Leaving the investigation of Lee to the experts, namely Darren, Peter, and Bevyn, I took Callum and Carew to ride the short distance with me to the Archbishop’s palace. We were accompanied by a portion of my usual entourage, led by Justin, deeming it unnecessary to descend on the Archbishop’s palace with more than thirty men.
Those of us who would enter the Archbishop’s precincts weren’t armed either, and it was strange not to feel the familiar weight of my sword at my side. But John Peckham was a man of God, genuinely loathing war, and he had asked that we leave our weapons behind when we entered his domain. Though he was very frail now, the Archbishop of Canterbury was still the most powerful churchman in England, and I’d bowed to his request.
With Lee on the loose, I hoped I wouldn’t regret my decision. Still, it was only a half-mile to the palace from the castle, and the route was as secure as Justin could make it. My hand-picked company of Welsh archers watched from the tops of buildings and the city walls. I was surrounded by those men of my own guard who could be spared from the task of hunting Lee, while the city’s regular garrison patrolled the streets. All in all, I thought both the attention to detail and security were impressive and had said as much to Justin.
The rain had continued to fall as rain in England tended to do, and my horse picked his way through the muddy street. I kept to the exact middle, careful to avoid the wheel tracks where water had pooled. The roads weren’t cobbled, so the dirt had turned to mud, mixing with the muck created by ten thousand people living too closely together without modern sanitation. Up ahead, in fact, was a garbage collector, loading his cart with what looked like soiled straw from a barn.
I gave the cart a wide birth and held my breath as I passed it. He was doing an important—if not crucial—job, though not one I would ever have wanted. Worse would have been a night soil collector with his cart; night soil being the medieval term for human waste.
Many people lined the edges of the street and bowed to me, undeterred by the weather. Above me on both sides, windows opened, and spectators shouted, ‘The king! The king!’ as I passed. I lifted one hand to them briefly before using it to tuck my cloak and hood more tightly around myself. This wasn’t so much because I was cold, but because I wasn’t in the mood to smile right now and didn’t want my people to know it.
Thomas Becket had been murdered in Canterbury, and it was because of that murder that Canterbury had become a place of pilgrimage as well as a thriving merchant town. It was near enough to the English Channel to be a waypoint for commerce between England and Europe, as well as a market fair for the whole region around it in eastern Kent. At one time, before the Norman conquest of England, Canterbury may have been bigger than London.
The city itself, oval in shape and running from southwest to northeast, was protected by a town wall. It had been built initially by the Romans and then refortified by the Saxons when they came to Kent. Unfortunately, the walls hadn’t prevented the Vikings from sacking the city at least twice, nor the Normans from taking it when they came. Over the last hundred years, as peace had come to England, the walls had been allowed to fall into disrepair. Since I’d become king, I’d authorized Peckham to see to their improvement, and over the patter of the rain, I could hear the distant tapping of stone masons working.
Although some businesses were located outside the walls—a meat market and a few houses—those same walls constrained Canterbury’s growth. Buildings were two or three stories high, pressed up against neighboring houses in groups of a half-dozen or so, with narrow alleys between the blocks. Canterbury Castle protected the southwestern part of the oval, with the castle walls forming part of the city’s defenses in that area. We were riding to the cathedral, which took up a whole sector in the northeastern part of the city.
“We’re fortunate that the legate fell ill, you know,” Callum said from where he was riding on my right side.
“How so?” I pushed back my hood and turned my head towards him. The wind was coming from behind us, so the rain pattered on the back of my head and shoulders, soaking my hair. But the rain was cooling my temper and felt cleansing after the sights and smells in the alley.
“Whatever the outcome of this conversation you’re about to have with the legate and Peckham, it might be some time before he is able to get word back to Pope Boniface of the extent of your disagreement with him,” he said.
“That’s supposed to cheer me up?” Yet even as I spoke, I laughed, glad that Callum had stirred me out of my melancholy. I was tired of it myself, which meant my advisers had probably been throwing up their hands in frustration with me. “You do realize that this meeting is probably going to end in my excommunication. The legate being ill is only putting off the inevitable.”
Carew spoke from my other side. “You could reconsider your present course of action.”
“I have considered it and reconsidered it,” I said, a hard edge returning momentarily to my voice. “You know my reasoning, and you also know why I will not back down from my stance on this issue.”
Carew bowed his head, admitting defeat. “Yes, my lord.” Then he looked at me sideways and said, sounding more like himself, “You don’t have to be so cheerful about it.”
I reached out a hand and clapped him on the shoulder. “Don’t give up on me just yet.”
“Never, sire,” Carew said.
