Read Eleanor of Aquitaine Online
Authors: Marion Meade
Eleanor of Aquitaine (40 page)
Eleanor’s appraisal of the situation would have proceeded on a quite different level: Becket, a self-seeking hypocrite from the outset, a consummate actor, was merely showing his true colors at last. Rather quickly she must have perceived trouble ahead for Thomas, a prospect that did not at all displease her. Indeed, it would have been altogether less than natural if she had not felt much relieved to see her rival topple from the king’s favor. In any case, she could hardly have held herself aloof from the controversy, since Westminster boiled with juicy reports of each encounter, the hostile courtiers baying triumphantly at the smallest black look the king gave Becket. A man who had accumulated as much power as Becket could not have helped making enemies, and now, explains one of Becket’s biographers, they sowed their tares eagerly. “The king’s courtiers, seeking to win his favor and itching to gain his ear, defamed the archbishop and hated him without cause.” Eleanor would not have been among those who whispered malice into Henry’s ear—not for nothing had she maintained a strict silence for the past eight years—because she understood to perfection that he would fall without her denigration, subtle or otherwise.
As spring drifted into summer, the drama between the two men grew more absorbing. In July, Henry held a council at Woodstock, and although the pipe rolls do not specifically mention Eleanor’s presence, it seems likely that she and the children accompanied him to live in the splendid manor house set among the green woods of Oxfordshire. At this meeting Henry introduced the subject of sheriff’s aid, a payment of two shillings per hide of land to the sheriff of each county as a token recompense for his administrative duties. Always alert to new sources of income, especially now that Canterbury was no longer vacant, he proposed that this customary gift to the sheriffs be paid instead directly into the treasury as a legal tax. The first person to voice an objection was Becket. Perhaps from force of habit, he momentarily forgot that he was no longer in a position to give the king advice, but more probably he believed it a grave tactical error to deprive the sheriffs of an important source of income, since it would encourage them to reimburse themselves by cheating the treasury. In any event, he took the king sharply to task.
“By God’s eyes,” Henry spat back, “it shall be given me as a tax and entered in the King’s roll; nor is it fitting that you should oppose me when no one is trying to impose a burden on you or the Church.” At this point Thomas would have been wise to have maintained a diplomatic silence. He, if anyone, knew how easily defiance could bring on an attack of Plantagenet fury, and as chancellor, he certainly would have known better than to answer. But he was no longer the king’s creature; he was archbishop of Canterbury, and he vented his own temper, confidently matching oath for oath. “By the reverence of those eyes by which you have sworn, my lord King, not a penny shall be paid from any of the land under Church jurisdiction.”
His face flushing crimson, Henry abruptly dropped the subject and moved on to the next item on his agenda. During this exchange, the barons had stirred nervously, waiting for the explosion that failed to come. But behind Henry’s controlled, if untypical silence—the result of shock more than anything else—burned deep rage, because normally no one dared speak to him in so disrespectful a manner, especially before an assembly of his barons. Perhaps for the first time, he allowed himself to recognize that his long friendship with Thomas the chancellor was finished; thereafter, he would be forced to deal with Thomas the archbishop. Since Becket seemed to be spoiling for a fight, he would give him one, and before the Woodstock meeting adjourned, Henry hit upon a suitable means of retaliation. For some time now he had been concerned over what amounted to an unprecedented crime wave in England, and in fact, many of the offenses appeared to have been committed by clergy, either men in holy orders or those who had merely taken religious vows. These “criminous clerks,” as they would henceforth be known, were in the habit of dressing up like monks, joining bands of travelers, and once they reached a forest or deserted stretch of road, robbing and murdering them. What especially enraged Henry was that anyone who enjoyed the status of clergy could not be tried in the civil court; they could plead clerical immunity and demand trial in the ecclesiastical courts, where, to the king’s thinking, they received absurdly light sentences. At the worst, their punishment amounted to a severe penance, suspension from the exercise of their priestly functions, or confinement in a monastery for the remainder of the offender’s life.
