April Queen (30 page)

To make the point that even the most senior churchman in England was subject to his laws, Henry had Becket arraigned on a trumped-up charge.
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Fearing for his life, the archbishop rode secretly the 30 miles from Canterbury to Dover only to find that he who had formerly only to lift a finger for the king’s captains to weigh anchor with as many vessels as he desired was now denied passage on the humblest fishing smack. It was not the first time he had planned to flee and been turned back. Passports were now required to enter or leave England, in a net of laws designed to catch one fish.

Arriving at Northampton on the day in October appointed for the court hearing, Becket found himself denied suitable lodgings in the town, with the plaintiff still in London and the king amusing himself with hawk and hound somewhere en route. Next morning after Mass, he attended early at the castle, to be left waiting in an ante-room while Henry slumbered on, or pretended to.
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Rising to his feet in respect as the king strode past him to hear Mass in his private chapel, the
archbishop was ignored and then ignored again when Henry returned to take his breakfast.

The court finally in session, Becket found himself facing a different charge of misappropriation, for which he was fined £300.
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The bishops present stood surety but no one could be found to inform the accused of the verdict until the ageing turncoat bishop of Winchester went out and broke the news to the man he had consecrated archbishop sixteen months before. His appetite for revenge whetted by that first humiliation, Henry now demanded another £300, which he alleged Becket had illicitly removed from the funds of the manors of Eye and Berkhamsted. For this amount, too, sureties were found among the bishops present.

On the following day, Henry’s first demand was for the repayment of 1,000 marks alleged to have gone missing from the tax Becket had raised for Toulouse. Sureties were again found, but this time among lay people. Then the king demanded detailed accounts for the enormous rents Becket had received on his behalf from vacant sees and other religious properties – a sum in the order of 30,000 silver marks was mentioned.
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Becket truthfully replied that he had been exonerated from all worldly obligations when he was consecrated at Canterbury – and this before witnesses who included Young Henry.

However, the sureties melted away, for who could tell what the furious monarch would demand next? Some of the bishops begged Henry on their knees to have mercy, but he was adamant. That night the archbishop’s entourage was divided, with many proposing that he should resign before the king’s wrath embraced the entire Church. Next day, in agony from an attack of renal colic, Becket was physically unable to attend the court, but roused himself twenty-four hours later to attend the resumed hearing. Dissuaded by some Templars from going barefoot as a penitent, he decided to put on the full panoply of Canterbury, but was persuaded not to, in case that irritated Henry even more. It was with a simple cloak over his black Augustinian canon’s surplice that he arrived in court, clutching his primatial cross before him as though to ward off the foul fiend himself.

With his legal background and familiarity with the workings of Henry’s mind, he cannot have been surprised at the ruling that he was to make no appeal to Rome, nor give any instructions to his suffragans, and that he was to submit full accounts for the 30,000 marks which the king alleged had gone missing. To this, Becket gave a lawyer’s reply, saying that he had come to court to answer the first charge and none other. Nor would he offer sureties. Instead, he would appeal to
God and the pope for himself and for the Church of Canterbury.
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Confronted with a new writ from Henry being served on him by the earl of Leicester, he declared that his travesty of a trial was without any legal basis and that he was not subject to the royal justice.

In turning to sweep out of the astonished court, his grand gesture turned to farce. The castle courtyard was so packed with the many hundred mounts of all the magnates, bishops, knights and their attendants that there was a parking problem. The archbishop’s horse was disengaged, as were several others, but Herbert of Bosham’s was so hemmed in that he had to jump up on the crupper behind Becket or risk being left behind. Then came panic: the gate was locked and the gatekeeper nowhere to be found. Becket’s party naturally assumed that Henry intended to imprison them all, there and then.
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But the key was found hanging on a hook, and the archbishop’s retinue made an undignified retreat, amid insults from the castle riff-raff who then beat up their unfortunate servants, abandoned in the hasty departure.

