Betrayals

Exactly how different the decade of the 1160s would be from the previous one the queen was soon to discover. Until the siege of Toulouse, the lucky years had shimmered and slid together, the future appeared so full of promise that the Plantagenets seemed touched by magic or the hand of a benign God. But Christmas of 1159 at Falaise cannot have been a happy one for Eleanor. For the past month, snow and biting winds had swept the Norman countryside, the December sky was colored like iron, and within the cheerless castle where William the Conqueror had been born, the atmosphere was overcast by failure. Henry was not a man to suffer patiently a wife’s sarcasms or recriminations, but on the other hand, neither was Eleanor a person to dissemble her feelings about a war so closely bound up with her own personal ambitions. Like Becket, she could see that Louis, bumbler though he might be, had been successful in confounding the king. Accustomed as she had grown to thinking of Louis as a fool and Henry as the clever one, it must have been unsettling to discover that perhaps her images of both men had been distorted. Henry’s failure at Toulouse seemed enormous to Eleanor, and although there was no open quarreling, the signs of coolness between them were apparent.

Usually, Christmas courts brought on a fierce lust in Henry, but this Christmas, unlike others, Eleanor did not conceive. Perhaps after six years of almost continuous pregnancy she was relieved to take a rest. Henry, a person who did not dwell for very long on either success or failure, had already appeared to have forgotten Toulouse, and now he grew adamant in pressing Eleanor to return to England. She had been absent from the kingdom for a year—he had been away for over two—and while his trust in Richard of Luci and Robert of Leicester remained intact, this was too long a period to leave England unattended by either himself or Eleanor. Perhaps more crucial, however, was his imperative need for money.

Before the Christmas holiday ended, Eleanor left Falaise, and on December 29, despite the bad weather, she boarded the royal yacht Esnecca with young Henry and Matilda and crossed the Channel. Her movements during the next few months are reminiscent of Henry’s when the chroniclers declared that he appeared to fly from city to city throughout his domains. At Westminster and Winchester, Eleanor arranged for coin to be loaded on carts and packhorses. Whether following Henry’s instructions or by her own authority, she escorted the treasury collection to Southampton, where it was loaded on the Esnecca, but instead of riding back to London, she accompanied the precious cargo to Barfleur, saw it safely unloaded, and then returned immediately to Southampton.

That unfortunate business at Toulouse began to recede from her thoughts as she plunged at once into her administrative duties. To judge from the pipe rolls, she led a peripatetic life, journeying from London to Middlesex to Southampton to Berkshire, from Surrey to Cambridge to Winchester to Dorsetshire, and everywhere she could see signs of growing prosperity. At the same time the records show that, no matter how slovenly a way of life Henry may have accepted, the Eagle believed in living well. During that winter of 1160, one of intense severity, she made numerous improvements in her quarters at Winchester; she ordered vast quantities of wine from Bordeaux, as well as incense, oil for her lamps, and toys for her three boys, now aged five, two and a half, and eighteen months. “For the repair of the Chapel and of the houses and of the walls and of the garden of the Queen ... and for the transport of the Queen’s robe and of her wine and of her Incense, and of the Chests of her Chapel, and for the boys’ shields ... and for the Queen’s chamber and chimney and cellar. 22£. 13s. 2d.” In Hampshire alone she signed thirteen writs authorizing payment to herself of £226, as well as £56 for the expenses of her eldest son, and in London she spent two silver marks on gold to gild the royal cups. By contemporary standards, she was living lavishly, even for a queen.

During this period, her life as regent of England was one in which her husband played little real part. Essentially a person of independent temperament, she functioned most happily when left to her own devices. Although couriers bearing instructions from the king constantly traversed the Channel, the responsibility for carrying out those orders devolved entirely upon herself. Perhaps it was her obsessive need for meaningful work that made her an ideal partner for Henry.

She was thirty-eight years old, no longer the rather frivolous girl who, in the Ile-de-France, had been more concerned with banquets and clothes than attending meetings of the curia. By now, however, she had proved herself an efficient executive, a wife of unswerving loyalty who would dedicate herself to implementing policies that her brilliant young husband had devised. The day had not yet arrived when she would be less willing to play the role of workhorse who unquestioningly carried out policies in whose making she had had no voice.

In the meantime, Henry remained on the Continent for the third successive year. In the summer of 1160, a situation came to his attention that demanded some sort of action, although precisely what sort was not yet apparent. During the six years of Louis Capet’s second marriage, Constance had conceived only once, the little princess Marguerite now under the care of the Plantagenets. Nobody knew quite so well as Eleanor how infrequently Louis made use of the marriage bed, and perhaps this accounts for the fact that both she and Henry had lulled themselves into believing that the Capetians would remain heirless. Now, however, came an unexpected and alarming piece of information: Queen Constance was expecting a child shortly. Not content to wait until the birth had taken place, Henry took steps to deal with all contingencies and in September he issued a frantic call to Eleanor, insisting that she drop everything and hurry to Rouen with young Henry and Princess Matilda. For a change, Henry’s attention was focused, not on his son, but on his daughter, whom he intended to betroth to the house of Capet in case their latest issue should be male. If his son could not sit on the Frankish throne, then his daughter would. One way or another, he planned to emerge the victor. In the end, though, all his furious preparations and precautionary measures turned out to be useless.

On October 4, Louis Capet was struck by a double calamity, one that even the farsighted Henry could not have predicted. After a difficult confinement, Queen Constance was delivered of a second princess and then, as if determined to avoid facing the fresh catastrophe she had inflicted on the royal family, closed her eyes and “passed from this world.” The effect on Louis was immediate and decisive. In this crisis, he was forced to face some painful truths: At the age of forty, he had four daughters, no son, and now, no queen. There was no time to waste. Within days of Constance’s death, he arranged to marry Adele of Blois and Champagne, the youngest sister of his future sons-in-law, Henry of Champagne and Theobald of Blois, thereby renewing the possibility of his having a son and abruptly rearranging the chessboard of twelfth-century European politics. That Louis should form an intimate alliance with the house of Blois, from which King Stephen had come and from which a possible pretender to the throne of England might arise someday, provided a grave threat to Henry’s security. Despite his rage at Constance, who had the effrontery to die in childbirth, and against Louis, who was behaving with uncharacteristic common sense, he never allowed himself to become the victim of circumstance if he could possibly help it. To retaliate, he countered with a move as ingenious as Louis’s had been peremptory.

On November 2, while Louis was busy preparing for his wedding, due to take place the following week, the Plantagenets celebrated a marriage of their own; the Princess Marguerite, fetched from her guardian, Robert of Newburgh, was transported to Rouen, where she was quietly, one might even say sneakily, married to Henry’s son, “although they were as yet but little children, crying in the cradles.” Although they were hardly infants—Henry was five; Marguerite, two—the marriage of two such very young persons was, nevertheless, highly irregular, so much so that special dispensations were necessary. Fortunately for Henry, two cardinals seeking his support were residing at his court at that very time. After Pope Adrian IV died in 1159, schism rent the Church again as rival popes claimed the Chair of Saint Peter, and even though Henry had already assured one of the papal candidates, Alexander III, of his support, emissaries were still pleading his cause. Thus, when Henry needed a favor, they were only too eager to be of service. Henry did not invite the bride’s father to the nuptials, although he was careful to conduct the affair strictly in accordance with the canons so that Louis would have no cause for complaint. A king who was to be married within the week had many important matters on his mind. He should not be distracted or inconvenienced by minor considerations. Since the bride was not yet of an age at which she might have demanded her father’s presence, indeed it is doubtful whether she fully understood what was going on, Henry proceeded on fairly safe ground; immediately upon conclusion of the formalities, again without notifying Louis, he claimed Marguerite’s dowry from the Order of the Templars, who had been holding it in trust for the princess. Having satisfactorily demonstrated that he had fulfilled the terms of this treaty with Louis, he received from the Templars the much-disputed buffer zone of the Vexin and immediately began to fortify Gisors and other principal castles.

In spite of Henry’s precautions, it cannot have been long before Louis learned of what had happened. Coming so quickly on the heels of all the other racking upheavals he had recently suffered, he can be forgiven for overreacting to the indecent haste of a marriage that should not have taken place for at least another ten years and that neatly deprived him of Marguerite’s dowry. Once again, Henry had made a fool of him. In reprisal, he expelled the untrustworthy Templars from Paris and, with the aid of young Theobald of Blois, fortified his future son-in-law’s castle of Chaumont on the river Loire in an attempt to threaten Henry’s territory of Touraine. Having anticipated such a counterattack, Henry immediately rushed to the scene of the action, where he dramatically relieved Theobald of his castle, a piece of real estate that he had been eyeing for some time. By this time, it was late November, and the season’ for fighting was at an end. Extraordinarily well pleased with themselves, the Plantagenets withdrew with their children and new daughter-in-law to Le Mans, where they celebrated an extremely exuberant Christmas. So clever had been Henry’s moves to checkmate Louis that any lingering resentment Eleanor might still have harbored from the Toulouse war now largely evaporated. She could not be angry with a man of his genius, and that December she conceived again.

