The Plantagenets (11 page)

None of this swayed Henry. The advantages of appointing Becket as a chancellor-archbishop far outweighed the laments that would rise from Canterbury. Long-term, Henry wished to pass the kingdom of England to his eldest son, with Becket as his mentor and regent. The boy was approaching the age of seven, at which it was customary for young noblemen to leave their mother’s household and begin their education for manhood. In 1162 the king planned to put young Henry under Becket’s tutelage. All the better that this should be in the household of an archbishop. Thus on 2 June 1161 Becket was ordained a priest. The next day he was consecrated archbishop.

In Henry’s mind Becket’s elevation was a great triumph, but very soon it turned out that there was a major flaw in his strategy. The flaw was Becket himself.

Despite all the titles, gifts and fortune lavished on him by the king, Becket felt deeply inadequate as archbishop. Part of the explanation lay in the fact that the English primate was almost always a monk. But for his first months as archbishop Becket was marked very clearly as an outside agent in the See by his pale, non-monastic dress. It induced in him a form of status anxiety. Having spent a lifetime learning how to be a great secular chancellor, Becket was now parachuted into a world where everything he stood for was despised. He was ill-educated, non-monastic and instantly disliked for his royal associations. He felt a painful need to prove himself worthy both to his new flock and to God himself. And this prompted, underneath his worldly garb, a sudden and violent change of outlook and attitude that would catastrophically reshape his relationship with Henry.

Almost as soon as he became archbishop, Becket began to distance himself from royal policy. His very first action was to resign the chancellorship, protesting that he was ‘unfit for one office, let alone two’. This was the most elementary rejection of the whole purpose of his translation. He then picked a fight over Church lands with several lay magnates, including the earl of Hertford and William, Lord Eynsford, another Kentish landowner. He declared the day of his own
consecration a new feast day – that of the Holy Trinity. And he sent a flurry of requests to Pope Alexander III, asking to strengthen the authority of Canterbury over the rival archbishopric of York. The royal agent became – almost overnight – an opponent. Henry had expected him to grease the cogs of royal policy within Church ranks. Instead, he was jamming bony fingers into them. Becket confounded all the king’s hopes, and became for the rest of his life a pompous, disagreeable and obstreperous distraction from Henry’s every effort at smooth governance.

Whatever the psychological cause of Becket’s transformation, it was seen by contemporaries as a near-Damascene conversion. The anonymous Battle Abbey chronicler unsurprisingly viewed it as a sort of glorious skin-shedding: a spiritual transformation wrought by his elevation in status.

In him, as the common proverb has it, ‘honours changed conduct’, but not, as with the conduct of nearly all men, for the worse, but day to day for the better. For he put off the old man who is created according to the world, and strove to put on the new man who is created according to God.

Even William of Newburgh, a writer generally unsympathetic to Becket, was impressed:

Soon weighing up by pious and wise consideration what the burden of such a great honour might be, he was thus immediately changed in habit and manner, as one might say ‘This is the hand of God’ and ‘This is the transformation of the hand of the Almighty’.

Becket’s switch from loyal Crown enforcer to prickly defender of Church rights happened with almost bewildering swiftness. Henry tolerated his friend’s exasperating behaviour from afar. Until the autumn of 1162 he was too preoccupied with Norman affairs to concentrate on England. But once he returned from the Continent in January 1163 he was determined to push through a series of legal and
governmental reforms that he felt were entirely essential to improve law and order. The programme of reforms that Henry aimed at introducing to England in 1164 is now known as the Constitutions of Clarendon. The sixteen-point document is one of the most famous in English constitutional history.

The Constitutions were Henry’s attempt to draw a clear line between the blurred jurisdictions of Church and royal authority. This was an area of bitter dispute, but the issue on which he chose to attack was that of criminous clerks.

