The magnates were still discussing the important question of the custody of the royal castles, and what struck him immediately was how badly they discussed it. Bishop Henry had an accurate mind, trained by the discipline of the Church; he kept to one point at a time, seeking agreement before going on to the next. But the lay lords all talked at once, each about the district which most concerned him; even when two of them reached a compromise over some fortress the whole question was reopened when they began to discuss the next shire. These gallant warriors were incapable of ruling the country, though they were too independent to permit anyone else to rule it. What was needed at the top was a single man with a clear brain, to make up their minds for them. They were entitled to offer their opinions, for England could not be governed without their assent; but nothing would ever be done unless they allowed a strong chairman to rule their discussion.
On that same evening Osbert and his delegation began their ride back to London. Osbert was worried, and said so frankly. On behalf of his city he had recognized the Empress; but most Londoners were on the other side, and only the accident of King Stephen’s capture had induced them to submit. If the Empress came straight to Westminster for her crowning, and made a gracious impression in London, the party of Blois would subside. But the Empress would not see that time was running against her, and she planned a long visit to Reading to offer prayers at her father’s tomb. At her coronation she would not be gracious to the burgesses; she had been uncommonly haughty with Osbert, her leading supporter; how she would bear herself to the supporters of Blois did not bear thinking of.
Sure enough, during the month of May, while the Empress prayed at Reading, the faction of Blois staged a riot in London. Osbert and Thomas, with the strongbox, took sanctuary in St. Paul’s; but the mob lynched the lord Aubrey de Vere, who happened to be visiting, unarmed, a jeweller in Cheapside; he had recently joined the faction of Anjou, but the burgesses hated him because his daughter was the wife of their foe, Count Geoffrey of Essex. In revenge for his murder Count Geoffrey unleashed his mercenaries on the city. Gilbert’s house was spared, since he displayed the leopard shield which was the arms of Anjou; but many shops were sacked, and many rich burgesses carried off to the Tower for ransom.
The city must at once buy the friendship and forgiveness of the Empress, and Osbert was once more despatched on an embassy. This time he did not take Thomas, for there was no question of negotiation; instead he took a mule-load of silver, which he handed over as his strongest argument. He brought back a cold message, which might mean anything or nothing.
At last came news that the Empress would reach Westminster on the 20th of June, and that the coronation would take place on St. John’s Day, the 24th. The frightened burgesses did what they could to appease her wrath. Every man who could bear arms or ride a horse came out to meet her at Knightsbridge, on the outskirts of Westminster; and of course the cavalcade was completed by the chest of silver which habitually made smooth any meeting between burgesses and sovereign.
Thomas remained in Cheapside, for he had been given the important task of supervising the making of the Empress’s new Great Seal; the inscription, by her express command, was MATILDIS IMPERATRIX ROMANORUM ET REGINA ANGLIAE, and even the silversmith grumbled at her for putting the Empire first and England as an afterthought. There was no doubt that she was becoming increasingly unpopular.
When Osbert returned from Knightsbridge, hot and chafed by the mail which never sat well on his paunchy figure, he was depressed by this fresh evidence of her lack of tact; but even more dejected by what he had seen.
‘The silly old woman has come without her army,’ he grumbled. ‘She brings a glorious train, her uncle the King of Scots and her brother the Count of Gloucester, Brian fitz Count and many more great magnates. But they ride unarmed, in splendid robes. Just to rub it in the whole force of London met her in arms, so that the meanest halfwit in the city sees that London has the power to chase her away. Can’t she understand that the burgesses don’t like her? She made things worse by exacting full Imperial ceremony. When I knelt before her horse she graciously protruded her toe that I might kiss her stirrup. Why not make me kiss the horse? And I am supposed to be her friend! How do you suppose she will greet her enemies? I hear on good authority that she paraded King Stephen in fetters through the streets of Winchester. It was agreed in the treaty that his detention should be honourable. This is simply asking for trouble.’
