Eleanor Of Aquitaine (19 page)

Alexander was in Sens, and it was to the
cuna
that Thomas made all haste in order to lay his case before the Pope. Louis chanced to be in Compiegne along the shortest route to Sens.
³²
On his passage Thomas was cordially received by the Capetian, who gave him safe conduct and ministered to his necessities. Canterbury found respite and relief at last from the fury of the Angevin in the citadels of the pious King of the Franks.

The most persistent hate is that which doth degenerate from love.

Map,
De Nugis Curialium
,

WHEN HENRY HEARD, on the morning after the council, that Becket had left Northampton in the night without his safe-conduct, he let it be known that "he had not done with" his archbishop.
¹
He closed the ports against his taking refuge with the Pope in France, as he had no doubt that Thomas meant to do; and, lest the thunder of anathema should overleap the Channel, he forbade any person, on pain of the direst penalties, to fetch or carry letters, and charged his officers to search all travelers to or from the Continent. He at once dispatched his own embassy, made up of the chief bishops and barons who had sat in judgment at Northampton, to seek an audience with the Pope in Sens, to anticipate there any appeal of the renegade archbishop. It was therefore with some dismay that he presently learned that Thomas had eluded the wardens of the ports, had escaped to Flanders, and was bearing his appeal in person to the papal
curia
. As it happened, Henry's embassy crossed the Channel on the same stormy day, All Saints,
²
on which Becket and his companions toiled from Sandwich to Oye.

The king's envoys were absent a month.
³
Henry received them on their return at Marlborough where he had convened his Christmas court in 1164. There was nothing to lend festivity to the season in their account of the proceedings in the Ile de France. They related that, while traversing the shortest routes toward Sens, they had learned that the archbishop, as he passed ever a little ahead of them, was making merit of his beggared state, rousing the prelates of Gaul to pious indignation. The envoys learned that the King of the Franks was in Compiègne, and they had turned aside to seek an audience and passport through his lands, and especially to deliver Henry's letter asking Louis not to harbor Thomas. Louis had been courteous, but sanctimonious too. When they had urged that he remand the errant archbishop to his own diocese of Canterbury, which he had quitted without the king's leave, Louis had lifted incredulous eyebrows.

"What do I hear," he said, "a prelate subject to the judgment and condemnation of his king? How could this be? I myself am a king no doubt, yet I am bound to state that it would be beyond my royal power to degrade the humblest clerk of my realm."

Thereupon the embassy from England had changed the tenor of the conversation and reminded Louis of Becket's campaign against him in Toulouse; but the Capetian had replied with admirable justice that he could not condemn Becket, as chancellor of the English king, for serving his master as best he might. He remarked that the King of the English would do well to keep in mind the versicle for the office of Saint Martin's vigil, which he himself had just been keeping: "Stand in awe and sin not"
(Irascamini et nolite peccare)
.

"Perhaps," he added with a quaint sinile, "if your king kept the vigils as often as his clerks do, he might be more familiar with it."

Hastening from this unsatisfactory delay, the envoys had pressed on toward Sens and just outside that city had passed a cavalcade assembling for the crossing of the Yonne. This, they had discovered, was nothing less than the cortege of the Archbishop of Canterbury, converging, like themselves, upon the metropolitan city in which Alexander sat. They had overtaken Thomas in the full panoply of his office with retinue of clerks, servants, horses, chapel, vestments, all supplied, it seemed, by the "munificence of the pious King of the Franks and the indignant prelates of Gaul.

Henry's embassy had, however, contrived to arrive before Becket in the presence of Alexander and his cardinals. They had addressed his Holiness, one after another, bishops and barons in turn, on the intransigency of Thomas since his elevation to the primacy. But the envoys had found themselves stiffly received, sharply cross-examined, greeted with incredulity, even with sarcastic twitterings when the Bishop of Chichester had stumbled a little, not in the mazes of his dialectic, but of his Latin.
⁵
Certain of the envoys had taken pains to remind Alexander of the indispensable support of Henry in his struggle for the papacy and to recall the occasion of his acclamation only two years before, when King Henry and King Louis, rivaling each other in filial piety, had walked abreast leading forth Alexander upon his mule as successor of Saint Peter amidst the plaudits of the universal church.