Perhaps one in six Englishmen in the late twelfth century was technically a clergyman. While most were not and never would be priests, there were plenty in minor orders, or who had entered the Church for education and left to work for lay masters. Many parish priests were poorly educated and barely literate. Their lives would not have differed much from those of ordinary peasants. But clerical status bestowed great advantage if one fell foul of the law. The Church demanded the right to discipline criminous clerks – those clergymen who stole, raped, maimed or killed. But punishments were considerably lighter under canon law. The Church could neither inflict trial by ordeal, nor mutilate or execute the guilty. This allowed what was perceived by Henry to be a shameful number of crimes to go unpunished. To the king’s mind, hawkish as it was about his royal rights, for criminous clerks to shelter beneath the broad cassock of the canon law was an egregious abuse, and one that he was not prepared to tolerate. It jarred with the spirit of his broadest aim as king: to restore the strong arm of kingship to its standing in his grandfather’s day.

To reduce a labyrinthine dispute to simple terms: Henry wanted criminous clerks tried in ecclesiastical courts to be stripped of their orders and returned to the secular powers for bodily punishment. This did not technically create a hierarchy of courts, but it brought churchmen who committed crimes into what Henry thought was their rightful place of punishment. Becket, meanwhile, desired to resist every perceived intrusion into the Church’s rights, at whatever political cost.

At the council of Woodstock in the summer of 1163, Becket quarrelled with the king over the payment of the ‘sheriff’s aid’. This was a form of taxation, which was traditionally paid by landowners directly to their local sheriff, to aid him in his peacekeeping duties in the county. Henry now wished to draw this revenue directly into the exchequer, earning a windfall tax for the Crown, bringing a large source of revenue under central supervision, and implicitly reminding the whole of England that it was from the wellspring of the king’s direct authority that all other political power flowed. To put it another way, this was an accounting reform with political significance. It was probably not a wildly important issue to anyone but the sheriffs themselves, and Thomas Becket, but the archbishop, cast in his self-appointed new role of scrutineer of the Crown’s reform programme, objected to it. He informed the king that ‘it does not become your excellence to deflect something that belongs to another to your use’, and added that the realm would not be ‘forced by law’. This so infuriated Henry that he swore a great oath. According to Edward Grim, a contemporary who wrote a biography of Becket, Henry shouted at his archbishop: ‘By God’s eyes! It shall be given as revenue and entered in the royal rolls: and it is not fit that you should gainsay it, for no one would oppose your men against your will.’

But the archbishop faced him down. ‘By the reverence of the eyes by which you have sworn, my lord king, there shall be given from all my lands or from the property of the church not a penny.’ This was especially stubborn behaviour from Becket, considering that he had very little personally to lose from the sheriff’s aid reform. But it showed just how determined he was to prove himself in his new position.

Relations between the former friends deteriorated further through the summer. The issue of criminous clerks would not disappear. Henry had heard from his advisers that in the nine years since his coronation more than 100 murders and an untold number of other crimes had been committed by clerks who had gone unpunished by the royal courts. Although Becket tried to ward Henry off making any fundamental changes in the courts’ jurisdictions by having several
criminous clerks banished, branded or imprisoned for life, it was not enough to convince the king that the matter could be left alone. On 1 October 1163 Henry summoned the spiritual magnates of the realm to a royal council at Westminster. He addressed his audience, demanding that they obey him over criminous clerks and observe the ancient customs of the realm. A heated legal debate broke out, in which royal and canon lawyers contested for supremacy. After some time, Henry asked the bishops to recognize that a criminous clerk, once found guilty in the Church courts, should be surrendered to the royal courts for bodily punishment. And if they would not, he demanded, then they must explain whether or not they were prepared to abide by any of the ‘customs of England’.

The issue was ballooning, thanks to Henry’s single-mindedness and Becket’s obstinacy. Led by Becket, the bishops at Woodstock answered that they would observe England’s customs ‘saving their order’ – a non-answer that reserved the right to observe canon law above the laws of kings.

