Inevitably, Thomas began his new career at the bottom, assisting his fellow-clerks with the legal and administrative work in which they all shared. How the archiepiscopal courts worked in the 1140s is still shrouded in mystery, but a generation later some cases were decided by the archbishop in person, while others were delegated to the senior, more experienced clerks from his household, who either heard the entire case and gave judgement or else listened to the evidence before reporting their findings to the archbishop, who delivered the final verdict.
As a novice in legal affairs, Thomas was most likely assigned tasks in the clerks’ office that included filing documents and taking witness statements. Perhaps as he grew more confident, he offered advice on points of law or procedure to Theobald’s brother, Walter, who regularly stood in for the archbishop in the consistory court, where the less important cases were decided. William fitz Stephen describes Becket as ‘raw and modest’ when he began his apprenticeship. He certainly had a lot to learn, since at Paris he had studied the liberal arts, not Roman or canon law, the subjects he mainly needed now.
To rectify this, Theobald assigned him a tutor, most likely the same master he had employed to teach his nephews. Soon Thomas was reading Gratian’s Decretum, the finest and most up-to-date encyclopaedia of canon law, first issued at Bologna, the pre-eminent centre of legal learning, in about 1140. He may even have met the Italian jurist Master Vacarius, whom Theobald had invited to Canterbury. One of the stars of the law school at Bologna, Vacarius would live and work in England for over fifty years, going on to teach briefly at Oxford before moving permanently to York. It may well have been at Canterbury that he began writing his celebrated Liber Pauperum (‘Book for Poor Students’), which contained selections from Justinian’s Digest and Code interspersed with commentaries and which would be used as a cheap student textbook on Roman law until the Reformation.
Whether or not Thomas knew Vacarius, this was when he first encountered the rudiments of a system of values that stayed with him for the rest of his life. Roman and church law prided themselves on being rooted in ‘equity and reason’; such principles, their advocates passionately believed, should underpin every aspect of a civilized nation’s life. Their importance can scarcely be exaggerated, because these were years in which, under the influence of charismatic leaders like St Bernard and Peter the Venerable, the ascetic reform movement in the Church gave a fresh impetus to canon law, which came to focus on a vast range of topics such as church property, sex and marriage, inheritance, the validity of oaths and contracts, and heresy. And as the flow of appeals to Rome increased, the pope began to appoint special legates and ‘judges-delegate’ (or personal representatives) to handle tricky lawsuits. Papal power increased even more swiftly than it had during the disputes over ‘lay investiture’ and soon the character of the papal curia itself began to change as lawyers replaced those cardinals trained in theology. The result was a model centred around the idea of a sovereign pope deciding lawsuits at Rome and hearing appeals from the church courts all over Europe – the prelude to the rise of a papal monarchy in the Church.
When Thomas had acquired the basic skills he needed, Theobald sent him to sit at the feet of the masters of the law schools at Bologna and Auxerre. William fitz Stephen says that he spent a full year at Bologna – his teacher is likely to have been the distinguished civil and canon lawyer Master Albert de Morra, a future cardinal and papal chancellor – before continuing his studies at Auxerre, near Sens in northern Burgundy. There, for the first time in his life, he studied assiduously, throwing all his energy into the task. Of course, he was on a series of crash courses and very probably took short cuts, studying Summae (or ‘cribs’) of classic textbooks such as Justinian’s Institutes rather than reading the real thing, although, if anything, by stripping out the nuances from the originals, such cribs would have heightened his grasp of the fundamental principles.
As Theobald’s clerk, Thomas also gained admission to the higher social circles that appealed to him. Since bishops and archdeacons often enjoyed hunting and hawking, it is a fair assumption that he began keeping his own falcons while living in the archbishop’s palaces. Appalled by his friend’s love of blood sports, John of Salisbury condemned both these and games of chance, especially dice, but his views were the exception not the rule. After his initial awkwardness among his fellow-clerks caused by the gaps in his education, Thomas was settling down, ingratiating himself where he could and genuinely trying to succeed. Theobald, who despite his nepotistic tendencies was still not easily impressed by his underlings, said that he had never seen greater zeal and fidelity than those shown by his new clerk, a remark that stung Roger of Pont l’Évêque into giving his rival the nickname ‘Baillehache’ or ‘hatchet man’, insulting him by deliberately confusing him with the low-born marshal whom Edward Grim says had first introduced him to the archbishop.
