Captive Queen (29 page)

“But Thomas, you have said yourself that the Church is in need of reform,” Henry protested.

“As your chancellor, I might voice such an opinion, but as Archbishop of Canterbury, I would be in a difficult position. And my enemies would be waiting to exploit that, to drive a wedge between us. Sire, England is not lacking in good churchmen who could ably fill Archbishop Theobald’s shoes. There is Bishop Foliot, for one, although I have never liked him; yet he would be the ideal choice. I am not even a priest, and I have never celebrated a mass!”

“It’s no good, Thomas. My mind is made up,” Henry declared with an air of finality. “I have thought long on this, over many months, and I
know
that you are the right man for the office. And you know, as well as I do, that you can be ordained priest one day, and consecrated Archbishop the next. I promise you, we will work together for the good of the Church—and of England. Now, no more arguments.”

Becket knew when he was defeated. He stood there miserably, looking as heavyhearted as a man who has just been sentenced to some terrible fate. Not for the first time, Eleanor felt pity for him. She knew his arguments were well founded, knew too that he would be at a disadvantage from the start. But both he and she were powerless to gainsay Henry once his mind was made up.

Becket had risen from his departing bow when the King bade him pause.

“I will have letters prepared, informing my English barons and bishops of my decision,” he said. “I must stay here in Normandy, but my son will be a witness to your enthronement. There is one other matter. I want you to purchase gold for the fashioning of a crown and scepter for Young Henry. I am minded to have him crowned in my lifetime, after the custom of the French kings.”

“Very well, sire,” Becket said, his voice unsteady, his face hollow. Eleanor was torn between elated surprise at her son’s coming elevation to kingship and dismay at Henry’s folly in believing that his friend would be able to render him unstinting loyalty once he was safely installed at Canterbury.

   The court was still at Falaise when, in May, reports reached Normandy of Becket’s formal nomination as Archbishop in the presence of the Lord Henry and the King’s justices; then came the news of his ordination as a priest, and his consecration in Canterbury Cathedral the very next day. He had been overcome with emotion, it was said, and wept when the Archbishop’s miter was placed on his head. Eleanor wondered uncharitably if he had done that for effect; Thomas had a great sense of occasion, she knew, and a flair for the dramatic gesture. It appealed to his vanity.

The next news was brought by an unexpected visitor, the new Archbishop’s secretary, John of Salisbury. Eleanor had long known of John by reputation. He had studied in Paris and worked in the Papal Curia before entering the household of Archbishop Theobald, by which time he had become famous as a man of letters, and he was now accounted one of the greatest scholars and thinkers of his time.

“He has no great opinion of me!” Henry grimaced, after John had been announced and they were waiting for him to come into their presence. “He thinks my court too frivolous.”

“He sounds a lot like Abbot Bernard,” Eleanor observed dryly, thinking of that austere old terror who had long since gone to his reward.

“I think it was Abbot Bernard who recommended our friend John to Archbishop Theobald,” Henry told her.

A tall, dignified cleric in his early forties was ushered into the solar. John of Salisbury was known to be high-minded and uncompromising, yet his manner toward his King could not be faulted.

“Greetings, John,” Henry said.

“Greetings, sire. I trust that you and the Queen are in health. My Lord Archbishop sends his fealty and his love, and has charged me to give you this.” He held out a richly embroidered purse with drawstrings and placed it in Henry’s hands. Henry looked dumbstruck.

“The great seal of England?” he queried, in apparent disbelief.

“The very same, sire,” John replied gravely. “My master has sent me to tender his resignation as chancellor. He begs you to excuse him, but he wishes from now on to devote his life wholly to the Church.”

“What?” Henry was ashen, and also angered. “I need him both as my chancellor and as my archbishop.”

John of Salisbury regarded his king with something akin to pity. “My master has said that the burdens of both offices are too heavy for him to bear.”

“Does he no longer care to be in my service?” Henry burst out. There were tears in his eyes. Eleanor could not bear to look at him, or to witness his crushing disappointment, which seemed almost akin to a betrayal.

“Lord King, he has changed. You would not credit it.”

“In what way has he changed?” Eleanor asked sharply.

“A miraculous transformation took place just after his consecration, my lady.”

“Miraculous?” echoed Henry. Eleanor, remembering how Becket had always reveled in playing his roles to the hilt, thought that perhaps John should have said “calculated” instead.

“As soon as he put on those robes, reserved at God’s command for the highest of His servants, my Lord Archbishop changed not only his apparel, but the whole cast of his mind. Overnight, he who had been a courtier, statesman, and soldier, a worldly man by any standards, became a holy man, an ascetic even. He has changed from a patron of play-actors and a follower of hounds to a shepherd of souls.”

“Thomas? An ascetic?” Henry could not believe what he was hearing. He looked utterly bewildered. Eleanor said nothing. She was thinking that, having ceased to be the patron of play-actors, Becket seemed to have become one. She could not credit this transformation as sincere, let alone miraculous. Becket had never done things by halves.

