Eleanor Of Aquitaine (18 page)

In January 1164 Henry convened a new council at Clarendon
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to bring Becket, chastened perhaps by his recent misfortunes, to public submission on the issues of Westminster. The king was confident of a triumph over his troublesome archbishop. Since Westminster the Pope (again in exile) had enjoined Becket to modify his promise to obey the king "saving the dignity of his order" to a more conciliatory promise "to obey in good faith." Besides, in the meantime, Henry had alienated from Becket's cause some of his suffragans. The king's own mind was single and his course was clear. At Clarendon Henry called on Thomas to assent to the old "customs" of rendering justice as these prevailed "aforetime in the realm." But Becket was every way divided: he owed allegiance to the Pope, for whom conflict with Henry meant the loss of indispensable support; yet more truly than the Pope, he realized that Henry would now reach beyond the "customs" to abridge ancient ecclesiastical rights, such as the appeal to Rome. He hesitated, ill at ease, and uncertain to what extent Henry had suborned the bishops, among whom were some who had opposed his elevation to the primacy. Pressed in the course of several days of argument by those bishops and nobles who dreaded above all a conflict that would oblige every man to make the dangerous choice between allegiance to the archbishop or to the king, Becket at last yielded "in good faith" to the "customs."

It thereupon appeared that his general concession was but the prelude to something more significant. Thomas found himself confronted with a weighty document, which he had had no opportunity to peruse with the care it deserved. A scroll was unfurled whereon Henry's legists had set down, chapter and verse, their definition of the "ancient customs," so describing the relations of church and state as to place the power and authorities in question under control of the king. If Becket, bred in Bologna on the canon law, had interested himself in codices, here were the decretals of the king, ordering the secular customs of Britain as the canons gave order to the usage of the church. Here was the "clear answer" Henry required of Thomas. Let him in "good faith," in the presence of bishops and barons, set the seal of Canterbury to the "customs," as put down in writing by Thomas' old associates in the king's court. Yes, or no?

In the Constitutions of Clarendon Becket scanned not merely the issue of the guilty clerks, but the whole area of conflicting jurisdiction between the church and the state. He read the articles with disinay. There he read that the king checked appeals to Rome, made excommunication conditional, exercised control over vacant sees and ecclesiastical preferments. Thomas had assented in "good faith" to the "customs." But he withdrew his seal from this strange document. "Never," he found voice to say, "never, while the breath of life is in me, will I assent to these articles."
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Grasping his copy of the Constitutions, he himself ended the conclave. Drawing off his following, he left the astonished council to bewilderment and awe. From that day the salvos of the king and the archbishop, "saving the customs" and "saving the dignity of our order," were on the lips of every liege man of the Angevin; and presently they resounded from Clarendon in all the centers of Christendom. The quarrel between the king and the primate had grown big.

Nine months later, in October, the Archbishop of Canterbury was given an experience of the king's justice. Thomas was summoned to appear in the court of Northampton to answer a charge of contempt.
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Since Clarendon he had done penance for his faltering assent to the "customs." Fortified in the spirit, as men said, by the sacraments, the comfort of the poor, and the counsel of a few intimates of the old household of Thibault, he had renounced his assent to the "customs" and revived his salvo. The bishops of his see were divided; but even those who clung to the suffrage of Canterbury besought him to avoid a breach that must tear the fabric of the church itself; those of Normandy clove to the king. Mediation between Thomas and Henry had failed; appeals to Rome had failed. Alexander, who could not sustain his own throne, could much less protect his archbishop from the very king whose support he himself could not forfeit. The disorder of the Pope's mind was seen in his correspondence. In successive letters to Henry and to the adherents of Becket, he alternately explained away his previous concessions to the other. In the interval between the assemblies of Clarendon and Northampton, Becket had attempted an unsuccessful flight to France from the intolerable thunderbolts of the king. He who, as chancellor, had commanded six vessels of his own for crossing the Channel now, as primate, was denied passage in a common smack. And after this chagrin Henry had taunted him with a question that defined its own answer: "Has the island grown too narrow to contain us both?"

