So ended one of the most extraordinary days in English history: a story told again and again over the following centuries and in the process robbed of many of its original meanings. The dispute between Henry II and Thomas Becket has sometimes been presented as a question of liberty versus tyranny, Church versus state. There were certainly wider issues at stake here, but in essence this was a story of a royal friendship gone poisonously wrong. Becket had begun as a virtual nobody, son of a London merchant, boasting of knightly ancestors in Normandy, but in essence an upstart, rising by the 1150s to become the enforcer and archdeacon of Theobald, Archbishop of Canterbury. In 1154, hoping in this as in so much else to emulate the success of his grandfather, Henry I, the newly crowned Henry II promoted Becket as his chancellor, controller of the royal writing office, clearly in the model of Roger of Salisbury, another upstart clerk who half a century earlier had risen to become chancellor, bishop and ultimately vice-regent under Henry I. Becket delighted in his new intimacy with the great. Like many upstarts, he became notorious for his dressiness and his attention to proper form. The King poked fun at his pride and luxury, forcing him to give up a costly robe to a beggar. No matter. In the late 1150s, in full pomp and with no less than twenty-four complete changes of wardrobe (yet another reminder of the theatrical quality of court life), Becket was allowed to represent Henry on an embassy to the French King in Paris, intended to advertise England’s wealth, riding at the head of a great procession that included tame monkeys and two vast wagons loaded with English beer, one of the earliest appearances of what would become a common refrain in Anglo-French rivalry: French wine versus good English beer.
Becket was a worldly man and no great scholar. Nonetheless, when the King wanted to organize an army, to besiege Toulouse, to force the English bishops to pay their taxes, or to garrison a castle, Becket was the right man for the job. In 1162, this placed him in an ideal position to be promoted as successor to the late archbishop, Theobald. The monks of Canterbury could see that Becket was a friend of the King. The other English bishops might despise him as a low-born court sycophant, but the King gave his support. Becket was duly elected as archbishop of Canterbury. Then things went suddenly and disastrously wrong. Like St Paul after his sudden conversion on the road to Damascus, Becket underwent a crisis of conscience. He gave up his office as chancellor. He began, in secret, to wear a hair-shirt. He demanded the restoration to his Church of lands previously farmed to laymen, including laymen with close connections at court. Despite never previously having shown much interest in either scholarship or the liturgy, he designated the Sunday of his consecration, the Sunday after Pentecost, as the principal feast of the Holy Trinity, the most disputed of all concepts in twelfth-century theology. At a conference at Clarendon in January 1164, the King made Becket agree, and forced him to make the other English bishops agree, to a draconian set of ‘Constitutions’, in effect recognizing the King’s right to discipline the clergy via the secular courts, to limit the English Church’s access to the Pope, to place the secular authority above the spiritual.
This was precisely the sort of thing that Becket, as chancellor before 1162, had been notorious for advocating. Having played out the role of a royal chancellor, however, Becket was now determined to act the role of archbishop. He had to be compelled by threats into agreeing to the Constitutions. In the process, Henry II was forced into a dangerously explicit statement of rights which the kings of England had previously exercised more or less unchallenged but which had never before been written down or granted public endorsement by the Church. Becket himself, having been compelled to agree the Constitutions, could immediately repudiate them as something extracted only under compulsion. A forced marriage is no true marriage, just as an oath extracted under threat is no true oath. The English bishops, already deeply suspicious of Becket’s sincerity, told by him at Clarendon to set their seals to the Constitutions, now found themselves deserted by the very leader who had persuaded them to bow to royal tyranny. Not surprisingly, most of them now abandoned Becket. One of them, Gilbert Foliot, bishop of London, a man of considerable learning who believed that he rather than Becket should have succeeded Theobald as archbishop, now emerged as Becket’s most bitter critic. Becket, he declared, was a fraud and a hypocrite. These thoughts were set down in a great manifesto of which Foliot was so proud that years later, even after Becket had been recognized as a saint and Foliot himself had received blessings from his shrine, he insisted be preserved: a most remarkable instance of authorial pride leading to the preservation of historical evidence that in any other circumstances would have been deliberately destroyed.