By 1145 the atrocities of the civil war had sparked a fresh upsurge of rumour and superstition throughout the land. In Norwich, it was said that a boy had been crucified by the Jews and that a miraculous light in the sky had revealed his corpse. In Hertfordshire, a pious recluse called Christina of Markyate became famous for her mystical visions and was said to have seen Christ returning to earth, disguised as a pilgrim. In Somerset, a hermit called Wulfric of Haselbury was the talk of his village, reciting the psalter nightly in a tub of cold water and converting a sacrilegious knight to religion so that in due course he became an abbot. Dabbling in prophecy and speaking in French despite his Saxon background, Wulfric established close connections with Henry of Winchester, Stephen’s brother. When the king himself came to visit him, the hermit did not flinch from urging him to lead a better life. He even went on to prophesy, menacingly, that the throne of England would descend not to Stephen’s eldest son, Eustace, but to Henry of Anjou, the eldest son of Matilda and her husband, Count Geoffrey.
Such prophecies reflected the deepening anxiety caused by the political deadlock after Matilda’s perilous flight from Oxford through the snow. The tide briefly shifted in Stephen’s favour as several of Matilda’s supporters either changed sides or left to go on pilgrimages to Jerusalem, but when his new allies saw that Stephen did not really trust anyone and was liable at any time to use his familiar technique of a contrived quarrel at court as the prelude to seizing their lands, they returned their fealty to Matilda. Peace talks had failed, allowing little prospect of a settlement. If Matilda and her brother still dominated Bristol and the West Country, Stephen was ascendant elsewhere, despite some isolated pockets of resistance. As long as neither side was prepared to offer concessions, the war of attrition would continue, but with one key change. Before long Matilda, desperately short of money and finding it almost impossible to win over the doubters to the idea of female rule, lost confidence in her ability to reclaim the throne unaided and came to believe that she was fighting to recover her lost inheritance on behalf of her son Henry, for whose cause she became the champion.
In the spring of 1147, two years after the earnest Cistercian monk Bernard of Pisa had been elected pope as Eugenius III, Theobald went to Paris, where he settled a dispute between the monks of Bec and the canons of St Frideswide’s in the presence of the pope, who was then travelling around France to preach the Second Crusade. Since his habit was to take two of his favourite clerks with him on such journeys, it is likely that Becket accompanied him or else interrupted his studies at Auxerre to come to Paris. Not yet strong enough to intervene himself in the English civil war, Pope Eugenius would reach a secret understanding with Theobald, offering to work with him in the future in ways that would greatly increase the archbishop’s ability to influence political events.
Theobald had returned to Canterbury shortly before October 1147, when Robert, Earl of Gloucester, died of typhoid fever and Matilda’s support collapsed. With her forces fast melting away, she found it necessary to retreat from her near-impregnable headquarters at Devizes Castle, which she had requisitioned from Bishop Jocelin of Salisbury, to whom Pope Eugenius had ordered her to return it. Threatened with excommunication if she failed to comply, she delayed for as long as she could, but finally left the stronghold in the hands of a small garrison with enough provisions to last for several years. She then set sail for Normandy to rejoin her husband and sons, never to return.
Now her strategy was to urge her followers to hold out until her eldest son, Henry, just turned fifteen and beginning to play a significant part in Angevin and Norman politics, came of age. Her plan was that her husband, Geoffrey, should one day abdicate as duke of Normandy in favour of their son, who would become free to launch the ultimate campaign to reunite the duchy with England as his grandfather Henry I had done on the death of William Rufus. Young Henry had already shown his mettle on a clandestine visit to his mother when, landing at Wareham in Dorset at the age of fourteen with a few mercenaries hired on credit, he had marched to Wiltshire to assist her but become trapped. Unable either to advance or to retreat, he had cheekily parleyed with Stephen, whom he had persuaded to pay off his mercenaries and give him a safe-conduct and enough money to return home. Astonishingly, rather than taking him prisoner to get him out of the way, Stephen decided to whisk him safely out of the country before he created a more serious threat. A quixotic act of chivalry though it was, it was also a fatal mistake.
For Henry would live to fight another day. And a hint of the sort of man he was likely to become can be gleaned from the fact that when he next returned briefly to England in 1149 to rebuild his support in the West Country, far from obeying Pope Eugenius’s decree to make restitution to Jocelin of Salisbury, he confidently defied the pope, excluding Devizes Castle from his reparations, saying that he would ‘of necessity’ retain it in his own hands ‘until God should show him that he could give it back’.