Thomas was summoned to Northampton to answer for his nonappearance a short time before in a case in which a baron complained to the king that he had not obtained justice in Becket's court. When in response to his citation Becket reached Northampton on the appointed day, the principals had not yet arrived. John Marshall, who had proffered the charge against Thomas, had lingered in London to finish a certain business of his own. Henry had found the hawking fine on a watercourse along his route. The lodgings reserved for some of the primate's suite were found occupied by the careless retinue of one of Henry's courtiers. The people of the town peered out of chinks to see the following of great Thomas pausing in the streets, moving backward, casting about. Plainly the "dignity of his order" was in despite.

Late on the morning of the delayed hearing, Henry slept off the fatigues of his exercise with his dogs and falcons on the day before. He was not yet abroad when Becket, having already said mass and observed the hours, arrived at the castle. In the course of time, while he waited, Henry crossed the antechamber on his way to his own chapel. Becket rose, but the king passed him by without the customary greeting. Thomas sat outside while Henry heard mass and broke his fast.

When the cause came up for trial the question was found to be not justice for John Marshall, but Becket's contempt for a previous summons to hear John's complaint. Becket offered the plea that he had been ill. He had sent messengers. He had not in any case been under compulsion to answer such a summons. But the judgment went against him, and he was, as the "customs" provided for guilty clerks, turned over to the "mercy of the king." A fine of three hundred pounds was set;
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but, although the bishops gave surety for the fine, not one was found among the judges to serve the sentence upon Thomas, who awaited the verdict in the outer room. In the end, Henry, the aged Bishop of Winchester who had consecrated Becket sixteen months before, went out and broke the sentence to his spiritual overlord.

The archbishop was calm in the midst of his anxious following. Here, he remarked, were seen the operations of the "customs" of Clarendon; yet never in the days of Henry's forebears had it been the "custom" for the Archbishop of Canterbury, the spiritual father of the king and all his people, to be thus tried in the king's court. However, he would not have it said that, for his own sake, he had thwarted the king's justice. He passed into the audience chamber to face the Angevin whom his predecessor Thibault had given him to curb and admonish. Henry was truculent. He now required the restitution of an additional three hundred pounds of revenues Becket had sometime received from the surrendered manors of Berkhampstead and Eye. Still proud Thomas found surety for the heavy sums. He had now been sentenced and fined, but he had not yielded
in bono
to the king's will.

Overnight Henry considered how he might come at those reservations with which Thomas invariably retired from the field. Perhaps he got a suggestion from some of those churchmen who had not forgotten the chancellor's levy on the bishoprics for the recovery of the queen's province of Toulouse six years before. At any rate, in the morning, Henry bethought him to require the return of one thousand marks which Thomas had taken on the king's surety for that costly and unfortunate affair, and certain lay folk gave pledge for this sum. Then the king demanded an accounting for the revenues that Becket, during his office as chancellor, had taken from vacant sees and abbacies, an amount reckoned by several chroniclers as 30,000 marks of silver.
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At these extraordinary demands, reaching back into his secular career, Thomas' sureties fled away. No one dared to offer himself as pledge for such redemptions. There might be more to follow. At this point the exactions of the king became too immense. Thomas, and some of his bishops with him, threw themselves at the king's feet, beseeching a limit to the royal anger, a mitigation of the claims. Henry, like the Conqueror before him, swore "by the splendors of God." He would not abate a penny. Again the assembly broke up in consternation. The night passed in fearful talk. Some declared Thomas should resign his primacy to save the church from the king's fury; some that he should hold fast to defend the church from the king's tyranny; some that Henry had sworn "by the eyes of God" to proceed to Becket's limbs, to tear out his tongue, his eyes.

