Among the many inducements for Henry to marry Eleanor, not least was her claim to the county of Toulouse, lost to the duchy of Aquitaine by William IX mortgaging his second wife’s dowry as a way of financing his departure on the First Crusade.1 If the former boundaries of Aquitaine from the Atlantic to the Mediterranean could be restored, uniting the two great cities on the River Garonne, trade would benefit enormously. Important customs dues would come from the resultant traffic in precious commodities like silk and glass and spices, shipped across the Mediterranean to Narbonne, up the River Aude to Toulouse and down the Garonne Valley to Bordeaux and from there by sea to England along one of the great natural trade routes of Europe.
Henry had an additional reason to covet this avenue to the Mediterranean. At what point he confided this to Eleanor is unknown – it could have been broached during Geoffrey the Fair’s secret talks with her – but all the evidence points to him having a grand design, in which Toulouse had an important part to play.
A crafty chess-player, whether on the two-dimensional board or in the four-dimensional world, he could bide his time before a crucial move until he was assured of success. With England firmly in his grasp and the Welsh and Scottish borders stabilised, and with his continental possessions as peaceful as they were ever likely to be, the time seemed ripe to move against Toulouse in August 1158 when Count Berenger of Barcelona allied himself with his neighbours of Béziers and Montpellier and the formidable warlady Ermengarde of Narbonne.2 If Henry joined them, Toulouse would be surrounded by enemies on three sides.
After the Christmas court at Cherbourg, for which Eleanor crossed over from England, the Catalan count was invited to an Easter meeting at Blaye on the Gironde estuary, where Eleanor’s presence gave legitimacy to Henry acting as duke.3 Together, they tied the knot of friendship by engaging eighteen-month-old Prince Richard to the count’s daughter Berengaria.4 Seemingly unaware that not all Henry’s betrothals ended in marriage, Count Berenger was delighted at the idea of his daughter one day becoming the duchess of Aquitaine.
Since Count Raymond V of Toulouse and St Gilles was not only Louis’ vassal, but also his brother-in-law, the next move was for Eleanor to send him a demand that the county be handed over to her. That refused, Henry gave instructions for his vassals in England and France to assemble with their knights at Poitiers by Midsummer Day, ready to move south. In default, they were to pay scutage. In addition, his seventeen-year-old ally Malcolm IV of Scotland – known as Malcolm the Maiden because he died before marrying – promised an expeditionary force.
Seeking to give the enterprise some legitimacy, Henry sounded Louis out during a meeting in Tours, but the last thing Louis wanted was any further expansion of the Angevin possessions. Remembering all too well his own abortive expedition to Toulouse when married to Eleanor, to whom he certainly owed no favours, he retorted that he would not sanction a war launched by one of his vassals against another who had given no offence – and who also happened to be his sister’s husband.
In a series of meetings at Heudicourt in Normandy on 6, 7 and 8 June 1159, Henry failed to change Louis’ mind. A week later, the die was cast when a fleet of forty vessels disembarked Malcolm’s small army in Normandy to join the coalition. Together, he and Henry moved south, gathering other forces as they went, among them Thomas Becket at the head of an impressive contingent of 700 knights equipped and provisioned by a special and very unpopular tax he had levied on Church lands in England, the shortfall made up by a loan of 500 marks from a Jewish moneylender.5 In this martial enterprise, Becket was being trained for even higher things.
Meeting up with the Aquitain and Angevin elements at Poitiers, where Eleanor seems to have remained during the expedition, the entire force reached Périgueux on the frontier with Toulousain territory at the end of June. Henry’s logistics had run like clock-work, but his allies were way behind schedule. When they failed to show up at Agen, three or four days’ march to the south, there was a limit to how much time could be passed in feudal niceties such as tournaments and ceremonies with Henry dubbing Malcolm a knight and Malcolm in return dubbing twenty or thirty of Henry’s young nobles. Time was spent threatening the important river crossing and town of Cahors, whose citizens accepted the coalition rather than see their homes destroyed.
