Eleanor Of Aquitaine (21 page)

As for the Becket affair, it was no more satisfactory. Henry could now expect the full blast of fulmination, for Becket had been authorized, if the peace failed, to launch his thunder on Ascension Day, now only a few weeks distant. Thomas would use his favorable moment to prevent the coronation of the young king by any bishop other than himself, and he would use his prohibition to procure the restoration of his see. It was without doubt to give himself an excuse for such proceedings that he had revived his salvo. After Montmirail it became more than ever urgent to invest the prince with his title to the throne of England.

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The failure of the peace at Montmirail brought Alexander under a fresh hailstorm of appeals. Louis's brother-in-law, Guillaume de Sens, hurried to Rome on Becket's behalf to urge papal severity with a king whom, as Thomas wrote, only severe chastisment could amend. The Bishops of London and Salisbury appealed to the Pope for absolution from the excommunication visited upon them from Clairvaux on the previous Palm Sunday. Henry sought guarantees against interdict upon his lands. Always, when in confusion, Alexander sent legatine missions. He now sent two legists, Vivian and Gratian, who were deemed incorruptible and capable of standing up to Henry.

The king met these astute bargainers with counter demands. Becket might reclaim his see and lead his exiles home, if, when, and after the bishops of England were freed from excommunication and his lands from the menaces of interdict. When the nuncios tried to preface their demands with if, when, and after, Henry again brandished his threat of schisin and shouted the legates out of court.

"I care not an egg for nuncios," he cried, "and if I am threatened, I will seek elsewhere than in Rome my safety and honor."

But as the time for the return of Guillaume de Sens from Rome drew near, Henry began those sudden flittings from place to place that betrayed some uneasiness. He angled for another interview with Becket on the pretext of getting the precise schedule of the letter's claims for the restoration of the properties of Canterbury. He judged that he might circumvent the Archbishop of Sens if he could surprise the world with a pact reached without the mediation of Rome. It proved not so very difficult for Henry to draw Louis into a scheme for maneuvering an interview with Thomas. He had only to profess a pious desire to perform his devotions at the shrine of the martyrdom of Saint Denis at Montmartre;
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and to take the occasion of his nearness to Paris to offer his blessing to little Philip Augustus, who would one day, by the grace of God, be his overlord; and lastly to deliver his son, the young Count of Poitou, affianced since the treaty of Montmirail to one of Louis's daughters, into the hands of the Capets, for a period of education in the court of France. As if incidentally, Louis engaged to see to it that the Archbishop of Canterbury came also to the chapel of the martyrdom at Montmartre.

All was arranged. Henry performed his devotions. He then paid a visit to Queen Adele and the little prince, who had come out some distance from the city to receive him. The heir of the Capets was now a fine, upstanding child nearly four years old. Becket, describing the interview to the Pope, relates that Henry drew the boy, whom he now saw for the first time, to his knee and scanned his countenance with keenest scrutiny. Presently, however, he thrust him aside with a melancholy air, as if he there read some dreadful portent.
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But we are told the infant scion of the Capets stood manfully over against the King of the English and gave vent to an unfaltering rhetoric. He admonished Henry to love the French, their king, and Holy Church with a right devotion and to earn thus the favor of God and man.

Becket arrived at Montmartre in company with Guillaume de Sens and the legate Vivian, not willingly, but out of scruple lest he should frustrate some destined miracle of reconciliation.
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The recent return of Guillaume from Rome had heartened him with promises of severity against the king and his followers and with a strict limitation of papal leniency. Thomas brought a whacking account for all the sequestered properties and the usurped revenues of Canterbury. Not a farthing lost in the five years of his exile had been remitted nor forgotten. Henry appeared in edifying mood. He accepted the account and even submitted to reproof and correction. He promised restoration and amendment. No one could find any fault with his consent. The bargain seemed to Becket's party almost too good to be true. Would the king be pleased to give some contractual guarantee? Let him, for instance, give Becket, in the presence of assistants, the kiss of peace.

