hide in the great rambling buildings of Christ Church, where every inhabitant was a clerk who could help to conceal him.
But danger had filled Thomas’s mind with icy calm. He saw everyone – himself, the frantic fitzStephen, Prior Robert, the knights – as so many pieces on a chessboard. It was not yet his turn to move, though he knew what his next move should be.
He refused to fly. An Archbishop should not leave his flock in time of danger; his flight from Northampton had given England six years of turmoil, without bringing nearer a resolution of the quarrel. Besides, the Archbishop of Canterbury was too well known to remain hidden; someone would recognize him, by his great height if for no other reason, and then he would be killed meanly, cowering in a corner, his end stained by cowardice. But these arguments were only rationalizations. He would not fly because he was a knight, attacked by his enemies in the open field. He had heard what Grim called after William fitzNigel, and he must show the Englishman that it was the Norman custom to stand fast.
Meanwhile each man in the crowded hall took his own measures in face of this deadly danger. The servants pushed through the little door opening on the cloister; across the square loomed the north wall of the great Cathedral and once within it they might escape unnoticed through its wide west porch. A few monks gathered by the main door of the hall; they pushed shut the great oak timbers, and bolted it with stout iron bars. Some clerks, visitors unfamiliar with the Archbishop’s palace, huddled at the far end of the room, as though they would be safer at a few yards’ distance from the intended victim. Most of the monks were forming in twos, as if for a procession.
The same thought was in every mind. Once the desire to kill has been gratified a man with a bloody sword will slay and slay so long as there is a living creature within reach; it had happened
in many towns and castles taken by assault, when women and children were cut down after the last warrior had been slaughtered. Every Norman and Englishman more than thirty years old could remember the terrible massacres of the civil war. If those assassins murdered the Archbishop in his high seat they would then exterminate every clerk in the building.
A bell sounded from the Cathedral. Prior Robert turned in triumph to his lord. ‘That is the summons to Vespers. See, the monks form in procession; as they should, for the Divine Office is the highest duty in the world, to be carried out even in the midst of catastrophe. I shall join them, since I am absent from my own community. You, my lord, should come also. You are Abbot of Christ Church, and you should attend the regular Office.’
Thomas permitted himself to be led to the cloister door, half pushed by the eager throng. He had a new plan, but he must keep it a secret.
Henry’s knights would kill him; there was no sure way of escape, and the bare chance of hurried flight was too ignominious to be risked. But his duty to the flock in his care demanded that the murderers should find him and kill him alone; otherwise they would go on to kill all his companions. Therefore he must leave this crowded hall and meet death in the cloisters. It was as simple as the answer to a problem of logic in the schools.
Though he would appear to be seeking the Cathedral he must take care not to reach it. Shed blood pollutes a church; if he were killed on its pavement the great shrine would be desecrated, a place unfit for the Sacrifice of the Mass. He would delay in the cloister until he was overtaken, alone.
The early dark of December had already fallen. At the black entrance to the cloister he halted, leaning back until his companions ceased to push him. ‘I will attend Vespers,’ he said in a level voice, ‘but in the proper state of my rank. Where is my cross? It must be carried before me.’
‘But you sent Herbert of Bosham off with a letter, only this morning,’ expostulated Prior Robert. ‘Ah, there’s the cross. Henry of Auxerre has it. Let him bear it, since your cross-bearer is away.’
‘Yes, that will do. There is no hurry. These monks are too timid, like all monks. But remember: it is not fitting that a church should be polluted with the blood of a sinner. Whatever comes must be borne with patience.’
The great iron-bound outer door shuddered under heavy blows. A moan of terror rose from the far end of the hall as the lath-and-plaster partition fell in and an armed figure appeared in the breach. He wore complete mail, so that his face was entirely hidden by the great helm resting on his shoulders; he still carried the hatchet with which he had hewn down the party-wall, and behind him another armed figure pressed forward.
While the company shuddered at this first sight of naked steel Thomas was chiefly interested to identify his assailants. At dinner he had noted their faces as vaguely familiar, seen before among the knights of the King’s household; but he could recognize every blazon of Normandy and England. To him men in great helms, with painted shields before them, were more clearly labelled than if they had been bareheaded.
‘Gules, a bear argent, muzzled sable,’ he muttered to himself. ‘That is Reginald fitzUrse. The man behind him bears Broc with a label of cadency; he must be the Robert de Broc who cut off the tail of my destrier.’
There was something familiar about fitzUrse, or why did he at once remember his Christian name? Of course, he was one of the vassals of Canterbury. That was too much. Thomas felt the blood hammering, in his temples, and his hand groped for the sword-hilt which once had rested on his hip. Here was a vassal come in arms to murder the lord to whom he had sworn homage! FitzUrse was recreant! He must be told so, to his face, in the hearing of as many witnesses as possible.
Meanwhile there was no excuse for further delay. He stepped into the cloister, and at once saw that Chance had intervened to keep him from the consecrated sanctuary of the Cathedral. That was all for the best. Now he would certainly die in the open, under the unconsecrated sky.
For the usual passage to the Cathedral, left-handed round the cloister, was filled with armed men, the brigands of Saltwood who had ridden in with the knights. The righthand passage appeared to offer another way, but Thomas remembered that a disused door of the servants’ dormitory lay round the corner, a door that was always locked. The procession must halt when they reached it.
