Great Tales from English History: The Truth About King Arthur, Lady Godiva, Richard the Lionheart, and More: 1

by Robert Lacey

  Controlling territory to the south of Normandy, the counts of Blois were powerful magnates with whom the Normans tried to stay on good terms. Stephen was an affable and well-liked character, popular with many of the Anglo-Norman barons. He was fortunate to have had a narrow escape in 1120 when he turned down an invitation to join the young hell-raisers on William the Aetheling’s booze cruise. Stephen was then in his early twenties, and the chroniclers give two reasons why he decided not to board the White Ship: he disapproved of so much drinking, and he was suffering at the time from diarrhoea.

  Maybe the diarrhoea had been an excuse, since it had not stopped him boarding the King’s ship that night. Stephen was a quick-thinking man. The moment he realised in December 1135 that there was a crown for the taking, he followed the example of his uncles William Rufus and Henry himself and headed hell-for-leather for the royal treasury in Winchester. Three weeks later, England’s first and last King Stephen was crowned in Westminster Abbey, just in time for Christmas.

  But Matilda had her father’s ferocious bloody-mindedness, and she was not willing to let her cousin steal her inheritance without a fight. The next twenty years would see Stephen and Matilda battling for control of England and Normandy, raising armies and bribing towns, bishops and barons to consolidate their cause. Matilda captured and imprisoned Stephen, then Stephen besieged her. In the winter of 1141, Matilda and her followers made a dramatic escape from Oxford Castle, dressed in white so they could not be seen against the snow. When Matilda held power, she alienated people with her overbearing ways. When Stephen had the whip hand he proved too soft and good-natured.

  To start with, the barons saw themselves as the beneficiaries of this family rivalry, and they used the widespread unrest to settle old scores, often switching sides without a qualm. Loyalty hardly seemed to come into it. The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle described the situation in a famous passage on the woes of a land torn apart by civil war:

  Every powerful man built himself castles and held them against the king . . . They sorely burdened the unhappy people of the country with forced labour, and when the castles were built, they filled them with devils and wicked men. By night and by day they seized those whom they believed had any wealth, ordinary men and women, and put them in prison to get their gold and silver and tortured them . . . They hung them up by their feet and smoked them with foul smoke. They hung them by the thumbs or by the head, then hung coats of mail [weighing about 25 kg] on their feet. They put knotted strings round their heads and twisted till it went to the brains. They put them in dungeons where there were adders and snakes and toads . . . Then when the wretched people had no more to give, they plundered and burned all the villages, so that you could easily go a day’s journey without ever finding a village inhabited or field cultivated . . . Wherever the ground was tilled, the earth bore no corn, for the land was ruined by such doings. And men said openly that Christ and his saints slept.

  Written by 1154, these vivid words come to us from Peterborough on the edge of the Fens, from the last monastery that was still producing editions of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle - and which would itself stop the updatings at the end of Stephen’s reign. The description quoted here was clearly based on the cruelty and destruction that the monks witnessed in their own neighbourhood; other parts of England may not have been so badly affected by what came to be known as the ‘great anarchy’. But by the early 1150s, exhaustion had set in. The nobles were refusing to fight for either side, and there was a clear need for a settlement.

  By then Matilda’s cause was being fought by her forceful son, the red-headed Henry Plantagenet, so named after the bright-yellow broom flower known as the planta genesta that was the emblem of the counts of Anjou, his father’s home territory to the south-west of Normandy. These Angevin rulers had a history of rivalry with the Normans, and Matilda’s marriage to Geoffrey of Anjou had always hampered her cause. But Geoffrey died in 1151, and, having succeeded to the title, his son Henry married Eleanor of Aquitaine, whose vast territories to the south of Anjou included Gascony and the rich wine district of Bordeaux.

  Henry Plantagenet was only twenty when he arrived in England in 1153, but through inheritance and marriage he controlled almost half of France, a wide swathe down the western, Atlantic coast, and he had the soldiers to match. That winter he struck a deal for the succession, allowing the old and weary Stephen to remain on the throne for the rest of his lifetime, which lasted, in the event, barely a year. In December 1154 Matilda’s son became King Henry II, the first ruler of England’s new Angevin and Plantagenet dynasty.