The issue before us was freedom of religion. To say I was in favor of it was to grossly understate the case. I’d been fighting a rearguard action for years against the prejudices of this time. Having talked my father into admitting the Jews into Wales back in 1284, I’d lifted all restrictions on their activities and fields of employment once I’d become King of England.
Unlike previous kings—in England and in most countries on the Continent—I also didn’t require anything different from the Jewish community than from the Christian one in terms of behavior or distinguishing clothing. For example, Jews no longer had to wear a badge on the outside of their coats as King Edward had required.
My position towards Jews had been taken quietly by Archbishop Peckham and the Church up until now. Even better, in the eight years since my father’s edict had welcomed Jews into Wales, I was even beginning to think that the level of distrust among the general populace had lessened. Canterbury—as well as London, York, and Chester—had become more diverse in recent years, as people from across Europe had come to take part in our prosperity. It was harder to be prejudiced against people who were your neighbors.
Plus, it wasn’t just Jews whose lives had changed. Women could vote for representatives to Parliament now, as could people who didn’t own land. A Jewish man had even been elected by the Christian majority in Shrewsbury. Maybe I was fooling myself into thinking the culture here had changed. Maybe anti-Semitism remained just below the surface, and Canterbury could explode into violence tomorrow if the economy crashed. It had happened before. Still, even if I was naïve, the job of a king was to lead, and the decision to treat people of all faiths equally had been, quite frankly, one of the easier decisions I’d made.
The real issue before me at this hour, however, wasn’t the status of Jews in England. It was heresy, which could be defined as beliefs that were at variance with Church doctrine or customs.
I understood the Church’s problem—really, I did. Because there was only one church at this time, many heretics were setting up mini-churches inside the Catholic Church and declaring they had the real truth. It was like camping out in the middle of the nave during a priest’s sermon and telling everyone not to listen to the guy in the black robes near the altar.
The pope was free to kick out people in his church who didn’t believe the doctrine. His house, his rules. I was cool with that part—but only as long as the people were free to make their own choice about it. They could believe … or leave.
But as this was the Middle Ages, the choice tended to be more along the lines of believe … or die.
Recent heresies had been laid at the feet of such diverse groups as the Cathars, with their dual gods and focus on sin, and the Waldensians, who preached poverty and strict adherence to the Bible. Both groups had taken root in southern France, and both insisted that the current Church was corrupt, a claim with which I couldn’t disagree.
To counter these schismatic beliefs, the Papal Inquisition had been in full swing throughout this century, mostly in southern France and Italy. To be fair, its initial intent had been to provide a forum for accusations of heresy, as a counter to mobs of townspeople murdering fellow citizens without a trial. Particularly since the middle of this century, however, the tribunals had grown more powerful and harder to control—and I wanted no part of them in England.
Nicholas IV, the previous pope, and I had come to an understanding on the matter out of necessity and pragmatism. He’d turned a blind eye to the fact that I was welcoming believers of every stripe into England, and I allowed him to catalog and tax the churches in England that were under his jurisdiction. I even snagged ten percent of his take.
Unfortunately, Nicholas had died in April of this year, and the new pope, Boniface VIII, believed that all humans on the planet should be subject to him for their salvation. Heretics, then, were a big deal because, in his eyes, it wasn’t possible to separate yourself from the Church. Everyone was Catholic. Period. So, everyone had to believe what the Church told them to believe.
In addition, he believed that his word was the final authority over not only the church but the state as well. While Carew may not have fully understood my position regarding freedom of religion, even if he accepted that I was willing to stake my throne on my belief in it, he was all for me standing up to the pope on matters of state. If I let the pope dictate national policy, even in small things, that was a slippery slope that neither I—nor my barons—wanted to go down. All of my barons could understand and support my refusal to accede to Boniface’s assertion that his word superseded mine in secular matters too.
Mom had suggested that, having saved Dad’s life and changed history ten years ago, we had started moving further and further away from the historical trajectory that she knew. Most of the time I thought that could be a good thing, though not if the change meant I was about to get my head handed to me on a silver platter by the papal legate.
Boniface had been in office for only a few months, but it was a difficult time for Christendom. He was under pressure from the rest of the clergy to increase the reach of the Church. Their power and wealth depended on his actions in the same way my barons’ power and wealth depended upon mine. A year ago, Acre had fallen to the Muslims, and with it had gone the Kingdom of Jerusalem. It was a painful loss for the Church.
I couldn’t help feeling that the Pope’s focus had turned northward because he sought to compensate for the loss by tightening his control on the Christian nations in Europe. To send a legate to me at this early stage of his rule meant Pope Boniface was interested in testing the limits of his power—and mine.