Since Henry had returned to England six months earlier, he had already clashed with Becket over several of these cases, Thomas having rescued the accused from the king’s court by claiming jurisdiction. At Woodstock now, still smarting from his defeat over the sheriff’s aids, Henry brought up the case of a Bedford canon, Philip Brois, who had been accused of murdering a knight. Tried in the court of the bishop of Lincoln, Brois had cleared himself by compurgation, an ancient practice in which the accused solemnly swears his innocence while twelve oath helpers also swear a similar belief on his behalf. This was enough for the Church, since the act of perjury jeopardized one’s immortal soul; it was not enough for Henry, who felt convinced that justice had not been done and who, moreover, felt annoyed that Thomas had whisked Brois from the clutches of the common law. The meeting at Woodstock adjourned with Henry formally requesting a report on the number of capital crimes committed since 1154, paying particular attention to the crimes of the clergy. As of July 1, 1163, the fatal gauntlet had been thrown down to Thomas Becket.
What began at Woodstock as more or less a personal feud soon threatened to escalate into a full-fledged contest between Church and State. During the summer and into the fall, the nobility scrambled to take sides in preparation for the storm that now appeared certain. At the same time, Henry’s ever-increasing fury at Becket reverberated through the royal household, and although he did not wholly neglect his other projects—later, in July, he arranged for Prince Henry to receive the homage of King Malcolm of Scotland—nevertheless, Eleanor and his family, indeed most concerns, faded into insignificance alongside his all-consuming anger. And yet he still oscillated between bouts of rage and periods of pure bewilderment, as if he were pinching himself in disbelief over what had happened. His treasured friend, the man he had been closest to during his entire life, had betrayed him. What galled him most perhaps was that he, the king who prided himself on judging men’s characters, had made a colossal mistake in the case of Thomas.
On the first of October, after further clashes with Becket, Henry was ready to bring the warfare into the open. The royal family had moved back to Westminster, where Henry convened an assembly of his bishops and barons to settle—or so he announced—a dispute between the archbishops of Canterbury and York, who had been wrangling about the respective privileges of their two sees. However, his opening address to the convocation that morning had to do with a very different matter. As if four months had not elapsed since Woodstock, he again took up the question of criminous clerks. Before his listeners quite realized what was happening, Henry had briskly plunged into a peroration in which he demanded that “clerks seized or convicted of great crimes should be deprived of the protection of the Church and handed over to his officers.” According to his records, in the nine years of his reign, over a hundred murders, in addition to uncountable rapes, thefts, and extortions, had been committed by clerics who, because of their immunity from civil trial, had gone virtually unpunished. The Church courts, he added, failed to impose severe enough penalties to deter lawbreakers from committing further crimes. Speaking with elaborate patience, Henry was careful to stress that he had consulted his legal advisers, and they too saw no reason why all subjects should not live under the same law. Thomas, invited to the council ostensibly for the purpose of discussing his quarrel with the see of York, quickly understood that he had been tricked and, furthermore, that the king intended to force the issue.
Now Henry directed his eyes squarely upon Becket. “My lord of Canterbury,” he challenged, “I demand that with the consent of yourself and of your fellow bishops, clerks who are caught committing crimes, or have confessed them, be degraded, deprived of all protection of the Church and handed over to my court for corporal punishment.” There was, he quickly added, no need for the Church to take alarm at his proposed remedy; it was nothing more than a return to the customs of the land when it had been ruled by his grandfather. It was, he implied, a tradition.
