The Plantagenets (10 page)

No doubt, as John of Salisbury reported, the princes of Spain and Gaul did indeed remark upon the size of the host Henry assembled, entrusted as it was to the charge of the splendid Chancellor Becket. But the princes would also have been sceptical of Henry’s chances of success. Toulouse was a large city, but well protected, positioned on a sharp bend in the Garonne, and divided into three fortified sections. The ancient Roman city was adjacent to a walled bourg which had sprung up rather later around the vast, beautiful basilica of the church of Saint-Sernin. A wall ran both around these two areas and between them, and to the south lay the Château Narbonnais, a separate castle in which the city’s ruler resided. It could not be parched into submission, since the river provided a constant supply of water and did not dry up during the summer.

For all the efforts of Henry’s invading force, and all the misery they inflicted on the countryside and castles of the region, the sceptics were vindicated. As had happened to Louis in 1141, a king once again had thrown his might at the city defences and found himself thwarted.

How did so huge a force fail to overrun a relatively tiny prize? Perhaps the liberal lordship of the counts of Toulouse was preferred to the clunking mastery suggested by Henry’s invading force. Perhaps the city’s natural defences really did make it untakable. But in either case, the decisive blow to finish Henry’s campaign was struck in the early autumn of 1159, when he was caught unawares by the arrival in Toulouse of Louis VII.

Of all the lords in France it was Louis whom Henry troubled the most during the expansions of the 1150s. The duke of Normandy’s elevation to the rank of king made him a dangerous vassal for the Capetian Crown – a vassal with military resources and aristocratic prestige that far outstripped any other French nobleman. This was
most obviously a problem where the boundaries of the duchy of Normandy and French royal lands met, in the area known as the Vexin. It was true that in 1156, in a ceremony of great pageantry and political symbolism, Henry had done homage to the French king, swearing to Louis that ‘I, King Henry, will safeguard the life, limbs and landed honour of the King of France as my lord, if he will secure for me as his
fidelis
my life and limbs and lands which he has settled on me, for I am his man.’ But Louis’s feudal status would be worth nothing if he sat by and allowed Henry to conquer Toulouse – an area that he had explicitly failed to bring within his own direct control nearly two decades previously. Moreover, Count Raymond was the French king’s brother-in-law. To let him down would proclaim a very hollow lordship.

Louis arrived in Toulouse knowing that his mere presence at Count Raymond’s shoulder would force Henry to consider very carefully whether he could afford to continue his campaign. Attacking Raymond alone was one thing; to take on Louis and Raymond together was an act of explicit aggression that would cause Henry untold problems further north in Normandy and Anjou – areas he had been at pains to keep in good order. Furthermore, to take on Louis in an armed contest and lose would be to undermine the symbolic value of the whole Toulouse expedition as a show of force, expressing the combined might of the English Crown and Plantagenet dominions.

Henry took counsel with his barons and his key advisers, including Becket. Without an insult to the royal honour, the Plantagenet barons counselled that it was unacceptable to attack the French king. Becket protested, demanding an immediate assault on the city. He was outvoted and ignored. Henry gave up the fight. Claiming that he wished to spare the Capetian king and the city, he withdrew from Toulouse around the feast of Michaelmas.

The chronicler Roger of Howden called Toulouse Henry’s ‘unfinished business’. It was not quite a disaster, yet it was undeniably a failure. The most profitable event of the campaign was tangential to the siege itself: William count of Boulogne, the last remaining son of
King Stephen, who had joined Henry on campaign, died on his way back to England in October 1159. His extensive English estates reverted to the Crown. Otherwise, all that could be said for an expensive summer spent hurling rocks at the walls of a city was that Henry had tested to the limit his geographical capacity for wielding military power, while simultaneously showing that a Plantagenet king could outgun, if not outrank, a Capetian.

And there was another English cost to the failure of the Toulouse campaign. It brought into question for the first time the relationship between Henry and his closest counsellor: the chancellor, Thomas Becket.