For three days, as angry men sought a way of escape from submission to a hated ruler, the city hummed with rumours. On the evening of the 23rd there was a great feast at Westminster, held with sublime but foolish self-confidence in an unguarded tent; as dusk fell points of light could be seen in the south-east, and the word went round that the other Matilda, King Stephen’s Queen, was wasting the Kentish lands of the adherents of Anjou. Osbert took refuge in the Tower, and Thomas went home to his father. It seemed that St. John’s Eve would be dangerous to Londoners who held by the Empress.
Sure enough, as the Beckets sat together in the privacy of their chamber, they heard the common bell beating out the broken hurrying rhythm of the tocsin. Gilbert, ever conscious of civic duty after thirty years as a burgess, made to rise; but his son restrained him. ‘Why bear arms against the Lady to whom you swore fealty? Don’t say that because the bell summons you it is your duty to obey. It is never the duty of a Christian to obey without question. If your superiors are wrong it may be your duty to disobey them. That is my advice as a lawyer. Let us keep the house dark and hope the mob will forget us. Tomorrow we can learn the news.’
All night they heard the mob cheering for King Stephen, vowing destruction to the Angevins and their henchman Count Geoffrey of Essex. For that was the root of their hostility; they would always be foes to the friends of Mandeville. Luckily no one remembered that the dark house in Cheapside sheltered Goodman Gilbert, the retired alderman who was faithful to the Empress. In the morning it stood unharmed.
The news, when they ventured out to learn it, was definite and final. The Empress and her companions had been forced to flee westwards, leaving in Westminster their gay tent and all their baggage. Queen Matilda, wife to King Stephen, was within the walls, with the knight-service of her own County of Boulogne and the shire-levy of Kent. The captain of her mercenaries, William of Ypres, was barricading the streets near the Tower against Count Geoffrey, and building siege-engines on Tower Hill. London was lost to the Angevins.
At this crisis, when everyone else thought only of war and revolution, Thomas remembered the new Great Seal. He sought out the silversmith, and broke the news that the work could not be paid for; then he personally witnessed the melting of the seal, and drew up a certificate to that effect. The craftsman had tried out his handiwork, as silversmiths would in spite of all prohibitions. Thomas took this single impression, and wrapped the lump of wax in his certificate of destruction. The unlucky Empress might like to affix it to some grant to remind her of how nearly she had been crowned Queen of England, and he would send it to her as soon as he could do so in safety. But the destruction was imperative; a Great Seal of England abandoned by its rightful owner could undermine the title of every man to his own land.
The Londoners missed their chance to destroy the Count of Essex. That rascal offered to change sides, and his power made him worth buying. The party of Blois bought him, making him sheriff and justiciar of London, Middlesex, Essex, and Hertfordshire. Whoever might be on top in this eventful civil war peaceful burgesses would always find themselves at the bottom.
Goodman Osbert Huitdeniers flourished like a green bay tree. He led the London contingent which marched against the Empress, but even during the blockades and counter-blockades of that campaign, which ended in an appalling sack of Winchester and the further flight of the Empress, he continued to insure against accidents. Thomas had been left behind to deal with letters in the London office; but when he was asked to copy a deed of the Angevin chancery, confirming Count Geoffrey in his ru
le over London and rewarding his faithful follower Osbert with land in Angevin Gloucestershire worth £20 a year, he decided that he could no longer soil his hands with work of this kind. He filed his papers with care, wrote a civil letter of resignation, and returned to his father’s house.
In November King Stephen was released, in exchange for Count Robert of Gloucester, who had been taken while covering his sister’s retreat from Winchester. In December the King again wore his crown at Westminster, and for London the crowded year 1141 ended with both parties holding what they had held at its beginning. But this was the time of which the monk of Ely wrote: ‘it seemed that God and His Saints slept.’ In every shire of the south, from Dover to Bristol, armed bands pillaged and ravished in the name of one or the other claimant to the crown. Trade vanished and burgesses grew poor.
By the autumn of 1143 Thomas was twenty-four. He was a Norman of the race who ruled from Sicily to Scotland, his intelligence was exceptional, and he had profited by the best and most highly regarded education in the world; he was honest, sober, and industrious. But no one would employ him.