In April 1161, Archbishop Theobald of Canterbury died. If Eleanor and Henry owed their throne to any single person, it was to the old man who had faithfully supported Empress Matilda and arranged the Treaty of Winchester by which Henry was assured as Stephen’s heir. It was he who had safeguarded the empty throne after Stephen’s death, he who had brought about England’s peaceful transition from the house of Blois to the new regime of the Plantagenets, and he who had bestowed upon the young king his much-beloved chancellor, Thomas Becket: Perhaps the aged archbishop was not expecting too much by feeling that Henry owed him, if not a huge debt of gratitude, then at the least a small amount of appreciation. During the illness preceding his death, he had sent a number of letters to Normandy, pleading and then ordering, with the king’s permission of course, Becket’s return to England before he died. Henry flatly refused. Thomas, he declared, was indispensable and could not be spared at that particular time. But behind these official protestations, Eleanor would have detected the symptoms of jealous paranoia that she now knew to be part of Henry’s temperament: Those in his family and household could have no other affections, no matter how innocuous, and all interests must be subordinated to his needs. In a last pathetic letter to Henry, Theobald had written, “My flesh is worn, my limbs wearied by age and toil, and long and grave illness warns me that the end of my days will soon be upon me. I was hoping that I might once more look upon your face, so long desired, before I die.” But Henry had other things on his mind that did not permit a visit to England.

At this time, a phenomenal building craze seems to have broken out all over Europe. In the Île-de-France, Louis madly built new churches, while Henry threw himself into a program of modernizing his castles, adding stonework to their facades and constructing more comfortable living quarters within. “He strengthened and repaired nearly all of his castles which were situated on the borders of Normandy and he made a royal park and a royal residence near Rouen. Near Caen, he built a house for lepers, an astonishing structure.” Not only in Normandy but in England, Anjou, Maine, and Touraine he either repaired old castles or built new ones. Taking advantage of his new passion, Eleanor made certain that a goodly share of building funds went to Aquitaine, and it was probably at this time that she prevailed upon her husband to restore the city of Poitiers. New walls, bridges, churches, markets, and shops transformed her ancestral city into a showplace, a very model of the latest in urban development. In the refurbishing of the ducal palace can be seen the hand of the queen, who, if she did not supervise the construction, at least made sure that the rebuilding proceeded according to her own specifications. Unlike Henry’s other castles, here was no drafty feudal fortress suitable for dogs and falcons and soldiers lolling on a straw-strewn floor, no milieu in which only a man would feel comfortable. Instead, the spacious hall was adorned with graceful arcaded walls and with windows opening out to an enchanting view of the valley and rivers below; small private chambers were added to the palace, intimate rooms where a lady might retire to be alone with her thoughts and desires, memories and fantasies. Although Henry’s construction focused on the secular, two new churches were planned for Poitiers: the ornate Notre-Dame-la-Grande, whose sculptured facade resembles a gingerbread dollhouse, and the immense Cathedral of Saint-Pierre with its domed vault over a crossing of pointed arches, a style that would be known as Angevin, or Plantagenet, Gothic.

The summer passed pleasantly, and in September, Eleanor gave birth to her second daughter and sixth child by Henry at Domfront, in Normandy. The princess was given Eleanor’s name and baptized in a showy ceremony by Cardinal Henry of Pisa, the same papal legate who had married young Henry to Marguerite. A few weeks later, Henry met with Louis at Fréteval. where they concluded once and for all their ten-year struggle over the Vexin. Louis, aware that Henry was too strong an adversary at this time and in any case having no alternative, agreed to his occupation of Marguerite’s dower. The conference at Fréteval ushered in one of those rare interludes of peace for the Plantagenets. With no major crises threatening their security, they could turn their attention to more pleasant duties, such as their growing family, which, in many respects, suffered from periods of benign neglect. Young Henry, nearly seven years old and a married man, had reached the age when he should have begun his formal education. The fact that he had not and, furthermore, still lived with his mother, shocked some people, one of them being the archbishop of Rouen, who sent a polite reproach to Henry: “Although other kings are of a rude and uncultivated character, yours, which was formed by literature, is prudent in the administration of great affairs, subtle in judgments, and circumspect in counsel. Wherefore all your bishops unanimously agree that Henry, your son and heir, should apply himself to letters, so that he whom we regard as your heir may be the successor to your wisdom as well as to your kingdom.”

There was no question in Henry’s mind with whom the boy should be placed for his education in letters and knightly accomplishment. Becket, the most well-bred man in the empire, already had under his care a number of noblemen’s sons, and now the prince was added to the group. While this move made sense to Eleanor, she could not have been completely enthusiastic, not when she heard Thomas referring to the prince as his adopted son. By this time, however, she had had ample opportunity to accustom herself to Becket and his relationship with her husband. Whatever resentment she had felt in earlier years had weathered into a sort of resignation by now, but even though the queen coexisted with the chancellor, she did not like him and never would. At any rate, ever since the Toulouse war she had noticed subtle changes both in Henry and in his affection for Thomas. In retrospect, their quarrel before the walls of Toulouse had marked a turning point; since then. there had been further differences, some of them fairly serious, and even though Henry won the arguments, the tenor of their relationship had gradually shifted from the social to the plane of pure business. The fact was, Henry had matured. At twenty-one, he had been a brash young man who needed a boon companion, someone with whom he could drink and hunt, a confidant for his youthful escapades. At twenty-eight, no longer so youthful or brash, his waistline thickened considerably, he had outgrown his boyish need of a buddy. Thomas’s slightly tutorial manner, which he had accepted before, now chafed him. None of this was lost on Eleanor.

We may be sure, therefore, that it was with some astonishment that she heard Henry mention that he was thinking of appointing Becket as a successor to Archbishop Theobald of Canterbury. What first gave Henry the curious idea of transforming his worldly chancellor into the highest prelate in England is impossible to say. In an especially good humor after Christmas court at Bayeux, he had sent to England for falcons and falconers and spent most of his time engaged in his chief pleasure. Perhaps while hawking one amber afternoon along a stream in Normandy, the image came to him full-blown; more likely he was influenced by the fact that a similar arrangement was working well in the Holy Roman Empire, where the archbishop of Cologne also served as chancellor. However unaccountably the seed was sown, he seemed in no rush to do anything about the idea, one reason being that while the see of Canterbury lay vacant, its revenues accrued to the crown and thus enabled him to recoup some of his financial losses from the Toulouse campaign. Even though he tested the idea on Eleanor and other intimates, he deliberately refrained from speaking to Thomas, instead pondering the plan, weighing the advantages and, to a lesser degree, the disadvantages. As Eleanor knew, Henry never did anything without a good reason, and she could not argue with much of his logic. While he had not been seriously dissatisfied with the working relationship between State and Church during the first eight years of his reign, nevertheless he had experienced some opposition, particularly over taxes, and in the future he anticipated more problems over the question of ecclesiastical courts. Combirring the offices of archbishop and chancellor seemed a perfect solution, and Becket the obvious choice; he had served the king loyally, and they had always been of one mind as to how the empire should be run. With an archbishop sympathetic to the crown, Henry could build an even more dominant monarchy without the threat of parallel leadership from the Church; not only that, he could also strengthen his courts at the expense of the increasingly independent Church courts. What better way to accomplish these aims than to install his alter ego at the head of the Church? But, of course, there were emotional factors, and to Eleanor it may have seemed, initially at least, that Henry’s scheme was just a dying ember of a foolish infatuation. The great love affair had not, apparently, run its course.

There is no way of knowing whether Henry asked Eleanor for advice, although they surely discussed the subject on many occasions. She might have pointed out the obstacles to Thomas’s election: He was neither priest nor monk and he had no reputation for holiness. Rather, apart from his efficiency as an administrator, he was best known for his excellent table, his lavish household, and his plumaged wardrobe. These objections Henry could not deny, but he did not anticipate difficulty on those scores. After years of maintaining stiff control over her every utterance in regard to Becket, Eleanor would not have said that she distrusted Becket. She had always believed him to be riddled with ambition, a man hungry for power. In the eight years she had known him, nothing had convinced her otherwise. Of course, he was most assiduously devoted to Henry, the perfect servant, correct, obedient, loyal. Small wonder that Henry counted on a pawn at Canterbury, but even pawns, she might have told him, sometimes assert their independence. In any case, Henry did not care what she thought, and as usually happened when he desired an opinion on important political matters, he consulted his mother. Probably to his annoyance, Matilda opposed the idea, but since she could give no concrete reasons beyond vague predictions of calamity, he was able to discount her forebodings. Perhaps he felt that Matilda, old by now, engrossed in pious works on behalf of the Church, had lost her normally keen judgment. In truth, he did not want anybody’s opinion; he had already reached a decision, and now all he desired was reinforcement. In at least one respect, Eleanor may have endorsed his decision. Known to the queen and other intimates, Henry was possessed of an almost obsessive terror that his heirs would be prevented from succeeding peacefully to the throne of England. Haunted by his own struggles, he was given to periodic anxiety attacks over the possibility that Prince Henry would be deprived of his rights, a concern that Eleanor shared, since no regular principle of succession had ever been established. Even though Henry had already obliged his English barons to swear allegiance to his namesake, this failed to reassure him, and now he resolved to adopt the solution that had been devised by Charlemagne, who had crowned his sons as kings during his own lifetime. This practice had been used with no apparent ill effects in Germany and also in France, where Louis Capet had been anointed before the death of his father. It was, nevertheless, a radical departure for the English. Recalling that King Stephen’s attempts to have Eustace crowned had been effectively scotched by both Archbishop Theobald and the pope, Henry anticipated the possibility of trouble. The point was—and this surely must have been a key factor in Henry’s reasoning—that only the archbishop of Canterbury was authorized to consecrate an English king; with Thomas heading the Church of England, this delicate situation could be handled with the efficiency that Becket had always demonstrated in matters close to Henry’s heart. On this basis alone, Eleanor may have suppressed any doubts about the chancellor’s promotion.