Even so, it was not a tradition that anyone remembered, and in fact, there is no evidence that Henry I had ever carried out any such procedure with lawless clerks. In the deathly silence that followed, Thomas and his bishops withdrew to consult among themselves. None of them had ever expected Henry to go quite so far, and some, frightened, argued that crimes of the clergy, more reprehensible by virtue of their order, should therefore be punished more harshly than the crimes of ordinary laymen. Thomas pointed out, however, that double punishment ran contrary to canon law: “God does not judge twice for the same offense.” After further discussion, they agreed that the king had attacked the freedom of the Church and that they must not yield to his demand. Filing back into the hall, Thomas stepped before the king. He stood tall and proud in his costly archbishopric robes, his once handsome face now pale from fasting, and looked down his long nose at Henry. “The customs of Holy Church are fully set forth in the canons and decrees of the Fathers,” his voice rang out. “It is not fitting for you, my lord king, to demand, nor for us to grant anything that goes beyond these, nor ought we to consent to any innovation. We ought to humbly obey the old laws, not establish new ones.”
He was not demanding anything of the kind, Henry retorted with belligerence. He was only asking that the customs observed in the time of his grandfather be observed in his. And furthermore, he added cuttingly, there were holier and better archbishops than Becket in those days who never raised any controversy about them with the king.
Thomas answered without flinching. “What was done by former kings ought not to be called customs but abuses, and whatever practices were observed that ran against the laws laid down in the canons was done out of fear of kings.” He continued to inveigh grimly against “such depraved practices,” concluding that Henry would always find the clergy “obedient and ready to accord with your will and pleasure in everything that we can possibly consent to, saving our order.”
Henry, his temper having grown progressively shorter as the day wore on, began to swear at Becket. “By the eyes of God!” he roared, “let me hear no word of your order! I demand absolute and express agreement to my customs.” Rounding on the bishops, he asked each one in turn if he were willing to observe the customs of the realm, and all but one echoed Becket; they would obey the king in all things “saving our order.” By shifting his ground from the abuses of criminal clerks to a general acceptance of what he called the ancient customs, Henry undoubtedly forced the bishops to make this reservation, “saving our order,” to protect themselves, but his change of emphasis would prove to be a mistake. The behavior of some clerks was already a national scandal, and an impartial contemporary observer such as William of Newburgh, himself a cleric, deplored those bishops who were “more concerned with defending the liberties and dignities of the clergy than they were with correcting and restraining their vices, and they thought they were doing a service to God and the Church by protecting criminous clerks from public punishment.” Henry’s original desire to secure the peace and order of his realm, which is what he meant by “observing the ancient customs,” soon became lost in semantics.
The whole day passed in argument, and now it was growing dark. Once again Henry turned to Becket. Puffing with anger, the king demanded that he and the other bishops take an oath to observe the customs “in good faith,” without any reservation whatsoever. He wanted a clear answer. Thomas made a last effort to pacify him. “My lord king,” he said soothingly, “we have already sworn fealty to you by our life and limbs and earthly honor, saving our order, and in that earthly honor were included all the customs of the kingdom.” No oath they could take now would be more binding.
Suddenly Henry rose and bounded out of the hall without a parting word, without even waiting for the customary blessing of the bishops, leaving behind a confused hush. Before daybreak the next morning he sent a messenger to Becket dispossessing him of the manors of Berkhampstead and Eye, which he had held since his chancellorship, and also removing Prince Henry from his tutelage. This done, he left Westminster without speaking to the prelates. What might have been a difficult but reasonable discussion on how best to deal with criminal clerks had now been blown out of all proportion, the issues forgotten in the clash of personalities. Even though Eleanor disliked Thomas, even though his recent problems had failed to call forth her sympathy, she still must have watched uneasily the extreme emotional reaction these encounters drew from her husband. For the first time since she had known him, he was allowing personal feelings to direct his actions. She had seen him rage and roll on the floor chewing straw, but this hostility, the result of emotions that ran even deeper than anyone had suspected, was something else. Betrayal was not, evidently, a situation that Henry could handle, although what in his background would have accounted for it is uncertain. Before her eyes, he was regressing from a clearheaded executive to a small boy wreaking vengeance on everything in sight. Nor was it easy to understand Thomas, his unyielding obstinacy, his determination to prove himself as powerful as the king. He knew that Henry did not restrain his anger, either in public or in private. What did he hope to gain by pushing the king?
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