For a brief period there was a lull. December passed awkwardly, with king and archbishop not on speaking terms. The king’s temper was not improved by the pope suddenly taking Thomas’s side. A papal bull or message arrived if not excommunicating at least suspending all the English bishops who had taken part in the young king’s coronation, leaving the English Church in a state of chaos.
On Christmas Day news reached Henry II, who was spending the festive season in icy Normandy, that Thomas had struck again. He had now excommunicated Ralph de Broc, who had been steward of the diocese of Canterbury’s lands during his absence. Maddened by this constant thorn in his flesh, raising his hands to heaven the always impulsive Henry said furiously, ‘Can none of the cowards eating my bread free me of this turbulent priest?’
No sooner were the rash words out of the king’s mouth than four knights who had always disliked Becket, Hugh de Morville, Reginald Fitz Urse, Richard le Breton and William de Tracy, left the hall and made for England. Having touched down at the home of Ralph de Broc, they went on to the Archbishop’s Palace at Canterbury.
On 29 December, on a dark winter’s afternoon with the pale sun scarcely penetrating the freezing skies, the archbishop was reading quietly in the library when there was a great commotion at the gate. Pursued vainly by palace servants–priests and serving boys–the knights burst into the archbishop’s room and demanded he withdraw the excommunications. The archbishop ignored them. Saying that he was only obeying the pope, he then set off for the nearby cathedral, followed by his cross-bearer Edward Grim, who lived to tell the tale.
The knights paused to put on their armour–though why they needed this was unclear since their only opponents would have been the unarmed monks singing Vespers. Ahead of them now in the gloom of the cathedral they could see Thomas’s white garments glimmering as he prepared to listen to Mass before the high altar. ‘Where is the archbishop? Where is the traitor?’ they shouted. ‘Here am I,’ said Becket, turning to meet his murderers, ‘not traitor but archbishop and priest of God.’ Then he meekly bowed his head as if for the first blow. One of the knights remembered his Christian upbringing sufficiently to want to kill the Archbishop of Canterbury outside consecrated ground, ground where for over 500 years the English nation had worshipped. He tried to drag the archbishop out. But Thomas refused to go. He clung so hard to a pillar in the north transept just below the north aisle left of the choir that the knights decided that they would have to kill him where he stood. The first blow missed him and hit the cross-bearer, but then all the knights piled in. The Archbishop of Canterbury was butchered before the High Altar.
This deed of blood perpetrated by four Christian knights apparently on the orders of the Christian King of England became the scandal of western Europe. Although Henry II probably had no idea that his exasperated outburst would be seen as an order to murder (we know from contemporary records that the king was planning to have him tried for treason), the world preferred to believe otherwise. The murder of the head of the English Church at the behest of the King of England had enormous reverberations. The cult of St Thomas the Christian martyr–for the pope promptly canonized him–spread as far as Iceland.
Thomas dead was far more powerful than Thomas alive. All his former misdeeds were forgotten, and he was venerated as the Church’s champion against injustice. The shrine erected to the former archbishop became one of the most popular in Europe–thus in The Canterbury Tales the Pilgrims are seeking the ‘blissful holy martyr’. It was also the most richly adorned, having a great reputation for miraculous cures effected by his lacerated body. If the archbishop had been wrong to resist the punishment of the clerks, there was some justification for him opposing such a naked assertion of royal power against the Church. But though Thomas à Becket passed into English folklore as a hero, the view taken of him today is less enthusiastic. His martyrdom put back the reform of an abuse for 300 years.
For all the animosity of the previous few years Henry II was a genuinely devout man and he was appalled by the murder. He burst into loud cries when he heard the news, put on sackcloth, rubbed his face with ashes and, as was noticed by the Bishop of Lisieux, behaved more like a friend than the sovereign of the dead man–which of course he had once been. Shutting himself up in his room for three days, he would not eat and fell into stupors so that for a while the country feared it might lost its king as well as its archbishop. Even though Thomas’s own erratic behaviour had to some extent brought his fate upon him, his hideous murder cast a stain over the rest of Henry’s reign from which he never quite recovered. The golden reputation and some of the zest for life faded. Despite his great legislative achievements from 1173 onwards his life was marred by rebellions throughout his far-flung possessions, stirred up by his sons whose enmity was used by the King of France to expand his territory at England’s expense.
