April Queen (35 page)

Begged by his household 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 palace and into the cathedral via the cloister. Protesting all the way, Becket made sure the door was left unlocked, so that the pursuing knights could enter. The service of Vespers had not yet ended when some of his servants ran through the choir in panic, interrupting the singing. Some monks came to see what the shouting was all about. Becket ordered them back to their stalls. Manhandled this way and that by servants seeking to protect him, he tried to leave the sanctuary and met the four knights, accompanied by one other, on the stairs leading up to the choir.

The killing was a messy affair for men whose business was arms. Becket was first beaten and insulted. They tried to carry him out of the building, to commit the deed in the cloister, but he fell. His cross-bearer
thrust the primatial cross out to shield him and had his arm severed at the elbow by a sword-cut. Many blows later, Becket lay dead, his brains a mess on the flagstones.

When his body was stripped after the murder, it showed not only great emaciation concealed under his many layers of clothing, but tunnels made by the vermin through the lacerated flesh of his back. In the stained-glass window of the cathedral made shortly after-wards, the prematurely grey-haired martyr’s face is not blissful, but haggard with pain, as it is in Herbert of Bosham’s ‘great glossed psalter’.
¹⁶

Hagiographical accounts of the martyrdom were bound to portray Becket as a man of vocation defending the Church from a rapacious monarch when, in fact, he had never shown any sign of vocation during his years in the schools of Paris, nor during the twelve years in Archbishop Theobald’s service when there were many opportunities to take further orders, had he the inclination. On the contrary, during his time as Henry’s chancellor, he had shown hostility to the Church on many occasions. And far from defending it during his archbishopric, he had constantly placed it at risk for little gain by his personal feud with Henry. This was in blatant contrast with his mentor and predecessor, for Theobald had been a model primate, serving both the Church and society throughout the civil war and working hard to make a stable relationship with Henry, whose accession he had done so much to facilitate. Being a shrewd judge of people, he had, of course,
not
suggested Becket as his successor.

At Argentan on 31 December or 1 January Henry greeted the news of Becket’s assassination with an awesome display of rage and contrition that lasted six weeks, during which he sent messages to Pope Alexander III protesting that he had sent messengers after the five knights
¹⁷
in a fruitless endeavour to stop the murder, in which he had had no part. But this seems to have been an exercise in plausible denial, for neither then nor later did he punish anyone involved in the plot.

Everyone present at the Christmas court, including Eleanor and her children, must have been aware of what was happening. But she had no reason to love Becket, and returned to Poitiers after the court more determined than ever to act as her father and grandfather had done, sealing charters in her own name with Richard’s appearing secondarily.

An important principal was dead, but the grand design was still in play – just. Having second thoughts about his oblate son’s obvious unsuitability for an ecclesiastical career, Henry had opened negotiations with Count Humbert of Maurienne through Abbot Benedict of Chiusa for the betrothal of Prince John to Humbert’s daughter Alix.
The importance of Maurienne was that the county stretching from south of Lake Geneva to the borders of Italy and Provence included the important Alpine passes vital for any invasion of the peninsula.

At Easter the pope at last excommunicated the four guilty knights, who took refuge at Knaresborough Castle in Yorkshire for the rest of the year. Hugh de Morville was eventually absolved of his guilt after making pilgrimage to the Holy Land. William de Tracy also departed for Outremer after giving his Devon manor to Canterbury Cathedral, but died on the way.

For three and a half centuries after the events of the fateful evening, the Church prospered from the major pilgrimage site north of the Channel, as enduringly reported by Geoffrey Chaucer in
The Canterbury Tales
. It was presumably reasoned by advocates of the newly elaborated doctrine of transubstantiation that a saint’s blood, like the True Cross, was infinitely divisible by virtue of its sanctity; for many years, the best-selling pilgrim’s souvenirs were the small flasks of diluted fruit juice, allegedly the blood spilled at the martyrdom, for believers to drink on the spot or take home with them. The cult lasted until Henry VIII had Becket’s name erased from prayer books and the shrine despoiled in June 1538.

After courting papal legates for years for his own political reasons, Henry for six months avoided those sent to negotiate terms under which he might be absolved of Becket’s murder because he had in mind a different way of winning papal support. On 6 August 1171 he returned to England to plan the long-delayed invasion of Ireland, borrowing a considerable sum from the Jewish merchant Joshua of Gloucester to pay his mercenaries there, despite criticism from the Church that in using the profits of usury even a king made himself an accomplice to the forbidden practice.
¹⁸
To escape the need for repayment, Joshua was ordered to recover the loan for himself out of the proceeds of tax farming.

On 16 October the army embarked at Milford Haven, landing next day at Waterford and setting up winter quarters at Dublin. With two stretches of sea between her and Henry, Eleanor rode south to hold her own Christmas court in Bayonne with Richard, but fell ill on the way.

It was not until 17 April 1172 that Henry returned to England – for less than a month. On 12 May he was back in France, bringing with him the Young King and Princess Marguerite, still uncrowned. To the papal legates waiting at Savigny, Henry played on Alexander’s gratitude for the conquest of Ireland and repeated his protestations of innocence in the assassination. However, his own bishops would not let the matter
drop because the surge in popularity of the martyr he had created was making their temporal overlord dangerously unpopular both in England and on the continent.

Second seal of Henry II

At Avranches, across the bay from the holy shrine of Mont St Michel, Henry finally admitted that he just
might
have been the indirect cause of Becket’s death by allowing the late archbishop’s provocations to upset him too much. Maintaining that the assassination had nevertheless grieved him more than the loss of his own father, he offered to go on pilgrimage to Rome, Compostela or even the Holy Land if proven guilty of having ordered it. To impress the legates he knelt outside the cathedral, where sinners and excommunicates belonged, and stripped off his outer garments to reveal a hair shirt. This too removed, he submitted to a scourging by relays of monks. Among the witnesses was Young Henry.

