Eleanor of Aquitaine (41 page)
Read Eleanor of Aquitaine Online
Authors: Marion Meade
Not long after that, Henry made his last peaceful overture toward his one-time friend. Meeting Thomas in a Northampton meadow on horseback, he spoke freely and plaintively: “Have I not raised you from poverty and lowliness to the pinnacle of honour and rank? And even that seemed little enough to me until I also made you father of the kingdom, placing you even above myself. How is it then that all these proofs of my love for you, which everyone knows, you have so soon blotted from your mind, so that you are not only ungrateful but oppose me in everything?” One feels, thinly disguised in those words, Henry’s fantasy that something—a word, an embrace, a look—would restore their friendship. Whatever his hopes, he was not prepared for Thomas’s rebuff.
The archbishop spoke very distinctly. “I have not forgotten your favors, my lord, favors which are not yours alone for God deigned to confer them on me through you.” With that he went on at length to explain that when his duty to king conflicted with his duty to God, he had no choice but to obey the latter. His defense was turning into a lecture, and when he warned that “we must obey God rather than men,” Henry would hear no more. “I don’t want a sermon from you,” he interrupted curtly. “Aren’t you the son of a peasant of mine?”
“It is true that I am not descended from a long line of kings, but then neither was Blessed Peter, on whom the Lord bestowed the keys of the kingdom of heaven and dominion over the whole Church.”
“That is true,” Henry returned, “but he died for his Lord.”
It was not meant as a threat, but Thomas, interestingly enough, seems to have interpreted it as one, for he answered gravely, “I too will die for my Lord when the time comes.”
Again Thomas refused to omit those three exasperating words “saving my order” from his oath, and despite Henry’s pleas and threats, they parted silently, neither having yielded an inch.
Eleanor and Henry celebrated Christmas of 1163 at the manor of Berkhampstead, one of the residences recently retrieved from Becket, and to indicate that it was to be particularly festive, the royal plate had been fetched from Winchester especially for the occasion. Ironically, Berkhampstead was more resplendent than most of the royal manors, because Thomas had spent large sums on its repair and redecoration. However, the Christmas festivities seemed oddly at variance with the real moods of the king and queen. The holiday, one of the most disturbing Eleanor had spent with Henry, was marked by cold rains, intrigue, negotiations, and ugliness. Henry’s childish insistence on holding Christmas court at Berkhampstead, an obvious attempt to further humiliate Becket, indicated a pettiness of spirit, the more so because recent developments had given him every reason to believe that he had won his struggle with Becket. When the dispute had reached the ears of Pope Alexander, he had sent letters and messengers to Becket advising him to submit to the king and obey the laws of the land. Admittedly in a difficult position because he needed Henry’s support in his battle against the antipope, Alexander nevertheless could not see that Henry had explicitly proposed anything directly contrary to the teachings of the Church. In fact, he had asked Henry for assurances on that point. To Alexander, the quarrel appeared simple: Thomas in open defiance had injured the king’s royal dignity, and obviously Henry would lose face if he allowed himself to be beaten by the archbishop. To salve the king’s pride. Thomas must omit the words “saving my order,” and then there would be peace. In fact, Henry had assured the pope that he would drop any further mention of the customs. As a result, Thomas had given way and, in December, had met with Henry at Woodstock, where he humbly made his submission, swearing to observe the customs of the realm in good faith. But the killing game had not yet ended. Immediately upon hearing Thomas’s recantation over the obnoxious salve ordine meo, he sprung his trap. Since Thomas had publicly defied him, an act of private submission would not suffice; the archbishop must repeat in public, in the presence of the Great Council, the oath he had just made privately. Under the circumstances, Becket could not refuse.