Unholy War

In the summer of 1158, a year before he led Henry’s troops to the walls of Toulouse, Thomas Becket rode at the head of an even grander procession into the city of Paris. Coming in peace, as the chancellor of England and servant of the English king, he radiated solemn magnificence and glory. Becket had been sent on an embassy to negotiate the betrothal of Henry’s three-year-old son and namesake to Louis’s baby daughter Margaret, creating a dynastic union between the two royal houses of western Europe and securing the Norman Vexin for the Plantagenets. It was appropriate that he should impress the French king with the wealth and dignity of his master.

Becket put on an extraordinary show. In private he was a rigorously pious man who scourged himself regularly, wore a hair shirt, ate frugally and never took a mistress. But Becket knew how to entertain a crowd. He swept into Paris with exotic gifts and lavish pageantry – dogs, monkeys, and a seemingly endless train of servants, all testifying to the English king’s largesse and splendour. A vivid record was kept by William Fitzstephen, who accompanied Becket and saw it all first-hand:

In his company he had some two hundred horsemen, knights, clerks, stewards and men in waiting, men at arms and squires of noble family, all in ordered ranks. All these and all their followers wore bright new festal garments. He also took twenty-four suits … and many silk cloaks to leave behind him as presents, and all kinds of parti-coloured clothes and foreign furs, hangings and carpets for a bishop’s guest-room.

Hounds and hawks were in the train … and eight five-horse chariots drawn by shire horses. On every horse was a sturdy groom in a new tunic, and on every chariot a warden. Two carts carried nothing but beer … for the French, who are not familiar with the brew, a healthy drink, clear, dark as wine, and finer in flavour. Others bore food and drink, others dorsals, carpets, bags of night attire and luggage in general. He had twelve sumpter horses and eight chests of table places, gold and silver … One horse carried the plate, the altar furnishings and the books of his chapel … Every horse had a groom in a smart turn-out; every chariot had a fierce great mastiff on a leash standing in the cart or walking behind it, and every sumpter beast had a long-tailed monkey on its back …

Then there were about 250 men marching six or ten abreast, singing as they went in the English fashion. At intervals came braces of stag-hounds and greyhounds with their attendants, … then the men at arms, with the shields and chargers of the knights, then the other men at arms and boys and men carrying hawks … Last of all came the chancellor and some of his friends …

Arrived in Paris … he loaded every baron, knight, … master, scholar and burgess with gifts of plate, clothing, horses and money.

It was a show fit for a king.

In 1158 Thomas Becket was fast becoming one of Henry II’s closest friends and most trusted advisers. The king had found him working as a clerk in the service of Theobald, archbishop of Canterbury. He had plucked him from obscurity and promoted him as the face of the most ambitious royal family in Europe. Becket rose to the task. He excelled in royal service.

Twelfth-century government was still a scrappy, personal business. The courtier Walter Map has left us a dramatic, but highly plausible, image of the Henrician court in full pelt.

Whenever [the king] goes out he is seized by the crowd and pulled and pushed hither and thither; he is assaulted by shouts and roughly handled; yet he listens to all with patience and seemingly without
anger; until hustled beyond bearing he silently retreats to some place of quiet.

At the heart of such a throng, the king required a large and sophisticated system of household servants, clerks, diplomats and administrators. It was this sort of loose organization over which Becket presided. Like the great royal servants of centuries to come – Henry VIII’s chief minister Thomas Wolsey, or Elizabeth I’s patient secretary William Cecil – Becket spared a charismatic monarch the strain of day-to-day government, and turned grand visions into reality.

Becket reached the height of his power around 1160, when he was just past forty, and the king approaching twenty-seven. The chancellor was a tall, pleasant-looking man with carefully learned manners and cultivated skills in courtly conversation. His rise to power, wealth and glory had been extraordinary. He had enjoyed a good education at Merton priory in Sussex and a London grammar school – perhaps St Paul’s. But his progress through life was cut short when his father’s business premises burned down. He spent two years studying in Paris during his early twenties, but never completed the full education in canon and civil law that distinguished any ambitious young medieval man of letters. All his life he would overcompensate for the sense of inferiority that lingered.

What Becket lacked in intellectual finesse, he made up for with ambition. As well as chancellor, he was archdeacon of Canterbury: an important position in the English Church. He accumulated rich benefices everywhere from Kent to Yorkshire, and kept a fine and luxurious household in London, to which several magnates sent their sons for education.