In early May 1162, the royal family was residing at the castle of Falaise in Normandy. Over a year had elapsed since the death of Archbishop Theobald, months in which the court had murmured furiously with rumors, but Henry, blithely untroubled, had ignored the vacancy at Canterbury. If anything, he seemed titillated to play a prolonged game of cat and mouse with Thomas. “The chancellor, however, who from certain forebodings and conjectures already had an inkling of the king’s purpose, kept silence about the matter, even as the king concealed his intentions.” Nor did it appear that the game would be called in the near future, because Henry now seemed totally preoccupied with his eldest son. Anxious to exact from his English barons another oath of fealty, he ordered Becket to take the seven-year-old prince to England, where he would call together the Great Council in the king’s name and require every bishop and baron in the realm to pay homage. Even though Eleanor and Henry would not be present, an appropriately majestic ceremony had been planned, and according to the pipe rolls, they paid the well-known financier William Cade the goodly sum of thirty-eight pounds six shillings “for gold for preparing a crown and regalia for the King’s son.”

On the eve of the departure, Thomas brought his young charge to Falaise so that Eleanor and Henry might say good-bye to their son. At the last minute, almost as an afterthought. Henry drew Thomas aside for a private conversation. “You do not yet fully comprehend your mission,” said the king, as if he imagined that Thomas had been blind and deaf for the past year. When Thomas did not answer immediately, Henry added imperiously, “It is my intention that you should become Archbishop of Canterbury.” Phrased in that manner, it was hardly an invitation. He did not ask Thomas for his opinion, nor did he leave room for discussion—it was his intention. There was an awkward silence, and when Thomas finally replied, it was in the bantering tone he often took with the king. With a deprecating smile he looked down and pointed to his expensive robe. “How religious, how saintly, is the man whom you would appoint to that holy see and over so famous and pious a congregation of monks.” When Henry failed to return his smile, he rushed on in a desperately serious voice: “I know of a truth that, should God permit it, you would quickly turn against me and the love which is now so great between us would be changed into the most bitter hatred. I know that you would make demands that I could never meet with equanimity, because already you presume too much in Church affairs. And so the envious would find opportunities to stir up endless strife between us.”

Henry dismissed his protestations almost as if he had expected them, and in fact, Thomas’s speech almost sounds rehearsed. But it should not be supposed that Becket was insincere. No matter how tempting the offer—not every day did a merchant’s son rise to the high place of Canterbury—he knew his master well, his jealousy, his sudden rages, his inability to tolerate opposition. According to Becket’s close friend, John of Salisbury, “From these considerations he rightly drew the conclusion that, if he accepted the post offered to him, he would lose either the favor of God or that of the king.” Whatever else may be said of Becket and his sincerity, there is no question that he warned Henry against the nomination. On the other hand, he does not seem to have protested at any appreciable length nor, in the end, did he refuse the offer. At any rate, it seems that Henry paid utterly no attention to the warning, because shortly afterward, perhaps the same day, he held a revealing conversation with Richard of Luci. “Richard,” he demanded, “if I lay dead in my shroud, would you see to it that my firstborn son Henry were raised to the throne?” When Richard assured him that he would do so at the risk of his life and limbs, Henry instructed him to leave at once for England and, exerting whatever pressure necessary on the monks of Canterbury, see that Thomas was elected.

It was settled then. Thomas would become archbishop, young Henry crowned king in due time, the throne of England safeguarded for the golden boy whom Henry adored. The empire would endure. It was the king’s privilege to have arranged these matters, but it would be a privilege for which he would pay heavily.

The salt wind swelled the silken sails of the Esnecca, skimming the royal barge closer and closer to the pale coastline of England. The Plantagenets had announced that they would celebrate Christmas in England, but impassable seas and contrary winds had delayed them many weeks in Normandy. They had been forced to spend a dismal, slapdash Christmas in Cherbourg, and it was not until the end of January 1163 that they had finally sailed for their island kingdom. On the dock at Southampton, an official delegation waited to hail a boisterous welcome to the king, who had been absent four years and the queen who had been away two. Those years in Normandy, while peaceful, had been dimmed for Eleanor by indefinable dissatisfactions, perhaps a sense of drifting more than anything else. She had lacked, of course, any challenge for her energies, and indolence never sat well with her. At the same time, the contours of her relationship with Henry were changing, and she must have noticed a certain restraint in his behavior since the birth of Eleanor fifteen months earlier. Close to forty, she had reached an age when women, no matter how beautiful, do not like to be reminded of their years, especially when their husbands are significantly younger, and she may have attributed Henry’s indifference to the age factor. Not only did he take her for granted as a woman but, more distressing, he had shoved her into the background. No longer a working queen, she was expected to derive contentment from idleness. This was not easy for her to accept, and she would have expressed resentment, with grievances and misunderstandings accumulating on her side as well as on Henry’s. The return to England and the prospect of seeing her son after a seven-month separation provided a welcome relief, more especially since his guardian’s elevation to Canterbury had unloosed a torrent of highly diverting gossip.

Throughout the previous summer and autumn, word of Becket’s activities had flown the Channel, with delighted talebearers repeating the latest news for the edification of the court. Ever since Becket’s consecration on June 3, he had become, if gossip could be trusted, a totally changed man. “Putting off the secular man, he now put on Jesus Christ,” throwing himself into the role of archbishop with a fervor equal to the enthusiasm he had exhibited as chancellor. It was said that he wore vestments of gold, but beneath was “a hairshirt of the roughest kind, which reached to his knees and swarmed with vermin.” It was also claimed that “he mortified his flesh with the sparest diet and his accustomed drink was water used for the cooking of hay,” that he exposed his naked back to the lash of discipline, slept on the bare floor next to a bed “covered with soft coverlets and cloths of silver,” and washed the feet of thirteen poor folk every morning. “Contrary to the expectation of the king and all men, he so utterly abandoned the world and so suddenly experienced that conversion which is the finger of God that all men marveled thereat.”

Eleanor, like Henry, tended to be cynical about such conspicuous miracles. For eight years she had seen the chancellor in many guises: as the oily-tongued courtier always ready with a quip; as the gourmet who decked his table with expensive wines and the best cuts of flesh; as a posturing soldier on his way to war; and as the resplendent diplomat, puffed up with self-importance and the ostentation of the nouveaux riches. Under the circumstances, his metamorphosis did not seem genuine. Within weeks of his consecration, however, there had come the first intimation that perhaps both Henry and Eleanor had misread Thomas Becket. They had been in Normandy when a Master Ernulf arrived, bringing with him a parcel and a message from Becket. When Henry saw that the package contained the Great Seal of England, he let loose with his favorite oath. “By the eyes of God!” he had shouted. “Doesn’t he want to keep it anymore?”

“He feels,” explained the messenger, “that the burdens of two offices are too much for him.”

“I feel that he no longer cares to be in my service,” snapped Henry, who, far from accepting Becket’s excuse of overwork, interpreted his resignation as a slap in the face.

Becket’s tactless haste in resigning the chancellorship provided an ominous clue that he planned to be his own master in the future, and other signs of trouble followed stealthily as he began to reassert Canterbury’s claim to property the Church had lost during Stephen’s reign. Wherever he found Church land, either farms or manors, in the hands of laymen, he dispatched his knights to seize it but, in his zealousness, very often neglected to bring the cases to court. Since Henry had granted him permission to reclaim alienated Church property, Thomas stood on fairly safe ground as long as he confined his recovery programs to small holdings; it was when he began laying claim to the castles of great lords that Eleanor noticed her husband’s temper rising sharply. Before long, there were indignant protests, one of them from Earl Roger of Clare, who complained that Thomas was trying to deprive him of his castle at Tonbridge. As Eleanor could have predicted, Henry bristled noticeably at this particular complaint because Roger’s sister “was more beautiful than any lady in the land and the king had at one time passionately loved her.” This insult to the family of one of the king’s mistresses was not taken lightly, but Henry, although worried now, pretended to overlook it. Soon afterward, however, had come Henry’s resolve to return to England, and obviously Becket’s new militancy was the cause.

