Authors: Douglas Boyd
Lionheart (8 page)
To counter the very real danger of an emissary from Becket crossing to England and preventing or complicating Young Henry’s coronation, the Norman justiciar Richard fitz Richard of Le Hommet had been ordered to close all Channel ports on the French side. The ruse succeeded brilliantly: Bishop Roger of Worcester was compelled to kick his heels in Dieppe, unable to cross the Channel and excommunicate all those involved in the coronation, as he had been instructed to do by Becket. This did not stop Becket from excommunicating at a distance the bishop of Salisbury and Gilbert Foliot, who had been his rival for the see of Canterbury and was now bishop of London – this for the ‘sin’ of assisting at the coronation service.
Once crowned, 15-year-old Prince Henry was formally referred to as Henry III or Henry the Young King, with his father designated ‘the old king’, although only 37 years old. To make Young Henry’s kingship official, his father had a seal engraved with which he could issue charters under his own name. Like many another young man born with a solid gold spoon in his mouth, Young Henry was often carried away by his own importance. At the coronation feast, his father, in a typically informal moment, carried in the platter bearing the decorated and stuffed boar’s head. The archbishop of York tried to smooth over an inappropriate remark from Young Henry by saying that it was a privilege to be served by a king. Compounding the initial insolence, Young Henry joked that he saw nothing wrong in the son of a count waiting on the son of a king – a deliberately insulting way of reminding Henry II of his comparatively lowly origin.
Insults came in all shapes and sizes. It was ostensibly to avenge the insult to Marguerite that Louis now invaded Normandy, causing Henry II to hasten to a meeting with him at Vendôme on 22 July, when he agreed to crown Marguerite in the near future. Still prepared to resolve the dispute with Becket, Henry authorised Archbishop Rotrou of Rouen to set up yet another meeting with him on 22 July at Fréteval in central France, which was later to be the setting for a momentous encounter between Richard and Louis VII’s son Philip Augustus. There, Henry went as far as he could to build a bridge for the exile’s return, admitting that the coronation of the Young King had been a mistake and asking Becket to re-crown him in England, together with his wife Marguerite Capet as the Young Queen. The contentious Constitutions of Clarendon were not mentioned.
In an additional effort to prevent his erstwhile chancellor from persuading the pope to place all England under interdict, Henry offered to go on crusade as a penance for his past behaviour
10
and to entrust Young Henry and the country to Becket as regent during his absence. Knowing the king as he did, Becket presumably treated this generous offer as just another of Henry’s promises. Henry refused him the kiss of peace, saying that he would get that once back in England.
Two weeks later, on 10 August, the old king fell ill in Domfront with a high fever, possibly malaria. Rumours of his imminent death ran throughout Christendom after he dictated a last will and testament confirming the division of power as at Montmirail, with Richard to be duke of Aquitaine, counselled by his mother.
11
Nearly two months passed before he could celebrate his recovery by a pilgrimage of thanksgiving to the shrine at Rocamadour in Quercy.
12
Grateful to still be alive, Henry was in a less rancorous mood than he had been for a long time when he and Eleanor discussed betrothing 8-year-old Princess Eleanor to Alfonso, the 14-year-old King of Castile, because her betrothal to the son of the German emperor had been broken off due to Henry’s intriguing with Saxony, Lombardy and Sicily.
What Richard was doing at this time is a mystery. When the monks of St-Aignan near Saintes came to Chinon to complain that the seneschal of Poitou was illegally taxing the salt produced by the community, it was not Richard, but Eleanor acting in his name, who signed the charter confirming the community’s ancient privileges and Richard’s signature is not among those appended thereto. Similarly, a charter given to a daughter house of Fontevraud Abbey, confirming its right to gather firewood for heating in the forest of Argenson, was given by Eleanor and witnessed by several functionaries, but not signed by Richard, always bored by the minutiae of feudal governance. Even when he did sign charters, prudent beneficiaries ensured that Eleanor confirmed them afterwards.
13
In October, Becket had another meeting with Henry II near Amboise before making the fatal decision to return to his duties at Canterbury under safe conduct from the king. In seeming contradiction (for he was suffering pain at a level that blocks rational thought), he continued issuing letters of excommunication right up to 30 November, the day before he landed at Sandwich, heavily in debt but bringing with him a library of books and scrolls weighing half a ton and a whole shipload of wine that was hijacked by ill-wishers somewhere between his landing and the arrival in Canterbury on 2 December. If Henry had been expecting gratitude, he was to be disappointed. Becket continued to provoke him by issuing further excommunications of royal officers and refusing to rescind his excommunication of the English bishops.
Summoned like any other vassal to Henry’s Christmas court of 1170 at Bures in Normandy to account for her stewardship of the duchy, Eleanor was present when Bishop Gilbert Foliot and two other excommunicated prelates protested about Becket’s unmitigated arrogance. Young Henry was holding his own Christmas court at Winchester, but Richard, Geoffrey, John and Princess Joanna were all at Bures, witnesses to what was about to happen. Furious that Becket was still defying him, despite all the concessions he had made, Henry’s mood was such that his chamberlain Ranulf de Broc
14
incited four household knights – Hugh de Morville, who had been an itinerant justice in the north of England, Reginald fitz Urse, Richard de Brito and William de Tracy, a former chancellor of Becket’s – to travel to England and there rid the king of his most troublesome vassal.