Hereupon Henry drew off. He recalled that he had once, in a fit of anger, vowed never again to kiss Thomas in all his life, and he supposed that churchmen could hardly expect him to disregard his solemn vow. A dispensation to relieve him of his inconvenient oath was proffered. But Henry was scrupulous. In England, after the archbishop should have returned to his see, the king would willingly kiss him a thousand times — his cheek, his hand, his foot. But here and now the kiss seemed to be exacted and would therefore have no significance.

The conclave broke up in gloom. Vivian publicly declared that he had never in all his rich experience with the
curia
seen or heard so crafty and slippery a prevaricator as the King of England.
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Louis warned Becket that he should not for his weight in gold return to England under such loose arrangements, and offered him the highest ecclesiastical honors to remain abroad. Thomas returned to Paris and the two kings rode off to Passy, where Louis expected to take Richard, the young Count of Poitou, into his custody But when they arrived, the count, by some casual mischance as it seemed, was not there.

Presently rumblings from Rome revealed the impact of the appeals and counterappeals that had been lodged there — first a blast in favor of Becket, then one for Henry. On the 19th of January the Pope commissioned the Archbishop of Rouen and the Bishop of Nevers to exact the kiss from Henry, and only if this were obtained within forty days (that is, by the first of March), to absolve the Bishops of London and Salisbury from the excommunication that Thomas had launched on the Palm Sunday of the previous year. Then prematurely and unaccountably, on the 12th of February, the Archbishop of Rouen, acting alone, absolved the bishops without having first chastened Henry This act of Rotrou of Rouen was presently seen as a prelude to Henry's urgent movements to stave off Thomas' interference with the crowning of the young king by the Archbishop of York.

In the third week of February, Henry with a considerable following put to sea from Barfleur for Portsmouth. With the first of March set as the term to papal lenience, he could not wait for weather. His fleet set out at midnight in the teeth of a gale. His ships labored all night and the next day, when his sundered vessels, with broken masts and tattered sails, were driven into various English harbors. One of the newest and best of the ships with four hundred passengers, men and women, was lost in the crossing But the king's ship, by the grace of Saint-Michael-in-Peril-of-the Sea, landed in Portsmouth before the ninth hour.

Arrived prodigiously on the wings of the storm, Henry put his coercive hand upon reluctant prelates and nobles of his realm, steadying with threats and importunities those who suffered qualms and scruples at the prospect of defying Canterbury in the matter of the coronation. He closed the Channel ports strictly, lest Becket's emissaries should launch unseasonable thunder bolts to restrain him from his purpose. He imposed the penalties of confiscation, mutilation, exile, for informers, and warned all his subjects against receiving or respecting proclamations from abroad.

Prince Henry had been left for the time in the custody of the queen in Caen, out of the reach of interdict on English lands. In Normandy remained the loyal Bishops of Sees and Bayeux, also immune from censures that might be visited on the suffragans of Canterbury. At last, when his plans were ready, Henry dispatched Richard of Ilchester to escort the prince and these bishops to London. There was some question in the minds of the Plantagenets about what should be done with the prince's consort Marguerite in the matter of the coronation. No course seemed free of difficulty. If Marguerite were ignored in the coronation of her husband, the Capets would of course be outraged; but would that be more serious in the eyes of Louis than having her crowned in defiance of Thomas and Pope Alexander by bishops subject to censure? The cautious Plantagenets had very suitable and expensive garments made ready for the princess both in Caen and in London in anticipation of emergency,
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but they finally decided that leaving her in Normandy with the queen would be the more remediable of the evils that confronted them.

Eleanor remained in charge of the court abroad and acted with the constable of Normandy in keeping the Channel ports closed against Becket's threat to outlaw the project of the king.
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Becket was known to have charged the Bishop of Nevers, as well as his own suffragan and the king's cousin, the Bishop of Worcester, to get passage to England in time to visit proscription and excommunication upon all the ecclesiastics upon whom Henry depended for the coronation. The Bishop of Nevers, out of respect for the torments Henry had prepared for informers, sought passage very languidly. The Bishop of Worcester, who was in the dilemma of having been likewise summoned by Henry to lend his episcopal splendor to the coronation, as an English bishop and as a relative of the king, found no means of crossing. The queen relieved both voyagers of their perplexity. Not a sail left the ports of Normandy.

