Becket and Henry II: The Conflict
THE THIRD ADDRESS IN THE BECKET LECTURE SERIES
THE ST THOMAS MORE SOCIETY, SYDNEY
20 AUGUST 2001
In contrast to the matters of high principle to come, the first public confrontation between Becket and Henry II was about the tawdry subject of money. It happened on 1 July 1163 at the King’s favourite hunting lodge of Woodstock, 12 kilometres north of Oxford and now within the grounds of Blenheim Palace, during the construction of which the Duchess of Marlborough peremptorily rejected her architect’s plea not to destroy the remains of the medieval lodge.
Henry proposed that the charge of two shillings on every hide of land that had traditionally been paid by landowners to the local sheriff, should henceforth be paid directly to the royal treasury. The archbishop, speaking on behalf of the assembled landowning nobles and bishops, protested that the sheriff’s aid was a fee for service, not a tax. No doubt the landowners thought they could withhold all or part of it, if the sheriff was not performing his duties as the local policeman and protector of property.
Flashing into his usual temper tantrum, Henry exclaimed:
“By the eyes of God, it shall be given as revenue and in the King’s scroll shall it be writ. Nor is it fit that thou shouldst gainsay me, when no man would oppose your men against your will.”
Such blasphemies from the king were commonplace. However, in an extraordinary gesture of defiance, the archbishop turned the blasphemy into a personal oath, escalating the purely secular dispute. Becket said:
“By the reverence of the eyes by which you have sworn, my Lord King, there shall be given from all my land, or from the right of the Church, not a penny.”
The measure of Henry’s fury was displayed in an uncharacteristic silence. This was open calculated insolence – the triviality of the issue exacerbating the impertinence. The chronicles are unanimous that this was the first open breach between the king and the archbishop.
Becket had made it impossible for Henry to treat him with respect, let alone as a friend, without loss of face. He had trumpeted his independence, as if daring the king to challenge it.
A few days after this confrontation, when the court had moved from Woodstock to Westminster, Henry launched an attack on the church’s most vulnerable privilege: the immunity of the clergy from punishment for crimes in the normal courts. Simon Fitzpeter – who had served Henry as justice, sheriff and as a commissioner of inquiry into losses of Crown land, and would do nothing without his authorisation – asserted that in his capacity as a Royal justice, he had been personally abused by a clerk called Phillip de Broi, in effect a contempt of court.
The incident must have preceded Woodstock, where Fitzpeter was in attendance. Fitzpeter said that, sitting as a judge on circuit in Bedfordshire, he had raised the issue of a homicide with which de Broi had been accused and of which he had been acquitted in the bishop’s court. In response, de Broi had abused him.
At Westminster the king demanded that the matter be investigated, both the alleged murder and the contempt of his court. According to Becket’s most fervent biographers, Edward Grim – who eight years later would be injured when trying to protect the archbishop from his assassins – said that the king “delighted at the opportunity of venting his spleen on a clerk, brought forth upon Philip the vials of his wrath”.
Subsequently, when appearing before an ecclesiastical court convened for this purpose in Canterbury, de Broi, while continuing to deny the homicide charge, pleaded that he should not be tried twice for the same offence. “I confess” he added “that overcome by my bitterness I have abused the king’s officer, but I promise full reparation for my outrage”. No doubt having heard the king’s views that death was the appropriate penalty, de Broi added, “Let not the penalty exceed the bounds of reason”. The ecclesiastical court upheld his plea against double jeopardy on the homicide charge. For the contempt, they ordered that he forfeit two year’s income to charitable purposes nominated by the king.
Henry ranted that this was insufficient penalty for an insult to himself. “By the eyes of God” – Becket’s hagiographers dutifully record the blasphemy – “you shall swear to me that you judged a just judgment and did not spare the man because he was a clerk”. As soon as the bishops made that oath the king broke into what was described as “a storm of rage”. This was his usual intemperate conduct whenever his will was thwarted or, indeed, even questioned. As he told one of his courtiers on another occasion:
“Am I not allowed to be angry when passion is part of man’s character and a natural attribute? I am by nature a child of anger; how therefore should I not be moved to anger? God himself was moved to anger.”
Indeed, when it came to dealing with clergy who committed crimes, Henry preferred the punishing God of the Old Testament.
The caste of tonsured clerks represented a substantial proportion of the population of medieval England – up to one-sixth of the total according to one estimate. The group of persons who claimed an entitlement to what came to be called “benefit of clergy”, was not limited to priests, monks and deacons directly involved in matters spiritual. It extended to include acephalous, vagabond clerks, ordained in minor orders, who were quite indistinguishable from their social peers and equally prone to fits of jealousy, anger, greed and sexual craving. Henry had been told that clerks had committed about 100 murders.
The church claimed the right to deal with clergy in all respects, including the right to put them on trial for criminal offences like homicide, rape and theft. This exemption from civil jurisdiction was, potentially, a significant factor in the maintenance of public order. It also affected the performance of other functions of the criminal process of particular significance at the time, such as compensation for victims and their families.
In a case in which a priest from the diocese of Salisbury had been found guilty of murder in the bishop’s court, Becket had formally ruled that the maximum penalty permissible anywhere in England was life imprisonment in a bishop’s gaol or life in a monastery. Becket proclaimed a general rule that no convicted clerk could be sentenced to death or mutilation.
The civil courts had no compunction about the shedding of blood. Death was a frequently imposed punishment, as were various kinds of gruesome mutilation, including amputation of limbs, flaying of skin, and gouging of eyes. At the time, even in the case of heretics – though the precedent had been set by this stage – public execution by burning was still not generally accepted in the church as an appropriate form of punishment. Henry, in this respect representing the brutish simplicities of the warrior caste of nobles, regarded sentences such as imprisonment, fines and deprivation of status, handed out to clerical criminals, as unacceptable in terms of revenge, unsatisfactory as a deterrent and, perhaps, unfair as discrimination against other offenders.
Henry spoke as if England was enveloped by a crime wave. Even in those comparatively simple times, before the emergence of the electronic lynch mobs of talkback radio, being tough on crime was seen to be a requirement of executive government.
There is no reason to believe that, in the mid 1160’s, the problem of clergy committing crimes had became worse. Indeed, it is almost certain that it had improved from the lawlessness prevalent throughout the reign of Stephen. Nevertheless, there is little doubt that there was a ‘law and order’ issue of substantial scale. A few years later, by the Assize of Clarendon of 1166, a nationwide inquest was conducted in which twelve men from every hundred and four men from every vill had to come forward and identify criminals believed to have committed robbery and murder. This sworn inquest before itinerant royal justices, would institutionalise a practice used, sporadically, by Henry I.
A feature of Henry’s reign was the expansion – by the creation for the first time of a permanent judiciary – of royal jurisdiction, at the expense of local jurisdiction in the courts of the hundreds and shires and in the manorial and honour courts of local lords. By firm and patient insistence on the maintenance of all royal jurisdictional rights, and by the progressive refinement of royal procedure, a gradual, at first imperceptible, shift of jurisdiction occurred. What had once been an extraordinary intervention to do justice, became more and more frequent. There was never a full-scale confrontation in this respect. A concurrent jurisdiction expanded gradually.
It proved otherwise in the case of ecclesiastical jurisdiction. There is no suggestion that Henry was concerned with the jurisdiction of ecclesiastical courts in matrimonial or testamentary disputes or even in criminal cases involving heresy, sacrilege, sorcery, usury, defamation, fornication, homosexuality, adultery and injury to religious places. Nor did he appear to be concerned with civil jurisdiction over cases involving contract, property and other disputes in which there was a breach of an oath. It was otherwise with respect to breaches of peace and the law relating to the transmission of, and incidents of, real property. The latter was the very foundation of political, social and, indeed, military power in an age, unlike our own, when the social hierarchies of status, wealth and power almost completely overlapped.