After the four grim-faced knights arrived in the cathedral precincts at Canterbury, Becket was accused by his own secretary, John of Salisbury, of having brought the situation upon himself. John of Salisbury was unusual in being an Anglo-Saxon who had risen in the hierarchy by sheer intelligence. He had been a pupil of Peter Abelard in Paris and was a very level-headed counsellor, who modestly referred to himself as
Johannes parvus
, or Little John. He pointed out that an archbishop owed a duty to heed his advisers’ counsel just as a temporal lord must listen to the advice of his vassals – a duty in which Becket was constantly remiss.
15
When it became obvious that his master was set on a martyr’s death, John pointed out that he and the other members of the archiepiscopal household were sinners who were not yet ready to meet their Maker, meaning that ‘no one else present
wanted
to die’.
16
In his eyewitness account of the events on that momentous evening may lie the key to Becket’s constant provocations. He had never participated in the king’s womanising when close to Henry and was never reported to have indulged in any other sexual activities, so it seems likely that he was a pathological masochist and, once launched on the progression from hair shirt to daily floggings, could not stop escalating the doses of suffering until the final and fatal overdose.
Begged by John of Salisbury and his other household servants to claim sanctuary in the cathedral, Becket refused. He had to be pulled and pushed against his will through a narrow tunnel leading out of the archbishop’s palace and into the cathedral via the cloisters. Protesting all the way, Becket made sure the door was left unlocked, so that the pursuing knights could follow him inside. The service of vespers had not yet ended when some of his servants ran through the choir in panic, interrupting the singing. Becket ordered the monks back to their stalls in the choir and attempted to leave the sanctuary and confront the four knights from Normandy and another man who may have been guiding them. In great confusion, Becket and his cross-bearer met the five intruders on the steps leading up to the choir.
The assassination was messily done, with Becket first being beaten and insulted. The knights tried to carry him out of the building, so that they could commit the deed in the cloister, but Becket fell. The cross-bearer thrust the primatial cross out to shield him and had his arm severed at the elbow by a sword-blow. After many further blows, Becket lay dead, his brains spilling out on the stone steps. When his body was stripped for burial, it showed great emaciation concealed under his many layers of clothing and also tunnels through the flesh of his back, lacerated by the daily floggings, made by the vermin infesting him.
There is a stained glass window in the cathedral that was made shortly afterwards. In it, the prematurely grey-haired martyr’s face is haggard with pain, not blissful as martyrs were conventionally portrayed. Hagiographical accounts of the martyrdom had Becket as a holy man defending his Church from a rapacious monarch. The truth was that neither in his years at the schools of Paris, nor during the twelve years spent in Archbishop Theobald’s service before entering that of the king, had Becket shown any inclination to take further orders. Indeed, during his time as Henry’s chancellor, he had shown hostility to the Church. During his archbishopric, he had constantly placed it at risk by his reckless personal feuding with Henry. This was in blatant contrast with his predecessor, for Theobald had been a statesmanlike primate, serving both Church and people throughout Stephen’s civil war and establishing a good relationship with Henry, whose accession he had done so much to facilitate. Being a shrewd judge of character, Theobald had
not
suggested Becket as his successor.
N
OTES
1.
W. Urry,
Thomas Becket: His Last Days
(Thrupp: Sutton, 1999), p. 116.
2.
Ibid, p. 118.
3.
Recueil des Historiens des Gaules et de la France
, ed. L. Delisle (Paris: Palmé, 1869–80), Vol 13, pp. 131–2.
4.
In Latin,
causa conjugii ab amore non est excusatio recta
.
5.
Richard, A.,
Histoire
, Vol 2, p. 242.
6.
Recueil, Vol 13, p. 151:
comes pictavensorum et dux aquitannorum
.
7.
Richard, A.,
Histoire
, Vol 2, p. 150.
8.
There is still extant the
ordo et benedicendum ducem Aquitaniae
said to be the order of service used, but Richard gives this document a later date (
Histoire
, Vol 2, p. 153).
9.
Roger of Howden,
Chronica
, ed. W. Stubbs, Rolls Series (London: Longmans, 1867–71), Vol 2, p. 34.
10.
Ibid, p. 163.
11.
Ibid, p. 155.
12.
Recueil
, Vol 13, p. 143.
13.
Richard, A.,
Histoire
, Vol 2, pp. 153–4, 161.
14.
Bartlett,
England under the Norman and Angevin Kings
, p. 257.
15.
Urry,
Thomas Becket
, p. 116.
16.
Ibid.
Part 2:
5
L
earning of the assassination while at Argentan on 31 December 1170 or 1 January 1171, Henry fell into an awesome display of contrition that lasted six weeks, during which he protested to Pope Alexander III that he done everything possible to prevent the murder, in which he had played no part. Everyone present at the Christmas court in Argentan, including Eleanor and Richard, must have been aware of these events, after which they returned to Poitiers, where Eleanor acted as her father and grandfather had done, sealing charters in her own name with Richard’s appearing secondarily.