“Yes, sire,” John was saying. “He has so completely abandoned the world that all men are marveling at the change in him. He has cast aside his elegant robes for a monk’s habit, and beneath it he wears a hair shirt, to keep himself in mind of the frailty of the flesh; my lord, it swarms with vermin. He drinks only water that has been used to boil hay. He has sold all his worldly goods, and now performs great acts of charity and humility. He washes the feet of thirteen beggars every day, and gives them alms. He asks his monks to whip his bare back in penance for his sins. His nights are spent sleepless in vigil.”

Henry was listening to all this with his mouth agape. It seemed incredible to him, who loved Becket, but not to Eleanor, who did not, and who viewed him with suspicion. She sensed that Becket was reveling in his new role, and enjoying the fame it was bringing him. How else could such a radical change be explained?

The King, still stunned, summoned Bishop Foliot and made John of Salisbury repeat to him what he had said of Becket’s transformation. Foliot, the only bishop who had opposed Becket’s election, looked grimly skeptical.

“My Lord King, you have wrought a miracle,” he said dryly. “Out of a soldier and a courtier, you have made an archbishop. And a saintly one, it seems.”

Eleanor made a face. The bishop looked at her, realizing that she was shrewder than he had hitherto supposed.

Henry was crestfallen. “I know not what to think,” he said. “I feel as if I have been abandoned. I feel as if I have lost a friend.”

20

   Eleanor was walking with her children in the park that surrounded the royal manor of Woodstock. Earlier they had visited the menagerie established there by their father, and young Richard and Geoffrey were enthralled to see the caged lions, leopards, lynxes, and camels that had been sent as gifts to the King by foreign princes.

Matilda and little Eleanor were particularly taken with a curious stick-backed beast.

“Hedgehog!” Eleanor cried in delight.

“No,” her mother said, “it’s a porcupine.”

They stood watching it rootling about for a few more minutes, then Richard dragged them back to see the lions, shouting, “Raaarr!! Raaarr!” Eleanor smiled lovingly upon him, then her thoughts strayed to her eldest son, whom she still missed painfully. He had remained in Becket’s household, and she had not seen him since February, when she organized a little festival for his eighth birthday. But it fell somewhat flat. He was very grand now, Young Henry, too old to be thrilled by birthday treats, and all too conscious that he was his father’s heir.

The July sun was warm, and when they returned to the Queen’s enclosed garden, a pretty arbor made enchanting with its flowery mead of delicate, heavenly colors, and its laden fruit trees, they were served ale that had been hung in buckets to cool in the moat. There, Henry joined them, fresh from hunting deer in the park. He was feeling particularly pleased with himself, for only the day before, every one of the princes of Wales had come to Woodstock to pay homage to him, following his vigorous suppression of a Welsh uprising in the spring.

When the children’s nurses had taken them back to the manor house to have their supper, Henry and Eleanor sat on a stone bench, basking in the late afternoon haze and talking of his ambitious plans to enforce law and order in his kingdom. This was his cherished project, and he had been working on it from the moment of his accession.

“What worries me the most is the increase in crimes committed by the clergy,” he said. “And the law, as it stands, allows them to get away with it!”

This was a topic long familiar to Eleanor. She had heard him grumble about it many times before. But there was a new determination in his voice when he spoke again. “I intend to put an end to this anomaly,” he declared.

He could never have guessed, she was to think years later, looking back on this summer’s day, how brutally that resolve would impact upon his life.

“It’s wrong, and it must be ended,” Henry went on. “If a lay person commits a crime, they end up in my courts and are punished according to their desserts, and often severely. That is the law of the land, and it is just. I have seen to that.” He got up and began pacing up and down in his usual restless manner. “But anyone in holy orders, even the lowliest clerk, if he commits a crime, be it murder or theft or rape, can claim benefit of clergy and be tried in the Church courts. And you know what that means.”

“The Church is not allowed to shed blood,” Eleanor said.

“Exactly. So it imposes the lightest penalties. Murder a man, and as long as you’ve got a tonsure, you get three Hail Marys! But if you or I were to commit murder, Eleanor, we would be hanged.” Henry’s face was flushed with anger. This issue rankled with him, and had for a long time. She suspected there was only one reason why he had not decided to act until now, and that was because he had not wanted to provoke a quarrel with Becket. Relations between them since Henry’s return to England had been at first wary and then amicable, but increasingly there was a distance between them that had never been there in the past, and she guessed that Henry grieved for what he’d lost, and feared to upset the equilibrium of what remained of the friendship. Even so, either he had become sufficiently vexed by the matter of the criminous clerks, as he called it, to put Becket to the test, or had managed to convince himself that his beloved Thomas really was on his side.

“No, my love, I have decided,” Henry was saying. “All offenders must be tried in the royal courts, without exception.”

He sat down, and Eleanor laid her hand on his. It was becoming increasingly rare for them to share such private moments of tenderness these days. Henry was always too busy with the many cares and duties that went with ruling such vast and far-flung domains, while she, for her part, was preoccupied with the demands of her growing family. And above all that, they existed in a state of truce, skirting around the issues that divided them. It did not make for intimacy.

“Some will see that as an attack on the Church itself,” she said.

“I know that. I expect some resistance. But I am determined to have my way.” His jaw was thrust forward, his gray eyes steely with determination. It would be a brave man who defied him.

   The next night, he came to her in some anger and distress.