Henry II was the first English king to extend Norman power to the next-door island of Ireland. Although Irish monks had preserved much of the classical corpus in their monasteries and Irish Christianity had been substantially responsible for the conversion of the Anglo-Saxon kingdom, the great days of early Irish civilization were over. Many monasteries had been destroyed in the ninth-century Viking raids that created the settlements of Dublin, Cork and Limerick. The arts and letters were no longer flourishing in a country ruled by a large number of kings who were in effect tribal chieftains. Bloody vengeance and constant war were now the custom of the country.
It was Dermot, King of Leinster who provided the open door to allow the Normans into Ireland. In 1166 he was expelled from Ireland by an alliance of his rivals, their pretext being that he had carried off Devorgil, the beautiful wife of the chieftain of Breffny in neighbouring Connaught. Dermot fled to Henry II’s court, which was then at Bristol, to ask for troops to win his kingdom back. Although the king turned down his request for aid, he gave Dermot a letter authorizing him to recruit any of his English subjects. In return King Dermot pledged his homage to Henry as his overlord. It soon became clear to Dermot that the place to recruit Norman adventurers or mercenaries was among the marcher lords of South Wales, who were on active service pushing back the frontiers of the fierce Welsh kings’ kingdoms. In the Norman system of strict primogeniture landless younger sons who would do anything for money and land were just the breed needed to reconquer Dermot’s kingdom.
Richard de Clare, the palatine Earl of Pembroke, volunteered to be leader of the Norman expedition to Ireland. His reputation as a warrior was so great that most people knew him by the nickname of Strongbow. In return for his help King Dermot promised the hand in marriage of his lovely daughter Eva and the throne of Leinster when he died. A painting can be seen at the House of Commons today which shows the wedding ceremony of Eva and Strongbow, marking the moment when Ireland began to be ruled from England, as it was for the next 800 years. It was up to Strongbow to recruit his own men, and he gathered together a very efficient band of Norman knights as the advance guard of the expedition. The most important of them were the family known as Fitzgerald and their half-brothers the Fitzstephens. They were all the sons of a Welsh princess named Nesta (daughter of Rhys ap Tudor) by Gerald of Windsor, a Norman knight with royal connections. Accompanying these warriors to Ireland was their youngest brother, a scholar known to history as Giraldus Cambrensis (Gerald of Wales–Cambrensis means Welsh in Latin). He described the expedition to Ireland in tremendous detail.
Despite the Normans’ small numbers–and even though Strongbow himself had remained in England–their superb discipline and battle tactics stood them in good stead against the Irish tribes and Danish kingdoms. Celtic individualism and traditions of tribal warfare made it just as difficult for twelfth-century Celts to band together and forget their historic enmities as it had been for first-century AD Celts in Britannia against the Romans. Though the Irish matched the Normans for bravery, they were quarrelsome and disorganized and found it so difficult to accept leadership, to forget their endless grudges and stop warri
ng against one another to combine against a far more dangerous foe, that the important towns of Wexford and Dublin quickly fell to the Norman adventurers. In 1170, after two years of fighting led by William, Raymond and Maurice Fitzgerald, Strongbow at last crossed the Irish Sea, took the town of Waterford and married Eva. When Dermot died the following year, Strongbow became King of Leinster. For all their exploits the Norman lords’ hold on Ireland was fairly tenuous. The Norse relations of the citizens of the Norse town of Dublin soon began to attack them, crossing from the Isle of Man. Though the Normans drove them off, they were then attacked by King Dermot’s Irish enemies.