Knowing that nothing less than his death would sate Henry’s hunger for vengeance, Becket spent the night in sanctuary, praying for part of the night at the altar of the priory where he had been lodging. The monks crept in for Compline, believing that the huddled form behind the altar was the archbishop asleep, but it was just a dummy made from cushions and cloaks. Becket had left Northampton before daybreak, a man on the run scurrying from one religious house to another, frightened to spend two nights in the same bed.

A week later, after making the 30-mile Channel crossing in a small rowing boat from the less frequented port of Sandwich, which was Church property, he was a fugitive in exile. At a monastery near St Omer, the faithful Hubert caught up with him, bringing clothing, horses and a small amount of money and plate from Canterbury to meet his immediate needs. Passing through Compiègne on the way to meet Pope Alexander in Sens, Becket was reassured on meeting Louis
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to hear that he was welcome on Capetian territory.

It was a refrain that all Henry’s enemies, including his sons, would be hearing over the years to come. Whether truly seeking to reconcile Becket and his monarch or to rub salt in Henry’s wound, Louis tried a dozen times during the archbishop’s six-year exile at Pontigny and Sens to arrange meetings of reconciliation between him and Henry. Each time they met, failure was the outcome.

On 24 December 1164 Henry was at Marlbrough with Eleanor for the Christmas court when the ambassadors he had sent to present his side of the dispute to the pope returned with the news that Becket had
got there first with Louis’ help. Having heard him out, Alexander was threatening to excommunicate the king of England. This triggered one of Henry’s legendary berserker rages, in which he threw himself about, rent his clothes, tore the bedding and chewed the straw of his mattress.

There was little of festivity next day for Eleanor and her children, but the following day was worse. Invoking the Germanic principle of
Sippenhaft
, Henry ruled that everyone related to Becket shared the archbishop’s guilt. As a result, 400 innocent men, women and children were forcibly deported to Flanders and left there homeless in midwinter with only the clothes they stood up in.
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In February, leaving Eleanor at Winchester, the king returned to Normandy and welcomed to Rouen Archbishop Rainald of Cologne with a view to worrying Louis, who rightly feared his enemies from east and west uniting against him. It was also a way of showing his resentment of the pope’s support for Becket. There was even talk of Princess Eleanor being married to the emperor’s infant son, Frederik, but at the same time Henry was negotiating for the marriage of Princess Matilda to Henry the Lion of Saxony, a cousin of the emperor who had been giving him much trouble lately.

Eleanor spent the spring of 1165 with all the children but Young Henry at Winchester without apparently exercising any real power. With her household and children she stayed for a while at Sherborne and on the Isle of Wight before moving back to Westminster, where Archbishop Rainald was introduced to the princesses and where she summoned a council on the king’s instructions to announce the new alliance. On the Sunday after Easter, Henry and Louis met at Gisors for an inconclusive meeting, after which he ordered the queen, now pregnant again, to meet him at Rouen with eight-year-old Richard and Matilda, aged nine.

However, his plan as part of the grand design to marry the princess there and then to Henry the Lion was put on hold either due to the schism or because it was Henry’s nature to promise but not deliver. Leaving Eleanor to oversee the continental domains, which can be read as an indication of her regained status now that Becket was out of the way – or at least of Henry’s renewed need of someone to rely on in addition to the ageing Empress Matilda while he was on the other side of the Channel – the king departed on another campaign against the Welsh for which there was scant enthusiasm among the English knighthood, causing him to institute the inquiry to establish exactly what knight service his vassals-in-chief owed him and were in turn owed by their vavassours. The essential lien of vassalage had so fallen
into disuse in England that many barons could give no clear answer to the inquiry before consulting the aged inhabitants of their fiefs.

There was even less enthusiasm for his continental expeditions because the English barons argued that they owed homage to him as king of England for their mutual support, but not to him as duke of Normandy or Aquitaine in pursuit of his ambitions on the continent.

Henry’s mood is indicated by his ordering during this campaign that all the Welsh male hostages be blinded and castrated; the females had their noses slit and ears cut off.
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Such violence was not reserved for enemies of the Crown. A small group of proselytising religious dissidents from Germany arrived in London and openly denied the sacraments. To show that he was not hostile to the Church
per se
, the normally tolerant king had them brought for trial before him and his bishops in council at Oxford. Sentenced to be branded and flogged before being outcast among a population forbidden to give them food or shelter, the Germans starved to death, their solitary English convert having recanted.