The canon law had a broadly based theory of legal liability, derived in large measure from a concept of sin. Secular jurisdiction made more specific claims derived from practical concerns. Overlap, tension and conflict was inevitable because of the ubiquity of sin and because of the institutional interests of the Church in matters secular, particularly with respect to church property.
In the first year after his appointment as archbishop, Becket had taken steps to recover virtually every piece of property that had ever been owned by the see of Canterbury and which had been alienated, whether consensually by, or non-consensually from, any of his predecessors. William Fitzstephen, the most reliable of his biographers, suggests that Henry had promised to stay out of Becket’s way in this regard, save in the case of one claim that affected Henry personally, Becket’s claim to recover custody of the castle at Rochester. At first, Henry had ignored the rhetoric of Becket’s program of restoration, which sometimes invoked the potentially socially disruptive doctrine of the canon law that no occupant of ecclesiastical office had the right to alienate church property.
On 22 July, immediately after the confrontation at Woodstock, the king formally rejected Becket’s claim about the tenure of Roger, earl of Clare, over the town and castle at Tunbridge. The depredation of church property by the earl, notably in the see of Ely – which Pope Adrian had ordered Bishop Nigel of Ely to pursue, under threat of his own suspension from episcopal office – was notorious and had been raised at the recent Council of Tours. The powerful, well-connected noble, had acted for some time as if the land were held directly from the king. Becket asserted that, as one of his predecessors was the original tenant-in-chief of the king, the earl owed him homage for the land, with all the opportunities for exercising authority and exacting revenue – at the king’s expense – which such a relationship entailed. Henry, for the first time – no doubt as an intended punishment for, or a warning about, Becket’s recent display of independence – acted to stop one of Becket’s claims of this character.
Henry had been prepared to accept Becket’s attempt to unravel the depredations that had occurred during the years of anarchy under King Stephen. However in one case Becket went beyond any permission that Henry may have ever given him.
The archbishop claimed a traditional right to appoint a clergyman to the occupation of a church at Eynsford in Kent. The lord of the town, William de Ros, claimed the same right of advowson. As Becket had himself done to his own tenants, de Ros took the law into his own hands and forced Becket’s nominee to leave. The right to appoint a clergyman to the occupation of a church, as with all such feudal rights, entitled the appointor to a fee – usually one year’s revenue of the church.
Rather than have the matter resolved in the king’s court, Becket displayed his independent authority by excommunicating William de Ros. He knew perfectly well that this would provoke the king. Henry, like his predecessors, would not allow himself to be put in a position where he could not communicate with one of his own tenants-in-chief. hey owed him direct personal obligations of service, attendance and advice. The customs of England, Henry correctly asserted, prohibited any such excommunication without the king’s assent. Indeed, whilst Becket had been chancellor, Theobold had refused to obey a papal order to excommunicate an earl who had appropriated church property, precisely for that reason.
Becket first asserted that the king had no right to order him to either absolve or excommunicate anyone – even if he had wielded his clerical sword for secular reasons. This was perhaps the first indication that Becket intended to apply the most rigorous Gregorian ideology of the complete independence of, indeed the superiority of, the Church. Henry, described by William Fitzstephen as “hotly enraged”, cut Becket off and would not see him. Becket backed down at this point. He lifted the order against de Ros. “For this I owe him no thanks”, Henry bitterly remarked.
The issue of criminous clerks became the focus of the conflict between archbishop and king. Three years before, John of Salisbury, Theobold’s former private secretary who had remained on the archbishop’s staff, had dedicated to Becket, then chancellor, a long treatise, entitled “Policraticus” – one of the highlights of 12th century political thought. He had concluded on this issue:
“That the material sword may not be wielded against a priest, even if he should tyrannise, for reverence to the sacrament of his holy orders, unless perhaps after being unfrocked, he should lay his bloodstained hands upon the Church of God. Even so, the rule must be observed that he does not suffer double punishment for the same offence.”
For reasons that cannot be now determined Henry decided to bring the issue of clerical criminality to a head.
In October 1163, Henry called a Council meeting at Westminster Palace – restored at great expense and at forced pace by Becket, when he was chancellor.
Probably immediately before the Council meeting, fourteen bishops and five abbots were present at a ceremony in Westminster Abbey, for the translation of the remains of the recently canonised King Edward the Confessor to a new tomb in the abbey. Becket made pointed use of his feudal right to impose a fee for performing a duty. He took as his trophy for presiding over the translation of the bones of Saint Edward, a gravestone of great significance. Wulfstan, bishop of Worcester, saintly but not then canonised, had been threatened with deposition by William the Conqueror himself at a Council meeting held at Westminster Palace. According to one version, this was because Wulfstan, a patron and preserver of the English language, could not speak French.
Declaring that he would only surrender his staff of office to Edward the Confessor, who had conferred it on him, Wulfstan had gone to Edward’s tomb and, according to the legend, as he struck his staff on it had declared – in his, and Edward’s mother tongue:
“Take it my lord King and give it to whomsoever thou will.”
Miraculously the marble melted and held the staff fast until a decision had been made in Wulfstan’s favour. He survived the purge of Anglo Saxon bishops by King William.
God had, by a miracle, prevented Henry’s great grandfather from perpetrating a gross injustice on the Church at a Council meeting in the palace of Westminster. The symbolism of Becket’s choice of emolument would have been obvious to all.
Henry surprised the Council with a new, carefully crafted proposal for compromise on the issue of criminous clerks. He suggested a new rule that permitted ecclesiastical courts to try clerics for crimes which were breaches of the peace, with the proviso that anyone found guilty would be handed over to the civil authorities for punishment.
According to one source, Henry told the assembly:
“I am bent on having peace and tranquillity through all my dominions and I am much annoyed at the disturbances which the crimes of the clergy have occasioned. They do not hesitate to commit robbery of all kinds, and very often murder also. I therefore demand your consent, my lord of Canterbury, and the consent of all the other bishops also, that when clerks are detected in crimes and convicted either by the judgment of the court or by their own confession, they shall be stripped of their orders and given over to the officers of my court to receive corporal punishment without protection from the church.”
Henry carefully prepared the ground, no doubt assisted by those of his justices who had received extensive training in canon law. The argument focused on the frequent use in the canons of the phrase “tradatur curia” – i.e. “handed over to the court”. Herbert of Bosham, one of Becket’s devoted biographers, recalled the events at the Council:
“Those who were apparently prepared to put their learning at the King’s service in order to curry favour with him, argued from this that such clerks should in no wise be exiled or sent into a monastery, but rather, as the canons ordained they ought ‘to be handed over to the court’ and this they interpreted to mean, to be delivered to the secular arm for punishment.”
No doubt Henry’s advocates would have gained comfort from the fact that the then pope, Alexander III, a skilled canon lawyer, had some years before written a treatise in which he accepted the possibility of double punishment. It seems probable that this reasoning would have been used by Henry’s advocates, although none of Becket’s biographers refer to it.
There was a period of intense negotiations, including in the King’s private apartments. Threats were made to the bishops about the consequences, if the Royal will were thwarted. Becket overruled the waverers. He said:
“The liberties of the church are in our keeping and it is incumbent on us to guard them or they will be subverted.”
The bishops agreed to reject Henry’s proposal and to adopt a united front. What followed, however, probably went further than any of them expected.