Fortunately for Strongbow, in 1171 Henry became alarmed at the threat an independent Norman kingdom in Ireland might pose to his own empire. The continuing furore over Becket’s death may have been an additional spur prompting him to assert his rule over the neighbouring island and its warring inhabitants of Irish, Danish and Norman lords. The number of soldiers available to the master of the Angevin Empire was of course far larger than Strongbow’s forces. In consequence, little attempt was made to stand up to the first English king to regard himself as ruler of Ireland, and Henry soon set up an English administration in Dublin. The Irish chiefs in fact welcomed the king as protection against the Norman adventurers, while the Norman rulers’ submission was soon secured, and the Irish bishops at the Synod of Cashel likewise acknowledged Henry as their liege lord. Henry garrisoned the towns of Waterford and Wexford with his soldiers, brought Anglo-Norman merchants, Anglo-Norman law and Anglo-Norman monks to the country, and built a palace in Dublin. Here he passed the winter. He would have done more had he not been forced in 1173 to deal with a rebellion which had broken out throughout the empire in his absence, instigated by his wife and sons.
As a result the impact of the Norman invasion of Ireland, unlike that of England, was not very far reaching. It was really limited to the conglomeration of what became in effect self-contained little Norman kingdoms around Waterford, Wexford and Dublin. The territory where the crown’s writ ran came to be known much later as the Pale (from the Latin palum, a stake, used to mark a boundary; this Irish usage gave rise to the expression ‘beyond the pale’). This territory was never a very well-defined area. In the fourteenth century it included Louth, Meath, Trim, Kilkenny and Kildare. By the beginning of the sixteenth century the chieftains and their clans had made enormous inroads into the Pale, while the old Norman families like the Fitzgeralds (whose leader was the Earl of Kildare) became so powerful and independent that the Tudors would feel the need to invade Ireland afresh in order to prevent the country becoming a base for a Yorkist revival (see below).
The revolt which forced Henry II’s return before he had accomplished his Irish mission was part of a pattern which would dog him for the rest of his life. It was the consequence of having a large empire, too many enemies in Scotland and France and too many sons. In 1173 and 1174 the rebellion against Henry stretched from the Tweed in the Borders to the Pyrenees, as all his enemies took advantage of his unpopularity after Becket’s murder and banded together.
By 1173 Henry’s elder sons were grown up. His passionate marriage to Eleanor of Aquitaine, the former wife of King Louis VII of France, was faltering despite eight children in fifteen years. Queen Eleanor was a forceful, sophisticated woman of literary tastes whose patronage encouraged the flourishing romantic secular literature which was a striking new feature of the twelfth century and who had considerable political influence owing to her personal power over Aquitaine. She was now estranged from her husband, who had openly taken a mistress in Rosamund Clifford, the daughter of a Welsh marcher lord.
Where his grandfather had imported wild animals, Henry had built within the grounds of his favourite palace at Woodstock in Oxfordshire a private lodge of intricate eastern design. Known as Rosamund’s Bower, it had a water garden and could be approached only through a maze. Round the maze the king is believed to have planted the most ancient rose in the world, striped in dark pink and white, which had been brought back by the Crusaders from Damascus. He christened it the Rosamundi, as it is still known today, the rose of the world, as a tribute to his mistress. Fair Rosamund, as she came to be called, died young, and legend has it that Queen Eleanor persuaded one of the king’s men to betray the secret of the maze to her. One evening, it is said, when Fair Rosamund heard the sound of bugles and hoofs and went flying to the door, expecting the king’s arrival after hunting, she met only Queen Eleanor, who stabbed her to the heart.
What is certainly true is that Queen Eleanor took her sons’ part against the king. Like their father they were energetic, active and commanding personalities in the Angevin and Norman tradition. In 1169, four years before, Henry II had divided up his empire between them. His eldest son, known as the young King Henry, received England, Normandy and Anjou. Eleanor’s own Duchy of Aquitaine went to her favourite son, the brilliant, generous but violent warrior known to history as Richard the Lionheart (or Coeur de Lion). Brittany, which Henry II had conquered from its duke, went to the third son Geoffrey. Nevertheless–rather like King Lear–despite this apportionment Henry II had no intention of relinquishing the actual government or income of these lands into their supposed owners’ hands.