On January 25, 1164, the mighty of the realm assembled at the royal hunting lodge of Clarendon, near Salisbury. The benches of the hall were packed with archbishops and bishops, earls, barons, nobles, and elders, whose names the chroniclers meticulously recorded. Eleanor’s is not among them, but it is fairly certain that she was with Henry at Clarendon, and it seems unlikely that she would have missed the opportunity to see Becket brought low. Moreover, her son Henry was presiding over the council along with his father for the first time. Exactly what took place at Clarendon is far from clear. We know, however, that Henry opened the proceedings by calling upon the archbishop to swear to the customs of the realm without any qualifications—and that Thomas, after some procrastinations and excuses, refused to take the oath. At which point, Henry flew into one of his famous rages, his outraged howls sounding to one witness “like the roaring of the lion.” He swore that if Thomas did not promise to observe the customs and dignities of the kingdom, he would resort to the sword. Precisely what this last threat meant nobody was quite sure, but some remembered how Geoffrey Anjou, in a fit of Angevin rage, had ordered the bishop-elect of Seez to be castrated. Over the next three days, the heated debates continued, and Henry grew increasingly furious. At the point when the bishops had almost persuaded Thomas to submit—a purely formal act to satisfy the king’s injured honor—Henry sprung another trap. He produced a written document, undoubtedly prepared in advance, listing the laws of the land as they were observed (he said) in the time of his grandfather. Hearing the Constitutions of Clarendon read aloud, Thomas immediately realized that he had been betrayed again; in effect, the provisions placed the Church of England under the king’s control, in that civil law was to take precedence over canon law. Churchmen were forbidden to leave the realm without Henry’s permission nor were they permitted to appeal his decisions to Rome.
After the provisions had been read aloud, Henry said, “These customs have been conceded to me. Therefore, lest any question should arise concerning them in the future or lest any new disputes should perchance come up, we will that the Archbishop put his seal to them.”
Becket’s reaction was one of horror. “By Almighty God, never, as long as I live, will my seal be put to them!” Clutching the copy of the Constitutions that Henry had given him, he stalked from the hall without waiting for the king’s dismissal.
The Constitutions of Clarendon stand out in the history of English common law for two reasons: It was the first time a king attempted to legislate in writing (until then the law consisted of general customs or tribal practices passed orally from one generation to the next); and, secondly, they contained the seeds of later legal innovations, such as the use of the jury of accusation for bringing to light offenses that individuals dared not denounce. Still, by putting the customs in writing and asking Thomas to sign them, Henry took their quarrel past the point of compromise. Taken in their entirety, the sixteen articles of the Constitutions would have destroyed the freedom of the Church of England, placing it subordinate to the king. Curiously, only one of the provisions dealt with clerical crime, the problem that had given rise to the whole controversy. So long as Henry had adhered to this issue he had remained on safe ground because Thomas’s refusal to clean house within the Church had run contrary to common sense, and Thomas knew it. Henry had never claimed the right to judge clerks in his courts; he simply asked that a cleric accused of a serious crime be first brought to the king’s court to answer for his breach of the peace. If he denied his offense and pleaded benefit of clergy, he would have the right to be tried in an ecclesiastical court. However, if convicted and degraded from his orders, then, as a layman, he would be handed back to the king’s court for an appropriate sentence, either mutilation or death. But once Henry reduced the customs to writing, including among them practices that the Church had violently opposed in the past, he lost his advantage.
The terrifying scenes at Clarendon, the yelling and threatening, impressed one observer more than any other. Young Prince Henry, one month short of his ninth birthday, had adored Becket for his cheerful temper, his refinement and suave manners, for being everything that his rough, choleric father was not, and he had called him foster father. It is not known what type of explanations were made the previous autumn, when he had been abruptly removed from Becket’s household. Instead of being returned to Eleanor, he had been given a house and servants of his own, and perhaps Henry had painted the best possible face on these sudden changes by designating them a special honor, something the heir deserved. At Clarendon, the boy would not have understood the issues to any appreciable degree, but he could not have helped but realize that his father wished Thomas harm. In the household of Henry Plantagenet, one could not remain neutral to his quarrel with Becket, and in those drab January days, young Henry chose his father’s side. While it would have been unthinkable for the small boy to have indicated any overt support of Becket—he feared his father too much for that—he was left with an abiding hostility toward the king. In time, his affection for Becket would fade, but the dislike for his father generated at Clarendon would remain for the rest of his life.
