by Simon Schama
Now that he was dressed to kill as the new Arthur, it was imperative that Henry’s apprenticeship be completed by a fitting Guinevere. As it happened, the perfect candidate had just become available in the person of Eleanor of Aquitaine. She had been recently divorced by Louis VII, the king of France, the official grounds being given as ‘consanguinity’ (too close a kinship for the Church to tolerate), but the truth was that she had failed to produce a male heir. The fruitlessness of the union, Eleanor let it be known, was none of her doing. Being married to Louis, she had complained, was more like being married to a monk than a king. It was rumoured that Geoffrey of Anjou had personally verified Eleanor’s appetite for passion before recommending her to his son. Still, the match was a gamble. She was thirty; he was eighteen. He was relatively inexperienced; she had seen as much of the ways of the world as it could offer. But something surprising apparently happened between the teenage Arthur and the dangerously mercurial Guinevere, something unusual in a marriage of political expediency: the parties concerned appeared to desire each other.
Barely eight weeks after Eleanor’s divorce, in May 1152, Henry stood at the altar beside a considerably older woman, whom all contemporary accounts describe as a dark-eyed beauty: disconcertingly articulate, strong-minded and even jocular, and not at all the modestly veiled damsel in the tower. For her part, perhaps Eleanor could see beyond her husband’s stocky frame, the barrel-chest, the boyish freckles and the fair complexion that reddened easily, like all his Norman ancestors, to someone who was an intriguing peculiarity: an unlikely combination of the bookish and the horsy; scruffy informality and arrogant self-possession; buzzing with febrile adolescent energy yet also somehow cerebral and inwardly intense; the rare prince who looked right with a falcon on one hand and a book at the other. In fact, their native worlds were not all that far apart: bloody-minded gangs of knights astride brightly caparisoned chargers, thudding into each other in the lists or obliging their overlords by burning down the opposition’s manors. If anything, Eleanor had grown up in a world even more besotted with the knightly ideal at the same time as it was violating it with habitual brutality. Her grandfather, Duke William IX of Aquitaine, had been a crusader but also the ‘first troubadour’, happiest in his cansa songs when celebrating the joys of adultery. The pious Louis VII of France might have known when he married Eleanor that he was not getting Griselda the Meek. A thousand innocents had been burned alive in the church of Vitry-le-François in an ugly little war she had had the king fight on behalf of her sister, Petronilla. When Louis took the cross to atone, Eleanor went with him to the Holy Land, in a magnificent, rather than penitential, style. Dismayed to discover that crusading was an arduous, pious business, she quickly developed an unhealthily warm relationship with her uncle, the slightly impious Raymond of Toulouse.
Divorced from Louis, Eleanor was damaged goods. So it was to Geoffrey of Anjou’s credit that he could see the brilliant possibilities of the match with his son, Henry, and he doubtless put them to Eleanor. Instead of being the cast-off queen of France, she would be the new queen of England and duchess of both Aquitaine and Normandy. In 1153 Henry Plantagenet, now twenty years old, crossed the Channel yet again, this time with arms and money supplied by his bride’s feudal levies as well as his own. Faced with this formidable army and the loss of his surviving son, Eustace, Stephen was pessimistic enough to come to terms. In November 1153 a deal was struck at Winchester. Stephen would be allowed to die on the throne (as seemed to be imminent) on condition that he named Henry his sole and legitimate heir.
Henry and Eleanor were crowned together in Westminster Abbey on 7 December 1154. When they emerged from the vivats and the incense, they were the sovereigns of an enormous realm, which stretched from the Pyrenees, through the vineyards of Gascony and the bustling Atlantic port of La Rochelle, across the Loire and Seine into orchard-dotted Normandy and over the Channel to England, all the way to the Welsh Marcher hills and the Cumbrian moorland abbeys. It was a good time to come into this inheritance. The mid-twelfth century was, literally, a gentler climate. Harvests were more abundant, and land was being taken from swamp, forest and moorland and put under pasture or even made arable. Technological innovations were making the land more productive. Nailed shoes, horse collars and tandem harnesses had made it possible for the first time for horses to replace oxen drawing ploughs, expanding the acreage that could be worked in a day. Machine-based processing, in the shape of watermills and even the occasional windmill, was appearing on the landscape. Markets and fairs were multiplying. Long-distance travel was safer, and commercial connections between west and east, north and south, made more dependably profitable.