By March 1173, encouraged by the king of France Louis VII, whose greatest ambition was to break up the Angevin Empire, a conspiracy had been hatched among these sons. They could call on the soldiers of disgruntled barons, particularly in Aquitaine, such as the Count of Poitou whose legal rights (including holding courts and minting money) had been steadily eroded by Henry II’s reforms. That month all over the Angevin Empire attacks were mounted against the king’s forces. When the rebellion began Queen Eleanor had been stopped, disguised as a man, while fleeing to the French court to join her three sons. She was thrown into prison at Falaise in France with her companion, one of the rebel barons, Hugh of Chester. There she remained until Henry II died. Louis VII tried to invade Normandy, while the young King Henry set sail with a French fleet to attempt, with an equal lack of success, an invasion of England. Barons throughout Aquitaine attacked Henry’s garrisons, and once again Scotsmen under William the Lion went marauding through Northumbria. All the rebels were made more confident by the continuing reverberations from the murder of Becket. It is astonishing to record that the king, despite the enormity of the rebellion, defeated them all.
He achieved this with the aid of soldiers who remained loyal to him throughout the Angevin Empire. As has been seen, Henry II was naturally devout. In 1172, the year before the revolt broke out, he had finally reached an agreement with the pope known as the Compromise of Avranches. In order to be cleansed of his sins, he had accepted that appeals to Rome would not be stopped in his lifetime and he revoked the Constitutions of Clarendon, which Archbishop Thomas had refused to sign. As a result, until the Reformation in the sixteenth century any man who could read Latin could claim ‘benefit of clergy’ to save him from being tried in the king’s courts for any crime, however heinous. To some extent this restored the king to respectability, since England had the threat of papal interdict lifted. The clergy–many of whom had disapproved of Thomas à Becket–were reconciled to Henry, and this ensured that the whole civil service of clerks and government officials remained loyal to him. Almost none of the ordinary people of England joined the barons’ revolt, as they had little to gain and much to lose from a new anarchy.
After a year of fighting, despite holding off his enemies from abroad in 1174 and quelling the revolt in Aquitaine, Henry II’s affairs were still unsettled and England continued to be in a state of uproar. On 12 July 1174, impelled by a genuine desire to atone for the sin of murder, which he believed was preventing God from granting him victory, the great king went on a pilgrimage to Canterbury, to do penance at Thomas’s shrine and beg forgiveness. It was a gesture that seized the (very inflammable) popular imagination. The king was barefoot like the poorest pilgrim and naked but for a shirt. When he got near the shrine, to symbolize his utter m
ortification Henry approached his friend’s grave on his knees. As he shuffled forward the monarch who was the Caesar of his day, as Giraldus Cambrensis called him, was scourged by monks wielding rods. He then spent the whole night lying before his former friend’s shrine in constant prayer. When amid what were now cheering crowds he reached London the next day, he discovered to his delight that while he had been on his knees at Canterbury the wily king of the Scots, William the Lion, had been captured during a raid on Alnwick in Northumberland.
Henry would always be lenient to his sons, but towards Scotland he was more hard-hearted. Ever since the days of Edward the Elder, kings of the Scots had been forced to acknowledge the king of the English as their overlord, though most of them secretly seized every opportunity to stir up trouble. But by the draconian Treaty of Falaise, which forced William the Lion to do homage to him, Henry II made sure that the overlordship meant what it said, planting garrisons in the main castles of Scotland–at Edinburgh, Stirling, Berwick, Roxburgh and Jedburgh. After this success Henry’s morale improved. With his old decisiveness he marched off to Framlingham Castle in Suffolk, which is still standing, to besiege Hugh Bigod, one of the most important leaders of the English barons’ rebellion. With Bigod’s capture, the threat of disorder at home also died down.
The next decade saw a period of internal consolidation within England, in contrast to the expansion which had marked the first part of Henry’s reign. The Assize of Arms of 1181 (an assize was a legislative ordinance), which revamped the laws for calling out the fyrd, was a reflection of Henry’s trust in the ordinary Englishman who had not risen against him during his sons’ revolt. Every freeman was ordered to keep arms in his home to defend his country or to suppress revolts against the king. This reform was also an attempt to shift military power away from the barons because, as with scutage, the Assize made Henry less dependent on their calling out their feudal levy. As a sign of the king’s new respect for his English subjects, from 1181 he stopped using foreign mercenaries in England, and employed them only abroad.
The Story of Britain Page 18