With Matilda safely out of the way, Stephen might have triumphed but for the understanding between Theobald and the pope, for under the archbishop’s influence Eugenius, despite his earlier reservations, swung round to Matilda’s side. The result was that Thomas Becket would emerge from his position as a lowly clerk over the next few years and come to play a crucial role in settling the succession in England and Normandy. This followed a church council at Rheims, summoned by Eugenius, who was still in France, in the same month as Matilda had left England. Suspecting political moves against him and advised by his brother, Stephen expelled the diplomats delivering the papal summonses and sent three hand-picked bishops to France as his official delegates, forbidding the rest to attend. Having been forced to buy the Church’s support at the beginning of his reign with his Oxford charter, he now – with Matilda gone – intended to return to the policy of William the Conqueror’s last years and severely restrict freedom of movement between England and the papal curia.
He had reckoned without the resourceful Theobald, who now transformed the old relationship between king and archbishop as it had existed in the time of Lanfranc and Anselm by politicizing it to a degree hitherto unknown. Skilfully evading Stephen’s spies, he fled from Canterbury, hiring a fishing smack in a remote bay, taking with him Becket, Roger of Pont l’Évêque and John of Salisbury. Their boat, said John wistfully as he suffered badly from seasickness, ‘could carry no more than a dozen men and lacked even the most essential equipment; and so [Theobald] crossed the Channel rather as a survivor from a shipwreck than in a ship’. When the archbishop eventually reached Rheims, he was given a hero’s welcome and Stephen’s chosen delegates, who had disingenuously presented the archbishop’s apologies to the council without his knowledge, were humiliated. Eugenius joked that Theobald had made his journey ‘by swimming rather than sailing’, retaliating against Stephen by suspending those bishops who had obeyed the king’s instructions to absent themselves from the council and especially Henry of Winchester, whose absolution the pope reserved to himself.
But what most enraged Stephen about this council was its decision, on Eugenius’s advice, to deprive William fitz Herbert, the king’s nephew, of the archbishopric of York and replace him with Henry Murdac, the Cistercian abbot of Fountains, on the grounds that Stephen had rigged the election. The furious king refused to accept Murdac and attempted to block his passage into Yorkshire – unsuccessfully, since he slipped through the net, reaching Beverley and then Ripon, from where he laid an interdict on the city of York.
In Rheims itself, the precincts of the basilica buzzed with activity. Becket found himself mingling with the great and the good, meeting the famous Abbot Suger of St-Denis, one of the chief architects of the reconstruction of the Capetian monarchy, who had risen through the Church from peasant origins to become a leading royal councillor. He saw the celebrated theologian Peter Lombard in action. He even saw his own old Paris master, Robert of Melun, and perhaps the great St Bernard himself.
The climax came on the final day when Eugenius decided to excommunicate Stephen. The supreme form of ecclesiastical censure imposed upon an individual, excommunication was the process by which a ban was placed on the offender and the sacraments or other spiritual benefits denied him until he confessed his sins and was absolved by the Church, meaning that should he die before the ban was lifted, he would go to hell. The candles had already been lit for the ceremony when Theobald, to everyone’s astonishment, knelt before the pope and begged for mercy for the errant king. So thunderstruck was Eugenius at the sight of so spontaneous a display of Christian charity, he ‘at first meditated in silence and then, sighing, spoke as follows: “My brethren, behold this man who enacts the Gospel in our own time by loving his enemies and never ceasing to pray for his persecutors. For although the king has by his effrontery deserved our wrath and the wrath of God’s church, nevertheless we cannot but commend such love or refuse to hear his prayers.” ’
Theobald was playing a long game. He knew that no matter how obstinate and unpopular Stephen was as an individual, the king rightly thought himself strong enough to defy the pope. Had Eugenius imposed so terrible a sanction as excommunication on him without adequate explanation in advance or without giving him a sufficient opportunity to repent and mend his ways, public opinion would have veered back in his favour against the pope. Theobald intervened because he knew that a censure which appeared to be premature in the eyes of the world and which could not adequately be enforced would fail, because everyone in England yearned for peace and a return to normal life.
