The Story of Britain: From the Romans to the Present (19 page)

But for Henry II the most controversial issue relating to the Church was its expansion into the criminal law. Its argument that it reserved to itself the right to try anyone in holy orders was allowing murderers and thieves off scot free. Royal judges who called for clerks in holy orders to appear before them were being insulted, and the miscreants were refusing to accept their authority. At this period the term holy orders meant not just priests but any person trained by the Church. Any man who could write Latin could say he was a clerk, and thus come under the category of clergy. So could anyone who simply had the top his head shaved in a tonsure. Because Church courts could not hand down a death sentence, a great number of ‘criminous clerks’, as Henry would call them, were escaping proper punishment. They usually avoided prison too, as the Church did not like to pay for it, arguing that its penalty of degrading a man from holy orders was punishment enough. As part of Henry’s drive to restore harmony and regularity to his new kingdom these anomalies had to be addressed. By appointing Thomas à Becket archbishop he believed he would draw the too independent and powerful Church into subjection.

However, Thomas was extremely reluctant to accept the post, partly because he foresaw a clash of interests. Despite his great worldliness he knew himself well enough to see that he always pursued his tasks wholeheartedly. He is said to have told the king, ‘If I become Archbishop of Canterbury, it will be God I serve before you.’ Thomas was in any case unpopular within the Church hierarchy itself for his hard line on making ecclesiastical lands pay scutage; many churchmen in addition were appalled that a mere deacon, who therefore could not say Mass, should become head of the Church. Those who knew Becket greeted his appointment with scepticism, unable to believe that this proud and arrogant chancellor could become a saintly archbishop and forswear a life of revelry and extravagance. But, much to the world’s surprise, that is just what he did.

As soon as he became archbishop, having been ordained priest, his behaviour underwent a transformation. He spent his nights in prayer and mortification of the flesh. Beneath his gorgeous vestments he wore a prickly shirt made of goat’s hair which swarmed with vermin so that he would always be suffering as Christ had done. For contemporaries and for many later observers, this metamorphosis was evidence that God and his august position had worked a great change in him. Modern historians, however, have been less inclined to take a view so strongly coloured by religious faith. It has been pointed out that once he became archbishop Thomas behaved in an extraordinarily antagonistic fashion to his patron. Despite his notably spiritual life he used his position to interfere in the king’s business as obstructively as he had been helpful before. It was as if he was testing his power against the man who had appointed him, though only months before they had been the closest friends.

Although the potential for a quarrel had been building up for some time, it burst out in 1163 when the king informed his bishops in council at Westminster of his intention to end the legal loophole known as ‘benefit of clergy’. He intended to make it the law that ‘criminous clerks’ convicted in the Church courts would be degraded from holy orders and punished by his judges, for it was now obvious that an informal understanding that convicted clerks be retried in the royal courts was not working. When Becket himself refused to give permission for the retrial of a canon, Henry struck. Claiming his right according to the ancient customs of England, in January 1164 he drew up the Constitutions of Clarendon as a restatement of the position of the English Church’s organization.

However, the Constitutions of Clarendon went a great deal further than the immediate issue at hand, and a great deal further than ancient custom. They dealt not only with criminous clerks but with Henry’s attempt to restrict the Church’s power and define relations between Church and state: priests were forbidden to leave the country without royal permission; nor could excommunication be used against the king’s barons without his permission; all disputes over land were to be decided in the king’s courts even if they concerned the Church; disputed debts were also to be confined to the king’s courts; appeals to Rome were to be made only if Henry allowed them.

Although most of the bishops, led by Gilbert Foliot, the Bishop of London, were at first angered by the Constitutions, they came round to them–persuaded by the king’s threats of violence against them. The exile from Rome of Pope Alexander III prevented him from doing anything that might annoy the King of England. Henry II was one of Alexander’s chief supporters against his rival Pope Paschal, the candidate of the emperor Frederick Barbarossa. Barbarossa, named for his red beard, had driven Alexander out of Italy, and Alexander would do anything to prevent the King of England going over to the emperor’s side in the long struggle for power that was the investiture crisis.