Returning to the Great Hall at Westminster, Becket – speaking in the name of the Holy Church – gave Henry a lecture, which travelled so far beyond the issue which Henry had raised as to constitute a challenge to his authority. The archbishop opened up with a reiteration of the most extreme position on the total independence of the church. He drew on the theology of the “two swords” saying there were two Kings – Christ in heaven and earthly Kings. That there were two laws – divine and human. That there were two means of enforcement – spiritual and corporal. Drawing on theology, rather than on canon law, Becket escalated his rhetoric:
“The clergy by reason of their orders and distinct office, have Christ alone as King … and since they are not under secular Kings, but under their own King, and under the King of Heaven, they should be ruled by their own law and if they are transgressors they should be punished by their own law, which has its own means of coercion.”
As Becket must have known, this proclamation was an anathema to Henry. The king carefully nurtured the overlapping jurisdictions between his courts and those of the barons and of the church. He never attempted to resolve every ambiguity by the application of fixed rules. He never attempted to reconcile every inconsistent jurisdictional precedent. The proposal he had put forward was designed to solve a particular problem, by a pragmatic adjustment of past practices. What Becket flung in his face – with according to Herbert of Bosham the repetition, again and again, in an insolent peroration of the phrase “This I neither ought nor will suffer” – was a public challenge to his honour and prestige as a king.
Becket proclaimed that the step of stripping a person of his clerical status was a punishment and church doctrine forbade double jeopardy. The phrase in the canons on which Henry’s advocates had relied –“handed over to the court” – meant for future offences, not further punishment for the one that had just been decided with the result of deprivation of clerical status. Something of this character became the actual position in England with the doctrine of benefit of clergy that was established after the martyrdom of Becket. A practice developed that the benefit could be used only once, irrespective of whether the offender had been deprived of clerical status on the first occasion. To enforce this practice, eventually, a convicted clerk was branded on the thumb. This is said to be the origin of the phrase “rule of thumb”.
At Westminster, in response to Becket’s rhetoric, Henry reacted with a retaliatory escalation that went beyond rhetoric. He demanded that all the bishops present affirm whether or not they acknowledged the king’s customary constitutional rights and prerogatives. There is no doubt that some of Becket’s rhetoric, taken to its logical conclusion – which was not the intention of the body of bishops – did challenge some of the customary prerogatives.
Led by Becket, one by one, to Henry’s growing fury, the bishops stepped forward and proclaimed that they would observe the customs of the realm “saving my order” – a phrase that would ring down through the subsequent controversy between Henry and Becket. Society was then universally regarded as trifurcated into orders: those who fight; those who work; those who pray. The qualification – “saving my order” – appears, on this occasion, to have been employed at this level of generality. It asserted that each bishop owed his primary loyalty to the church, and that in the case of any conflict between the royal prerogative and the canon law, the latter must prevail.
The position taken by Becket and the bishops was not intended to be provocative. As Becket pointed out, and Henry must have known, the same phrase - “saving my order” – was part of the formal homage that each bishop made to the king, when being invested with the temporalities of his see, before consecration as a bishop. The quick-witted Becket added that when each of them had sworn fealty “in life and limb and earthly honour saving their order”, the reference to “earthly honour” encompassed the royal customs.
Henry would have none of this. On all accounts he was indulging in a fit of royal pique, which could only be aggravated by the upstart ingrate making a good point. Henry of Bosham reported the king’s response:
“He declared that they had formed a firm and united front against him, that poison lurked in the phrase saving their order and that it was a mere sophistry. He therefore demanded that they should absolutely and without qualification promise to obey the Royal customs.”
In his play Curtmantle, Christopher Fry captures the moment:
“Henry: I need your word that you’ll obey these customs.
Becket: God said ‘I am Truth’, not ‘I am Custom’.
I interpolate that this excellent line, which Fry has lifted from the Becket material, was originally deployed by Pope Gregory VII against the Holy Roman Emperor, Henry IV, a century before.
Henry: Whose truth are you acrobat? These Customs are the truth of the men whose lives shaped them.
Becket: What you see as the freedom of the State within the law, I fear as the enslavement of that other state of man, in which and in which only he can know his perfect freedom. So this is how I must answer you: We obey you in everything unless it should threaten the will of God and the laws and dignity of the church.
Henry: ‘Unless’ is nothing. No answer and no vow! Who is to set limits on your laws and dignity? Who apart from your own reading of God, is going to control your ambition? Very astute isn’t it to attach yourself to a power which proceeds and communicates only through you.
Becket: If by me, you mean the Church, tell me who controls the ambitions of the State?
Henry: The well-being of the whole community.”
The reference to the “State” is, of course, anachronistic. In any event, Henry could never himself have adopted an ideology of royal absolutism. His interests as a duke and count under the king of France would have prevented that.
Henry’s formula would, of course, incorporate any rights of the church, including limits on royal jurisdiction, that had been adopted as a matter of custom. In that respect the qualifying phrase “saving my order” had no work to do. The problem was who would ultimately decide where such limits lay. It is by no means clear that Henry assumed that the king would always do so. It is quite likely that he accepted that some form of collaboration was required. However the formula on which he now insisted did not make provision for any give and take.
The principal theme of Henry’s reign in the early years, was a rhetoric of restoration of the rights of the monarchy to what they had been in the time of his grandfather, Henry I. No one could have been unaware of the frequent repetition of this formula in writ after writ, charter after charter, letter after letter. Becket himself would have fully understood the significance that Henry attached to this position.
The difficulty, of which Becket would have been very much aware, was that since the death of Henry I in 1135, the canon law had considerably expanded and, indeed, had changed the claims it made about the jurisdiction of the Church and of its courts. There was ample scope for conflict. In the case of England, unlike the position in Henry’s other domains on the continent, that conflict was exacerbated by a contest between two exceptionally stubborn men, whose former personal intimacy had borne a poisonous fruit.
Henry stormed out of the Westminster Council meeting and, the next morning, without notice and without the required formalities, rudely abandoned the Council and left Westminster.
The intensity of Henry’s past affection for Becket was manifest in the torrent of hostility which he directed at his former protégé.
Within twenty-four hours after the Westminster Council, he stripped Becket of his remaining royal honours – custody of the castles of Eye and Berkhamsted. He also removed his son and heir, the young Prince Henry, from Becket’s household. Like other noble youths the young Prince had been entrusted to another for training as a knight, away from the perceived biases of parental affection – a toughening up process which echoes in the British boarding school tradition. The prince’s committal had been a mark of trust and confidence in his then chancellor. His removal indicated that all such feelings had disappeared.
Henry took steps to divide the bishops. He swung his support behind the Archbishop of York in the perennial dispute over the primacy of the English church. Roger of Pont L’Eveque was, predictably, the first to come over and agree to an unqualified submission to the customs. Henry, who had already obtained papal authority to have his son crowned by the archbishop of York – in defiance of Canterbury’s most cherished privilege – now sought the appointment of Roger of York as papal legate, a position which Becket had not acquired with the archbishopric. Such an appointment could, in one deft act, effectively remove Becket as head of the English church.
In defiance of tradition, Roger of York began to parade in the south of England behind his cross. “He has raised cross against cross, and opposed cross to cross”, Becket complained to Pope Alexander, “taking advantage of a particular opportunity, thereby symobolising that Christ is divided”. Roger of York, Becket asserted was “attempting to deprive the church of Canterbury of her ancient honour”.
Henry, seeking to undermine Becket’s authority in every conceivable way, lent his support to the abbot of St Augustine’s in Canterbury, a tough minded Norman called Clarembald, universally regarded as a worthless monk, who was in a state of continual conflict with his monks and who exploited the monastery’s wealth for his personal profit and pleasure – according to one account fathering no less than seventeen bastards on one of the monastery’s manors. Eventually he would be deposed for scandalous and licentious conduct. Clarembald had revived the claim over which Theobald had fought for so long: the exemption of his abbey from the archbishop’s jurisdiction.