Eleanor, too, was anxious to observe for herself the metamorphosis of the elegant chancellor into, as one chronicler described him, “an erect pillar in the Church of the Lord, a bright candle on God’s candlestick.” When they landed at Southampton, she caught sight of a gaunt Becket advancing toward them, her son Henry’s hand clasped in his. After having listened to Henry’s cautious fulminations against Thomas for some months, Eleanor must have watched their meeting with interest. Aside from a slight formality in Henry’s manner, they greeted each other with kisses, embraces, and expressions of pleasure; that evening at supper and the next day traveling up to London the two men never left each other’s side, chattering and laughing in a manner reminiscent of earlier days. If Eleanor had hoped for something different, she must have been disappointed; still, despite the show of cordiality and friendship, she knew Henry too well to believe that the breach had been fully mended.

At Westminster, Eleanor again found herself in the position of decorative queen, carefully restricted to the shadows. Judging from the pipe rolls, she must have arranged a festive party for young Henry’s eighth birthday, but otherwise she seems to have been inactive. By this time, it must have been apparent that her vision of equal partnership with Henry had been a delusion, although during the periods of her regencies he had seemed pleased enough to benefit from her services. He had permitted her sovereignty under special conditions, namely during his absences, but when they both occupied the same territory, he would not countenance her interference. Only in separation, then, was she able to function with any semblance of autonomy or even productivity, but of this she was only imperfectly aware at this time. It has been suggested that she took small interest in the king’s feud with Becket; on the contrary, feeling at loose ends and having little else to occupy her time during that restive year of 1163, she must have been a keen observer of the steady buildup of tension that resulted, in large part, from Becket’s persistence in goading the king at every turn. Already, words had passed between them in public, and Eleanor, more than anyone else, would have been witness to Henry’s private irritation, his charges of ingratitude, his rambling threats to cut the archbishop down to size—all embellished by cries of “By God’s eyes!”

Eleanor’s appraisal of the situation would have proceeded on a quite different level: Becket, a self-seeking hypocrite from the outset, a consummate actor, was merely showing his true colors at last. Rather quickly she must have perceived trouble ahead for Thomas, a prospect that did not at all displease her. Indeed, it would have been altogether less than natural if she had not felt much relieved to see her rival topple from the king’s favor. In any case, she could hardly have held herself aloof from the controversy, since Westminster boiled with juicy reports of each encounter, the hostile courtiers baying triumphantly at the smallest black look the king gave Becket. A man who had accumulated as much power as Becket could not have helped making enemies, and now, explains one of Becket’s biographers, they sowed their tares eagerly. “The king’s courtiers, seeking to win his favor and itching to gain his ear, defamed the archbishop and hated him without cause.” Eleanor would not have been among those who whispered malice into Henry’s ear—not for nothing had she maintained a strict silence for the past eight years—because she understood to perfection that he would fall without her denigration, subtle or otherwise.

As spring drifted into summer, the drama between the two men grew more absorbing. In July, Henry held a council at Woodstock, and although the pipe rolls do not specifically mention Eleanor’s presence, it seems likely that she and the children accompanied him to live in the splendid manor house set among the green woods of Oxfordshire. At this meeting Henry introduced the subject of sheriff’s aid, a payment of two shillings per hide of land to the sheriff of each county as a token recompense for his administrative duties. Always alert to new sources of income, especially now that Canterbury was no longer vacant, he proposed that this customary gift to the sheriffs be paid instead directly into the treasury as a legal tax. The first person to voice an objection was Becket. Perhaps from force of habit, he momentarily forgot that he was no longer in a position to give the king advice, but more probably he believed it a grave tactical error to deprive the sheriffs of an important source of income, since it would encourage them to reimburse themselves by cheating the treasury. In any event, he took the king sharply to task.

“By God’s eyes,” Henry spat back, “it shall be given me as a tax and entered in the King’s roll; nor is it fitting that you should oppose me when no one is trying to impose a burden on you or the Church.” At this point Thomas would have been wise to have maintained a diplomatic silence. He, if anyone, knew how easily defiance could bring on an attack of Plantagenet fury, and as chancellor, he certainly would have known better than to answer. But he was no longer the king’s creature; he was archbishop of Canterbury, and he vented his own temper, confidently matching oath for oath. “By the reverence of those eyes by which you have sworn, my lord King, not a penny shall be paid from any of the land under Church jurisdiction.”

His face flushing crimson, Henry abruptly dropped the subject and moved on to the next item on his agenda. During this exchange, the barons had stirred nervously, waiting for the explosion that failed to come. But behind Henry’s controlled, if untypical silence—the result of shock more than anything else—burned deep rage, because normally no one dared speak to him in so disrespectful a manner, especially before an assembly of his barons. Perhaps for the first time, he allowed himself to recognize that his long friendship with Thomas the chancellor was finished; thereafter, he would be forced to deal with Thomas the archbishop. Since Becket seemed to be spoiling for a fight, he would give him one, and before the Woodstock meeting adjourned, Henry hit upon a suitable means of retaliation. For some time now he had been concerned over what amounted to an unprecedented crime wave in England, and in fact, many of the offenses appeared to have been committed by clergy, either men in holy orders or those who had merely taken religious vows. These “criminous clerks,” as they would henceforth be known, were in the habit of dressing up like monks, joining bands of travelers, and once they reached a forest or deserted stretch of road, robbing and murdering them. What especially enraged Henry was that anyone who enjoyed the status of clergy could not be tried in the civil court; they could plead clerical immunity and demand trial in the ecclesiastical courts, where, to the king’s thinking, they received absurdly light sentences. At the worst, their punishment amounted to a severe penance, suspension from the exercise of their priestly functions, or confinement in a monastery for the remainder of the offender’s life.

Since Henry had returned to England six months earlier, he had already clashed with Becket over several of these cases, Thomas having rescued the accused from the king’s court by claiming jurisdiction. At Woodstock now, still smarting from his defeat over the sheriff’s aids, Henry brought up the case of a Bedford canon, Philip Brois, who had been accused of murdering a knight. Tried in the court of the bishop of Lincoln, Brois had cleared himself by compurgation, an ancient practice in which the accused solemnly swears his innocence while twelve oath helpers also swear a similar belief on his behalf. This was enough for the Church, since the act of perjury jeopardized one’s immortal soul; it was not enough for Henry, who felt convinced that justice had not been done and who, moreover, felt annoyed that Thomas had whisked Brois from the clutches of the common law. The meeting at Woodstock adjourned with Henry formally requesting a report on the number of capital crimes committed since 1154, paying particular attention to the crimes of the clergy. As of July 1, 1163, the fatal gauntlet had been thrown down to Thomas Becket.

What began at Woodstock as more or less a personal feud soon threatened to escalate into a full-fledged contest between Church and State. During the summer and into the fall, the nobility scrambled to take sides in preparation for the storm that now appeared certain. At the same time, Henry’s ever-increasing fury at Becket reverberated through the royal household, and although he did not wholly neglect his other projects—later, in July, he arranged for Prince Henry to receive the homage of King Malcolm of Scotland—nevertheless, Eleanor and his family, indeed most concerns, faded into insignificance alongside his all-consuming anger. And yet he still oscillated between bouts of rage and periods of pure bewilderment, as if he were pinching himself in disbelief over what had happened. His treasured friend, the man he had been closest to during his entire life, had betrayed him. What galled him most perhaps was that he, the king who prided himself on judging men’s characters, had made a colossal mistake in the case of Thomas.

On the first of October, after further clashes with Becket, Henry was ready to bring the warfare into the open. The royal family had moved back to Westminster, where Henry convened an assembly of his bishops and barons to settle—or so he announced—a dispute between the archbishops of Canterbury and York, who had been wrangling about the respective privileges of their two sees. However, his opening address to the convocation that morning had to do with a very different matter. As if four months had not elapsed since Woodstock, he again took up the question of criminous clerks. Before his listeners quite realized what was happening, Henry had briskly plunged into a peroration in which he demanded that “clerks seized or convicted of great crimes should be deprived of the protection of the Church and handed over to his officers.” According to his records, in the nine years of his reign, over a hundred murders, in addition to uncountable rapes, thefts, and extortions, had been committed by clerics who, because of their immunity from civil trial, had gone virtually unpunished. The Church courts, he added, failed to impose severe enough penalties to deter lawbreakers from committing further crimes. Speaking with elaborate patience, Henry was careful to stress that he had consulted his legal advisers, and they too saw no reason why all subjects should not live under the same law. Thomas, invited to the council ostensibly for the purpose of discussing his quarrel with the see of York, quickly understood that he had been tricked and, furthermore, that the king intended to force the issue.

Now Henry directed his eyes squarely upon Becket. “My lord of Canterbury,” he challenged, “I demand that with the consent of yourself and of your fellow bishops, clerks who are caught committing crimes, or have confessed them, be degraded, deprived of all protection of the Church and handed over to my court for corporal punishment.” There was, he quickly added, no need for the Church to take alarm at his proposed remedy; it was nothing more than a return to the customs of the land when it had been ruled by his grandfather. It was, he implied, a tradition.