Becket refused to sign the Constitutions, on the ground that they infringed the liberties of the Church. This was hugely embarrassing because if the Constitutions were to become law they required the seal of the Archbishop of Canterbury.

The king’s anger knew no bounds, though he was also hurt by Thomas’s strange behaviour and wound up by his jealous rivals in the Church. He confiscated the archbishop’s property and removed his eldest son Henry from his guardianship. He then set about ruining him. When the king’s Great Council met at Northampton in October 1164, Henry demanded that all the money which had passed through Becket’s hands when he was his chancellor should be accounted for. Thomas replied that he had spent it all in the king’s service. He enraged the king still further by carrying a large crucifix to indicate that the only protection he claimed was God’s. Like everything about the archbishop, to his enemies this seemed absurdly dramatic behaviour. But to his supporters like John of Salisbury it was courageous and showed the astonishing miracle that God was performing in Becket’s heart.

The king’s bullying only increased Thomas’s stubbornness. Despite pleas from the bishops that he sign the Constitutions, Thomas insisted on arguing with Henry face to face, and there was an angry exchange of words. Henry exclaimed that he was appalled by Thomas’s ingratitude. He had raised him to the pinnacle of honour in the land, yet Thomas did nothing but oppose him. Had he forgotten all the proofs of his affection? Thomas responded that he was not unmindful of the things which God, bestower of all things, had seen fit to bestow on him through the king. He did not wish to act against his wishes, so long as it was agreeable to the will of God. Henry was indeed his liege lord, but God was lord of both of them and to ignore God’s will in order to obey the king would benefit neither him nor the king. For as St Peter said, ‘We ought to obey God rather than man.’ When the king retorted that he wanted no sermons from the son of one of his villeins, Thomas said, ‘It is true that I am not of royal lineage, but neither was St Peter.’

As the archbishop still refused to sign, Henry’s justiciar pronounced him a traitor. At last appreciating that with the King of England as his enemy his life was in danger, Thomas escaped from Northampton in the middle of the night and fled abroad to appeal to Pope Alexander III. He remained out of the country for six years.

For Henry the situation became intolerable. It embarrassed him at home and internationally for England to be without a head of the Church for so long. By 1170, however, the archbishop had returned, following intervention by the pope. It was believed by both sides that a reconciliation had been effected. At a meeting in France the king promised to allow the archbishop back into the country.

Thomas returned in December, taking up residence once more in the Archbishop’s Palace at Canterbury. His occupancy lasted less than a month. Although at their meeting Henry II had never mentioned signing the Constitutions of Clarendon the king had assumed that this would take place and begin the process of reform. But the archbishop was as obstinate as ever. He refused to lift the sentence of excommunication he had imposed on the Archbishop of York who on Whitsunday in Thomas’s absence had crowned Henry II’s eldest son, the young Henry. This was a medieval custom intended to ensure the loyalty of the barons in the future, but performing the ceremony was the special right of the Archbishop of Canterbury. In fact that December Becket re-excommunicated all those who had been involved, seven of the most important men in England including the justiciar and Gilbert Foliot, the Bishop of London, with nine other bishops.

For a brief period there was a lull. December passed awkwardly, with king and archbishop not on speaking terms. The king’s temper was not improved by the pope suddenly taking Thomas’s side. A papal bull or message arrived if not excommunicating at least suspending all the English bishops who had taken part in the young king’s coronation, leaving the English Church in a state of chaos.

On Christmas Day news reached Henry II, who was spending the festive season in icy Normandy, that Thomas had struck again. He had now excommunicated Ralph de Broc, who had been steward of the diocese of Canterbury’s lands during his absence. Maddened by this constant thorn in his flesh, raising his hands to heaven the always impulsive Henry said furiously, ‘Can none of the cowards eating my bread free me of this turbulent priest?’