From Avranches, he was dragged by his father to Montferrand, now Clermont-Ferrand in the Auvergne, for a pre-arranged meeting with Count Humbert and the neighbouring count of Vienne, whose lands were equally important for an invasion of Italy. The alliance with Maurienne was concluded by the betrothal of six-year-old John Lackland to Humbert’s eldest daughter Alix, the marriage to be celebrated when John came of age. Alix’s dowry included the strategic Alpine valleys of Novalaise and Aosta and John was to inherit the entire county of Maurienne should Humbert die without leaving a male heir. In return, the count was promised 3,000 silver marks in instalments.
¹⁹

It was at this summit conference that Raymond of Toulouse confirmed himself the vassal of Richard, duke of Aquitaine
²⁰
and agreed to do homage with 100 knights for forty days. In addition, he was to make an annual payment of 100 silver marks per annum or give in lieu ten trained warhorses, each having a value of not less than 10 marks, or £7. Since Richard was absent, the ceremony of swearing fealty was postponed until Whitsun.
²¹

When Henry headed back to Limoges, Humbert accompanied him in the hope of finding out what exactly were the possessions of Prince John. Henry’s announcement that they would be the castles of Chinon, Loudun and Mirebeau infuriated Young Henry, who considered them his and declared his father had acted
ultra vires
in giving them to John. To placate him, the king arranged a second coronation – this time with Marguerite installed beside him. Because the archbishops of London, York and Salisbury were still under the cloud of excommunication and no new archbishop of Canterbury had yet been appointed, it was the bishop of Evreux who officiated at Winchester on 27 August. Neither Eleanor nor Henry was present, she being in Poitou and he back in Brittany.

In November Young Henry again demanded to be given absolute power. This being refused, he flounced off to Paris, where Louis welcomed him and Marguerite and listened to his son-in-law’s complaints about his father’s parsimony and unwillingness to share power. To put a stop to this, Henry summoned his son back to Normandy, but the Young King showed his independence by avoiding the Christmas court on the excuse that he was giving a banquet for knights called William, of whom 110 arrived while all his differently named friends were turned away that day.

Not amused, Henry spent Christmas at Chinon with Eleanor, Richard and Geoffrey. In the draughty castle perched high above the River Vienne, it was not just the wind that was cold. From Rome came news that Becket was to be canonised on 21 February 1173. Miracles had been claimed by the thousand in his name, a hospital dedicated to him in London and numerous churches named for him. But none of this bothered Henry. On that day he and Eleanor were at Limoges entertaining the Spanish kings Alfonso II of Aragon and Sancho VI of Navarre on pilgrimage to the tomb of St Martial.
²²

With Eleanor came Richard as duke. With Henry came Young Henry, fast becoming a figure to whose banner the growing mass of barons both in France and England who resented his father’s high-handedness could rally with a show of legitimacy. Had Henry not been preoccupied with tying the knots of the grand design, he might still have nipped the rebellion in the bud, but during the week-long festivities in Limoges, his main concern was finalising with Count Humbert the betrothal of Prince John and Alix of Maurienne, which ended with four-year-old Alix given into Henry’s keeping, her upbringing entrusted to Eleanor.

However, a conspiracy had been born. Had it been restricted to a few barons who acted fast enough, it might have succeeded, but the
king’s spies were everywhere among his sons’ advisers and friends. Learning of it from Raymond of Toulouse, who considered that of his three oaths of loyalty it would pay best to honour the one made to the father of his immediate overlord,
²³
Henry made the pretext of leaving the city with Raymond, ostensibly for a day’s hunting.

Making a lightning tour of all his castles in the region and ordering his castellans to put them on a war footing, Henry appointed Abbot William of Reading to replace Archbishop Bertrand of Bordeaux, who had died the previous December, and sent him off to pacify Gascony before himself returning to Limoges, whence the barons had departed to raise their troops for the rebellion. To pin the snake by its head, he dismissed the Young Henry’s household knights
²⁴
and ordered the sullen prince to accompany him back to Normandy at the beginning of March, leaving Eleanor in Poitiers with Richard and Geoffrey.

For once, he was not vigilant enough. While his father was still sleeping at Chinon on the way north, Young Henry crept out of their shared bedroom and escaped from the castle early in the morning of 6 March, heading off at speed through the dawn mists via Le Mans and Alençon to Argentan. Henry was roused in a fury, to thunder in pursuit in a chase scene worthy of Hollywood. The terrified prince rode horses into the ground, as did his furious father, following closely behind.

Hearing that Louis was at Mortagne, Young Henry sought asylum there on 8 March, while his father was still taking stock of the situation back in Alençon.
²⁵
It was both a filial betrayal and a feudally proper thing for the invested duke of Normandy to place his dispute with the count of Anjou before their mutual overlord the king of France. When Henry’s emissaries arrived in Paris saying they were sent by the king of England, Louis affected surprise on the grounds that his guest was the crowned king of England and that the ‘old king’ had resigned, as everyone knew.
²⁶

He also had a replica made of Young Henry’s seal, left behind in Rouen. This was used to validate charters bestowing gifts of Angevin possessions on the barons who flocked to the cause. Philip of Flanders was rewarded with Dover Castle and the county of Kent; his brother the count of Boulogne with the county of Mortain. William of Scotland, whose men were already raiding the north of England, got Northumbria; his brother David the shires of Huntingdon and Cambridge. All these allies argued that Young Henry needed his brothers to declare for him – with Richard would come Poitou and Aquitaine, while Geoffrey would bring Brittany to the coalition.