Even so, it was not a tradition that anyone remembered, and in fact, there is no evidence that Henry I had ever carried out any such procedure with lawless clerks. In the deathly silence that followed, Thomas and his bishops withdrew to consult among themselves. None of them had ever expected Henry to go quite so far, and some, frightened, argued that crimes of the clergy, more reprehensible by virtue of their order, should therefore be punished more harshly than the crimes of ordinary laymen. Thomas pointed out, however, that double punishment ran contrary to canon law: “God does not judge twice for the same offense.” After further discussion, they agreed that the king had attacked the freedom of the Church and that they must not yield to his demand. Filing back into the hall, Thomas stepped before the king. He stood tall and proud in his costly archbishopric robes, his once handsome face now pale from fasting, and looked down his long nose at Henry. “The customs of Holy Church are fully set forth in the canons and decrees of the Fathers,” his voice rang out. “It is not fitting for you, my lord king, to demand, nor for us to grant anything that goes beyond these, nor ought we to consent to any innovation. We ought to humbly obey the old laws, not establish new ones.”

He was not demanding anything of the kind, Henry retorted with belligerence. He was only asking that the customs observed in the time of his grandfather be observed in his. And furthermore, he added cuttingly, there were holier and better archbishops than Becket in those days who never raised any controversy about them with the king.

Thomas answered without flinching. “What was done by former kings ought not to be called customs but abuses, and whatever practices were observed that ran against the laws laid down in the canons was done out of fear of kings.” He continued to inveigh grimly against “such depraved practices,” concluding that Henry would always find the clergy “obedient and ready to accord with your will and pleasure in everything that we can possibly consent to, saving our order.”

Henry, his temper having grown progressively shorter as the day wore on, began to swear at Becket. “By the eyes of God!” he roared, “let me hear no word of your order! I demand absolute and express agreement to my customs.” Rounding on the bishops, he asked each one in turn if he were willing to observe the customs of the realm, and all but one echoed Becket; they would obey the king in all things “saving our order.” By shifting his ground from the abuses of criminal clerks to a general acceptance of what he called the ancient customs, Henry undoubtedly forced the bishops to make this reservation, “saving our order,” to protect themselves, but his change of emphasis would prove to be a mistake. The behavior of some clerks was already a national scandal, and an impartial contemporary observer such as William of Newburgh, himself a cleric, deplored those bishops who were “more concerned with defending the liberties and dignities of the clergy than they were with correcting and restraining their vices, and they thought they were doing a service to God and the Church by protecting criminous clerks from public punishment.” Henry’s original desire to secure the peace and order of his realm, which is what he meant by “observing the ancient customs,” soon became lost in semantics.

The whole day passed in argument, and now it was growing dark. Once again Henry turned to Becket. Puffing with anger, the king demanded that he and the other bishops take an oath to observe the customs “in good faith,” without any reservation whatsoever. He wanted a clear answer. Thomas made a last effort to pacify him. “My lord king,” he said soothingly, “we have already sworn fealty to you by our life and limbs and earthly honor, saving our order, and in that earthly honor were included all the customs of the kingdom.” No oath they could take now would be more binding.

Suddenly Henry rose and bounded out of the hall without a parting word, without even waiting for the customary blessing of the bishops, leaving behind a confused hush. Before daybreak the next morning he sent a messenger to Becket dispossessing him of the manors of Berkhampstead and Eye, which he had held since his chancellorship, and also removing Prince Henry from his tutelage. This done, he left Westminster without speaking to the prelates. What might have been a difficult but reasonable discussion on how best to deal with criminal clerks had now been blown out of all proportion, the issues forgotten in the clash of personalities. Even though Eleanor disliked Thomas, even though his recent problems had failed to call forth her sympathy, she still must have watched uneasily the extreme emotional reaction these encounters drew from her husband. For the first time since she had known him, he was allowing personal feelings to direct his actions. She had seen him rage and roll on the floor chewing straw, but this hostility, the result of emotions that ran even deeper than anyone had suspected, was something else. Betrayal was not, evidently, a situation that Henry could handle, although what in his background would have accounted for it is uncertain. Before her eyes, he was regressing from a clearheaded executive to a small boy wreaking vengeance on everything in sight. Nor was it easy to understand Thomas, his unyielding obstinacy, his determination to prove himself as powerful as the king. He knew that Henry did not restrain his anger, either in public or in private. What did he hope to gain by pushing the king?

Not long after that, Henry made his last peaceful overture toward his one-time friend. Meeting Thomas in a Northampton meadow on horseback, he spoke freely and plaintively: “Have I not raised you from poverty and lowliness to the pinnacle of honour and rank? And even that seemed little enough to me until I also made you father of the kingdom, placing you even above myself. How is it then that all these proofs of my love for you, which everyone knows, you have so soon blotted from your mind, so that you are not only ungrateful but oppose me in everything?” One feels, thinly disguised in those words, Henry’s fantasy that something—a word, an embrace, a look—would restore their friendship. Whatever his hopes, he was not prepared for Thomas’s rebuff.

The archbishop spoke very distinctly. “I have not forgotten your favors, my lord, favors which are not yours alone for God deigned to confer them on me through you.” With that he went on at length to explain that when his duty to king conflicted with his duty to God, he had no choice but to obey the latter. His defense was turning into a lecture, and when he warned that “we must obey God rather than men,” Henry would hear no more. “I don’t want a sermon from you,” he interrupted curtly. “Aren’t you the son of a peasant of mine?”

“It is true that I am not descended from a long line of kings, but then neither was Blessed Peter, on whom the Lord bestowed the keys of the kingdom of heaven and dominion over the whole Church.”

“That is true,” Henry returned, “but he died for his Lord.”

It was not meant as a threat, but Thomas, interestingly enough, seems to have interpreted it as one, for he answered gravely, “I too will die for my Lord when the time comes.”

Again Thomas refused to omit those three exasperating words “saving my order” from his oath, and despite Henry’s pleas and threats, they parted silently, neither having yielded an inch.

Eleanor and Henry celebrated Christmas of 1163 at the manor of Berkhampstead, one of the residences recently retrieved from Becket, and to indicate that it was to be particularly festive, the royal plate had been fetched from Winchester especially for the occasion. Ironically, Berkhampstead was more resplendent than most of the royal manors, because Thomas had spent large sums on its repair and redecoration. However, the Christmas festivities seemed oddly at variance with the real moods of the king and queen. The holiday, one of the most disturbing Eleanor had spent with Henry, was marked by cold rains, intrigue, negotiations, and ugliness. Henry’s childish insistence on holding Christmas court at Berkhampstead, an obvious attempt to further humiliate Becket, indicated a pettiness of spirit, the more so because recent developments had given him every reason to believe that he had won his struggle with Becket. When the dispute had reached the ears of Pope Alexander, he had sent letters and messengers to Becket advising him to submit to the king and obey the laws of the land. Admittedly in a difficult position because he needed Henry’s support in his battle against the antipope, Alexander nevertheless could not see that Henry had explicitly proposed anything directly contrary to the teachings of the Church. In fact, he had asked Henry for assurances on that point. To Alexander, the quarrel appeared simple: Thomas in open defiance had injured the king’s royal dignity, and obviously Henry would lose face if he allowed himself to be beaten by the archbishop. To salve the king’s pride. Thomas must omit the words “saving my order,” and then there would be peace. In fact, Henry had assured the pope that he would drop any further mention of the customs. As a result, Thomas had given way and, in December, had met with Henry at Woodstock, where he humbly made his submission, swearing to observe the customs of the realm in good faith. But the killing game had not yet ended. Immediately upon hearing Thomas’s recantation over the obnoxious salve ordine meo, he sprung his trap. Since Thomas had publicly defied him, an act of private submission would not suffice; the archbishop must repeat in public, in the presence of the Great Council, the oath he had just made privately. Under the circumstances, Becket could not refuse.

On January 25, 1164, the mighty of the realm assembled at the royal hunting lodge of Clarendon, near Salisbury. The benches of the hall were packed with archbishops and bishops, earls, barons, nobles, and elders, whose names the chroniclers meticulously recorded. Eleanor’s is not among them, but it is fairly certain that she was with Henry at Clarendon, and it seems unlikely that she would have missed the opportunity to see Becket brought low. Moreover, her son Henry was presiding over the council along with his father for the first time. Exactly what took place at Clarendon is far from clear. We know, however, that Henry opened the proceedings by calling upon the archbishop to swear to the customs of the realm without any qualifications—and that Thomas, after some procrastinations and excuses, refused to take the oath. At which point, Henry flew into one of his famous rages, his outraged howls sounding to one witness “like the roaring of the lion.” He swore that if Thomas did not promise to observe the customs and dignities of the kingdom, he would resort to the sword. Precisely what this last threat meant nobody was quite sure, but some remembered how Geoffrey Anjou, in a fit of Angevin rage, had ordered the bishop-elect of Seez to be castrated. Over the next three days, the heated debates continued, and Henry grew increasingly furious. At the point when the bishops had almost persuaded Thomas to submit—a purely formal act to satisfy the king’s injured honor—Henry sprung another trap. He produced a written document, undoubtedly prepared in advance, listing the laws of the land as they were observed (he said) in the time of his grandfather. Hearing the Constitutions of Clarendon read aloud, Thomas immediately realized that he had been betrayed again; in effect, the provisions placed the Church of England under the king’s control, in that civil law was to take precedence over canon law. Churchmen were forbidden to leave the realm without Henry’s permission nor were they permitted to appeal his decisions to Rome.