He lived with his widowed father, keeping the accounts of the moribund drysalting business and sometimes earning a small fee by drawing up legal documents for his neighbours. But these were rare, for the London ward-moots administered the old customary Law of England, unlike anything he had learned in Paris. He could advise only in commercial cases, which were judged in the Church Courts by international Roman Law, or in matrimonial suits before the archdeacon. But with trade so slack there were few matrimonial suits; for they were fantastically expensive, and in hard times men made do with the wives their parents had chosen for them. To make matters worse, the Beckets were unpopular. Everyone knew they favoured the Empress, whose brief occupation had done such harm to London; and who was losing the civil war anyway.
Thomas passed much of his time walking the quiet streets, where shabby burgesses shrank to the wall as the sergeants of Mandeville swaggered by. He was sick at heart. In the three years since his return from Paris he had accomplished nothing. Why had he worked so hard in the schools, scorning idleness and debauchery, if in the end he was to sink to the conditions of an unemployed clerk, a Goliard, a casual snatcher at little bits of screeving for the illiterate, a bohemian sponger? Better to have enjoyed himself in the taverns of Paris until he finished on the Provost’s gallows, than to hang about English beerhalls, hoping that his gown and his learned conversation would gain him a lowly place at some wedding feast.
But the discipline of Merton still held. His rage was as strong as ever, but he always fought it down; and when the flesh tempted him he prayed to Our Lady, as his mother had taught him. His intelligence was in danger of rusting from disuse, but it had not been damaged by self-indulgence.
One gloomy November day, as he sat in his father’s hall, reading a borrowed law-book, he heard the rare sound of mules entering the yard. He hastened to pull aside the linen window, hoping this was a pack-train at last arrived from the west. It was something even more surprising, two prosperous clerks with servants and baggage. They must be strangers, ignorant that the hospitality of Goodman Gilbert was a poor introduction to the ruling circle in London. He ran out to do the honours in the absence of his father.
The visitors introduced themselves as Baldwin, archdeacon of Boulogne, and Master Eustace his brother, come to consult the Archbishop of Canterbury in the matter of a will that disposed of land both in England and France. ‘I am told the Archbishop is at Harrow, not far from London,’ said Baldwin. ‘We wish to stay in the city, and when I heard that in Cheapside lived a burgess who had known the Archbishop in childhood, and that his son was the Master Thomas whose learning is still remembered in Paris, I thought this house would be our best lodging. Do you know the Archbishop intimately, and is he busy at Harrow?’
‘My father and the Archbishop played together when they were children,’ Thomas answered, ‘and when my father waited on him three years ago the lord Theobald remembered him. Since then we have not seen him. In the troubles two years ago my father supported the faction that was beaten, and while the fighting raged the Archbishop kept away. I fear we shall not help you to forward your cause, though you are very welcome.’
Master Eustace looked keenly at the tall, shabby youth, noting his fierce nose and disciplined mouth. ‘You are Master Thomas of Paris, I suppose? You upheld the losing faction in one of these futile civil wars for which England is notorious? And so you sit in your father’s house with no real work for your mind? Young man, you take these squabbles too tragically. The Archbishop of Canterbury is above faction. If I find you work in his household will you accept it?’
‘Sir, I will accept anything. Last week I drew up a deed to endow a sanctuary lamp with twopence a year, and that was my only legal work this month. But the Archbishop must have many clerks as learned as I, and my Angevin record will count against me.’
‘Don’t be too sure of that,’ said the archdeacon. ‘London may think King Stephen safe on his throne, but in France we see more clearly. The Angevins grow stronger every day. In any case, no Archbishop has enough competent clerks. Your Paris training must not be wasted.’
Then Gilbert came in from his vain search for customers, and the conversation turned to old days in Normandy.