When even this circumstance had failed of the generous response that it deserved, they had veered from the dreary effects of dialectic and history to a fiscal argument. They had offered to revive a more careful levy of the Peter-penny in Britain, which had somewhat lapsed under the Angevin — an English penny every year for Rome from every chimney that gave forth smoke in England. But, in spite of everything, the envoys had at last been put off more with threats than with promise of appeasement. The sultry odor of anathema was in the air. They had been forestalled. Thomas had sold his grievance at a good price in Sens and Compiègne. The insular affair of the king and the archbishop had gone mischievously abroad and into the arbitrament of the king's enemies.

Various chroniclers relate that the Angevins were subject on occasion to rages that gave warrant for the legend, current in their day, of a demon ancestress in the house of Anjou. One of these demonic seizures overcame Henry in Marlborough when he heard the report of the envoys. On the day after Christmas, as if to defy anathema, he himself fulminated a fearful decree of banishment against all the kith and kin of Becket, male and female, old and young. Some four hundred victims were routed from their firesides and their labors, stripped of resource, laden on smacks, and shipped to the wintry shores of Flanders. There were enough of them to tax not only the private purses of Thomas' friends, but even the monastic foundations and the unbounded chanty of Louis Capet. At the same time Henry committed the properties of Canterbury to Ranulf de Broc, the castellan of Dover, a very secular knight with an exact sense of his duty to the king.

*

In two prosperous decades the great Plantagenet had risen triumphant as the sun. By his marriage with the Countess of Poitou, Henry had doubled his lands with spoils slipped from the grasp of Louis Capet. He had won England from the related house of Blois. He had subdued disorders in Wales. On the Continent he had conquered Brittany, thrust out his ancestral borders here and there, and fortified a solid domain vastly superior to that of his overlord and chiefly at his overlord's expense. But he had ringed himself with enemies, each smarting with his own particular humiliation. His uneasy gains were not fully mastered when the quarrel with Becket forced him into the opprobrious role of outlaw against the church and encouraged his scattered foes to look in high places for asylum and redress. These they found with the King of the Franks, the Archbishop of Canterbury, the Pope, the dispossessed barons of Henry's enlarged living space.

The role thrust upon Louis by the Becket affair was the most superb that a grudging fortune had ever cast for him. In his long traffic with the Angevin he had never known such sweet commerce between his conscience and his will as that which enabled him to earn merit with heaven by harrying his mortal enemy. He was encouraged by the rising tide of his fortunes to make decisions he had long held in cautious reserve. He presently threw in his lot wholly with the house of Champagne, whose power he had long dreaded in his vassalage. He had married as his third queen the daughter of that house He now married the two daughters of Queen Eleanor, whom she had been obliged to leave in the court of France at the time of her divorce, to two brothers of the reigning Queen of France: Mane to Henry, Count of Champagne, and Alix to Thibault of Blois. Guillaume, another brother of the same house, became Archbishop of Sens, metropolitan of the see to which Paris belonged.

Louis's general truculence toward the Angevins was greatly increased by an event in 1165, which signalized for him, after his long afflictions, the returning favor of heaven. During the first year of Becket's exile, when the whole outlook so greatly improved for the Capetians, the royal house had renewed with particular ardor its petitions for an heir, and had, with propitiatory intent, increased its alms and engaged the prayers of the clergy and the people.
⁸
Louis had prostrated himself before the chapter of Clairvaux and refused to get up until assured that his supplications for "an heir of the better sex" should be borne aloft upon that holy order's intercessions. "Give it not to my enemies to say," he implored, "that my hopes are deceived, my alms and prayers rejected."