After the provisions had been read aloud, Henry said, “These customs have been conceded to me. Therefore, lest any question should arise concerning them in the future or lest any new disputes should perchance come up, we will that the Archbishop put his seal to them.”

Becket’s reaction was one of horror. “By Almighty God, never, as long as I live, will my seal be put to them!” Clutching the copy of the Constitutions that Henry had given him, he stalked from the hall without waiting for the king’s dismissal.

The Constitutions of Clarendon stand out in the history of English common law for two reasons: It was the first time a king attempted to legislate in writing (until then the law consisted of general customs or tribal practices passed orally from one generation to the next); and, secondly, they contained the seeds of later legal innovations, such as the use of the jury of accusation for bringing to light offenses that individuals dared not denounce. Still, by putting the customs in writing and asking Thomas to sign them, Henry took their quarrel past the point of compromise. Taken in their entirety, the sixteen articles of the Constitutions would have destroyed the freedom of the Church of England, placing it subordinate to the king. Curiously, only one of the provisions dealt with clerical crime, the problem that had given rise to the whole controversy. So long as Henry had adhered to this issue he had remained on safe ground because Thomas’s refusal to clean house within the Church had run contrary to common sense, and Thomas knew it. Henry had never claimed the right to judge clerks in his courts; he simply asked that a cleric accused of a serious crime be first brought to the king’s court to answer for his breach of the peace. If he denied his offense and pleaded benefit of clergy, he would have the right to be tried in an ecclesiastical court. However, if convicted and degraded from his orders, then, as a layman, he would be handed back to the king’s court for an appropriate sentence, either mutilation or death. But once Henry reduced the customs to writing, including among them practices that the Church had violently opposed in the past, he lost his advantage.

The terrifying scenes at Clarendon, the yelling and threatening, impressed one observer more than any other. Young Prince Henry, one month short of his ninth birthday, had adored Becket for his cheerful temper, his refinement and suave manners, for being everything that his rough, choleric father was not, and he had called him foster father. It is not known what type of explanations were made the previous autumn, when he had been abruptly removed from Becket’s household. Instead of being returned to Eleanor, he had been given a house and servants of his own, and perhaps Henry had painted the best possible face on these sudden changes by designating them a special honor, something the heir deserved. At Clarendon, the boy would not have understood the issues to any appreciable degree, but he could not have helped but realize that his father wished Thomas harm. In the household of Henry Plantagenet, one could not remain neutral to his quarrel with Becket, and in those drab January days, young Henry chose his father’s side. While it would have been unthinkable for the small boy to have indicated any overt support of Becket—he feared his father too much for that—he was left with an abiding hostility toward the king. In time, his affection for Becket would fade, but the dislike for his father generated at Clarendon would remain for the rest of his life.

A few days after Clarendon, Henry received news of his youngest brother’s death, an event that only added further fuel to his hatred of Becket. Henry had always felt a special affection for William. Unlike his second brother, Geoffrey, whose ambition and jealousy created barriers between them, William seems to have demanded nothing. Earlier, the king had entertained thoughts of invading Ireland for the express purpose of providing William with a fief of his own, and only his mother’s reservations had led Henry to abandon the project. Determined to provide for William, he tried to give him the hand and extensive estates of the widowed countess of Warenne, heiress to the earldom of Surrey. Due to Becket’s intervention, however, the marriage had been forbidden on the grounds of consanguinity. This had been one of Becket’s victories in the months shortly after his ascension, but it would be a victory he would come to regret. There was no denying William’s very voluble disappointment, because he complained to his mother, to the monks at the Norman monastery at Bec, indeed to anyone who would listen. Thus, when he fell ill and died on January 30 at the age of twenty-seven, it was not surprising that people claimed he had died of a broken heart. Whatever the cause of death, Henry, inconsolable, held Thomas responsible.

To judge from the pipe rolls for 1164, Henry’s melancholia found expression in a total incapacity for work. He and Eleanor spent the winter in the southern counties and then traveled up to London for Easter on April 12, but uncharacteristically, he accomplished nothing of note. For the months of May, June, and July the king and queen seemed to have dropped out of sight, because there is no record of their whereabouts, an extraordinary occurrence. Those months must have been fearful for Eleanor. It was a time of violent passions, a time of mourning, for Henry grieved the death of his friendship with Becket as strongly as he did his brother’s passing, and a time of great hatred. The king had prematurely aged, in fact he suddenly seemed older than she, and the tyrant into which he had matured was not a person she could admire. One reason she had married him was her belief that he would develop into a great man, but whatever greatness he had once assumed in her eyes had dwindled during the quarrel with Becket. It had brought out the worst in him, and no one saw this more clearly than Eleanor. She saw, too, that Thomas, who had once preoccupied him by virtue of the pleasure he provided, continued to preoccupy him in hatred. It must have been a bitter and humiliating realization to know that Henry and Thomas hated as only those who have loved deeply can hate.

By the end of the summer it was apparent that matters were coming to a head. While Henry had exercised his right to influence Becket’s appointment to Canterbury, and although he often ranted that he would bring him low and put him back where he had found him, still he could not remove the archbishop from office. It was necessary for Becket to resign, something Henry intended to humiliate him into doing. It was clear that the archbishop, for all his defiance, was a frightened man, because twice in early September he had made two abortive attempts to leave England, only to be turned back by the king’s men at the Channel ports. Henry’s taunts—“Has this island grown too narrow to contain us both?”—had the ring of a man who has backed his prey into a very tight corner. Now he pursued the archbishop as though he were a besieged castle that must be laid waste at all cost. As Eleanor well knew, there was no room in England for a queen let alone two kings, and Thomas . had made himself a rival to Henry. During seven days in October, she received a telling lesson on how the king treated a rival whom he wished to destroy. After a complaint by one of his barons, John Marshal, that he had not received justice in the archbishop’s court, Henry summoned Thomas to appear at Northampton on Tuesday, October 6, to answer charges of contempt. When Thomas arrived, he found that the lodgings reserved for his party had already been occupied by some of the king’s men, who refused to move. He also discovered that the king had apparently forgotten his coming, because he had gone out to hawk along the river Nene. The king did not return until evening.

Early Wednesday morning, Thomas dutifully appeared at Northampton Castle, where the hearing was to take place. Informed that the king was attending Mass, Thomas sat down to wait in the corridor connecting the chapel with the main hall. When Henry entered, Thomas rose to greet him, but the king strode by as if the archbishop were invisible. The king, he was informed by servants, was going to have his breakfast. Later in the morning, when finally he was admitted to the royal presence, Thomas immediately referred to the complaint made by John Marshal. Why, he asked, was Marshal not present to press charges? The king replied that Marshal had been detained in London on business (Marshal, in fact, would never arrive). With that, he put over Thomas’s case until the next day and sent him back to his lodgings.

Between Thursday, October 8, and Sunday, October 11, the king demanded that Thomas return all of the monies entrusted to him while he had been chancellor, the financial exactions including nine years’ revenues from the manors of Eye and Berkhampstead as well as, curiously enough, five hundred marks that Henry insisted he had lent Thomas during the Toulouse war. In effect, what was being asked of Thomas was every penny he had been advanced for expenses during his eight years of service as the king’s chancellor. One chronicler stated that Henry demanded a total of thirty thousand marks, a sum equivalent to the total revenues of the archbishopric of Canterbury for seventeen years or, in today’s currency, almost $850,000. Few individuals in the world, kings included, could have paid such a colossal assessment.

After retiring for the night on Sunday, Thomas, who suffered from kidney stones, was stricken with acute renal colic so painful that he could not sit up in bed.

On Monday morning, he notified the king that he would not be able to appear that day due to illness. The king, suspicious, sent the earls of Leicester and Cornwall to Thomas’s room to find out if he were malingering.

On Tuesday, October 13, a group of bishops begged Thomas to resign, because they had heard rumors that the king planned to condemn him as a traitor. Thomas refused. After celebrating Mass, he appeared at the king’s castle carrying the great silver cross of Canterbury, a sight that caused onlookers in the courtyard to gape in amazement, for an archbishop’s cross was customarily borne by his crossbearer. At the castle doorway stood Gilbert Foliot, bishop of London, and Hugh Nonant, one of Thomas’s clerks. “My lord Bishop of London,” said Nonant, “why do you allow him to carry the cross himself?”

Gilbert Foliot despised Thomas. “My good man,” he snapped, “he always was a fool and he always will be.”