The next day Thomas was sick, but on the following day he had recovered possession of himself. He rose early and was clothed in his archepiscopal miter and the pallium which his friend John of Salisbury had fetched for him from the Pope. He celebrated the mass of Saint Stephen with its introit, "Princes sat and spake against me." He was dissuaded by certain Templars from going to the castle barefoot in penitential garb. Though clothed as usual, he rode from his lodgings with his primate's silver cross borne before him, and this, with his own hands, he carried into the antechamber. Several tried, but vainly, to dissuade him from thus impressing his authority upon the king. When the trumpet sounded for the assembly, Becket saw the Archbishop of York proceed to the inner hall, his cross borne before him in defiance of the cross of Canterbury.
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This presumption Thomas let pass. No longer a party to deliberations, he waited outside with the little company of his household for the conclusion of his trial. Bystanders saw that he had withdrawn to "inwardness."

Becket, who had mastered the articles of Clarendon, and knew Henry, as he said, "only too well," cannot have been surprised at the comprehensiveness of the verdict. He was to make no appeals to Rome, issue no commands to his suffragans; and he would presently submit to a review of his accounts as chancellor, although it was a matter of record that he had been discharged from the liabilities of this office before his consecration. Becket did not rise to meet the officer sent to pronounce these terms upon him. He was no longer Thomas, the king's proud chancellor, brought low; but Canterbury, clothed in the ghostly panoply of his see, fortified against the world by his primatial cross. Measuring his words, he spoke without the stuttering that sometimes checked his utterance.

"I came hither to the king's court for one cause only, that brought by John Marshall. For none other will I answer. I was given to Canterbury free of all reckonings. I will bring no other sureties. I appeal, I appeal for myself and the church of Canterbury, to God and the Pope."

These words, uttered in direct defiance of the king's sentence and at the moment when Henry's party believed his triumph complete, threw the conclave again into turmoil. In the face of Becket's appeal to Rome, those who had ranged themselves under the crosier of York could not drive away a ghostly fear. Again men searched their conscience, their reason, their interest.

Some appealed to Becket, some to the king to yield a jot. Becket heard that the Archbishop of York had already protested to Rome against his "perjury" at Clarendon — his first assenting to the "customs" and then withholding his seal from the written scroll.

In the inner chamber Henry and his liege men devised some further thing. The Earl of Leicester, the king's chief justiciar, returned with a new decree. But this was not uttered.
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Becket rose to his full stature to meet this high and venerable authority of the king's council. Between them he planted the cross of Canterbury and forbade the earl to speak. The habit of awe and reverence stayed the words upon Leicester's lips. It was Becket who spoke. Even by the "customs" there had been no trial Canterbury was not amenable to the king's summons on the matters that had been dragged forth. He would hear no sentence from those who were of his spiritual family, his own suffragans. "Now," he said, "I will depart, for the hour is past." As if shaking the dust of Sodom from their feet, Thomas and his company turned to the outer door.

Some who had been in the king's hall crowded out to see the end of the drama in the antechamber. The substance of York's appeal to Rome was hurled after the archbishop's following: "Traitor, traitor."
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One of the bystanders pelted Thomas with trodden rushes from the floor. Some say Becket gave back to his tormentors better words for good; others that he passed with a stern mien amongst them to the door. This was found locked, and a fearful surmise went about that Canterbury was the king's prisoner in the castle.
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But the key was presently found hanging on its nail, and Thomas passed into the afternoon streets of Northampton. Here crowds of the populace waited for news of the monstrous conflict between the lord of their bodies and the shepherd of their souls. Perhaps Henry, looking out from the chamber of his justice, saw Thomas ride away from the castle preceded by his cross and followed by the rabble of burghers and villeins, that still undisciplined army of the third estate.

No one knew better than Becket the tenacity and suddenness of Henry's tactics in war. He spent the first hours of the night in sanctuary beside the altar of Saint Stephen, rose early, said mass,
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and before cockcrow departed in disguise by secret ways from the king's court in Northampton. Under another name he moved darkly from one monastic shelter to another; at the end of a week he found passage from Sandwich in a common smack manned with two pairs of oars to help its speed; landed at Oye; floundered for leagues upon the sodden roads of Flanders; obtained refuge for a few days from cold and hunger with the monks of Saint Omer near Clairmarais. Here he was joined by several of his clerks and servants who had pressed after him from Canterbury with horses, raiment, and some treasure for his needs.