Gilbert had been so discouraged by the decay of his business and his own unpopularity that he had forgotten his link with the Archbishop. Once reminded of it he could think of nothing else; Thomas would soon be a great man, and in that worthy cause they must make a show of prosperity. He sold a good horse, bought wine, engaged a good cook, and prepared to keep open house for any of the Archbishop’s family who might have business in London. Naturally the first to come were the lesser servants, not the clerks who had their own friends in the city; but they pressed Gilbert to call on their lord. Theobald, who had been a holy monk and was not ashamed of his humble birth, rejoiced to see again the comrade of his infancy. It was taken for granted that the Archbishop would find a place for the son of his old friend. Thomas was to take up his duties at Epiphany 1144, immediately after the Christmas holiday.
At Christmas, of course, the Archbishop kept open house, and his dependents naturally stayed at home for the feasting. Only one of them put up with Gilbert over the holidays. He was Gyrth, woodchopper to the kitchen, whose aunt kept a beerhall by the river. He was a rough Englishman, who preferred boisterous jollity in the waterfront taverns to the good wine and long prayers of his master’s hall; besides, at home there would be firewood to be chopped, even on a holiday. On the morrow of Epiphany, the 7th of January, he was sober and had outstayed the welcome of his aunt. He offered to show Master Thomas the road to Harrow, and the two of them walked there together.
Thomas knew he could do the work of an Archbishop’s clerk, and do it well. But he was frightened at meeting a crowd of strangers. For more than three years he had lived among the burgesses of London, and he had forgotten the flippant superficial chatter which was the talk of clerks off duty. They would see him as dull, infected with the merchant’s love of money, a clod from the countinghouse. Probably they would be right. The schools every year discharged a host of clever men with a promising future, who remained men with a promising future until they died of old age. The worst of it would be living in a crowd. He had not lived in intimacy with a group of equals since he left Pevensey, for at Paris he had passed his evenings in solitary study. He knew that his tall figure and angry eyes gave the impression that he thought himself too good for his company, and he was eager to avoid the appearance of pride. So when Gyrth, who was feeling poorly after ten days in the taverns, asked him to carry the heavy hatchet he had bought in London, he took it at once, in a glow of humility. He was carrying it when they reached Harrow; and that was a dreadful mistake.
Loitering under the eaves was a group of young clerks, chatting as they sniffed fresh air and sheltered from the January drizzle. On Gyrth’s approach they all belched loudly, putting their ha
nds to their foreheads; then they welcomed him with cries of sympathy, asking whether the maidens of London were as easily vanquished as ever, and whether Aunt Gytha still gave body to her beer by drowning her neighbours’ puppies in it. It seemed that Gyrth was a character in the household; but not the most suitable character to introduce a serious and ambitious clerk.
Now they turned on Thomas. ‘Who are you, Gyrth’s brother or his son?’ called a short chubby youth with blue eyes and sandy hair, instinctively repelled by the tall, gaunt figure before him. ‘I see you have brought your hatchet. I suppose you are the woodchopper’s mate?’
With an effort Thomas bottled up his rage. ‘I am Master Thomas of London, not long from the schools of Paris. His Lordship the Archbishop has offered me employment in his service.’
‘I am Master Roger de Pont l’Eveque, clerk to the Archbishop. But, my dear fellow, are you sure you want to work in the office? We never use hatchets there, even to cut the pens. Now if you turn left you will find the kitchen, and a splendid pile of firewood waiting for you. I never knew the doctors of Paris lectured on the art of chopping wood, but I suppose it was the field of study best suited to your talents.’
‘Master Roger, will you be so good as to lead me before the Archbishop?’ said Thomas, with icy calm.
‘If you insist, Master Thomas Bailhache. Do you cling to your hatchet, or may Gyrth take it from you now you have it safely here?’
Thomas dropped the wretched tool as though it were red hot; he was glad to be rid of it before he yielded to temptation and cut that silly sneering face in half.
But as he smoothed his gown and prepared to follow the other into the presence of his lord he knew, after long years passed with schoolboys and young students, that the nickname so lightly given, ‘Bailhache’, the hatchet-bearer, would be very hard to lose.
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