Within the Cathedral it was already dark, save where candles glowed on the choir-stalls; the great west door stood open, and the fifty or so choir-monks standing in their places glanced anxiously into the gloom outside. The chant rose and fell raggedly as nervous men questioned their neighbours in whispers. Most of these choir-monks had dined as usual in the Abbey refectory, and walked in procession to their accustomed places; but, as was customary, a few had dined in the palace as guests of the Archbishop, and when they hurried in they brought with them a spate of disturbing rumours.
The King had sent an army to kill his Archbishop, sack the Cathedral, and cut the throats of all the monks in England. That was the least alarming version. Others spoke of having left the Archbishop weltering in gore at his own table. Even the level-headed, who kept their eyes on their psalters and their ears alert to the cadence of the chant, knew that armed men were mustering outside; for they could hear the trampling of horses and see the gleam of torches reflected from mail. Good monks should be ever prepared for martyrdom, and the Prior kept them to their task; but they looked imploringly into the friendly darkness of clerestory and aisle.
Into this ordered ritual, which had continued in Canterbury for more than four hundred years, suddenly burst a shattering interruption. Two scullions, laymen who worked in the monastic kitchen and lodged in the loft above the cloister, dashed through the disused servants’ entrance to shout that the King’s men were killing the Archbishop just behind them. They had unbarred the outer door of their quarters, to offer a chance of escape to any fugitives. The chant ceased, and the monks left their stalls to peer through the narrow door by which the scullions had entered.
Through this mean little door came the Metropolitan cross of Canterbury, still borne by Henry of Auxerre. Then two by two the clerks of the Archbishop’s household, walking hurriedly but not actually in flight. Last of all, with Grim and Prior Robert pulling at his arms, the Archbishop himself stood on the threshold, glancing behind him and clearly reluctant to come further. Beyond, in the gloom of the open cloister, which was not quite so dark as the nave of the Cathedral, the watchers could see a group of armed men, hesitating by the door of the palace.
As the Archbishop was hustled into the Cathedral the Prior of Christ Church ordered the doors to be closed and barred. The same thought was in every mind: if King Henry had sent his household knights to murder the Archbishop they might hesitate to carry out their orders if it meant the desecration of the Mother Church of England; and if, as was more likely, this was an unauthorized act of private revenge, the sheriff of Kent or the sergeants of the Young King might arrive before the doors were battered in.
But the Archbishop countermanded the order of his Prior. ‘The House of God should not be made a castle,’ he protested. ‘I command you, under holy obedience, to open those doors.’
Hearing that invocation, no son of St. Benedict could disobey his Abbot. The doors were flung open to the night.
Dazzled by the lighted hall, Sir Reginald fitzUrse gazed uncertainly into the blackness of the cloister. The Archbishop had gone that way, but there was no telling whether he would hide in the Cathedral or take horse to seek refuge with the Young King. It was all very difficult, and he wished he had never undertaken this adventure. When he left Normandy with his three companions they had made a plan, a good plan, with everything cut and dried and no loopholes for mistakes. They would march up to the Archbishop, give him one last chance to absolve the King’s loyal Bishops, and when he refused, as he was sure to refuse, they would bind him, sling him over a horse, and take him ignominiously before the judgment seat of the master they served. No one would suffer greater injury than a whack fr
om the flat of a sword, no blood would be shed, and no law would be broken. For the King’s outburst over his wine surely empowered any loyal vassal to arrest the Archbishop.
The plan had worked perfectly, right up to the moment when they made their final appeal to the Archbishop in his hall. He had refused, of course, and they should have seized him then and there. But there were too many people in the room, and knights accustomed to fighting in mail always felt naked and helpless when unarmed. They had retired to put on their armour, a sensible precaution, fully warranted in the circumstances; and then everything had begun to go wrong.
That impetuous law-breaker Robert de Broc egged them on. Reginald recalled that he himself had found the hatchet he was still carrying, in a pile of carpenter’s tools lying untidily on a half-finished outside staircase. When Broc discovered the unbarred door near the palace kitchen he, Reginald, had used the hatchet to hew down the partition between kitchen and hall. That was house-breach, burglary, and invasion of the Archbishop’s peace; three felonies, each carrying the death penalty. He had put himself hopelessly in the wrong; if he went home quietly, admitting that the Archbishop had escaped him, he would hang within the month.
His only chance was to do the King such a service that any breach of the everyday law would be forgiven. They must secure the Archbishop, if they had to knock him down on the steps of the High Altar and bind him with his pallium. There was nothing left but to plunge onwards.
He surveyed his companions. The Brocs and their followers would be happy to sack Canterbury and go home to Saltwood; they were not afraid, but it would be difficult to keep their attention to the matter in hand. But Tracy and Morville stared vacantly about them, and Richard le Breton was already edging to the rear. Reginald had led more than one storming-party into a breach bristling with sword-points; he recognized the moment when the balance hangs even between charge and retreat, the moment when doubtful men will still follow their leader, though already they wish to flee. He shifted the hatchet to his left hand, holding it awkwardly inside his shield. He drew his sword, to wave it aloft in a gesture of encouragement while he shouted the war-cry of the King’s household, ‘Realz, King’s Men’.
God and My Right Page 37