Elsewhere, crops were being laid waste and vineyards destroyed as everything that could be carried or driven off was taken and the rest burned to deny it to the enemy. For the troubadour Bertran de Born, lord of the castle of Hautefort in Périgord, this was the stuff of life:
Tot jorn contendi e m’baralh,
M’escrim, e m’defen e m’tartalh
E m’fon hom ma terra e la m’art
E m’fai de mos arbres essart …
[I’m always in the thick of the fray. / Skirmishing and fighting, that’s my way. / They waste my lands, leave my fields burnt brown. / Now they’re hacking my trees all down …]
Not until the beginning of August did the combined allies reach Toulouse,6 by which time the commander of the city was not the weak and idle Count Raymond. Goaded into action by Henry’s lobbying, which had soured the memory of the joint pilgrimage to Mont St Michel, and already regretting the betrothal of Princess Marguerite to Young Henry, Louis had ridden at full speed from Paris with only a small entourage in order to stiffen the resolve of his brother-in-law, whom he suspected of being all too likely to seek terms at the outset of hostilities.
Once in Toulouse, he showed unusual powers of leadership, motivating the garrison and strengthening the walls, as a result of which Henry’s usual blitzkrieg tactics failed at considerable cost to the attackers. Among the casualties was William, the last surviving son of Stephen of Blois. For once, Louis had done everything right, and even provisioned the city to withstand a siege of many months. Stingy as ever, Henry had contracted his mercenaries for only thirteen weeks, and his purse would be empty long before the Toulousains’ larders.
To everyone’s surprise, he announced that he had only come from loyalty to his Catalan allies, and would give a good example of feudal duty to his own vassals by refraining from attacking the city so long as his suzerain was present there.7 With Becket’s contingent left behind in Cahors, Henry withdrew and the coalition melted away, leaving the peasantry contemplating the bleak prospect of a winter famine with their crops destroyed. As wars went, this was a small one, but what Bertran de Born saw as heroic had a very different look to Aimeric de Pegulhan:
Quare de guerra ven tart pro et tost dan
E guerra fai mal tornar en peior
en guerra trop, per qu’ieu non la volria
viutat de mal, et de ben carestia.
[The fruits war seeds are wormwood and gall. / Life, already hard, gets only worse / for all our problems stem from this curse / that brings great grief – of good, nothing at all.]
Eleanor’s disappointment at the failure of the campaign was tempered by knowledge that Henry had an alternative plan which did not involve sharing Toulouse with any allies. They spent the time of the grape harvest and vintage on her estates in Poitou,8 after which he headed north with Malcolm early in October. That he did not tarry in the renowned hunting forest of Talmond was due to Louis’ brothers Count Robert of Dreux and Bishop Henry of Beauvais having taken advantage of his preoccupation with Toulouse to invade Normandy. There, fighting dragged on into December, when the two sides agreed to a truce negotiated by the bishops, which was to last until Whitsun.
Eleanor rejoined Henry at Falaise for the Christmas court. Short of funds after the abortive Toulouse campaign, Henry sent her to England to bring back the money he desperately needed. She set sail on 29 December in his ship Esnecca,9 rode to Winchester, secured the bullion and coins and then escorted the precious consignment back to Barfleur before returning to England – all this in the throes of midwinter weather.
Her reward for this arduous errand was to be Henry’s regent there for much of the next three years, with Beaumont as chief justiciar, while Becket stayed initially in Normandy with Henry. The Pipe Rolls reflect her progress from castle to city to castle, living in some style as she travelled extensively throughout southern England. In Winchester she had repairs carried out to the palace, the chapel and the walls and garden, and drew on the Exchequer for the considerable sum of £226 for herself and £56 for Prince Henry. As well as her children and servants, her household included maids- and ladies-in-waiting. If the married ladies spent short periods in her service, for which some were rewarded by money and some by gifts, a maid-in-waiting could often be a ward of the Crown for years.
In addition to her duties of state, Eleanor found the time and energy to polish the dull cultural scene in London by importing the latest fashions in poetry and music. Prone to send away from her Thameside court with a flea in his ear any man who appeared badly dressed or with hair uncut, she expected her ladies to follow her example in the latest continental fashions. For their amusement, Arthurian legends had to compete not only with chansons de geste recounting the deeds of Roland, Charlemagne or Godefroi de Bouillon on the First Crusade but also the legends of Greece and Rome and the poetry of favourite troubadours. It was arguably at Eleanor’s short-lived London court that European literature, whose business had hitherto been instruction, first developed the entertainment form it has never lost.
Romances were dedicated to her. There was no public theatre, but plays performed at court included a lost tragedy Flora and Marcus, written by the brother of Peter of Blois. Chrétien de Troyes may have been another of the queen’s protégés; his habit of describing himself as ‘of Troyes’ indicates a knowledge of English and he did later frequent the court of her daughter, Marie de Champagne. And the mysterious poetess Marie de France – whose topical lais include the 1,184-line poem Eliduc about a devoted wife whose husband brings a second wife home from overseas – also appeared in England at about this time, to be patronised by Henry’s bastard William Longsword and probably the queen also.