The answer to the prayers of the Capetians is recorded by the famous Giraldus Cambrensis, who chanced to be toiling over his studies in the schools of Paris in the summer of 1165.
¹⁰
Giraldus relates that the August days were suffocating in the Ile and he had profited by the coolness of the night to pursue the universals in his chamber, which overlooked one of the public squares of the Cité. He had just after midnight pillowed his head, all brimming with dialectic, when a sudden clamor of bells broke like a tocsin upon his ear. His first thought was that a conflagration must have started in some quarter of the Ile. He plunged into his shirt and leaned from the window. The city was alight with bonfires in the squares. The bells rose to bedlam, chiming over the roofs, among the towers, far abroad over the Seine. Burghers and students flocked in the streets, tending westward toward the king's domain, swinging torches and lanterns, shouting and gesticulating after the Gallic manner. Giraldus was amazed. He called down from his window to a pair of poor women racing along with faggot brands. By his accent they knew him for a subject of Henry Plantagenet, and one of them stopped long enough to brandish her torch at the window.

"By the grace of heaven," she cried, "there is born in Paris tonight a king who shall be a hammer to the King of the English."
11

At last the intercessions of the Franks had been regarded. The moment of Louis's triumph had come. The noble house of Champagne had brought to the Franks a king, to Louis a son. The tidings flew over the Seine to the burghers' city on the right bank, to the schools on the left. It was Saturday night, the octave of the Assumption of the Virgin, and the messengers announced the event at Saint-Germain-des-Prés just before matins, as the monks were beginning the canticle, "Blessed be the Lord God of Israel, for he has visited us and ransomed his people." Paris hailed Philip Augustus, Dieu-Donne, heir of the Capets. To the queen's servant Olger, who brought him the joyful news, Louis granted in perpetuity three
muids
of cheese to be taken annually from his grange of Gonesse, and to that grant he affixed the royal seal.

The Pope, though eager to support the "most Christian King of France" and defend the Primate of England and the universal authority of the church, was often placed in strained attitudes by Becket's intransigence. Alexander III owed his papal throne in no small measure to Henry's recognition of his election against the candidate of the Holy Roman Emperor, and Henry's support was indispensable to him in the schism that had, before Becket's flight, driven him from Rome to the protection of the French king in Sens; yet in the struggle of Henry with his primate, it was Becket who championed the interests of the universal church. Alexander, in spite of acts that make up a tissue of contradictions, upheld his irreconcilable archbishop as much as his own situation enabled him to do. His policies with both Henry and Becket were alternately stern and conciliatory. If he authorized Becket to threaten Henry with the dread censures of the church, he cautiously annulled for Henry the effect of his suspension from grace; if he made promises to Henry, he countermanded them to Becket. But these fluctuations of policy simply register the tides in his own affairs.

Becket, after his first successes in the
curia
and the French court, was persuaded by his friends to give up his episcopal retinue and bide the issue of a struggle that must be protracted, in some retirement, where maintenance of his dignities would be less expensive to those who were supporting not only his exile, but the banishment of all his kin.
¹⁴
These friends hinted that a cloistral seclusion might, in the circumstances, do more for the stakes at issue than any insistence on those temporal grandeurs to which Thomas was accustomed. Becket willingly submitted his person to the hair shirt and cowl, the regimen of fasts and vigils; but when he put on the white wool cassock of the Cistercians blessed for his use by Alexander and retired to the simplicity of the y of Pontigny,
¹⁵
it was not to a mystical retreat. He busied himself collecting works on the canon law and worked up his case, item by item. He beset his suffragans, the chapters of the orders, the courts and chancelleries of Europe, and the
curia
with a tide of correspondence, brief upon brief, arguing his position, insisting upon his salvos, inveighing against the "constitutions," pressing for the redress of his grievances, which were the grievances of Rome.

Early in 1166 Alexander's own prospects against the antipope and the Holy Roman Emperor brightened for a season, and he was able to return for an interval to Rome. In this auspicious moment he raised Becket's fortunes with his own. At Easter he made the exiled archbishop legate for all England save the diocese of York, which had anciently been excluded from the governance of Canterbury. Thus, even though Henry's malice thwarted Thomas from the exercise of his authority as primate, he might use his legatine authority from abroad to control his rebellious bishops in England and to threaten the king. Armed with these extraordinary powers, Becket sought to force from Henry the surrender of his sequestered see.