The new bishop of London, Gilbert Foliot, raised a third challenge to Becket’s authority as primate of England.
Foliot was highly educated, an accomplished administrator, a skilled canon lawyer, an ascetic monk of unblemished personal piety. Pope Alexander wrote to him about his total abstinence from alcohol and his strict vegetarianism: “We are afraid if a pack horse is deprived of what it needs, it will fail from excessive weakness”. Foliot had attended the great Burgundian monastery of Cluny were he rose to be a prior. He was appointed in his thirties as Abbot of Glastonbury and a decade later, in 1148, as bishop of Hereford, before being translated to London, a virtually unprecedented lateral shift which required a specific papal license. Foliot was regarded by many as unlucky not to have succeeded Theobald at Canterbury.
Alfred Lord Tennyson in his Play “Becket” had Henry describe Foliot to Becket in terms of Shakespeare’s Cassius:
“… He! To thin, too thin.
Thou art the man to fill out the Church robe:
Your Foliot fasts and fawns too much for me?
At the time of Becket’s fall from favour, Foliot was resisting Becket’s insistence that he make a further formal profession of obedience to the archbishop of Canterbury, in his new position as bishop of London. Foliot wanted to turn the see in the capital into an archbishopric, an institutional inspiration first proclaimed by the noble-born Foliot’s relative, who had become bishop of London fifty years before, a claim which then caused great consternation to Anselm of Canterbury. Foliot took family seriously. Over a period of four decades as bishop he appointed five archdeacons, every one of them a relative. Foliot, who was Henry II’s personal confessor, would have been aware that, in the absence of the then exiled Anselm, his relative forebear as bishop of London had officiated at the coronation of Henry I, his grandson’s abiding role model and point of reference.
In the wake of the Westminster Council, Foliot advanced a new claim, based on some transparently self serving mythology that London was not subject to Canterbury at all.
Pope Alexander, exiled from Rome by his conflict with the Emperor and the factious Roman families, was close at hand in Sens. A stream of letters and envoys from Henry crossed the Channel seeking decisions by the pope on all these matters.
The Pope was in no position to assist. In exile he relied on the support of Henry in his conflict with the Emperor. He urged compromise. A meeting between Henry and Becket was arranged at Northampton.
Henry, pointedly refusing to have Becket inside his castle, insisted that the meeting be held in an open field outside the town. With the conversation disrupted by the neighing and rearing of their horses, no doubt sensing the restless tension of their masters, the two antagonists met alone. One contemporary, Roger of Pontigny, who would have heard Becket’s version, left a verbatim record – the interplay of stubborn defiance and the mixture of promise and threat comes down clearly through the flowery terminology of the hagiographer:
“Have I not raised you from a poor and lowly station to the pinnacle of honour and rank. How comes it then that so many benefits so many proofs of my love for you, well known to all, have so soon been obliterated from your mind, that you are not only ungrateful, but oppose me in everything?”
“I am not unmindful of the favours which, not you alone, but God who dispenses of all things has condescended to confer on me through you. Wherefore, far be it for me to show myself ungrateful or to act contrary to your will in anything, so long as it accorded with the will of God … you are indeed my liege Lord, but he is both your Lord and mine, to ignore whose will in order to obey yours would be expedient neither for you nor for me … for temporal lords are to be obeyed, not against God as saith St Peter, ‘We ought to obey God rather than men’.”
“I don’t want a sermon from you. Are you not sprung from one of my villeins.”
“In truth I am not sprung from royal ancestors; neither was St Peter, prince of the Apostles on whom the Lord deigned to confer the keys of the Kingdom of Heaven and the primacy of the whole Church.”
“True, but he died for his Lord.”
“And, I will die for my Lord when the time comes.”
“You trust to much to the ladder you have mounted by.”
“I trust and rely on God for cursed is the man who putteth his hope in man. Nevertheless whatever you may say and I answer, as of old so now, I am ready for your honour and pleasure, saving my order.”
Henry promised the pope and the English bishops that he had no intention of taking any steps against the clerical order. The omission of the phrase “saving my order”, his envoys said, was not a step in a covert attack on the rights of the church. It was a matter of honour for him. Others were tempted by this blandishment. Not so Becket. He told Hillary of Chichester:
“The King has promised you that he will make no demands on you that may be against your order. If he wants to he will keep his word; if not, nobody is going to oppose him. But you, you will be compelled to keep what you have promised, for you are his man and he will make you keep it.”
Pope Alexander increased his efforts to have Becket compromise. He chose as his emissary Phillip, abbot of L’Aumone, a universally respected Cistercian, who had been Bernard of Clairvaux’s prior and acquired some of the late saint’s moral power. His mission called on Becket at his Harrow manor. He said that he accepted Henry’s assurances that the omission of the reference “saving my order” was simply a matter of face and that there was no threat to the church in its omission.
Becket finally agreed. He called on the king at Oxford Castle and promised to accept the customs without qualification. To Becket’s surprise – because of the assurances that only a formal submission was required – Henry demanded that the surrender should, like the earlier defiance, be delivered at a full Council meeting. Henry required a public humiliation.
The meeting was convened for January at Henry’s hunting lodge at Clarendon a few miles east of Salisbury. With his customary impish swagger in victory, Henry could not refrain from rubbing salt into Becket’s wounds. He chose to spend Christmas at the castle of Berkhamsted, which he had just expropriated from Becket – publicly parading the consequences of impudence past.
Henry called together as complete a Council of tenants-in-chief as could reasonably be expected to be available at any one time, to bear witness to Becket’s humiliation. Ten earls, two archbishops, twelve bishops and numerous royal officials and barons, assembled at Clarendon in January.
The precise sequence of events at Clarendon cannot be reconstructed with any assurance. There are too many gaps and inconsistencies in the documents that have survived. One thing is quite clear, however. Becket prevaricated. Contrary to what he had told the king, he was reluctant to give an unqualified promise. Days of threats and blandishments followed.
The four tempters, which T S Eliot locates in the days before the martyrdom – sensuous pleasure, political power, revenge and the glory of martyrdom – would all have been present in Becket’s mind at Clarendon.
The First Tempter said to him, as he spurned it:
“You were not used to be so hard on sinners
When they were your friends …”
and left him with a cynical aside:
“I leave you to the pleasures of your higher vices,
which will have to be paid for at higher prices.”
The first such arrived in the form of the Second Tempter, who said:
“Real power is purchased at the price of a certain submission. Your spiritual power is earthly perdition. Power is present for him who will wield.”
When asked what was required in exchange, the Tempter replied:
“Pretence of priestly power.”
Eliot cast Becket’s reaction as dismissive:
“Those who put their faith in worldly order
Not controlled by the order of God
…
Degrade what they exalt.”
The Third Tempter, revenge, explained that there was no hope of reconciliation and Becket should align himself with the barons, some of whom wished to rid themselves of royal authority. Becket responded:
“To make then break, this thought has come before
The desperate exercise of failing power
Sampson in Gaza did no more.
But if I break, I must break myself alone.”
Finally, the Fourth unexpected, Tempter: the glory of martyrdom. Becket refused, in perhaps the most famous lines of the play:
“The last temptation is the greatest treason:
To do the right deed for the wrong reason.”
Numerous pros and cons, such as these, must have gone through Becket’s mind at Clarendon about the correct position to adopt. No doubt the interests of the Church would have received determinative weight. Surrender may have become the best means of promoting those interests, even at the temporary expense of some aspects of independence.