Both John of Salisbury and Walter Map complained that all these entertainments were distracting men’s minds from more serious matters and that Eleanor’s regal but flirtatious southern ways were effeminising the men of her court. To them, such devices as the shepherdess seduction theme of the pastorela were a perversion that romanticised the rutting of peasants. If Map was simply sarcastic, Salisbury went so far as to suggest excommunication of all who earned their living as entertainers in Eleanor’s London – an attitude that persisted in the long denial to the acting profession of burial on consecrated ground. Even Eleanor’s music, embracing the concept of harmony that had pleasured her ear in Byzantium, had been condemned by such as Abbé Bernard, who complained that the human voice was given to man for no other purpose than to praise God without any of the devil’s artifices of harmony and counterpoint getting in the way.
Yet Gerald de Barri – better known as the Welsh chronicler Giraldus Cambrensis – had to admit later that the cultural revolution brought about by Henry’s queen made the royal court at Westminster interesting enough to compete with the attractions of Becket’s house in the city. Jealous tongues wagged until inevitably the same accusations of loose living that had been levelled at Eleanor on the Ile de la Cité were soon heard in the cloister at Canterbury and the streets of London. Innocent Louis had probably never heard the rumours before departure on crusade, but had there been any substance to them in London, there is no doubt Henry would have known. A king whose constant curiosity and perpetual paranoia drove him to quiz every newly arrived messenger not only about the state of the roads over which he had travelled but also the latest news from Jerusalem and Rome, could not have failed to learn of misconduct by his queen. And had he learned of such, he would have locked Eleanor up without any qualms, as later events were to prove.
Being an Angevin, he understood that what to the Anglo-Norman eye looked like scandalous intimacy between a troubadour and his adored mistress was no more than a game by which the frustrations of ladies married off for reasons of state could be sublimated without any harm to them, even if from time to time an importunate poet like Bernat de Ventadorn did become a casualty of the game. So long as Eleanor performed her duties as his queen and provided sons for the succession and daughters to use as pawns, it mattered little to Henry that she took her pleasures thus, so long as things went no further. Others were less tolerant: in disapproval of this neo-pagan society centred on the queen’s court, in the summer of 1160 the archbishop of Canterbury begged the king to return to England on the grounds that the growing princes needed their father’s moral guidance.
In September Henry ordered Eleanor to bring Prince Henry and Princess Matilda back to Normandy, not out of paternal sentiment10 but for another round of betrothals. At a cost of seven English pounds, according to the Pipe Rolls, the queen hastened to cross the Channel. For diplomatic reasons she was not present when Henry witnessed Prince Henry’s act of homage to Louis for the duchy of Normandy, given on bended knee to make amends for his father’s invasion of Toulousain territory and because Henry had in mind to betroth Matilda to the child about to be born to Louis and Constance, should it be male.
The next step in the plan went awry as misfortune struck the king of France yet again. In giving birth to his fourth daughter, Queen Constance died. Forty years old, the widowed father of four girls and no sons, Louis was desperate for an heir. His counsellors advised strengthening the house of Capet by taking a wife from the house of Champagne, despite his late brother Philip having been denied a bride from that family on the grounds of consanguinity. Less than a month after Constance’s death, Louis risked that sin by marrying Alix or Adele of Champagne, who was a sister of his future sons-in-law, the counts of Champagne and Blois!11
To Henry, this smelled of conspiracy. Assembling the whole family at Neubourg, he took advantage of the presence of two papal legates soliciting his continued support of the new Pope Alexander III against the German Emperor Frederik Barbarossa, who supported the antipope Victor.12 Princess Marguerite, now three years old, was married by Cardinal Henry of Pisa to five-year-old Prince Henry13 in defiance of the requirement to obtain a papal dispensation for the marriage of minors and in total disregard of the oath of fealty the boy had sworn so shortly before.
What had this to do with Toulouse? It seems that Henry’s support for the pope was also part of his grand design.