  Matilda had never been able to enjoy her inheritance. The closest she had come to being queen was to be styled the ‘Lady of the English’ during one of her brief periods of power. But she was to outlive her rival Stephen by a dozen years, and she had the pleasure of seeing her son, the new king, reign over a vast empire that stretched from Hadrian’s Wall to the Pyrenees.

  MURDER IN THE CATHEDRAL

  AD 1170

  KING HENRY II AND HIS CHANCELLOR Thomas Becket were the closest of friends. People declared the two men ‘had but one heart and one mind’. The new Plantagenet king was twenty-one when he came to the throne in 1154. Thomas Becket, a London merchant’s son, was in his mid-thirties, but the difference in their ages and status did not seem to matter. They hunted and played chess together - and both were furious workers. Henry was consumed by the challenge of holding together his diverse and disorderly collection of territories in England and France. Thomas, appointed his chancellor at the start of the reign, was in charge of the royal writing office, drawing up official documents and firing off letters. One clerk later recalled that before taking dictation from Becket he would have to get at least sixty, and sometimes as many as a hundred, quill pens cut and sharpened in advance - he knew there would be no time for sharpening during the session.

  Business from all over Henry’s Angevin empire passed through Thomas’s hands, and he revelled in the glory of his position. Imitating his master’s grandfather, Henry I, Thomas kept exotic animals - monkeys, and a couple of wolves that he had trained for hunting their own kind, which still lurked in the royal forests. When he went to France in 1158 to negotiate a marriage treaty for one of Henry’s daughters, he travelled in fabulous luxury.

  ‘If this be only the Chancellor,’ marvelled onlookers, ‘what must be the glory of the King himself?’

  Henry would tease Thomas wryly about his grandeur. As the two men rode together through London one winter’s day, the King saw a poor man shivering in the cold and suggested that he needed a coat. Thomas agreed - whereupon Henry grabbed at his chancellor’s magnificent fur-lined scarlet cloak, and the two friends wrestled together until Thomas gave way.

  Henry II was proud of the law and order that he had brought to his so recently chaotic realm. He would refer contemptuously to the reign of his predecessor as the years of ‘disorder’, as if King Stephen had never been. It was in Henry’s reign that the legal status of the jury, first introduced by the Danes, took firm root, and from this time comes the word ‘assizes’, from the Norman French for ‘sitting’. The King’s judges would travel from county to county, sitting in justice over the people to administer the common law - the law that applied to all free men.

  The exception was the Church, which had its own courts and a law of its own. If a priest murdered or raped or stole, he could avoid the common-law penalties of hanging or mutilation by claiming ‘benefit of clergy’, the right to be tried in the bishop’s court, which could do no worse than defrock him - expel him from the priesthood - and impose a penance. Common law stopped at the church door, and some clerics were major powers in the land. Rich bishops and abbots enjoyed the revenues of large estates, with their own retinues and sometimes mini-armies. Although they swore loyalty to the King, they insisted that their earthly oaths must rank below their loyalty to God and to his supreme earthly representative, the Pope in Rome.

  When the Archbishop of Canterbury died in 1161, Henr
y saw the chance to tackle the problem. He would give the job to his best friend, who would use his energy and loyalty to put the Church in its place while at the same time remaining his chancellor. But Henry - along with almost everyone who had ever seen the two men together - was astonished when the new archbishop insisted on resigning his position as chancellor and almost immediately started to champion the rights of the Church. Becket publicly opposed Henry’s attempts to levy a tax that applied to bishops as well as to barons, and when it came to the vexed question of Church versus common law, he took the position that priests should never be subject to the death penalty. With the donning of his archbishop’s robes, the King’s worldly comrade had become his pious and prickly opponent, dedicated to frustrating the very changes he had been put in place to implement.