As Becket delayed, the enraged king unleashed his bovine barons. According to Foliot, writing two years later, by which time he was in the king’s camp:
“We were all shut up in one chamber, and on the third day the princes and nobles of the realm, waxing hot in their wrath, burst into the chamber where we sat, threw off their cloaks and shook their fists at us exclaiming ‘Attend, all ye who set at nought the statutes of the realm and heed not the king’s commands. These hands, these arms, yea even our bodies are not our own but belong to our lord the king and they are ready at his nod to avenge every wrong done to him and to work his will, whatever it may be … Take fresh counsel then and bend your minds to his command, that you may avert the danger while yet there is time’.”
Suddenly Becket capitulated. On one version he returned to the Great Hall at Clarendon leading his flock of bishops and said:
My Lord King, if the dispute between us had resolved around my personal rights, I would have yielded to your will at once without the slightest opposition. But since it concerned the affairs of the Church, and since grave and dangerous matters have been brought forward on both sides, you should not regard it as strange or offensive that I have been so scrupulous in God’s cause. I know that I must account to God for my stewardship and He does not spare the wicked. Now trusting in your prudence and your clemency, I consent to your demand and I declare that I will observe the customs of the kingdom in good faith.”
The invocation of “prudence and clemency” was an oblique reference to the various promises Henry had made that only a formal submission was required and that he had no intention of forcing the archbishop to act in any way which would have been protected by the phrase “saving my order”. In the days immediately before the capitulation, two earls and two Templars had called on Becket – good cop, alternating with bad cop – making threats and offering assurances. The Templars reiterated the undertaking that Henry only wanted a victory to save face. This promise had already been made to the cardinals and the curia and to the saintly Phillip of L’Aumone.
The public capitulation was a dramatic moment and, it appears, a surprise to the bishops. On Becket’s express instructions each bishop made the same promise on oath.
Gilbert Foliot, the Bishop of London would later fling Becket’s inconstancy in his face:
“It was the leader of our chivalry who turned his back, the captain of our camp who fled; our Lord of Canterbury abandoned the society of his brethren and forsook our common counsel. He made his own decision, and when he returned to us after a space uttered these words, ‘It is the Lord’s will that I should forswear myself; for the present I submit and incur perjury, to do penance for it later as best I may.’ Hearing such words, we stood thunderstruck, clinging to each other with mutual astonishment … our archbishop himself acquiesced in the king’s prerogatives and the ancient customs of the realm and agreed to their being recorded.”
Becket’s inclination not to believe that the king would be satisfied with merely a formal submission, was affirmed by a letter he received after the Council at Clarendon from John of Canterbury, the third member of a clique on Theobold’s staff before the other two, Becket and Roger of Pont L’Eveque, had fallen out. John had recently been elevated by Henry to the position of Bishop of Poitiers the most important see of Acquitaine. John had adopted the same position as Becket on the issue of criminous clerks.
Indeed, a few years before John had infuriated the royal court in a case brought against a dean who had extracted twenty two shillings – twenty for the archdeacon and two for himself – to drop a charge of adultery against a burgess’ wife. The case was brought at the instigation of Henry who proclaimed that throughout the nation rapacious archdeacons extracted annually more than the royal revenue. The judgment of the clerical court, presided over by John of Canterbury, then Treasurer of York, ordered a full refund and imposed a fine payable to the archbishop. “What then” said Richard de Lucy, the king’s justiciar, “will you say to the king whose law has been broken”. Richard expected a moiety of the fine. “Nothing”, John had replied. “The man is a clerk”. Henry was furious but there was no permanent breach, as shown by John’s elevation to Poitiers.
Upon his appointment to Poitiers, Henry had told the bishop that he expected him to act in accordance with, the slightly different, customs dividing the clerical and lay jurisdictions in the region of Acquitaine. As John explained in his letter to Becket:
“They began with forbidding me in general terms and under severe denunciations to interfere with such things as concerned the King’s royal dignity; and when I readily promised to do so, they came to more specific points, forbidding me 1. to summon before me any inhabitant of my diocese at the suit either a widow, orphan or cleric, till the King’s law officer or the lord of the manor had failed to award justice. 2. to hear any complaint in cases of usury. 3. to pronounce sentence of excommunication against any baron, without first either consulting themselves or obtaining his consent to my judgment. These were the principal points in which I was said to interfere with the King’s prerogative and this especially in the case of clerics.”
A similar process occurred after the formal submission of the English bishops at Clarendon. The precise way in which the document, known as the “The Constitutions of Clarendon”, was compiled cannot be reconstructed from the surviving material. There are, however, marks of compromise and negotiation on the face of the document – sixteen numbered paragraphs dealing with a range of jurisdictional issues - which suggests a long and complicated process, involving the lawyers on the royal staff and also, probably, the bishops who had abandoned the common stand after Westminster.
It is quite unlikely that Herbert of Bosham is correct when he suggests that Henry’s demand that the customs should be written down, came as a complete surprise. The unprecedented step of a formal written statement of customs was ironically a step not itself sanctioned by custom. It was unprecedented in England.
However, a year before, in his capacity as duke of Normandy, Henry had reissued the statement of William I, pronounced at Lillebonne in 1080, and once before formally reissued by Henry I, which defined the jurisdictional privileges of bishops in Normandy and proclaimed that no new rights could be established without express approval of the duke. Henry’s position was a consistent one.
The relationship between the medieval Church and secular rulers is best understood in terms of federalism. There were two interconnected and overlapping jurisdictions.
At the federal level there was the European Union of Christendom, with baptism as a form of citizenship, a European Parliament in the form of Church Councils and territorial units of bishoprics exercising both executive and judicial authority, under the centralised control of the pope and the curia. There was a clear hierarchy of judicial authority, culminating in appeals to the pope.
The local unit of government was constituted by a variety of secular territories with their own interrelationships - monarchs, dukes, earls, lords and the like – also exercising both executive and judicial authority.
A critical issue was to identify the constitutional principle by which jurisdictional conflicts were to be resolved. All federations require a rule as to which jurisdiction prevails in the case of inconsistency. In Australia, s109 of the Commonwealth Constitution states that the rule of the centre shall prevail. The medieval canon law of the Church had a similar rule: an issue was subject to canon law, if canon law said it was. The Church proclaimed its constitutional authority to be superior. The scope of its jurisdiction was to be determined in accordance with its own interpretation of its jurisdiction.
Henry’s success in obtaining the concession of the bishops to the customs at Clarendon was inconsistent with such a principle. The very means by which he had obtained the bishops’ submission, supported the opposite approach, i.e. in the case of any conflict between customs and the canon law, the former would prevail.
Moreover, the freezing of those customs at an earlier date, rolled back the Church’s success in extending its authority over the last few decades. The canon law – consisting of papal decrees, the legislative canons of Church councils and the determinations of ecclesiastical courts – had been a disparate mass of undigested material during the reign of Henry I. Its first systematic compilation – the Decretum of the Bologna academic Gratian – which was quickly adopted as an authoritative statement – was not published until five years after the death of Henry I. In the years since the “‘customs of England” were now to be accepted as frozen in time, the canon law had developed dramatically.
The boundaries between clerical and secular authority were uncertain precisely because, in the federal structure of European governance, neither pope nor king asserted, or could command, total allegiance. The pluralism that continues to exist in the institutional structure of Western nations, finds it origins in this medieval conflict.
The preamble to the Constitutions of Clarendon sets the institutional tone: this was a proclamation of the “customs, liberties and rights” of the monarchy as such. The concluding words, however, were equally significant. They accepted that the Church and the barons also had rights:
“There are moreover rights and customs, both many and great, of the Holy Mother Church of the Lord King and of the barons of the realm, which are not contained in this writing; they are to be saved to the Holy Church, to the Lord King and to his heirs, and to the barons of the realm and are inviolably to be observed forever.”