Neubourg was perilously near French territory. Lest Louis should be tempted to kidnap the two children and find grounds for the dissolution of the unconsummated marriage, they were whisked away to the safety of Eleanor’s household despite the specific undertaking to Louis that Marguerite would not be brought up by her. By advancing the marriage a decade, Henry legitimised to his own satisfaction the plan to take possession of Marguerite’s dowry castles straight away. The three supposedly neutral Templar castellans chose to comply with his imperious demands,14 given the appearance of papal sanction by the legates’ presence.
In retaliation, furious at having been again outwitted, Louis expelled all the Templars from his domains and began massing his forces, plus those of Champagne and Blois, on the borders of Normandy. With the speed of a snake Henry struck first, capturing the castle of Chaumont from Thibault of Blois before Advent ended campaigning for the year. The Christmas court of 1160, held by Henry with Eleanor in Le Mans, was in celebratory mood.
On 18 April next Archbishop Theobald died unmourned by either the protégé he had raised so high or the king for whom he had done so much. It is significant that he knew Becket’s character too well to propose him as successor. Indeed, few in the Church hierarchy seriously considered him for the office. Yet, with Henry’s record of interfering in Church matters on both sides of the Channel, the canons of Canterbury Cathedral had little hope that he would allow them to choose their new archbishop.
Henry saw in this important appointment a chance to curb the political power of the Church in England and, in particular, to end what he regarded as gross abuses of clerical privilege, by which a ‘criminous clerk’ could claim benefit of clergy and escape the penalties of his actions under the law of the realm by demanding to be tried before an ecclesiastical court, where he would receive preferential treatment.
Second, there was the grand design, in which the appointment of a new archbishop was the crucial move – so crucial that Henry pondered it for a whole year, during which he was also working on his strategy to secure Toulouse by means other than warfare, which included improving the comital palace at Poitiers as a base for his operations and a general tightening of his grip on the duchy of Aquitaine by installing his own northern administrators – the same error that Louis had made.
One tightening of the screw too many resulted in a group of Eleanor’s resentful vassals approaching the papal legates with a family tree showing how she and the king were related, probably at the meeting in early September at Toucy-sur-Loire between Louis and Henry under the aegis of the exiled pope, settled for the time being in Sens. Diplomatically, the cardinals showed no interest in separating the king from his wife, who was expecting a child any day. Later in the same month Eleanor gave birth for the ninth time at Domfront – to a girl, baptised Eleanor after her mother by Cardinal Henry of Pisa, with the chronicler Robert de Torigny as godfather. As thanksgiving, her mother joined Henry in financing the construction of the cathedral of St Pierre in Poitiers.15
The archbishops of Rouen and Canterbury were not alone in saying that it was time for Young Henry’s formal education to begin. To whom could a prince better be entrusted than to Becket, already responsible for a cluster of noble lads? After the Christmas court of 1161 at Bayeux, and impelled by another illness that gave the matter urgency in his mind, Henry sought to kill two birds with one stone. While honouring few of the obligations he entered into, Henry had an obsession with the renewal of pledges by others, and decided to avoid any disturbance to the realm consequent upon the announcement of his candidate for the prelacy by having the barons of England first renew their pledge of allegiance to Young Henry, given at Wallingford in the year after his own coronation.
At the Easter court in Falaise, Becket was therefore instructed to take the prince back to England, have a suitable golden coronet and sumptuous ceremonial robes made for him and convene the barons and bishops in Winchester to renew their recognition of the prince as the next king of England.16 At the last moment before they set out for Barfleur, Henry took his chancellor aside and told him apparently for the first time of his plan to set him on the throne of Canterbury. Instead of thanking his monarch for yet another great honour, which can hardly have taken by surprise someone so astute, Becket implored him to reconsider, quoting the Gospel of Matthew (6: 24): ‘No man can serve two masters. For either he will hate the one and love the other, or else he will hold to the one and despise the other. Ye cannot serve God and Mammon.’
To deflect Henry’s displeasure at this reaction, he jokingly plucked at his costly brocaded sleeve and asked how such a worldly garment would look, if worn by the humble shepherd of Canterbury.17 But Henry would not take no for an answer even when Becket proposed a list of other candidates, whom he considered better suited for the primacy.
While Chancellor Becket was dutifully convening the barons and bishops in Winchester at Whitsun, the imposing Chapter House at Canterbury was in uproar at the announcement of the king’s plans for the succession to the see. The most obvious objection to Becket was that he was ineligible, having only taken minor orders. Meanwhile, the future archbishop was on his bended knees, not before an altar but pledging his homage to the boy of seven, whose father was about to make the worst miscalculation of his career.