No sooner were the rash words out of the king’s mouth than four knights who had always disliked Becket, Hugh de Morville, Reginald Fitz Urse, Richard le Breton and William de Tracy, left the hall and made for England. Having touched down at the home of Ralph de Broc, they went on to the Archbishop’s Palace at Canterbury.

On 29 December, on a dark winter’s afternoon with the pale sun scarcely penetrating the freezing skies, the archbishop was reading quietly in the library when there was a great commotion at the gate. Pursued vainly by palace servants–priests and serving boys–the knights burst into the archbishop’s room and demanded he withdraw the excommunications. The archbishop ignored them. Saying that he was only obeying the pope, he then set off for the nearby cathedral, followed by his cross-bearer Edward Grim, who lived to tell the tale.

The knights paused to put on their armour–though why they needed this was unclear since their only opponents would have been the unarmed monks singing Vespers. Ahead of them now in the gloom of the cathedral they could see Thomas’s white garments glimmering as he prepared to listen to Mass before the high altar. ‘Where is the archbishop? Where is the traitor?’ they shouted. ‘Here am I,’ said Becket, turning to meet his murderers, ‘not traitor but archbishop and priest of God.’ Then he meekly bowed his head as if for the first blow. One of the knights remembered his Christian upbringing sufficiently to want to kill the Archbishop of Canterbury outside consecrated ground, ground where for over 500 years the English nation had worshipped. He tried to drag the archbishop out. But Thomas refused to go. He clung so hard to a pillar in the north transept just below the north aisle left of the choir that the knights decided that they would have to kill him where he stood. The first blow missed him and hit the cross-bearer, but then all the knights piled in. The Archbishop of Canterbury was butchered before the High Altar.

This deed of blood perpetrated by four Christian knights apparently on the orders of the Christian King of England became the scandal of western Europe. Although Henry II probably had no idea that his exasperated outburst would be seen as an order to murder (we know from contemporary records that the king was planning to have him tried for treason), the world preferred to believe otherwise. The murder of the head of the English Church at the behest of the King of England had enormous reverberations. The cult of St Thomas the Christian martyr–for the pope promptly canonized him–spread as far as Iceland.

Thomas dead was far more powerful than Thomas alive. All his former misdeeds were forgotten, and he was venerated as the Church’s champion against injustice. The shrine erected to the former archbishop became one of the most popular in Europe–thus in
The Canterbury Tales
the Pilgrims are seeking the ‘blissful holy martyr’. It was also the most richly adorned, having a great reputation for miraculous cures effected by his lacerated body. If the archbishop had been wrong to resist the punishment of the clerks, there was some justification for him opposing such a naked assertion of royal power against the Church. But though Thomas à Becket passed into English folklore as a hero, the view taken of him today is less enthusiastic. His martyrdom put back the reform of an abuse for 300 years.

For all the animosity of the previous few years Henry II was a genuinely devout man and he was appalled by the murder. He burst into loud cries when he heard the news, put on sackcloth, rubbed his face with ashes and, as was noticed by the Bishop of Lisieux, behaved more like a friend than the sovereign of the dead man–which of course he had once been. Shutting himself up in his room for three days, he would not eat and fell into stupors so that for a while the country feared it might lost its king as well as its archbishop. Even though Thomas’s own erratic behaviour had to some extent brought his fate upon him, his hideous murder cast a stain over the rest of Henry’s reign from which he never quite recovered. The golden reputation and some of the zest for life faded. Despite his great legislative achievements from 1173 onwards his life was marred by rebellions throughout his far-flung possessions, stirred up by his sons whose enmity was used by the King of France to expand his territory at England’s expense.

Henry II was the first English king to extend Norman power to the next-door island of Ireland. Although Irish monks had preserved much of the classical corpus in their monasteries and Irish Christianity had been substantially responsible for the conversion of the Anglo-Saxon kingdom, the great days of early Irish civilization were over. Many monasteries had been destroyed in the ninth-century Viking raids that created the settlements of Dublin, Cork and Limerick. The arts and letters were no longer flourishing in a country ruled by a large number of kings who were in effect tribal chieftains. Bloody vengeance and constant war were now the custom of the country.