Thomas entered the hall and sat down on a bench, holding the heavy cross before him. From a second floor chamber Henry sent down some . of his barons to ask Thomas if he was prepared to account for his financial transactions while chancellor and to stand trial in the king’s court. Thomas reminded them that he had been summoned to Northampton to answer John Marshal’s complaint and for no other reason. For most of the day Thomas sat in the downstairs hall clutching his cross, while Henry, upstairs, badgered his council to pass sentence against the archbishop. When this information was relayed to Thomas, he pointed out that he had appeared before no court, had received no trial, and therefore could not be sentenced. After the barons retired to the second floor to report this latest development, Thomas picked up his cross and began to leave. Stumbling over a pile of fagots, he regained his balance and pushed his way through the crowd. “Where are you going!” someone called out menacingly; “traitor!” shouted the king’s illegitimate brother, Hamelin. Some of the bystanders began to pelt him with handfuls of rushes and other refuse they scooped from the floor.

According to one chronicler. Thomas answered, “If I were a knight, I would prove thee a liar with my own hand.” Others claimed that he made no answer at all, or that he replied violently, calling Hamelin “varlet and bastard.”

That night, under cover of a storm, Becket left Northampton disguised as a monk named Dereman. For the next two weeks he traveled by night, moving from one monastery to another and finally reaching the coast at Sandwich, where he managed to hire a small boat. On the evening of November 2, 1164, he washed up safely on a beach in Flanders, accompanied by two canons and a servant, carrying with him only his pallium and his archiepiscopal seal.

When Henry learned of the archbishop’s flight, he fell, it was said, into so spectacular a rage that he could not speak. Only when he had recovered his breath did he gasp, “We have not finished with him yet!”

The events at Northampton and Becket’s escape had a subtle but dramatic effect on Eleanor’s relationship with her husband; after five years of physical and emotional estrangement (how complete cannot be said) there now appears to have been a sort of reconciliation. With the object of Henry’s persecution safely out of reach, he seems to have turned in his frustration to his queen, even though thoughts of Thomas constantly tormented him and he still thirsted for revenge. Immediately after learning of the archbishop’s departure, he had sped an embassy to Louis Capet with a letter demanding Becket’s extradition from France or Flanders or wherever he might have sought asylum. “Be it known to you that Thomas, who was Archbishop of Canterbury, has been publicly judged in my court by a full council of the barons of my realm as a wicked and perjured traitor against me.... Wherefore I earnestly beg you not to permit a man guilty of such infamous crimes and treasons, or his men, to remain in your realm.... Let not this great enemy of mine, so it please you, have any council or aid from you and yours, even as I would not give such help myself to your enemies in my realm.”

It was a shocking letter, unstatesmanlike, whining, exaggerated, almost comical, and Eleanor no doubt suspected that if Louis had his wits about him, he would use it to Henry’s disadvantage. After all, of what “infamous crimes and treasons” was Thomas guilty, except that he had pitted his will against Henry? And while he had not exactly won, neither had he lost. Common sense told her that Louis, always on the lookout for ways to undermine Henry’s authority on the Continent, would be eager to take Thomas’s part.

After Northampton, the court made a progress through southern and southwestern England and then, as Christmas drew near, retired to Marlborough for their court festivities. It was the time for feasting and caroling, for festooning the Great Hall with boughs of holly and dragging in the Yule log to blaze on the hearth. If Eleanor had looked forward to a holiday without shadows, this hope was shattered on Christmas Eve, when the ambassadors whom Henry had sent to France finally caught up with the traveling court. Louis, the envoys reported, had interrupted them before they had finished reading the first sentence of the letter; a verb annoyed him. “Who was Archbishop of Canterbury?” he had cried in agitation. “Who has deposed him? Tell me that, my lords, who has deposed him? Who has deposed him?” When Henry’s men could think of no good reply to that embarrassing question, Louis rendered his opinion. “Certainly I am as much a king as the King of the English, but I do not have the power to depose the most insignificant clerk in my realm.” This rebuke, which had been noted with satisfaction by the dignitaries attending Louis’s court at Compiègne, caused Henry to glare and breathe heavily. Did they remind the king of France that Thomas, as chancellor of England, had seized some of his towns during the Toulouse campaign? What did he say to that! What he had said smacked of the tiresome sermonizing that invariably made Henry’s blood boil. As far as Louis could see, Thomas’s conduct at Toulouse had been in the service of his lord, and it ill became Henry to return evil for good. Then the king of France had turned to a papal chamberlain standing nearby and said meaningfully, “Tell my lord Pope Alexander from me that I hope he will receive the Archbishop of Canterbury with kindness, and not heed any unjust accusation against him.”

By this time, Henry had worked himself into a seizure. Christmas 1164 was undoubtedly one of those occasions when “the King, burning with his customary fury, threw the cap from his head, undid his belt, threw far from him the cloak and robes in which he was dressed, with his own hands tore the silken coverlet off the bed and sitting down as though on a dung-heap began to chew the straw of the mattress.” The next day he seethed impotently, his hands tied out of respect for the Lord’s nativity, but on the day after that, “giving way to unbridled passion more than became a king, he took an unbecoming and pitiful kind of revenge by banishing all the archbishop’s relatives out of England.” In the dead of winter some four hundred persons of every age and sex were stripped of their possessions, herded into boats, and shipped to Flanders where they were forced to beg their bread on the highroads. It was a cruel and tyrannous act but one that seemed to surprise none of Henry’s intimates and surely not the queen. What may have startled her, however, was that sometime during that violent Christmas court Henry returned to her bed. Early in the new year of 1165, at the age of forty-two, she found herself pregnant again.

With another child on the way, it was easy for Eleanor to entertain the illusion that her life with Henry had taken a permanent turn for the better. Becket, when she thought about him, may have seemed exactly what Henry had said—the son of a peasant—and as such, he had little significance compared to the Plantagenets’ real business of governing their lands and establishing a solid empire for their heirs. During the past two years both Eleanor and Henry had lost sight of these goals, but now they turned their attention to the future of their eldest children. Ten-year-old Henry, the child of greatest importance, seemed nicely settled with Princess Marguerite in their own court, an honor that some thought unnecessary because the boy was already showing a tendency to nurse illusions of grandeur. It seemed virtually certain that someday he would preside over a greater territory than his father, since Louis Capet’s marriage to Adele of Blois, now in its fourth year, remained childless. Of course, one undeniable inconvenience resulting from Becket’s precipitate flight was the lack of an archbishop of Canterbury to crown the boy, but Henry vowed that this did not matter; he would find another archbishop to anoint his namesake. All in all, the prince’s prospects seemed splendid.

Shortly after the beginning of the year, Henry began considering the future of his eight-year-old daughter; when he looked at Matilda, he did not see, as Louis Capet had once remarked about his girls, “a superfluity of daughters,” but a channel through which he might extend Plantagenet power and also score another point against both Becket and the traitor’s new patron in Paris. Sailing to Normandy in February, he entered into negotiations at Rouen with a delegation from the Holy Roman emperor, an action at once anti-Becket, anti-French, and antipapal. Pope Alexander, in exile at Sens, southeast of Paris, had received Thomas with tears and embraces, despite his reluctance to offend in any manner the king of England. The pope’s greatest fear was that Henry would ally himself with the German emperor, Frederick Barbarossa, who had supported Alexander’s rival for the papal throne. Even though the antipope, recognized in Germany as Victor IV, had died the previous year, the Germans had perpetuated the schism by recognizing a new rival, Paschal III. When Alexander learned that Henry had agreed upon a marriage between Matilda and the emperor’s cousin, Henry the Lion, duke of Saxony and Bavaria, he grew alarmed, which was precisely Henry’s intention.

Eleanor, who had remained in England, was not content to leave the matchmaking entirely to Henry, for in April the archbishop of Cologne visited England to speak with her and meet Matilda. Henry the Lion was thirty-six years old, Matilda only eight, an enormous age difference even for the twelfth century, but Eleanor does not seem to have regarded this an insuperable barrier. Henry the Lion was the most notable of the emperor’s vassals; he had brought under subjection the eastern part of Germany, and by now had almost a free hand in the empire. Furthermore, he seemed to be the kind of man Eleanor admired: rich, powerful, a patron of the arts and of the Church, a man already famous throughout Europe for his courage and enlightenment; hence, she most likely believed it to be a prestigious match for her eldest daughter.

After Henry’s departure, Eleanor remained at Winchester. She had been given no viceregal duties and seems to have spent the spring making short trips with the children to Sherbourne Castle in Dorset and what sounds like a seaside holiday at the Isle of Wight. In several respects, however, that spring of 1165 was a time of renewed hope. After five years of idleness, she was eager to reassume responsibility, and now circumstances combined in such a manner that Henry felt need of her assistance. Since the previous autumn, he had been planning another expedition against the Welsh, who had shown amazing persistence in pushing the English out of Wales. This time, however, determined to avoid the mistakes of 1157, he planned to campaign with foot-soldiers instead of knights in cumbersome armor. Now that his energies would be devoted to war preparations, he decided to make Eleanor regent for Anjou and Maine. On May 1, she crossed the Channel with Matilda and Richard, her other three children remaining in England, and joined Henry in Normandy. It was a brief reunion because two weeks later Henry returned to England, while she moved south to establish a headquarters at Angers. This was as close as she had come to her homeland in several years, and while there is no evidence that she visited Aquitaine, she does seem to have renewed contact with at least one member of her family, her uncle Ralph de Faye.