The written specifications of some of these rights, would have to wait until the Church and the barons, together, forced Henry’s son John to issue the Magna Carta in 1215.
The Constitutions of Clarendon resolved a number of disputes of an institutional kind. There is nothing in the document which bears directly on the church’s religious functions. It reads like a political arrangement between two levels of governance in a federal system.
Article 12 repeats the formula for appointment of bishops and abbots which had resolved the dispute between Henry I and Archbishop Anselm – recognised at the time to be a compromise between the claims of the Crown and the dictates of strict canon law, by requiring a bishop or abbot to formally do homage to the king before his consecration, using the customary formula – an ironic echo of the trigger for the recent dispute - “homage and fielty to the Lord King as to his liege lord, the life limb and earthly honour, saving the rights of his order”.
Perhaps the most controversial Article was 3, with respect to criminous clerks. This was the provision which Henry had suggested at Westminster: clerics would be tried in an ecclesiastical court and, if found guilty, would be deprived of its protection. However, the most important aspect of clause 3 – which appears to be a development on the proposal at Westminster – is the assertion that it was for the king’s court to decide whether or not the ecclesiastical court had any jurisdiction. The clause provided:
“A clerk cited and accused of any matter shall, when summoned by the king’s justice come before the king’s court to answer there concerning matters which shall seem to the king’s court to be answerable there and before the ecclesiastical court for what shall seem to be answerable there.”
To whom, in the latter respect, was left to implication.
This was a fundamental challenge to the separate role of Church courts and the Church’s understandable desire to protect the clergy from the irrational modes of proof still extant in lay courts – trial by ordeal would not be banned by the Church until the Lateran Council of 1215 - and from the barbaric punishments of maiming and mutilation to which clerics would become subject.
The Constitutions also contained a number of express assertions of royal control over the internal deliberations of the church. No tenant in chief could be excommunicated without the King’s consent and no person under the king’s control could be excommunicated until the king’s representatives had been asked to bring him to justice and failed to do so. Furthermore, no appeal could be made to the pope without the King’s consent and no senior cleric was permitted to leave England without such consent. At least nine of the sixteen Articles were in conflict with the canon law.
Becket resisted Henry’s demand to affix his seal to the document. He nevertheless acknowledged the written version, which had been executed in triplicate, by publicly accepting one of the three copies. Another copy was retained in the Royal archives. The final copy was handed to the archbishop of York, pointedly treated by the king – who could not resist imposing this final humiliation – as Becket’s equal. There can be no doubt that by his oral promise, and by accepting delivery of the document, Becket and the English church were bound by the customs so declared. Henry’s triumph was complete.
Writing after the martyrdom, many of Becket’s biographers assert an immediate repentance after Clarendon. They speak of “groans”, “remorse”, “transgression” and the like. There is, however, no credible evidence that Becket did anything other than accept the binding force of what he had agreed at Clarendon. Assertions of some kind of resistance are not supported with any actual example of conduct. Nevertheless, Becket must have been depressed by the magnitude of his defeat. This was not just a personal humiliation, although it was that. It was also a failure in the performance of his overriding duty to the institution he now served.
Herbert of Bosham’s version has the stamp of truth:
“Now I begin to see that it is through me and because of my sins, that the English church is reduced to bondage … she who before reigned as sovereign lady is now through me, wretch that I am, visibly reduced to servitude … It is all my fault that the church is destined to suffer these things in my time. For I was promoted to this office, not like my predecessors from the service of the church but from the court; not from the cloister of some religious house nor from the school of the Saviour, but from Caesar’s household … In truth my past life has been far from conducive to the safety of the Church and now she has been undone through me.”
Henry’s emissaries, seeking the approval of Pope Alexander to the Constitutions, carried with them letters of support from both Becket and Roger of York. Henry’s agenda to continue the punishment of Becket and to marginalise him was maintained by the reiteration, on the part of the same envoys, that Roger should be appointed papal legate for the whole of England.
Alexander explained his position in a letter to Becket of 27 February:
“In the matter of the ancient constitutions and dignities, though you and others had given your consent to them, yet we would not grant his request. But that we might not altogether exasperate him against us, and also for your own sake, and considering the evil nature of the times, we have granted the legation to the above named archbishop. And, for as much as condescension must be shown to the will of princes, we advise, and in every way exhort your prudence, to consider well the necessities of the times and the perils which may befall the Church, and so endeavour to please the King, saving the credit of the ecclesiastical order, that you may not by doing otherwise, set him against both you and us, and cause those who are of a different spirit to mock and deride us. We will not fail, when an opportunity offers, to speak to the King in every way that may tend to maintain and to increase your honour, and any rights and privileges of your church.”
In a separate letter, apparently for Becket’s eyes only, which was also probably sent on 27 February, Alexander tried to reinforce the reassurance of the last sentence by suggesting that the legation – like the authority for Roger of York to perform a coronation ceremony - was simply a matter of posturing, without practical consequence:
“Let not your heart fail you, my brother, because the legation has been granted; for the ambassador who gave us beforehand an assurance from the King, and offered themselves to confirm it on oath, that the letter should not be delivered to the archbishop without your knowledge and consent. You cannot believe it is our wish to humble you or your church by subjecting it to any other than the Roman pontiff. Wherefore we advise your prudence, as soon as ever the king shall be known to have delivered the letters, which we cannot easily believe he will do without your knowledge, to inform us at once of it by letter, that we may, without delay, declare you and your church and city to be exempt from all legatine jurisdiction.”
Becket could hardly have been reassured by Alexander’s private fallback position, which would have reduced Becket to no more than the bishop of Kent. In any event, Henry rejected the condition and sent another delegation to Alexander requesting an unqualified legation for Roger.
The ambassador arrived at the papal court on the very day that news arrived of the death of the anti-pope, Octavian. Temporarily - for Frederick Barbarossa would soon appoint a successor - Alexander believed that his position was sufficiently strengthened for him to reject Henry’s request. Nevertheless, perhaps as a gesture to Henry, he now agreed to the king’s other campaign to humiliate Becket. He directed Becket to consecrate Clarimbald as abbot of St Augustine’s, without making a formal profession of obedience to the archbishop. Perhaps Alexander hoped that Henry would be satisfied with such a small measure of vengeance. That was not likely.
On 1 April 1164, Becket officiated at the dedication of a church at Reading Abbey, in the presence of ten of his suffragan bishops. The abbey, founded by Henry I, was the king’s family shrine. The first Henry was buried there and, in 1156, the second Henry had buried his first son, William, there. The abbey had a relic of the first importance – the hand of St James – brought back from Germany by Henry II’s mother, the Empress Matilda. As Becket publicly proclaimed an indulgence of forty days for anyone visiting the shrine, his mind could well have gone back to the royal Council of 17 July 1157 when he, as chancellor, had participated in the decision to refuse the request of the Emperor Frederick Barbarossa, for the return of the sacred relic to the emperor. It was at that very Council meeting that his predecessor, Theobold, had finally exacted a public profession of obedience from Sylvester, abbot of St Augustine’s – the very step which the pope, at the urging of the king, had just denied him.
Henry II’s mind, however, probably focussed on a more directly pertinent precedent, probably standing before him in the choir. One of the nondescript monks at Reading was Henry of Essex, banished to the monastery only a year before. Henry of Essex had been one of the king’s closest associates. He served as a constable, as a sheriff, as an itinerant justice and, indeed, had served as joint commander with Becket himself of the troops in Toulouse.