Reviving her first court of the marriage in Angers, Eleanor received from Becket a plea for her support in the quarrel with Henry. Whether she replied is unknown, but the bishop of Poitiers told him he was wasting his time in such an approach and hinted darkly that Eleanor’s hostility was the result of the undue influence of her uncle Raoul de Faye, who was acting as her chief counsellor. Once again a celibate used the oldest slur to demean the queen, hinting broadly that there was something illicit in the relationship of uncle and niece. At the time Eleanor was four months into her eleventh pregnancy.

On 22 August 1165, Louis at last had a son and heir to the throne of France. Giraldus Cambrensis, then a student on the Ile de la Cité, was awoken in the middle of the night by the ringing of every bell in the city. Sticking his head out of the window, he learned from some women passers-by that France now had a prince who would one day put the Angevins in their place. Baptised Philip after his dead uncle and Augustus for the month, Louis’ son was also called Dieudonné – the God-given. Hearing the news in Wales, Henry knew that his plan to claim the crown of France through Young Henry as husband of Marguerite would never come to fruition.

In October Eleanor gave birth to a third daughter, christened Joanna. Taking advantage of the queen’s indisposition and Henry’s problems with the Welsh, the barons of Maine and Brittany had risen up against Angevin domination. Despite the dispatch of a punitive force under the Constable of Normandy, the rebellion simmered on. For the first time Eleanor and Henry celebrated Christmas apart: she
in Angers and he at Oxford. Romantically inclined historians have interpreted the separate Christmas courts and his relative immobility as evidence of obsession with Rosamund Clifford, despite there being no evidence that he cared more for her than several other mistresses like Rohese, a daughter of the De Clare family, with whom he had had a liaison three years earlier.

Eleanor, like all noble and royal wives, was supposed to shut her eyes to these adulterous adventures, of which the chroniclers kept a lick-smacking tally. Giraldus Cambrensis delighted in quoting the Latin puns on Fair Rosamund’s name: not Rosamunda but
rosa immunda
, the unclean rose – and not
rosa mundi
, the rose of the world, but
rosa immundi
, the rose of filth or unchastity.
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He offered no suggestion how the beautiful teenage daughter of Walter Clifford, a Norman marcher lord performing knight service for Henry during his forays into Wales, could have rejected the advances of the king, whose vassals and tenants went to great lengths to keep their wives and daughters away from his lascivious gaze,
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unless they sought to gain something from satisfying his desires. As so often, it was the helpless female victim who was assumed to have seduced the powerful male perpetrator unwilling to control his lust.

Of one or more rumoured bastards by this liaison, nothing is known. Rosamund may have been discarded by Henry when Richard’s child fiancée Princess Alais came of an age to share his bed, for she died young in pious retirement at the convent of Godstow, where she had been educated. Henry paid for a lavish tomb in the convent church, on which the charitable nuns who had known her better than any gossipy celibate chronicler honoured the memory of the king’s ex-mistress with daily floral tributes until Bishop Hugh of Lincoln was scandalised on a visit early in the 1190s. On his orders, the tomb was resited less publicly lest the pious should cease to fear the dreaded consequence of such a life of sin as she had led.
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Resited in the nuns’ chapter house, the new tomb was ornamented with an admonitory inscription:

The legend inspired by her early death has Fair Rosamund kept by Henry for his pleasure in a secret bower within the maze at Woodstock Palace, where ‘Dame Ellinor the furious queene’ discovers her and offers her young rival a choice between poison and the knife. Even if Eleanor had arrived unexpectedly at Woodstock and found Henry’s young paramour on the palace estate, she would not have demeaned herself in this or any other way. No detractor ever accused her of lacking queenly dignity; nor would she have been particularly surprised, having known at least two of Henry’s bastards personally. As to the poison and the knife, she would be under lock and key as his most closely guarded prisoner at the time of Rosamund Clifford’s death.