Henry was needled. ‘In heated mood [the king] left London without notice, and with all his business unfinished and lawsuits left hanging,’ wrote Becket’s close companion and biographer Herbert of Bosham. The next morning Henry demanded that Becket must return all the castles granted to him during his chancellorship and removed his son from Becket’s care. Born from frustration, it was a spiteful gesture that tore the heart out of a decade-long friendship. Becket was doing the opposite of everything he had been parachuted into Canterbury to achieve. Henry’s view, later expressed in person to Becket in a failed rapprochement at Northampton, was that the archbishop ought to stop preaching and remember that he owed everything to royal favour. ‘Were you not the son of one of my villeins?’ he asked Becket. ‘You adhere and rely too much on the manner of your ascent.’ It was a piercing remark.

The breach at Westminster left bad feeling on both sides. Both men appealed to Pope Alexander. The pope, however, had troubles of his own and was in exile from Rome. His quarrel with a secular lord – in this case Frederick Barbarossa – had resulted in papal schism. An
anti-pope, Victor IV, sat at Rome. Alexander gently urged Becket to cooperate, as later did Gilbert Foliot, bishop of London, and Roger, archbishop of York, several cardinals and the respected Cistercian abbot Philip of Aumone. In November, according to Roger of Pontigny, ‘the archbishop, swayed by the advice of the lord pope and the cardinals and the words of this abbot and the others who came with him’, agreed to submit to the king. He did so privately at Oxford. Apparently triumphant, Henry summoned a great council to his hunting lodge and palace at Clarendon, towards the end of January 1164. He intended Becket’s humiliation to be public and complete. Becket was uneasy and evasive, but was manipulated, through a series of tantrums and dark threats from Henry, into declaring before the assembled magnates – barons, officials and bishops – that he would uphold all the laws and customs of the realm, without condition.

Henry then sprang a trap. Rather than accepting this moral victory, he pressed home his advantage and drove for binding, unambiguous supremacy. On 29 January, the Constitutions of Clarendon were issued as a chirograph – a written form of lawmaking that implied permanence and universality. A copy of the Constitutions was handed to Becket, a copy kept for the king, and a third copy filed in the royal archives for posterity.

Becket was appalled. The document listed sixteen points, comprising the ‘customs’ to which he had apparently assented the previous day. These included Henry’s desired scheme for criminous clerks, a limitation on appeals to the papacy above the king’s authority, and several broad statements asserting the primacy of royal courts over the Church’s.

The archbishop denounced the snare Henry had closed around him, but he was caught in the lie of his position – browbeaten by the king to accept royal policy upon the Church, he had placed the Church in a position of unprecedented submission, and proven himself to be what he supposed everyone must all along have thought him: a royal patsy.

Tormented, Becket suspended himself from priestly duties. He imposed penance and wrote to the pope admitting what he had done
and begging absolution. He was, said Herbert of Bosham, ‘unusually disquieted and gloomy’. Great salty sobs racked his body as he bewailed his unfitness for office in the light of his secular past. His wild attempts to prove himself to his spiritual peers, to God and to himself had come to nothing. He had wholly lost the king’s goodwill, political support and friendship, but he had not gained the favour of a greater lord: ‘I clearly see myself worthy to be abandoned by God and removed from the holy seat in which I was placed,’ he cried. Panicking, and further demonstrating his defective political judgement, he wrote to Henry’s enemy Louis VII for support, and in the summer attempted unsuccessfully to flee to France.

Henry, meanwhile, was in vindictive mood. In the autumn he summoned Becket to a council of the magnates in Northampton castle. On 6 October 1164 Henry’s archbishop and former friend was accused of embezzlement committed during his term as chancellor. Becket again appealed to the pope. So did Henry. He aimed to have the archbishop deposed and denounced his appeal, for malicious effect, as being in breach of the Constitutions of Clarendon.

Faced with crimes against the Crown and against his own soul, Becket panicked. As judicial proceedings against him at Northampton were coming to a head, he declared that he refused to hear judgement pronounced, turned on his heel and walked out of the room. He managed to flee the castle and the next morning, as rain lashed from a leaden sky, the disgraced and sodden archbishop tramped from the town, with just four men to accompany him. He escaped England on 2 November 1164, when a desperate and dangerous Channel crossing in a small boat put him ashore in Flanders to seek refuge with the king of France. He would not return to England for almost five long years.