In 1157, two years before that campaign, Henry of Essex, the hereditary bearer of the royal standard, had, during the king’s invasion of northern Wales, prematurely panicked and fled the battlefield. Despite this he had retained a relationship with the king for six years. Then, for reasons which are not apparent, the king turned on him, accused him of cowardice and treason in the Welsh campaign. The issue was settled in Becket’s presence at Oxford on 6 April 1163, by the Norman method of proof, trial by battle. Essex lost. He promptly forfeited all of his estates to the king and - probably as a gesture of mercy – was tonsured a clerk at nearby Reading Abbey. He remained there as a monk.
This was the kind of future that Henry now had in mind for Becket.
The next instrument chosen by Henry for his campaign of harassment against the archbishop was John Fitzgilbert, a loyal soldier who had served Henry I and had lost an eye in the service of Henry’s mother. Known as John the Marshall, after the office he occupied in the Exchequer, in which office he had succeeded his father by 1130. His own son, William, would become the earl of Pembroke. John, who had been present at Clarendon as a member of the royal household, now made a claim for the occupation of some land within the archbishop’s manor of Pagham in Sussex. The land was one of those which had been forcibly reoccupied by Becket who, like any other magnate, had many men at arms in his service. John’s claim to possession had been overruled in the archbishop’s court.
John appealed to the king by means of one of the king’s writs. The returnable royal writ was one of the great inheritances that the Norman kings had acquired from the Anglo Saxon monarchy. Flexible in its application and issued in various peremptory forms - forbidding, commanding or informing and, increasingly, requiring attendance before an impartial tribunal to answer a complaint - the procedure was being used more and more frequently. Certain standardised forms had begun to emerge. They were to be gradually transformed from executive commands into judicial processes. This would prove to be the foundation of the common law.
The origins of the returnable writ lay in the fiction that access to the royal courts was exceptional, indeed that it was a privilege. The invention in the king’s chancery of new kinds of writs and their progressive standardisation by royal justices, concealed in the forms of a judicial process what was, in essence, legislation.
The writ in the case of John the Marshall, ad hoc though it probably was, is referred to by historians as the earliest example of what would become standardised as the writ of novel disseisin. This proved to be one of the most significant developments in English legal history. Pursuant to this procedure the king’s courts offered a new form of remedy for any landholder who claimed to have been unjustly dispossessed by a more powerful baron. This became one of the most important areas of jurisdiction exercised by the king’s courts. It maintained the peace by restraining self help in claims for restoration of land. After the anarchy of Stephen’s reign, there were many claims of dispossession to be resolved. The concept of seisin helped keep the peace. The more difficult issues involved in establishing ownership, took too long.
It was a necessary pre-condition for the invocation of the superior jurisdiction of the king in this, as in other respects, that the person seeking the writ solemnly swear that justice had been refused in the lower court – that he had been disseised “unjustly and without judgment”, as the ultimate form of the writ required. False oaths were not unknown. John the Marshall had sworn his oath on a service book called a troper, rather than on the gospels or on a sacred relic. The suggestion was that this would enable him to avoid a charge of perjury.
By the writ, Becket was summoned to appear before the king on 14 September. Ignoring the precise terms of the king’s order – which required his personal attendance – Becket sent representatives with letters from himself and from the king’s own officer, the sheriff of Kent, which outlined the weaknesses of John’s claim, his failure of proof and, most significantly, John’s failure to properly invoke the king’s appellate jurisdiction by making a proper oath.
This may have appeared to be a provocative act – not that Henry required any provocation. It suggested that, notwithstanding his defeat at Clarendon, Becket would not be cowered. If so, this was a re-emergence of the personal posturing that had already created friction. Becket’s pride – both personal and institutional – would still not allow him to display the formal servility which Henry demanded, indeed which he appeared to crave with a pathological intensity.
The king ranted at the messengers, as was his usual way, whenever his will was questioned. Eventually, he accepted the formal security each gave and which they would forfeit if the archbishop did not appear personally on the next occasion. He issued summonses to his tenants-in-chief – the barons, bishops and senior abbots – to attend a Council at Northampton on 6 October. All of the summonses were issued in the customary form, except that directed to Becket. Refusing to address him personally – in part perhaps to avoid the formal salutation of greetings and well-wishes – Henry ordered the sheriff of Kent to summon the primate. This was not a meeting of the Council to which Becket was invited as a royal councillor. This was to be a trial.
The issue before the court was not to be the formal appeal by John the Marshall. Indeed, Henry’s barons may not have entirely approved of the king’s court dealing with a dispute that would traditionally be dealt with in a baron’s court – in this case, that of the archbishop. They would have been sensitive to the principle that a lord should not lose his court, unless he failed to do justice in that court. On the other hand many would have acquired land which once belonged to the church. The suggestion that Becket’s claim against John was based on the canon law principle of the inalienability of church property, would have been a threat to many. The balance of interests may well have been in favour of accepting the protection of the royal courts against the broad claim of the canon law.
Choosing his ground carefully, Henry accused Becket of contempt of court. No matter how good his defence to John’s claim was, he should have appeared on 14 September to deliver it in person.
The Council summoned at Northampton for 6 October commenced with a series of petty but calculated insults. The king arrived a day late – he was hawking. Becket found that one of the king’s knights had taken up part of his lodging and he had to ask the king to remove him. John the Marshall was still in London on Exchequer business and the matter was deferred until the next day, Thursday 8 October.
William Fitzstephens who was one of Becket’s large entourage at Northampton, reported that day’s events:
“When the bishops, earls and all the barons of England as well as many from Normandy, had taken their seats … the archbishop was accused of contempt of the Crown because, although summoned by the King at the suit of John he had neither come nor given a valid excuse. The archbishop’s defence was not accepted when he declared the wrongs committed by John and maintained the validity and integrity of the jurisdiction of his own court in this matter. The king demanded judgment and the archbishop’s defence was wholly rejected.”
The judgment was that of the king in council, with the involvement of all the bishops. The usual punishment was imposed: the archbishop was condemned to forfeit all his goods and moveables to the King’s mercy. It was customary that such a penalty – traditional in form – would be commuted into a reasonable fine commensurate with the particular offence. However this was not a usual trial. The fine was set at the amount of five hundred pounds. The bishops agreed to stand surety. What followed was as grotesque an abuse of power that the long history of royal pique has recorded.
Without notice, Henry demanded that Becket account, on the spot, for the sum of three hundred pounds which had gone through his hands as custodian of the two royal castles of Eye and Berkhamsted. Becket, rejecting the preposterous demand that he could answer such a charge immediately, asserted that the whole of the amount had been spent on improvements at those castles and at the Tower of London. Nevertheless, expressing a reluctance that a question of mere money should be the source of a quarrel, Becket agreed to pay the sum.
The next day Henry made fresh demands – the overnight delay suggesting that not even he had come fully prepared to proceed in this way, but that this was an unpremeditated rolling royal fury.
First, he demanded repayment of a loan of five hundred pounds which he had made to his former chancellor for the military campaign in Toulouse, five years before. Becket again pointed out that he had no notice that such a claim would be made and asserted that the amount was a grant and not a loan. Becket was required to find sureties for the amount. His indignant assertion that his property was obviously greater than this sum could only have aggravated the king’s mood. Henry probably regarded the statement as defiance, rather than the meek submission before the entire English political elite, which he was seeking.
Henry also demanded a formal account of all the vacant bishoprics and abbeys which Becket had administered in the king’s name during his chancellorship, said to be in the order of twenty thousand pounds. This had become a vendetta. It had become clear that the king wanted Becket removed from office.