Although he must have been all too aware of its discomforts and dangers (the drowning of the White Ship had, after all, engendered a civil war), Henry II made the Channel crossing twenty-eight times in the thirty-five years of his reign and is more likely to have thought of the sea as an inconvenience than an elemental divide between two utterly unlike halves of his lands. The two sides, after all, were joined by a common language of polite culture and government – medieval French. And while Westminster was, increasingly, the heart of administration, this did not make London an imperial ‘capital’. It was natural and necessary for Henry to think of other centres of power – Rouen in Normandy, Chinon on the Loire, Eleanor’s city of Poitiers in Aquitaine – as equally vital in holding together the disparate territories of his realm. On both sides of the Channel his Francophone administration faced the same challenges to its authority: the unreliable loyalty of local feudal magnates; and a clergy, both monastic and secular, fast developing the autonomous doctrines encoded in the canon law codified in Rome. In the rapidly burgeoning towns immigrant populations, Flemings and Jews, each speaking their own tongues, were encouraged to settle under the direct protection of the Crown, a protection that included their vulnerability to the extortion of forced loans and levies.
Beneath all these social layers, the vernacular cultures survived, both in speech and in written literature – English, Breton, Occitan, Brythonic Welsh and perhaps even some traces of Danish and Norse in East Anglia – and Henry would have been made enough aware of the different traditions and customs in each of these territories to avoid ever imagining he could impose some sort of uniformity on them. When he eventually (and reluctantly) delegated power in Normandy, Brittany and Aquitaine to his three oldest sons – Henry, Geoffrey and Richard – he assumed they would, as he did, respect the local customs and conventions of their respective territories, if only from a sense of political prudence. What they were supposed to be governing was not, in any sense, a common empire of language and law but rather a multi-national family firm.
England was, however, undoubtedly the trickiest case to master. At the outset, Henry, who was brought up almost entirely in Anjou, might not have had much of a clue about the peculiarities of its governance. His mother, Matilda, who had botched the job when given the chance, was not an auspicious model. His father, Geoffrey, had spent his crucial years in the dogged conquest of Normandy. Henry spoke only very basic English, and although accompanied by a translator when in England, of the abstruse and esoteric institutions of law and government bequeathed by both the Saxon and Norman monarchies, he could have comprehended very little. What, after all, did Huntingdonshire know of Henry Plantagenet or Henry know of Huntingdonshire? What he would have grasped, however, if only from the coronation oaths handed down from Edgar and Edward the Confessor, was that kings of England were supposed to be judge and warlord, theocrat and potentate. The basic obligations were four: to protect the Church, to preserve the patrimony of your ancestors, to do justice and (most sweepingly) to suppress evil laws and customs. No one would have any reason to fault Henry II on counts two and three. The crop of castles that had sprung up during the civil war was mown down, along with the petty tyrannies entrenched within their walls. The barons were given the opportunity to surrender gracefully or see their walls smashed and the lord branded a traito
r. Not for nothing was Henry II known as ‘castle-breaker’. Within the British isles, Henry turned out to be a true imperialist, pushing English power, for the first time since the Conquest, across its old borders, across the Irish Sea to Leinster and reducing the king of Scotland into a humiliated vassal.
The Angevin Empire in France.