Just over a month later, Becket was consecrated priest, bishop and then archbishop in the space of two days by Henry, the compliant bishop of Winchester who had crowned Stephen of Blois.18 The city of Canterbury, half of which was owned by the cathedral priory, had been ravaged the previous year by a fire in which most of the houses were destroyed, so the magnates and fifteen diocesan bishops and all the knights and attendants in their retinues were accommodated in a huge tented camp outside the walls like some army on campaign. In the presence of the justiciar and Young Henry, Becket renounced all his worldly offices and gave up the chancellor’s seal.19 It was the news of this which caused Henry to wonder for the first time whether his plan was going to work.
Becket took to wearing a horsehair shirt, constantly irritating the skin beneath the fine clothes he still affected, and followed a strict horarium with midnight prayers, rising at dawn to wash the feet of beggars and distribute food to the hungry. He also ordered for himself daily penitential floggings. Yet many of the bishops were unimpressed by this ostentatious conversion, their attitude summed up by the wry comment of Gilbert Foliot, bishop of Hereford and abbot of Wells, that the king had worked a veritable miracle in so swiftly translating a soldier and courtier into a priest. And even when Becket visited his old school at Merton and adopted the sober black habit of an Augustinian canon over the hair shirt, his ecclesiastical critics still pointed to the lavish lifestyle he was unable to put aside. Among the sceptics must have been the king, who wrought the miracle, for had he not shared all the pleasures of life with Becket, except women?20
Henry had intended holding his Christmas court in England but, weather preventing a departure from Barfleur, it was from Cherbourg that he and Eleanor eventually set sail on 25 January 1163, three stormbound weeks after holding the Christmas court there with several of their children. Waiting at Southampton to welcome the king back to England after an absence of three and a half years was Becket. Young Henry, who was still living in his household, emerged from the shelter of the archbishop’s cloak21 to greet his parents and sisters.
Far from sorting out the ecclesiastical excesses of which the king complained, Becket had in the months since his ordination clawed back from the barons many former Church properties they had seized during the unrest of Stephen’s reign.22 Henry I’s travelling justices, reinstated after the civil war with the help of Becket himself, were already complaining at the spate of clerks now avoiding the law under the umbrella of ecclesiastical protection. These early excesses have been interpreted as Becket’s way of ingratiating himself within the Church hierarchy, but they bear more the stamp of a once-brilliant subordinate unable to handle the top job. Or had he got cold feet after being taken fully into Henry’s confidence about the true reason for his appointment?
According to Herbert of Bosham, there were harsh words from Henry at the first meeting on the quayside in Southampton, but the following day the two men, who had been bosom friends, rode side by side to London, with the king gnawing at a solution for the problem he had created: if Becket would not bend, he must be broken.
Henry’s return marked the end of Eleanor’s interrupted regency in England. What he saw as Becket’s betrayal inflamed his paranoia so much that he gathered to himself all the reins of power before departing to renew hostilities against the Welsh, this time with greater success that ended with all their princes swearing fealty to him. Meanwhile, Eleanor was reduced to making preparations to celebrate Young Henry’s eighth birthday in a style befitting a crowned king of England.
What she had thought of Henry’s idea of making Becket archbishop, we do not know. But the Empress Matilda had gone on record as speaking out against it23 for the good reason that she had, during her years as German Empress, seen the same device fail when Archbishop Adalbert of Mainz decided to serve his Church and not the temporal overlord who had appointed him. She was wasting her ink, for Henry could point to a more recent precedent, when Frederik Barbarossa had appointed his chancellor Rainald von Dassel archbishop of Cologne only two years previously.
If he had hoped to win over his own ex-chancellor by soft words, he had a rude awakening. Returning from a meeting with the pope at the Council of Tours in May 1163, Becket took up the cause of the English bishops who were protesting against the interference of agents of the Crown in Church matters and the diversion of what they regarded as ecclesiastical funds. It was one affront too many for the king, who called a Great Council at Westminster on the first day of October, at which he harangued the prelates present for the liberties they were taking and demanded an undertaking to comply with his will.
The tactic having failed, he stormed out of the meeting, to summon Becket the following day for a personal humiliation in which he was dispossessed of the chief sources of his wealth – the manors of Eye and Berkhampstead. As an additional slap in the face, Young Henry and his child bride were removed from Becket’s care, with the prince being given a household of his own. From the pope – in Paris to lay the foundation stone of Notre Dame and in Henry’s debt for continuing political support – came no encouragement for the contentious archbishop; Becket was urged by the pontiff to make peace with his king.