With his height, pale skin, dark hair and long nose, the chancellor could not have cut a more opposite figure to the short and red-haired king, with his raw energy and an ease in company more inborn than acquired. Becket set great store by values that meant very little to the king, but that were essential to maintaining the dignity of kingship. According to Becket’s biographer Fitzstephen, the chancellor ‘hardly ever dined without the company of sundry earls and bishops’. He kept
a fine table, with delicate foods served in fine vessels of gold and silver. He enjoyed all the lordly pageantry that bored the king, and Henry allowed him to carry it out in his stead.

Indeed, the king seems to have enjoyed the almost comical contrast between himself and Becket, and made great fun of his friend. Fitzstephen recorded a famous story of Becket and Henry riding together through the wintry streets of London early in their friendship. The king pointed out a poor beggar shivering in the cold, and remarked to his chancellor that it would be a fine thing to give him a thick, warm cloak. When Becket agreed that this would indeed be charitable, Henry grabbed him and forcibly ripped the fine scarlet and grey cape from his back, before presenting it to the bewildered beggar. Becket’s natural pomposity did not allow him to share in the hilarity caused among the royal attendants. But Henry always insisted on pricking his friend’s pride when he could. He was known to ride into the chancellor’s dinner hall, jump from his horse and sit down to eat. The experience must have grated on Becket as much as it amused the king. Yet despite the irritations and the torments, Becket was Henry’s friend, trusted servant and confidant.

Most importantly, the king saw Becket as the bridge between two worlds: Crown and Church. All over Europe during the twelfth century, kings and secular lords were struggling with popes over the question of jurisdiction and authority. There were frequent clashes over matters including the right to perform coronations, the right to appeal to papal rather than royal courts, the rights of bishops to leave the country to attend conferences and the rights of kings to divorce their wives. Virtually every king in Europe had been or would be threatened with Interdict (a sentence banning most Church services and sacraments throughout a realm) or personal excommunication. Pope Eugene III had attempted to impose both penalties on King Stephen. And Frederick I Barbarossa – the Hohenstaufen prince who had been elected Holy Roman Emperor, and the only king in Europe with more extensive territories than Henry himself – was excommunicated in 1160 for failing to recognize the authority of Pope Alexander III.

As the 1160s dawned, Henry was aware that his ambitions for governing England would find disfavour with the papacy and the Church in England. He felt that his rights as king of England were prejudiced by an over-powerful Church, which he was determined to bring into line. Building his empire was, for Henry, not just a matter of expanding borders. It was about defining and deepening the rights and powers of kingship within the realm. He did not wish to create total secular dominion over the Church, or to rule as king and priest combined. But he certainly wished to be exact about his royal rights within his own land, and to defend them.

On 18 April 1161 Archbishop Theobald died in his palace in Canterbury, after a long illness. He had lived past the grand old age of seventy, and had reigned as archbishop since being appointed by King Stephen in 1138. When the news reached Henry, he saw an opportunity. He had plans for the future that would require a pliable archbishop in the seat of Canterbury. Chief among them was his aim to have his eldest son Henry crowned as king designate. This was something that Theobald had explicitly refused to do for King Stephen when Eustace was alive. Henry also wished to begin a process of redefining the boundaries of rights held by Church and Crown. This would require careful management, with an ally rather than an enemy as primate of the English Church.

To Henry, therefore, Becket seemed the ideal candidate to replace Theobald. Frederick Barbarossa used archbishop-chancellors – of Mainz and Cologne – to rule Germany and Italy. Henry resolved to do the same. Yet to many in the English Church, including the monks of Canterbury Cathedral who claimed the right to elect the archbishop, Becket’s candidacy was a travesty. To them, he was unfit for office on numerous grounds. He was essentially a secular figure. He had a second-rate academic background. He was no lawyer and certainly no theologian. He was a clear partisan of the Crown. And he had treated the Canterbury monks themselves ungraciously during his service for Theobald. And the monks were not alone. Henry’s mother, the Empress Matilda, who kept up a keen interest in her son’s political career from her retirement in Rouen, also wrote to
discourage Henry strongly from promoting his friend to archbishop.