At Northampton, in October 1164, in what amounted to one of the first state trials in English history, Becket was ritually humiliated and, over the course of four days, ordered to render accounts for his previous service to the crown. The intention was perhaps to intimidate him into resigning his archbishopric. Instead, in a scene so melodramatic that even his fellow bishops suspected him of ham acting, Becket appeared before the King carrying his cross before him in his own hands, thereby declaring himself to be a new Christ bound for crucifixion. Rather than face the consequences, he then fled from court, in secret and by night. For the next seven years, in exile with the French king, with the papal court itself in exile at Sens, south-east of Paris, or at the great Cistercian abbey of Pontigny, Becket proceeded to make the most appalling nuisance of himself, firing off letter after letter in which he rehearsed his grievances in the most exalted of language (in many cases written for him by John of Salisbury, another of the former clerks of Archbishop Theobald, although a much better Latinist than Becket would ever be). By 1169, he had exhausted the patience not only of Henry II but of the Pope. He himself seems to have believed that Henry was still his friend, albeit a friend whose affection had been temporarily withdrawn. This was not at all Henry II’s view of the matter.
When a reconciliation was at last effected, Henry was reluctant even to grant Becket the kiss of peace, the outward sign that his anger had calmed. When Becket returned to England and then proceeded to reopen exactly the same wounds that it had been agreed should be left to heal, refusing to lift the anathema he had pronounced against the English bishops who in his absence had dared crown Henry II’s eldest son, excommunicating the royal bailiffs who since 1163 had administered the Canterbury estates and who, even after Becket’s return, continued to impound his wine and cut off the tails of his pack horses, Henry’s patience snapped. Hence the outburst at his Christmas court, when the King, far from demanding that he be ‘rid of this troublesome priest’ (a phrase that appears in no contemporary account), seems to have directed his fury chiefly against his own courtiers, striking a response from the four knights who now hurried to Canterbury, men who felt themselves particularly compromised by their service to the regime of King Stephen.
The ensuing murder in the cathedral transformed far more than the image of Thomas Becket, now revealed as a saint and martyr rather than as a troubled and troublesome hysteric. The monks of Canterbury who had elected Becket because he was the King’s friend and who had therefore been all the more horrified to see him transformed into the King’s worst enemy, found their own bitter dislike of Becket melt into veneration. Through the miracles worked at his shrine, through the droplets of his blood mixed with water and sold as wonder-working relics, through the flocks of pilgrims who now began to visit Canterbury from as far afield as France or Italy, the monks grew immensely rich. Other churches cashed in on the pilgrimage boom, translating or inventing their own saintly relics, many of them reviving memories of the Anglo-Saxon past, in an attempt to advertise their merits, if not as rivals then as sharers in Canterbury’s good fortune. A great dossier of Becket’s letters was collected. A dozen or more lives were written, celebrating his sanctity within five years of his death, in some cases by writers as far away as France or Iceland.
At Canterbury, a great liturgy was composed for the celebration of Becket’s feast day with hymns an
d music, including some of the most beautiful of Latin poetry in honour of ‘The shepherd slain in the midst of his flock’, the greatest blessing both of England (the ‘Happy land’ of Thomas’s birth), and of France (which had cherished him in exile). In 1179, for the first and only time before the Revolution of 1789, a reigning French king, Louis VII, came voluntarily to England, to make pilgrimage to Canterbury and there to pray for the health of his son and heir recently recovered from sickness. In gratitude, Louis made a grant to the Canterbury monks of 100 measures of wine each year, perhaps as much as 1,600 gallons, to be received from vineyards just to the south of Paris. The redness of the wine was intended to complement the martyr’s blood. The gift itself marked a fit repayment for the English beer which Becket had carried to Paris in the 1150s, a triumph of French over English magnanimity. The son for whose life Louis prayed, the future King Philip Augustus, was within thirty years to prove the Plantagenets’ nemesis, sweeping away the last vestiges of Plantagenet rule in northern France.
