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 and securing the 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 Henry’s chancellor 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 splendor. A vivid record was kept by William Fitzstephen, who accompanied Becket and saw it all firsthand:
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 flavor. Others bore food and drink, others dorsals [dossals], 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 staghounds 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. Theobald had admired the young man’s ambitious capacity for hard work and had promoted him through his service until in 1154 Becket had become archdeacon of Canterbury. It was in this post that he became known to Henry, who was encouraged to think of Becket as a highly competent candidate for the post of English chancellor. In 1155, on Theobald’s recommendation, Henry had placed Becket at the top of the English administration. 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 Henry’s 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 principal secretary William Cecil—Becket spared a charismatic monarch the strain of day-to-day government and turned his grand visions into reality.
Becket reached the height of his power around 1160, when he was just past forty and the king was approaching twenty-seven. The chancellor was a tall, pleasant-looking man with studied 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 merchant 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 in London a fine and luxurious household, to which several magnates sent their sons for an education.
With his pale skin, dark hair, and long nose, the chancellor could not have cut a more contrasting figure with the short, red-haired king, with his raw energy and ease in company more inborn than acquired. Becket set great store by values that meant very little to his 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 was happy for him to carry it out in his stead.
The king seems to have enjoyed the almost comical contrast between himself and his chancellor and occasionally poked fun at 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 gray cape from his back, which he presented to the bewildered beggar. Becket did not share in the hilarity this 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 small indignities, Becket was Henry’s friend, trusted servant, and confidant.
Most important, the king saw Becket as the bridge between two worlds: Crown and Church. All over Europe during the twelfth century, kings and their vassals were struggling with ecclesiastical authorities over questions of jurisdiction and authority. There were frequent clashes over the right to perform coronations or to appeal to papal rather than royal courts, the right of bishops to leave the country to attend conferences and that 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 during a bitter argument about an appointment to the archbishopric of York. And Frederick I, “Barbarossa,” the Hohenstaufen prince who had been elected Holy Roman Emperor and was the only king in Europe with more extensive territories than Henry, was excommunicated in 1160 during a war for legal supremacy with Pope Alexander III.
Henry knew that his plans for governing England would not please the papacy and the Church. He believed his rights as king were prejudiced by an overpowerful Church, which he was determined to bring into line. Building his empire was 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 seize total dominion over the Church or to rule as king and priest combined. But he had exacting notions of royal prerogatives, and he intended to defend them.
On April 18, 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 been archbishop since 1138, when Stephen had appointed him. Henry saw an opportunity. He had plans that would require a pliable archbishop in the seat of Canterbury, chief among them his aim to have his eldest son crowned as king-designate. This was something Theobald had explicitly refused to do for King Stephen. Henry also wished to begin a process of redefining the boundaries of rights held by Crown and Church. It suited him to have an ally as English primate.
Becket struck Henry as the ideal candidate to replace Theobald. Frederick Barbarossa had 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 traditionally held the right to elect the archbishop, Becket’s candidacy was a travesty. He was unfit for office on several grounds. He was essentially a secular figure with a second-rate academic record. He was no lawyer and certainly no theologian. He was a clear partisan of the Crown and had treated the Canterbury monks ungraciously during his service for Theobald. The monks were not alone in objecting. Henry’s mother, the empress Matilda, also wrote strongly to discourage him from promoting his friend to archbishop.
None of this swayed Henry. The advantages of appointing Becket as a chancellor-archbishop far outweighed the laments that would rise from Canterbury. Henry wished to pass the kingdom of England to his eldest son, with Becket as his mentor and regent. The boy was nearly seven years old, at which age it was customary for young noblemen to leave their mothers’ households 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. On June 2, 1161, Becket was ordained a priest. The next day he was consecrated as archbishop.
In Henry’s mind Becket’s elevation was a triumph, but he soon discovered that there was a major flaw in his strategy. The flaw was not the reaction from others in the Church. It was Becket himself.