A few days after Clarendon, Henry received news of his youngest brother’s death, an event that only added further fuel to his hatred of Becket. Henry had always felt a special affection for William. Unlike his second brother, Geoffrey, whose ambition and jealousy created barriers between them, William seems to have demanded nothing. Earlier, the king had entertained thoughts of invading Ireland for the express purpose of providing William with a fief of his own, and only his mother’s reservations had led Henry to abandon the project. Determined to provide for William, he tried to give him the hand and extensive estates of the widowed countess of Warenne, heiress to the earldom of Surrey. Due to Becket’s intervention, however, the marriage had been forbidden on the grounds of consanguinity. This had been one of Becket’s victories in the months shortly after his ascension, but it would be a victory he would come to regret. There was no denying William’s very voluble disappointment, because he complained to his mother, to the monks at the Norman monastery at Bec, indeed to anyone who would listen. Thus, when he fell ill and died on January 30 at the age of twenty-seven, it was not surprising that people claimed he had died of a broken heart. Whatever the cause of death, Henry, inconsolable, held Thomas responsible.
To judge from the pipe rolls for 1164, Henry’s melancholia found expression in a total incapacity for work. He and Eleanor spent the winter in the southern counties and then traveled up to London for Easter on April 12, but uncharacteristically, he accomplished nothing of note. For the months of May, June, and July the king and queen seemed to have dropped out of sight, because there is no record of their whereabouts, an extraordinary occurrence. Those months must have been fearful for Eleanor. It was a time of violent passions, a time of mourning, for Henry grieved the death of his friendship with Becket as strongly as he did his brother’s passing, and a time of great hatred. The king had prematurely aged, in fact he suddenly seemed older than she, and the tyrant into which he had matured was not a person she could admire. One reason she had married him was her belief that he would develop into a great man, but whatever greatness he had once assumed in her eyes had dwindled during the quarrel with Becket. It had brought out the worst in him, and no one saw this more clearly than Eleanor. She saw, too, that Thomas, who had once preoccupied him by virtue of the pleasure he provided, continued to preoccupy him in hatred. It must have been a bitter and humiliating realization to know that Henry and Thomas hated as only those who have loved deeply can hate.
By the end of the summer it was apparent that matters were coming to a head. While Henry had exercised his right to influence Becket’s appointment to Canterbury, and although he often ranted that he would bring him low and put him back where he had found him, still he could not remove the archbishop from office. It was necessary for Becket to resign, something Henry intended to humiliate him into doing. It was clear that the archbishop, for all his defiance, was a frightened man, because twice in early September he had made two abortive attempts to leave England, only to be turned back by the king’s men at the Channel ports. Henry’s taunts—“Has this island grown too narrow to contain us both?”—had the ring of a man who has backed his prey into a very tight corner. Now he pursued the archbishop as though he were a besieged castle that must be laid waste at all cost. As Eleanor well knew, there was no room in England for a queen let alone two kings, and Thomas . had made himself a rival to Henry. During seven days in October, she received a telling lesson on how the king treated a rival whom he wished to destroy. After a complaint by one of his barons, John Marshal, that he had not received justice in the archbishop’s court, Henry summoned Thomas to appear at Northampton on Tuesday, October 6, to answer charges of contempt. When Thomas arrived, he found that the lodgings reserved for his party had already been occupied by some of the king’s men, who refused to move. He also discovered that the king had apparently forgotten his coming, because he had gone out to hawk along the river Nene. The king did not return until evening.
Early Wednesday morning, Thomas dutifully appeared at Northampton Castle, where the hearing was to take place. Informed that the king was attending Mass, Thomas sat down to wait in the corridor connecting the chapel with the main hall. When Henry entered, Thomas rose to greet him, but the king strode by as if the archbishop were invisible. The king, he was informed by servants, was going to have his breakfast. Later in the morning, when finally he was admitted to the royal presence, Thomas immediately referred to the complaint made by John Marshal. Why, he asked, was Marshal not present to press charges? The king replied that Marshal had been detained in London on business (Marshal, in fact, would never arrive). With that, he put over Thomas’s case until the next day and sent him back to his lodgings.
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