  What made Becket change? The elegant chancellor’s startling transformation has been debated ever since, not least by playwrights and poets from Alfred Lord Tennyson to T. S. Eliot, who have created stirring dramas from the change in character that turned dear friends into mortal enemies. Thomas had been ‘born again’, it seemed. From being the King’s man, he became God’s man - as he saw his God, at least. But there were those in the Church who suggested that the change had not been as total as it seemed. There had always been something artificial about the glittering Thomas, something of the actor. Becket could never resist catching the public eye: he loved being a celebrity. Gilded companion of the King or sackcloth servant of the Church, he never failed to act his part - or to overact it - superbly.

  ‘An ass he always was,’ remarked Gilbert Foliot, the Bishop of London, ‘and an ass he’ll always be.’

  Foliot was a broad-minded churchman in the tolerant tradition of Bede. He understood the need for compromise between Church and state, and, like other senior clerics, he openly opposed the obstinacy of the new archbishop.

  But compromise had never been a word in Thomas’s vocabulary, and he now pursued God’s cause in a succession of confrontations that came to a head in October 1164. Becket arrived at Northampton Castle to answer Henry’s complaints, with a large retinue of clerks and monks and an armoured bodyguard. He insisted on carrying the massive silver cross of Canterbury in his own hands to signify that he was claiming God’s protection against the King.

  ‘Perjurer!’ shouted the barons who supported Henry and felt that Thomas had broken his oath of loyalty to him. ‘Traitor!’

  Born-again Becket gave as good as he got, temporarily forsaking his saintly demeanour to retort ‘Whoremonger!’ at the baron who organised the King’s mistresses, and ‘Bastard!’ at Henry’s illegitimate brother. Anticipating arrest and captivity, Thomas then slipped out of the castle before dawn by an unguarded gate, and made his way in disguise to the south coast where he took a small boat to Flanders, and then on to France.

  In the six years of exile that followed, Henry and Thomas met three times in France to try to patch up their differences - encounters that were fraught with emotion. In July 1170 in a field near the banks of the River Loire, Thomas was so overcome that he jumped off his horse and threw himself to the ground in front of Henry. The King responded by himself dismounting. Then he took hold of his old friend and forced him back into the saddle, holding his stirrup so as to help him up.

  On this occasion the two men had been arguing over a crowning ceremony that Henry had arranged for his eldest son earlier that summer in an attempt to solidify the royal succession. In Thomas’s absence, Henry had called in the Archbishop of York and Gilbert Foliot of London, with other bishops, to consecrate the ceremony. The crowning hijacked a job that archbishops of Canterbury had always jealously preserved as their own, but Becket agreed to return to England, all the same.

  Back in Canterbury, however, and preaching from the cathedral pulpit on Christmas Day, the restored archbishop denounced the bishops who had taken part in the illegal crowning.

  ‘May they all be damned by Jesus Christ!’ he cried, hurling flaming candles to the floor.

  Over in Normandy, Henry flew into a tantrum of his own. ‘Will no man rid me of this turbulent priest?’ is the cry that legend has attributed to the furious king.

  In fact, these words come from many centuries later, and there is much better evidence from closer to the time. Within two years of the episode Edward Grim, a priest on Becket’s staff who was personally involved in the drama, reported Henry railing even more bitterly. ‘What miserable drones and traitors have I nourished and promoted in my household, who let their lord be treated with such shameful contempt by a lowborn cleric?’

  Four of his knights took this cry as a summons to action. They crossed the Channel to Kent, stopping at Saltwood Castle to mobilise an arrest party, then rode on to Canterbury. When they arrived at the cathedral on 29 December 1170, the archbishop had just finished his lunch. It was around three in the afternoon when the visitors were ushered into his bedroom, and though they had taken off their sword-belts as a gesture of courtesy, Thomas studiously ignored them at first. He certainly knew at least three of the knights personally, but he chose to treat them with disdain, angrily rejecting their request that he should accompany them to Winchester.