Meanwhile, Becket and his symbols, the image of the four knights and their swords, the leaden ampoules in which the bloody water of St Thomas was collected, became perhaps the most easily recognized of all English images abroad, better known even than Opus Anglicanum or English wool. These were images which by their very nature proclaimed the wickedness of Becket’s murderers and hence the culpability of Henry II. In 1173–4, within four years of Becket’s death and in the same year as his canonization, there emerged the greatest baronial coalition ever raised against an English king, comprising Henry II’s own wife and sons, a dozen or more of the most powerful earls and barons of England and Normandy, the Count of Flanders and the kings of Scotland and France. All the frustrations of the previous twenty years spilled out. Men whose grievances stretched back to the reign of Stephen, or who felt themselves slighted by the Plantagenets after 1154 now made common cause with the King’s wife and sons to drive Henry II from the throne. At this moment of crisis, Henry at last sought to make his peace with Thomas Becket. Arriving in Canterbury, he walked barefoot to the cathedral where he spent the night in tears and supplication before Becket’s tomb, not even leaving the building (so we are told) for the normal bodily functions. The following morning, he had himself scourged, beaten on the back, by every member of the cathedral convent of perhaps a hundred monks. He then rode off for London. A few nights later, as Henry lay dozing on his couch at Westminster, a minstrel strumming a harp for his amusement and another servant massaging his feet, news arrived from the north that the King of Scots had been taken prisoner at Alnwick, this great event occurring at almost precisely the same moment that Henry had been praying before Becket’s tomb in Canterbury. The omens were clear, Henry was forgiven, Becket had triumphed, and the king might again reign in harmony with his Church and his barons. Within only a few months, the great rebellion collapsed.
This at least was the official version of Henry II’s penance. In reality, as is often the case, things were rather more complicated. After 1174, Henry did his best to associate himself with the tomb of Becket, visiting Canterbury on a regular basis, posing as chief sponsor of Becket’s cult, even punishing the four knights who had committed the murder and who were exiled to the Holy Land where they are said to have died as Templars or as hermits, their own sons and offspring disinherited at the King’s command, leaving only widows and daughters to succeed them. In 1172, under the so-called ‘Compromise of Avranches’, Henry had already made his peace with the Pope, promising the service of 200 knights for the Holy Land and himself to take vows as a crusader, later commuted to a promise to found four new monasteries in England, in return for reconciliation with the Church. Even so there were many who still doubted the King’s sincerity. The large sums of money that Henry sent to recruit his 200 knights served merely to poison relations amongst the Christian leadership in the East, leading the King of Jerusalem into a rash campaign that culminated in 1187 with the Battle of Hattin and the fall of Jerusalem to Saladin. To this extent, Henry was indirectly to blame for one of the greatest disasters in the history of medieval Christendom. The monasteries which Henry founded in penance for Becket’s murder were in at least two cases established not from his own resources but from land seized back from the Queen, Eleanor of Aquitaine, as a result of her own rebellion against the King in 1173.
Meanwhile, it is surely no coincidence that from the reign of Henry II onwards, the rash of royal biographies that commemorated earlier twelfth-century kings dried up. No contemporary wrote a life of Henry II or of any of his sons or grandsons. Ever afterwards, the Plantagenets were known in Europe as a dynasty that had murdered its archbishop, a family that trampled upon the rights of the Church. As for the Church itself, although in theory Becket’s death brought ‘liberty’ through the ‘victory’ of his cause, in practice Henry II very soon resumed precisely that tight control over the English Church against which Becket had protested. The difference after 1170 was that the King no longer advertised his supremacy in writing. He continued to control appointments to bishoprics. He continued to intervene in cases before the church courts. Criminous clerks were to be judged in church courts but their chattels were confiscated for the King, and a papal legate, no less, agreed that, in respect to the royal forests and forest law, no exceptions should be made to the King’s arbitrary justice, even for clerical offenders.
Twelfth-century renaissance?