Shortly after she arrived in Angers, it appears that she was approached by supporters of Becket, who wished to solicit her aid. If the archbishop imagined that the queen might feel sympathetic toward his cause, he was either remarkably insensitive or perhaps merely desperate. If he had failed to recognize her hostility in previous years, this was due to the fact that she had covered her feelings well, but nevertheless he should have known better than to expect her support. While it is unclear precisely what sort of feelers may have been extended, we do have a letter indicating her reaction. In July, the bishop of Poitiers wrote to Becket, now living at the Abbey of Pontigny in Burgundy, that he should not expect the queen’s intervention, since she was wholly under the influence of Ralph de Faye, one of the archbishop’s enemies. The bishop, evidently a gossip, added gratuitously that the relationship between Eleanor and her uncle was subject to “conjectures which grow day by day and which seem to deserve credence.” Although he fails to specify the nature of the conjectures, his implications are unmistakable. This was the first recorded scandal about Eleanor since she became queen of England, but it serves as a reminder that her past, those tales of adultery bruited about during the final years of her marriage to Louis, had not been forgotten. To the argument that Eleanor acted indiscreetly at Angers, it may be answered that she often behaved with excessive affection toward her relatives, and this was not the first time that outsiders attributed unwarranted significance to her actions. Even though accusations of illicit relations with uncles seem to have hounded her, there is no need to give any particular credence to the bishop’s account. No doubt Eleanor felt relieved to be free of the morose English court, an atmosphere made all the more depressing by her husband’s continual emotional outbursts. Twelve years earlier, during the first year of her marriage, she had been happy at Angers, and perhaps her renewed residence there brought back memories of carefree days when she had still been serenaded by poets. Angers was not Poitiers, but for the moment it was close enough to bring her a measure of happiness.

In August 1165, Gerald of Wales was still a student in Paris. The weather, he would recall years later in one of his chronicles, had been suffocating, and he had taken to studying his books in the evening when it grew cool. Shortly after midnight on Sunday the twenty-second, he suddenly heard a commotion that sent him running to the window. It sounded as though every bell in Paris were ringing, and at first he thought that there must be a very bad fire somewhere in the Île. When he leaned from his window, he saw the square below blazing with bonfires and Parisians racing about with torches, shouting and waving their arms. Calling down to a woman he knew, he asked what was going on.

“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.”

Louis Capet’s prayers had been answered. At the age of forty-five, after twenty-eight years on the throne, he had given the Franks an heir. Small wonder that the boy would be called Philip Augustus and hailed by the Franks as Dieu-Donné, “the God-given.”

The reaction of the Plantagenets to this depressing piece of news has not been recorded. Later it would be recalled, however, that two comets had been reported in the month of August, one in the west of England and another in the north. A comet, as everyone knew, appeared only at the death of a king or betokened the ruin of a nation. Hindsight notwithstanding, it did not take a wizard to understand that 1165 was a spectacularly poor year for the Plantagenets.

For the second time, Henry’s expedition against the Welsh had ended in complete failure, and by September he was back in England with nothing to show for his months of planning and enormous expenditures, except a few hostages, whom he ordered savagely mutilated. In Angers, Eleanor was having troubles of her own because, despite the bishop of Poitiers’s insinuations of sexual escapades, she had the difficult task of maintaining order in a region poised for rebellion. While Henry had been preoccupied in England with the Becket imbroglio, the border region where Brittany adjoined Anjou, Maine, Poitou, and Normandy had grown restless, and the border barons of Brittany and Maine had formed a league to resist his authority; in fact, during the previous summer, the constable of Normandy had been forced to muster an army against the confederates. As Eleanor must have known when she arrived to take up the regency, she had been assigned a tinderbox. She might ignore Thomas Becket, even dismiss him as a bit player on the great stage of kings and queens, but she soon discovered that his defiance of Henry and his widely publicized asylum on the Continent were having serious effects. Becket demonstrated to all with a mind for taking the law into their own hands that Henry Plantagenet was neither irresistible nor invulnerable. He could not only be defied but defied successfully. While Henry was fighting the Welsh, Eleanor found her orders treated with contempt. And it was not only in Brittany and Maine that discontented subjects opposed Henry’s rule, but also in Aquitaine, where, she learned from her uncle that Earl Patrick, Henry’s military governor there, was faring no better. After thirteen years of Plantagenet rule, Eleanor’s vassals had had enough. “The Poitevins,” reported Gervase of Canterbury, “withdrew from their allegiance to the king of the English because of his pruning of their liberties.” If fact, some Poitevin nobles had appealed in desperation to the papacy, requesting that Eleanor’s marriage be dissolved on the grounds of consanguinity, and they had laid before the papal legates a genealogical table to prove their case. Forboding reports of conspiracies came to Eleanor’s ears, stories that the counts of Angoulême and La Marche had formed a confederation to break away from Henry and offer their allegiance to Louis Capet.

Unlike her previous tour of duty at Angers, this stay did not offer the leisure to create a court or invite troubadours. In October, Eleanor gave birth to another daughter, whom she named Joanna, but on the whole, there was little cause for rejoicing, and she must have waited anxiously for Henry’s return. Even though the Welsh campaign had ended in late August, the king seemed in no hurry to leave England. He failed to return that year, not even to see her new baby or celebrate Christmas, the one time of the year they always spent together. Moreover, there seemed to be no good explanation for his absence. For a man who never stood still. who arrived at a place and then immediately ached to leave, Henry was behaving with strange lethargy. From September 1165 to the following March, except for brief trips to Winchester and Clarendon, Henry spent most of his time at Woodstock, near Oxford. In early March of 1166, he prepared to cross the Channel, but then at the last moment changed his mind and returned to Woodstock. Not until March 16 did he leave Southampton. Whatever suspicions Eleanor may have had, whatever tales of a new mistress may have found their way to Angers during those months, she seemed determined to ignore them. Or perhaps the rumors only heightened her desire to prove herself still desirable to Henry, because within weeks of his return to Normandy, she became pregnant. At this point she must have been nearing menopause, and one way of denying her age and maintaining at least the illusion of youth would have been maternity. On the other hand, this pregnancy, which would be her last, may simply have been an accident. She could hardly have failed to see that Henry had lost all interest in her—he wanted young women—but she struggled to keep him. Once back on the Continent, he reverted to his old habits, that is, he never stopped moving. According to the pipe rolls, he immediately set out for Maine to ravage the castles of those border barons who had been rebelling against Eleanor’s orders. He spent Easter with her at Angers, but after that she could not have seen much of him. From Angers he went to Le Mans, in June he was detained at Chinon for several weeks due to illness, but by July 12 he was campaigning in Brittany, where he spent most of the summer, summoning eight-year-old Geoffrey from England and betrothing him to the heiress of Brittany, five-year-old Constance. If he behaved like a man on the run, it was from necessity, because every time he turned his back, his vassals eagerly took advantage. Even Louis Capet, puffed up with confidence since the birth of Dieu-Donné, had turned remarkably bold.

By October, Henry was back in Normandy, at Caen, where he began considering how best to deal with the rebels in Aquitaine, who, he had heard, were covertly intriguing with Louis. Apparently settling on a velvet-glove approach, he summoned the troublesome barons of Poitou to a conference at Chinon on November 20 and also announced that he would hold Christmas court at Eleanor’s newly rebuilt palace in Poitiers, an honor that the Poitevins failed to appreciate. For some unknown reason, he decided against taking Eleanor to Poitiers, resolving instead to visit the south with Prince Henry so that he might present the queen’s vassals with their future overlord. Surprisingly, Eleanor journeyed to England in the autumn. Certainly there were no pressing reasons for her presence there, and in her advanced state of pregnancy one would think that she might have preferred to travel south rather than to that foggy island on the rim of the world. Crossing the Channel with Matilda in October or November, she arranged for young Henry’s trip to the Continent, receiving from the sheriff of Devonshire £100 for the prince’s traveling expenses. In December, she traveled in Oxfordshire, and shortly before Christmas she retired to Beaumont Palace in Oxford, where Richard had been born. There, on Christmas Eve 1166, she gave birth to another son, whom she named John in honor of the saint of his natal day. It was a lonely, bitter, humiliating Christmas, spent in the company of a ten-year-old girl and a newborn infant, lonely because she longed to be in Poitiers, bitter because by now she had most likely discovered the existence of Rosamond Clifford. What she had learned by the day John was born filled her with raging hatred against her husband, and when she looked at the tiny, dark-haired infant, so different from her other golden children, she felt no joy. For the rest of her life, the sight of John would be sufficient to bring back memories of a man she despised, of that bitter Christmas she had spent in Oxford choked with shame and rage. Sometime during that Christmas season she resolved to return permanently to Aquitaine; she would no longer be a wife to Henry Plantagenet. From the devil he had come and to the devil he could go.