Authors: Douglas Boyd
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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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?
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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 cloak
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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.
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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 it
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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.
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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.