It is to be wondered whether some miscarriage in his plans delayed Henry's proceeding at once with the crowning. Ascension Day, at which time Becket was free to renew his censures on the English prelates, occurred on May 29, whereas the coronation was set for the 14th of June. A throng of Londoners filled Saint Paul's on Ascension Day. Restrained perhaps by some foreboding, neither the Bishop of London nor the dean was present in the cathedral on that fateful morning. A minor priest, one Vitahs, celebrated mass. As he began to chant the
offertorium
and the wine and bread were being made ready, a stranger, who appeared to be a clerk, drew near, and falling devoutly on his knees, presented his offering. When the priest, some what surprised at this approach to the altar, reached out his hand to receive the gift, the stranger seized and detained him long enough to utter these words:

"In the absence of the bishop and dean of this diocese, I here present to you this letter from the Archbishop of Canterbury conveying the sentence he has pronounced on the Bishop of London and enjoining him and his clergy to observe this sentence. I bid you, by God's authority, to celebrate mass no more in this church until you shall have delivered this letter."

Thereupon the stranger disappeared in the crowd, which was already dispersing, and not even the king's officers, who scoured the whole city and posted guards at all the crossroads, found any trace of him. The bystanders in Saint Paul's, who saw rather than heard the incident, asked fearfully if mass had been prohibited in the cathedral; but when reassured they went out quietly. A day later the same mysterious person delivered in York a prohibition forbidding the archbishop to crown the young king in despite of the primatial rights of Canterbury. Precisely on the day of wrath, and in defiance of the king's defensive measures, Thomas' thunderbolt struck awe in the heart of England. The prelates of Britain were now obliged to choose unequivocally between the authority of Rome and Canterbury and that of the king.

In the face of these august menaces, Henry assembled his nobles and his bishops for the feast of Saint Barnabas
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and went forward with his plans. He himself hastily dubbed the prince, whose knighting by the King of the Franks had been inconveniently postponed. The coronation, though carried through without the blessing of Rome or Canterbury, was no clandestine or niggardly affair. It lacked no traditional feature that could give it sanction except the presence of the primate and a few of his suffragans. The setting, as custom decreed, was Westminster y. Roger of York, relying on the mandate conferred upon him long before, but now twice outlawed by Becket's prohibitions, performed the offices in the anointing of the prince. The assistants, if confused and uneasy about the auspices of the occasion, took comfort in the number of their fellows. The royal accounts show that no expense was spared for the regalia of the prince, nor for the feasts that entertained the king's magnates in the palace of Westminster.

At the banquet following the ceremonies in the y, the "young king" as the prince was now to be called, is said to have dined in hall with Roger of York, and the sewer who brought in the boar's head was no other than Henry Plantagenet himself, signalizing in this fashion the incomparable estate of his first-born son. At this gorgeous spectacle, the archbishop brought forth a neat epigram.

"Not every prince," he remarked, "can be served at table by a king."

The prince, who since Montmirail had been encouraged to nurse delusions of grandeur, capped this with another even wittier.

"Certainly," he said, "it can be no condescension for the son of a count to serve the son of a king."

The astonishment of the company is unrecorded. The prince was not, however, presented with a scepter after the feast. He was kept safely in England and remanded to his tutors, sound legists and loyal subjects of the Angevin.

After the summary and successful business of establishing the most important of his sons in his heritage, Henry returned at once to Normandy to forestall whatever Gaul and Rome might do about the
fait accompli
. As he went from his port to Falaise to rejoin the queen, he chanced to fall in with his cousin, the Bishop of Worcester. At sight of him Henry burst into a fury of abuse because the bishop had not presented himself at the coronation. Worcester explained that, when he had sought passage, he had been intercepted by royal mandate in the port.