As Henry ordered the gates of the castle closed – forbidding anyone to leave without his consent – Becket consulted his bishops about the claim for a formal account of Becket’s superintendence of finances whilst Chancellor.
Hilary of Chichester made the king’s wishes plain:
“The king is reported to have said, that either he or you must resign … It is better, therefore, to throw yourself entirely on his mercy.”
Gilbert Foliot knew better than anyone that the church’s spiritual authority could not tolerate a king being able to, in effect, dismiss a bishop, let alone the archbishop of Canterbury. This principle, however, did not necessarily apply to a person who should never have been made an archbishop, his frequently proclaimed opinion of Becket. Foliot revealed a keen appreciation of the king’s near pathological need to appear to be dominant in all matters at all times:
“If you could only remember, my father, the condition from which his majesty raised you and what benefits he has conferred on you, also the ruin which hangs over the church and all of us if you persist in your opposition to the king, you would not only give up your see, but ten times as much if it were in your power; and perhaps the king would recompense your humility by giving it back again.”
Becket bitterly dismissed this advice with – according to one of his biographers – a curt reference to Foliot’s thwarted ambition to succeed Theobold and, perhaps even now, Becket himself:
“It is enough. Your opinion is evident; so are your motives.”
It was left to the elder statesman of the church, Henry of Winchester, to remind the assembled bishops that when he performed the consecration ceremony of Becket, he had extracted a release from all royal claims. This had been given in the king’s name by his son. The debts were remitted on the promotion - “like sins in baptism”, Foliot would later scoff.
Henry of Winchester made a more telling point:
“This discussion is most pernicious to the Church of Canterbury and ought to make us blush for shame. If our archbishop, the primate of all England, shall set us the example of resigning the cure of souls committed to his charge at the beck and nod of a temporal sovereign what will become of the whole Church: there will be no more regard paid to rights and privileges, but anarchy will ensue and the priest will be no better than the people.”
The Council was not scheduled to sit the next day, a Sunday. Frantic consultations, and no doubt preparations for the final act, proceeded apace. On Monday – to Henry’s openly expressed scepticism and indignation – Becket was ill with, what the symptoms suggest, was a renal colic, to which he was prone and which could well have been brought on by the most acute stress to which he had ever been subject. For Becket had resolved that the abject surrender which Henry craved, was impossible.
Putting aside questions of personal pride – which could not have been absent – Becket’s most abiding characteristic was his sense of honour. That was expressed, in accordance with the mores of the time, in the form of complete loyalty to the institution he served. Compromise was possible, within limits. Dissembling was sometimes advisable, within limits. What Henry now demanded was beyond all limits.
To resign at the king’s behest would be to acknowledge the Church’s subjection to secular power. Perversely, by his resignation – rather than as originally feared, by his appointment – Becket would be remembered as the instrument of such subjection.
Early the next morning, Tuesday 13 October 1164, Becket rode past the hushed crowds that had gathered in the streets of Northampton. His expression was one of stern resolution – “the face of a man and at once the face of a lion”, Herbert of Bosham would later recall. Becket dismounted in the castle courtyard and, as the gates clanged shut behind him, he took the primatial cross from his cross bearer and proceeded across the yard, brandishing it before him defiantly.
One of the bishops stepped forward and said: “Suffer me my Lord to carry the cross, which is much better than that you should carry it yourself.”
“No my son”, he replied “suffer me to retain it as the banner under which I fight.”
Foliot tried to wrest the provocative symbol from his hands: “Look now, my lord archbishop, such conduct as this tends only to disturb the peace, for the king will arm himself with his sword and then we will have a king and an archbishop well matched against each other.”
“Be it so”, Becket replied. “My cross is the sign of peace and I will not let it go. The king’s sword is an instrument of war”.
Foliot reacted with exasperation: “He was always a fool and he will always be one”.
This very primatial cross – a wooden staff surmounted by a bronze cross, most likely gilded, with a figure of the Saviour superimposed – would feature once again during the martyrdom.
Addressing the assembled bishops, Becket gave them an order which manifested his open defiance:
“I now enjoin you all, in virtue of your obedience and in peril of your orders, not to be present in any cause which may be moved against my person: and to prevent you from doing so I appeal to that refuge of the distressed, the Holy Roman See.”
As Becket retired to a small antechamber off the main hall on the ground floor, the bishops were summoned to the full Council meeting on the floor above. Just then Roger, Archbishop of York, plainly advised of the imminent climax, swept past, preceded by his own cross bearer, in open defiance of tradition that proscribed this assertion of symbolic equality when the archbishop of York was in the province of the archbishop of Canterbury. Roger had carefully absented himself from all of the deliberations of the bishops, although obviously close at hand, according to William Fitzstephen “in order to avoid the appearance of being of the king’s party”. Roger had come in for the kill.
In the Council meeting upstairs the bishops reported Becket’s defiance. He had breached two clauses of the Constitutions of Clarendon. He had purported to prohibit the bishops from participating as councillors of the King and he had defied the proscription on appeals to Rome without the king’s consent.
The king – who it is by now unnecessary to state did not react with equanimity – dispatched a number of barons to ask the archbishop whether he intended to honour his promise to uphold the Constitutions and also to submit to the court in the matter of the account of his financial administration as chancellor. However, the breach was now complete. Becket said:
“My lords, I acknowledge myself bound by oath and fealty to his Majesty as his liege man, and it is my duty to show him all earthly honour and fidelity saving my obedience to God, the dignity of the church and my own episcopal character.”
The reference to “saving my order” had become a more elaborate list of exemptions. Becket continued:
“I am summoned here to answer in the matter of John Marshall, but am bound to nothing else whatever, neither to answer to any other charge, nor to render any pecuniary accounts … When I was archbishop elect, before my consecration, the king gave me indemnity for all previous transactions. Most of you are aware of the fact and all the ecclesiastics of the kingdom know it well. I pray you to make this evident to the king, for it would be unsafe to produce witnesses of the fact, nor am I willing to do so, for I will not litigate this matter … As regards the bishops, I blamed them for passing so severe a sentence on a single instance of neglect of court, which did not amount to contumacy. I also appeal from their judgment; I forbid their proceeding any further to judge me; I appeal from the sentence and place myself and my church, under the protection of God and the sovereign Pontiff.”
This was a declaration of war or, rather, a resumption of hostilities.
The bishops were left in a dilemma. They were obliged to sit in the king’s court and give him their advice. However, they were also obliged to obey their ecclesiastical superior. It was probably Gilbert Foliot who proposed the ingenious compromise. The bishops were excused from sitting in judgment, on the condition that they should unanimously appeal to the pope on the grounds of Becket’s breach of his own oath to uphold the Constitutions and his order to the bishops to take the same oath, which he now required them to break.
As Becket stepped through the chamber – again raising his own cross like a battle standard – to howls of abuse like “traitor” and “perjurer" from the sycophantic barons, he traded insults like the Norman he was. He reminded one baron of his relative who was hung as a criminal and a second of his parents’ failure to marry. “Were I a knight”, he told another, “my sword should answer that foul speech”. This was not the exit of a man preoccupied with matters spiritual.
Henry – mastering his temper – immediately understood the dangers inherent in this new situation. He dispatched a herald to proclaim safe conduct for the archbishop. At midnight, the suspicious archbishop escaped by the unguarded north gate of the city, through the torrential rain of an autumn gale. First he travelled north, deceptively away from the Channel ports. Disguised as a Gilbertine lay brother, he slowly made his way back down the coast and, three weeks after his escape from Northampton, crossed the Channel in a small boat – first to Flanders and then France. The battleground shifted to the papal curia, also in exile at Sens.
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