In April 1148 Theobald slipped back into Canterbury and was given a hero’s welcome by the townsfolk and the Christ Church monks. But Stephen did not feel himself in any way beholden to him for his support against the pope. Instead, hearing a report of his return, he sent one of his loyal henchmen, Richard de Lucy – a committed royalist whom Thomas Becket would one day find himself excommunicating – to demand his submission. When the archbishop refused, his property was seized and he was frogmarched to Dover and deported to Flanders, where he took refuge at the Benedictine abbey of St Bertin at St-Omer. His friends were free to come and go as they pleased, bringing him gifts of food and clothing and carrying messages to and from Stephen’s court, but nothing could disguise the fact that the king had driven the primate into exile. It was only in July, when fresh peace negotiations failed and news of Theobald’s expulsion reached Eugenius at Brescia in northern Italy, that the pope intervened, ordering Stephen to recall his archbishop and restore his goods. If he refused, then England was to be laid under a general interdict suspending the spiritual benefits of church membership to the entire population, and if nothing changed, the king was to be excommunicated after all.
Eugenius had dramatically raised the stakes. When Stephen continued to defy him, Theobald put the papal interdict into effect, but his original instinct had been sound. John of Salisbury says that many of the clergy refused to comply with the interdict for fear of rekindling the civil war. Among the first to disobey were the Londoners, who lodged an appeal to Rome. Only in Theobald’s own diocese of Canterbury did the clergy conform, and there too compliance must have been patchy, since John says that the monastery of St Augustine’s resisted the pope’s decree for as long as 180 days.
When by the following spring the scale of the failure was fully known, Theobald believed he had no choice but to ratchet up the pressure, well aware of the rapacity of Stephen’s henchmen, whom he feared would ravage his estates and ransack his manor-houses while the king turned a blind eye. Hiring another boat, he sailed from Gravelines in Flanders to Gosford in Suffolk, then galloped in disguise to Framlingham, where he took refuge in the castle under the protection of Hugh Bigod, who had defected to Matilda. From behind the high curtain walls of this mighty fortress, he resumed his authority over the English Church, receiving bishops and hearing lawsuits with the help of his clerks, including Thomas. Knowing he had gone too far and was in danger of driving the archbishop straight into the arms of his enemies, Stephen settled the dispute and restored him to his lands, even paying compensation for the damage to his property. Theobald had shown he could win out even against the odds.
Whether Becket had been with Theobald at St-Omer and Framlingham is unknown, but in 1167 he would send a vivid account of the episode to Cardinal Boso at the papal curia. Reminding him that no one had better exemplified the church of Canterbury’s obedience to the pope than Theobald, Thomas proceeded to recount how the archbishop had been forced into exile for obeying Eugenius’s summons to the council. ‘Which other bishops have you ever seen or read about,’ he says, ‘who set themselves against princes to defend the Church’s liberty and to preserve the institutions of the fathers, out of respect and obedience for the Apostolic See, except the archbishops of Canterbury? Indeed there is not even one who has done so in our own time, and you will find none if you read the ancient histories.’ Stephen, he continues, faced with Theobald’s opposition ‘did not stop attacking [him] until Lord Eugenius, of pious memory, ordered all the bishops to observe without leave of appeal the sentence issued against him and the interdict imposed on his lands. For the wolf is not easily kept away from the sheep-fold, unless he is frightened by the stick and barking dogs.’
Thomas would come to see Theobald’s resistance as a shining example of an honest churchman’s refusal to be bullied by a tyrant. Such resolute action, he claimed, provided the precedent for his own sudden flight into exile. Here he spins his story to suit his own ends, because it was not Theobald who had chosen exile but Stephen who had deported him, and the pope’s interdict would signally fail. And yet the spin would be as important as the substance, for what Becket’s letter also makes clear is that by the time his own career had arrived at its great crisis, he would be more of a politician than even Theobald, to whom it would never have occurred to search for precedents of churchmen standing up to tyrants.
As Thomas steadily gained in knowledge and experience, he was sent alone on diplomatic missions to Rome. The first, in late 1149 or early 1150, concerned Theobald’s bid to secure appointment as resident papal legate, able to represent the pope in England and armed with his authority. That it ended in success was a considerable triumph, since Bishop Henry, Stephen’s brother, had previously held this role, giving him precedence over the archbishop and seriously undermining his authority. According to the monk Gervase of Canterbury, it was only Becket’s powerful advocacy before Pope Eugenius that had swung the case for Theobald. Bishop Henry dashed to Rome himself in a last-ditch attempt to revive his candidacy, but failed to outwit Thomas. The way was now open for the archbishop to intervene decisively in the civil war should he so choose.