Henry would prove to be a zealous dispenser of justice. During his reign there was a decisive and irreversible shift away from baronial courts to royal courts. Any freeman might appeal from the lord’s local jurisdiction or simply demand that their case be heard before the king’s justice. A ‘jury’ of twelve, begun informally and selectively in Aethelred II’s reign, now became the norm for trying many such cases, so that justice ceased to be an extension of the unequal social order and was, instead, an obligation of the king’s state. That was the principle, at any rate. In reality, of course, the criterion of ‘freeman’ necessary to have access to this ‘common law’ excluded the vast number of those peasants – villeins and cottars – who were legally tied to the lord of their manor and subject to the law of his court. Nonetheless, it was still an immeasurable advance on the feudal monopoly of justice common elsewhere in baronial Europe.
It was because Henry II was so determined that his writ should run supreme through England that he failed to avoid a collision with the Church. Deep in the throes of his bitter quarrel with Thomas Becket, Henry would discover, to his dismay, that he had pacified one kind of civil war only to inaugurate another, spiritual conflict, which was every bit as destabilizing. This was particularly ironic since at the beginning of his reign it was the Church that supplied him with the literate and numerate personnel who staffed the Chancellery and who initiated Henry into the complicated mysteries of English government. It was the venerable Archbishop of Canterbury, Theobald, who talent-scouted for the king, pushing his way bright, well-travelled and internationally schooled young men, who were perhaps better suited for work in the world than the cloister. One of his recommended protégés, quickly appointed as chancellor, was Theobald’s archdeacon, Thomas Becket. Until he transformed the office, being chancellor was a good deal less important than it sounded. It involved running the spiritual side of the royal household – a combination of personal chaplain and (much more significant) a secretary-general, keeper of the archives and guardian of official knowledge.
Becket was the first Londoner to make a serious mark on English history. The fact that a merchant’s son could rapidly become the king’s closest adviser said something about the potential of the swarming city itself, its population grown by the mid-twelfth century to around 25,000. At its heart, then as now, was the great church of St Paul’s and around it, upriver from the grim pile of the Conqueror’s Tower and on both banks of the Thames, were wharves, thick with ships, wool going out, wine and silk coming in. And in the midst of them was the pride of London, the original river café, a public cook-shop and eatery, catering to all pockets, open twenty-four hours day and night: ‘coarser meats for the poor, more delicate for the rich such as venison and big and small birds . . . those who would cater for themselves fastidiously need search no further for the sturgeon, or for the Ionian godwit.’ In this noisy, jostling, swilling and swaggering place, Gilbert Becket, Thomas’s father, lorded it, not just a merchant but a construction baron, sheriff of the city, owner of one of the biggest houses in Cheapside, with a 40-foot frontage and 110 feet deep. So Thomas was born and raised in flashy confidence. We think of him, with good reason, as an austere man, but the truth is that he was a real Londoner, with an instinctive flair for the things that Londoners have always cared most about: display and costume; the getting and spending of money; theatre, private and public; and (even though his stomach was delicate) fine food and drink. He was street smart and book smart. He was, from the get-go, a Player.
Henry seems to have noticed this right away, for during the six years of his chancellorship, Becket was seldom out of the king’s presence. They were a match of opposites: Becket, the older by thirteen years, had the mastery of administrative minutiae that Henry was happy to leave to someone else. The king was packed with edgy energy; the chancellor, taller, his pale face crowned with dark hair, was more studiously self-contained. From his years in the cathedral schools in Paris and Auxerre he seemed to know the Church, doctrinally and (a boon this) economically. His personal seal seemed shockingly pagan: a naked, helmeted figure, perhaps Perseus, slaying a monster. And he could keep pace with the king. Medieval courts were always itinerant, travelling 20 or 30 miles a day, eating in a royal forest or by the roadside. But Henry, who made a fetish of exercise for fear of growing fat like his great-grandfather William, never slowed down, hawking as he rode, barely arriving at one of his favourite places, like Clarendon near Salisbury, or Woodstock near Oxford, before chasing off again. As one of his courtiers, Peter of Blois, wrote:
If the king has said he will remain in place for a day, he is sure to upset all the arrangements by departing early in the morning. And you see the men dashing around as if they were mad, beating packhorses, running carts into one another, in short giving a lively imitation of Hell . . . I hardly daresay it but I believe in truth he took delight in seeing what a fix we were in. After wandering some three or four miles in an unknown wood and often in the dark we thought ourselves lucky if we stumbled upon some filthy hovel.