  A shouting match ensued. As tempers rose, the knights waved their arms about and twisted their heavy gloves into knots, according to one eyewitness. Their leader Reginald FitzUrse - literally Reginald ‘Bear-son’ - ordered the archbishop’s followers to leave, and when they refused, led his own men out of the room to get their weapons. Thomas seemed almost disappointed that they were retreating.

  ‘Do you think I’m going to sneak off?’ he cried. ‘I haven’t returned to Canterbury in order to run away. You’ll find me here. And in the Lord’s battle, I’ll fight hand to hand, toe to toe.’

  ‘Why should you annoy them further,’ remonstrated one of his followers, ‘by getting up and following them to the door?’

  ‘My mind is made up,’ replied Thomas. ‘I know exactly what I have to do.’

  ‘Please God,’ came the reply, ‘that you have chosen well.’

  By four o’clock Thomas was in the cathedral. It was getting dark. In the candlelit church, the monks were just finishing their devotions and townsfolk were arriving for public evensong. Meanwhile, the knights were out in the cloisters, pulling on their armour and strapping on their sword-belts.

  ‘Where is the traitor?’ they shouted as they broke into the cathedral. ‘Where is the archbishop?’

  ‘Here I am,’ replied Becket. ‘No traitor to the king, but a priest of God!’

  We know these words and all the dramatic details of what happened next in the cathedral that fading December evening, because no less than four of Becket’s followers recorded their own accounts of the tragedy - with first-hand vividness, and considerable honesty as well. One admitted that he ran off and hid behind the altar as soon as the fighting started. But Edward Grim was made of sterner stuff, and he stayed beside Becket as the knights moved in to lay hands on the archbishop. Becket, a strong man, robustly wrestled them off, and as Grim put up a hand to shield his master, a sword struck through his arm to the bone, then rebounded, flying onwards to slice into the top of Becket’s head.

  ‘He received a second blow on the head,’ wrote Grim, ‘but still stood firm. At the third blow he fell on his knees and elbows, offering himself a living victim and saying in a low voice, “For the name of Jesus and the protection of the church, I am ready to embrace death.”’

  Grim described the grisly details as a further blow cut Becket’s skull right open, spilling ‘blood white with the brain, and the brain red with the blood’ on to the cathedral floor.

  ‘Let’s be off, knights!’ cried one of the assassins. ‘This fellow won’t be up again!’

  The eyewitness accounts make clear that in the initial terrible shock of such violence, few people saw the slaying as a martyrdom. It was Becket’s own confrontational style that had turned the arrest party into murderers - and some even suggested that Becket had provoked the disaster thr
ough his own arrogance.

  ‘He wanted to be a king - he wanted to be more than a king,’ was one angry reaction. ‘Let him be a king now!’

  But then the monks started readying Thomas’s body for burial, and as they cut away his bloodstained outer vestments, the surprising garment they discovered underneath changed their attitude entirely.

  ‘Look,’ cried one, ‘he’s a true monk!’

  A KING REPENTS

  AD 1174

  IF THOMAS BECKET HAD BEEN WEARING SILK underpants when he died, he might never have become a martyr. Luxurious clothing would have confirmed all the worst suspicions about his vainglorious pride. But as Thomas’s confused followers stripped off his bloodied vestments on the evening of 29 December 1170 to prepare his body for burial, they discovered the very opposite of luxury. Next to the skin of the murdered archbishop was a shirt of the roughest goat’s hair, extending from his neck to his knees. It was the ultimate monkish symbol of humility, the painfully itchy garment that the pious wore when they wished to punish themselves - and Thomas had taken self-punishment to extremes. His hair shirt was crawling with maggots and lice.

  This was the moment when the process of sainthood began. The discovery of the hair shirt, we are told, astonished everyone except Thomas’s private chaplain Robert of Merton, the archbishop’s spiritual confidant, who had been in charge of his private devotions. These included, it now turned out, the trussing-up of the heavy hair shirt as many as three times a day, so the chaplain could whip the archbishop’s back until the blood flowed - and if the man tired, Thomas would tear at his flesh with his own fingernails.