The sheer number of accounts, and the sheer immediacy of the human reaction to Becket’s martyrdom allows us to view the story of Henry and Becket in a detail and with an insight that are impossible for virtually any other incident in English medieval history. Even so, this should not be allowed to distract us from the broader flow of events or to overshadow the wider changes brought about during Henry II’s reign. Viewing England in the 1170s, an observer would have found a very different society, and a very different elite from that of a century before. Some of these differences were the result of European-wide phenomena. The emergence of chivalry and the increasing distribution of wealth and ideas of social stratification amongst an aristocratic elite determined to display its good fortune were features of German, Spanish or even Hungarian society, not confined to England. Learning, across Europe, was on the upsurge, with the rediscovery of the works of the classical past and the opening of new secular schools, freed from the discipline of monastic orders, leading to the flowering of what historians refer to as a ‘Twelfth-Century Renaissance’. Even so, in both of these fields, chivalry and learning, England had unique contributions to make.
Heraldry, originally intended to identify particular groups within the melée or mock battle which at this date was the tournament’s climax, emerges into the light of day in England as early as the 1150s. The serjeants and household knights of King Stephen already used distinctive shields and saddles, perhaps emblazoned with heraldic symbols. Henry II’s younger brother William, lord of Dieppe, is the first member of the English royal family known to have used a coat of arms, an image of three leopards displayed on his seal, perhaps modelled on the three rampant leopards or scraggy lions which had already appeared on the funeral monument of Henry and William’s father, Geoffrey Plantagenet. The Plantagenet leopards of gold on red thereafter became standard symbols of a family at war, joining the dragon standard carried before the King into his battles, itself mentioned both on crusade in the 1190s and raised against the French invaders of England in 1216. Leopards appear on the seal of Richard I only a few years after the fleur-de-lys, in silver on a blue background, was adopted as a badge by the Capetian kings in Paris, symbolizing the lilies held at the Annunciation by Mary, Notre-Dame, the particular protector of France.
In England, meanwhile, chivalry and its code of honour was held, even as early as the 1130s, to exclude certain subject peoples. The Welsh and later the Irish, though not the lowland Scots (led by a king and an aristocracy of largely Norman or French descent), were placed beyond the chivalric ‘pale’, itself a term derived from Henry II’s
conquests in Ireland and the establishment of the ‘pale’ of Dublin as a civilized colony amidst native barbarity. As enemies who raped women, murdered children and took no hostages, they were to be treated in their turn with savage and summary violence.
We know of this barbarization of the Welsh and Irish thanks largely to English historians such as William of Malmesbury, still active in the 1140s, a Benedictine monk and one of the leading figures in England’s cultural renaissance. Rather like those antiquaries of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries who salvaged the vestiges of the medieval and monastic past at the very moment that such evidence was about to pass away, William of Malmesbury collected stories of the kings and bishops of Anglo-Saxon England, just as the Anglo-Saxon past was on the point of crumbling into dust. His findings were set down in two great books of history, The Deeds of the Pontiffs, and The Deeds of the Kings. William was a magpie collector of interesting facts, with a magnificent library of research books and an omnivorous desire to dig out the most neglected and significant relics of the past. Writing to some extent for a secular rather than a monastic audience, Geoffrey Gaimar, as early as the 1130s, had composed a History of the English in French verse, translating a large part of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle and celebrating the Norman kings as worthy successors to the heroes of the Anglo-Saxon past. Gaimar’s verses to some extent supplied a model for the poet-historians patronized at the court of Henry II. In particular Master Wace, born in the Channel Islands, later canon of Bayeux, was commissioned by Henry to write his Tale of Rollo (the Roman de Rou), a retelling in verse of the whole of Norman history from the time of the first arrival of the Vikings in Normandy through to the Conquest of England and the reigns of Rufus and Henry I. It was Wace, with his long lists of those who had fought at Hastings, who supplied the materials for many later, spurious genealogies, drawn up a century or more after 1066. For the barons of the 1160s, securing a mention in Wace’s history seems to have been roughly equivalent to the kudos to be obtained for today’s parvenus from an entry in Who’s Who or Debrett’s Peerage.
A Brief History of Britain 1066-1485 Page 21