On 13 October Henry was present in Westminster Abbey when Becket officiated at the translation of the remains of Edward the Confessor – an event of greater symbolic importance to Henry because the Emperor Frederik was arranging with the new antipope Paschal III for the canonisation of one of his predecessors, the Emperor Charlemagne.
About this time Henry decided to marry his surviving brother William to Isabella de Warenne, the widow of Stephen of Blois’ son who had died at Toulouse. Becket forbade the match on the grounds of consanguinity, and when William died shortly afterwards, there were many among the archbishop’s increasing number of enemies who said the king’s brother had had his heart broken by the prohibition that denied him his true love. True or not, it was one of the accusations hurled at Becket by Henry’s knights on the night of the murder in Canterbury Cathedral.
With the pope firmly aligned on the king’s side, many English bishops began to worry where Becket was leading them in this dangerous test of strength. Even the archbishop’s most loyal supporters begged him to find some compromise, and many bishops who had resented his manner of raising the tax for the invasion of Toulouse were openly hostile to their spiritual overlord for the troubles his inexplicable arrogance was bringing upon them all.
To concert the opposition to him within the Church hierarchy, headed by Roger, the rival archbishop of York, Henry appointed Gilbert Foliot bishop of London. It was a move that required, and received, a special licence from the pope. When Becket demanded the new bishop’s homage for his see, Foliot refused, saying that he had already given it when bishop of Hereford.
At the palace of Woodstock in December, Becket appeared to back down, to the bishops’ great relief. But Henry’s blood was up. To show the world who ruled England, he announced that the Christmas court would be held at the castle of Berkhamsted, where he took a vicious pleasure in working with Becket’s former assistants in what had been Becket’s luxurious private palace on the drafting of what would become the Constitutions of Clarendon.
As though in compensation for the difficulties caused by Becket, at the end of Advent 600 miles to the south the bellicose new archbishop of Bordeaux, Bertrand de Montault, was doing his best to make up for Henry’s failed invasion of Toulouse. He took advantage of Count Raymond’s indolence to lead his own knights and a number of Eleanor’s other vassals in ravaging the disputed country around Rodez, getting to within a trebuchet’s range of the city of Toulouse itself after destroying several castles, burning and looting churches on the way and departing with prisoners to be held for ransom.
The council held at Clarendon on 25 January 1164 had as its purpose the restoration of the ‘former customs’ of the realm by which power had traditionally been shared between Church and Crown. Henry made sure that the archbishop who had been so well schooled as a lawyer did not receive an advance copy of the lengthy document, but was confronted with it in plenary session.
The sixteen articles of the Constitutions defined the relationship of Church and State in a manner going far beyond any former customs. The king was to receive the revenues from all vacant sees and monasteries, which could be filled only with his consent. Cases of advowson or Church patronage, debts and disputes over land held in lay fee were reserved to the secular courts, as was any property dispute between a layman and a churchman. Benefit of clergy was to be abolished, with ‘criminous clerks’ subject to the king’s justice like anyone else. Even the right to appeal to Rome, or to leave the country on pilgrimage, became privileges to be accorded or withheld at the king’s whim.
The bishops reluctantly assented with the face-saving proviso salvo ordine – ‘saving their order’. To their amazement, Becket capitulated in the face of Henry’s unconcealed fury and agreed to everything, although refusing to set his archbishop’s seal to the document. As Gilbert Foliot commented acidly, it was the captain who ran away while the troops stood firm. In penance for his hypocrisy and the perjury he had committed at Clarendon, Becket ceased removing at night his hair shirt, which rapidly became vermin-infested, increasing his discomfort, but had a slit made in the back, tied up with tapes that could be undone to permit his daily floggings.
When Pope Alexander read the Constitutions, he condemned them but sent contradictory letters to Henry and to Becket, each explaining away some concession granted to the other as he swayed in the political winds blowing across Europe.24 However, the gist of Alexander’s advice to the archbishop was that he could expect no gesture of support that might upset the king, whose political support continued to be vital to the papacy.
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.25 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.26 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 £300.27 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.28 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.29 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.30 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 Louis31 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.32
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.33 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.34
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,35 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.36
Resited in the nuns’ chapter house, the new tomb was ornamented with an admonitory inscription:
[The rose of the world lies here / but not too clean, I fear. / Not perfume, but stenches / she now dispenses.]
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.