Becket understood Henry’s game of studied informality and his aversion to the formal crown-wearings that William the Conqueror had so much enjoyed; his affectation of ordinary riding clothes; his volatile behaviour towards his entourage; the way in which he cultivated friendship, the better to have courtiers eating out of his hand, only to inflict on them frosty withdrawals of affection to be followed by terrifying explosions of full-throttle Norman-Angevin rage. It was Becket’s own pseudo-sibling relationship with the king that may have given him the confidence later to take him on as a virtual equal – with catastrophic results for all concerned. Time and again Becket must have told his faltering band of followers, in effect: ‘Look, I know this man. This is the way he works, trust me.’ But even in the glory days of the chancellorship there were telling signs of tension. When the king and Becket rode through London, Henry pointed to the numberless destitute and, eyeing Thomas’s scarlet and grey cloak with its edging of miniver, let it be known how charitable it would be to cloak a poor beggar’s nakedness. ‘Well yes,’ responded Becket. ‘You should attend to it right away.’ An undignified wrestling match on horseback followed, with the chancellor finally allowing the king to pull the cape from his back and give it to the deserving indigent.
But Becket was always more than a sparring partner. More than any other medieval councillor he understood the hypnotic power of spectacle. The Norman kings had achieved authority with brute force. Becket thought he could dazzle his way to allegiance, so he orchestrated jaw-dropping displays of animals, music and armour, shrewdly understanding that against that gaudy backdrop Henry’s genuine preference for simplicity would appear even more majestic. So Becket became the royal impresario and was never more in his element than in the embassy to France in 1158, designed to impress Louis VII enough to allow his infant daughter, Margaret, to be betrothed to Henry’s little son. What Becket organized was an immense, calculated display of Englishness. There were 250 footmen singing English anthems, followed by English-bred mastiffs and greyhounds, followed by eight carts with iron-rimmed wheels bearing Real English Ale, each pulled by teams of five horses. Each of the horses had a groom and a monkey (not English, but dressed in English livery) riding on its back. And then there were twenty-eight packhorses, the gold and silver plate, the squires and falconers and, finally, Becket himself with a few friends, bringing up the rear with studied casualness. The best compliment paid to this strategy of numbing ostentation was Louis VII’s desperate attempt to deprive the train from being supplied from French villages, hoping it would arrive in Paris famished and bedraggled, a tactic pre-empted by Becket who had bought up everything on the rout
e well in advance.
When Archbishop Theobald died in 1161 Becket must have seemed the perfect replacement: savvy in the ways of the world, yet learned in the ways of the Church. For Henry needed someone who would put the Church in its place. This was never meant to be a lowly posture, grovelling and servile at the feet of the glamorous warrior-king, but a place, nonetheless, firmly within what Henry kept referring to as ‘the laws and customs of the realm’ as he imagined they had been at the death of his grandfather, Henry I. This was not just a matter of dynastic nostalgia. It was the fact that the authority of twelfth-century temporal rulers, especially in the crucial matter of appointing bishops, had, of late, been infringed by the pretensions of the papal Church. Kings took it as axiomatic that they were the directly anointed of God, so when Henry II restored the remains of Edward the Confessor to Westminster, carrying the coffin on his own shoulders, he was as good as saying: ‘Behold a king – both saint and monarch. And I, by the way, am his true successor.’
But this idea of the sacred autonomy of kings had never been accepted by the papacy. They held the keys to salvation and the supreme power over Christendom. They crowned the Holy Roman Emperor and allowed archbishops to crown kings as a recognition that these temporal rulers were the servants, not the masters, of the Church, and that their authority was upheld on condition that they understood the Church’s independence. In the eyes of the Church, then, royal sovereignty stopped at the cathedral porch. In the eyes of the Angevin king, sovereignty was absolute within his realm. So from time to time, this fundamental difference of conviction, a medieval cold war, was bound to warm up.