Despite the titles and gifts lavished on him by the king, Becket felt deeply inadequate as archbishop. Part of the reason for this lay in the fact that the English primate was traditionally a monk. Becket was marked very clearly as an outsider by his pale, nonmonastic dress. Having spent a lifetime learning how to be a great secular chancellor, he was now parachuted into a world where everything he stood for was despised. He was poorly educated in ecclesiastical terms 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. This prompted a sudden and violent change of outlook and attitude that dramatically and catastrophically reshaped 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.” 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 trusted royal agent became—almost overnight—an opponent of the Crown. Henry had expected him to grease the cogs of royal policy within Church ranks. Instead, he was jamming his bony fingers into them. Becket became, for the rest of his life, a pompous, disagreeable, and obstreperous distraction from Henry’s every effort at smooth governance.
Whatever the cause of Becket’s conversion, it was remarked on with astonishment by contemporaries. 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 honor 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 had taken place with bewildering swiftness. At first Henry tolerated his friend’s exasperating behavior from afar. He was too preoccupied with Norman affairs to concentrate fully 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 thought were essential to improve law and order. The program of reforms he introduced in 1164 is now known as the Constitutions of Clarendon, for the royal hunting lodge where it was drawn up. The sixteen-point document is one of the most famous in English constitutional history, representing 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—the term used for those clergymen who stole, raped, maimed, or killed.
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 an 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 but punishments were considerably lighter under canon law than under the secular criminal code. The Church would 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.
To reduce a complex 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 would bring churchmen who committed crimes into what Henry thought was their rightful place of punishment. Becket meanwhile chose 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 quarreled with the king over the Church’s payment of the sheriff’s aid. This was a form of taxation, which was traditionally paid by landowners directly to their local sheriff, to help fund his peacekeeping duties in the county. Henry now wished to draw this revenue directly into the exchequer, bringing a large source of finance 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. This was an accounting reform with political significance. It was probably not a wildly important issue to anyone but the sheriffs themselves, but the archbishop, cast in his new, self-appointed role of scrutineer of the Crown’s reform program, objected. 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 behavior 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 and to thwart his sovereign’s ambitious plans for reform.
Relations between the two former friends deteriorated further over the course of 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 one hundred 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 banishing and branding several criminous clerks and imprisoning others for life, it was not enough to convince the king that the matter could be left as it stood. On October 1, 1163, Henry summoned the spiritual magnates of the realm to a royal council at Westminster. He addressed his audience, demanding that they obey and observe the ancient customs of the realm. A heated legal debate broke out, in which royal and canon lawyers contested for supremacy. 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. If they would not, then they must reveal whether or not they were prepared to abide by any of the “customs of England.” Led by Becket, the bishops at Woodstock answered that they would observe England’s customs “saving their order,” a nonanswer that reserved the right to observe canon law above the laws of kings.
“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 return all the castles granted to him during his chancellorship and removed his son from Becket’s care. It was a spiteful gesture that tore the heart out of a decade-long friendship. Henry’s view, later expressed in person, in a failed rapprochement at Northampton, was that the archbishop ought to stop preaching and remember that he owed everything to royal favor. “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 feelings on both sides. Both men appealed to Pope Alexander. The pope, however, had more pressing troubles of his own and was in exile from Rome. He had quarreled with the Holy Roman Emperor, Frederick Barbarossa, and the end result had been papal schism. An antipope, Victor IV, now sat at Rome, while Alexander licked his wounds in Venice and other, less grand parts of the Italian peninsula. 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. Henry summoned a great council to his hunting lodge and palace at Clarendon in late 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 accept this moral victory, he pressed home his advantage and drove for binding, unambiguous supremacy. On January 29 the Constitutions of Clarendon were issued as a chirograph, a written form of lawmaking that implied permanence and universality. A copy was handed to Becket, a copy was kept for the king, and a third copy was 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 Church jurisdiction.
Browbeaten by the king to accept royal policy, Becket had placed the Church in a position of unprecedented submission and proved himself to be what he supposed everyone must all along have thought him, a royal patsy.
Tormented, Becket suspended himself from priestly duties and denounced the snare Henry had closed around him. He 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. 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 favor 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, he wrote to Henry’s enemy Louis VII for support and in the summer attempted unsuccessfully to flee to France.
Henry, meanwhile, was in a vindictive mood. In the autumn he summoned Becket to a council of the magnates in Northampton Castle. On October 6, 1164, Henry’s 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 judgment 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 town with just four men to accompany him. He escaped England on November 2, 1164, when a desperate and dangerous Channel crossing in a small boat put him ashore in Flanders, where he set off to seek refuge with the king of France. He would not return to England for almost five years.