When Stephen’s sullen reaction was to threaten and ostracize Theobald, the archbishop came ever closer towards declaring his outright support for Matilda and the Angevins. No longer could the king rely on his brother to crown and anoint his eldest son, Eustace, as his designated heir, as he had planned to do, since Theobald – whose right it now was as both archbishop and papal legate to preside at the coronation ceremony – had objected. So with his eye fixed firmly on a dynastic settlement, Theobald sent Becket on a second, even more impressive embassy to Rome, where he secured a papal decree forbidding Eustace’s coronation.
No sooner was the decree issued than Stephen sent Roger of Pont l’Évêque, Thomas’s rival, to Rome to get it withdrawn. Now archdeacon of Canterbury following Walter’s promotion to the bishopric of Rochester, Roger was as ambitious as ever and keeping his options open. How this played with Thomas we do not know. Maybe they respected each other’s positions and politely agreed to differ, but given their competitive instincts Roger’s mission is more likely to have further sharpened their enmity.
Roger’s petition for Eustace’s coronation to be allowed was denied. Pope Eugenius ruled decisively in Theobald’s favour, because Stephen had broken his oath to Matilda in assuming the throne. At long last she was vindicated in the eyes of the Church and Stephen condemned by his perjury. Her difficulty was to translate that moral advantage into a political and military victory for herself or her son.
Whether Theobald’s success in gaining the decree was due more to Becket’s diplomacy or Eugenius’s impatience with the delinquent Stephen is impossible to judge. Gervase claims that it was a crucial step in Becket’s rise to greatness. But this is probably hyperbole, since Thomas says very little about his own role in the negotiations.
And once more caution is needed, because in his later references to the affair, Thomas once again spins his story. In another letter written in 1168, he would recall how one of the cardinals had spoken in Roger of Pont l’Évêque’s support, ‘saying that it was easier to hold a ram by the horn than a lion by the tail’. By then, Thomas would place a radically different value on this argument, suspecting that it might have been preferable if Roger’s petition had after all been successful and the papal prohibition overturned. For if Eustace had been crowned, then it would have been him (the ram), and not Matilda’s son Henry of Anjou (by then Becket’s nemesis), who would have succeeded Stephen.
But despite Thomas’s subsequent U-turn, there is no hint that he recanted his part in the diplomacy or believed that Eugenius had been wrong at the time. Rather, his main purpose in referring back to the incident is to show that nobody could ever have foreseen how King Stephen would be succeeded by an even greater tyrant – the ruler against whom Thomas would later make his stand.
In the spring of 1152 Stephen convened a great council of magnates and bishops at London to decide whether he could muster enough votes to proceed with crowning Eustace regardless of the papal ban. Determined to press for a decision, he presided at the meeting with Eustace sitting at his right hand. Opening the discussion, he turned to the bishops, demanding their assent, but none was willing to usurp the primate’s right of coronation, and when Theobald stood firm and told Stephen to his face that the pope had forbidden it, his support was solid.
At so public a rebuff, Stephen and Eustace flew into a rage. A chronicler relates how ‘both father and son, greatly disappointed and incensed, ordered the bishops to be shut up in one house together, and by threats and hardship endeavoured to compel them to comply with their demand’. When a putsch appeared imminent, a few bishops, declaring that Stephen ‘had never loved priests’, yielded, but most refused to budge. Making his escape, Theobald boarded a ship and set off along the Thames as fast as he could, for fear of his life.
As an anonymous ‘Life of Theobald’ copied into the chronicle of Bec Abbey explains, the archbishop knew that he had reached a crossroads. Having watched the king degenerate from a protector of the Church into a tyrant before his eyes, he was ready to support an invasion of England by Henry of Anjou. Already invested as duke of Normandy in succession to his father, who had succumbed to a fatal bout of malaria, young Henry was mustering his troops. Informed by spies of Theobald’s clandestine contacts with the Angevins, Stephen, says the Bec chronicler, let it be known that he no longer cared if anyone physically attacked his renegade archbishop, even though he himself ‘was not prepared to touch a hair of his head’. Hearing this, a dozen knights drew their swords and rushed from the court intent on assassinating him, chasing him along the Thames, but he got away. Was Thomas at the archbishop’s side as he escaped with this murderous band of knights hard on his heels? If so, he could hardly have forgotten such a harrowing experience – one that would have made him fully aware of what kings might attempt if they were crossed.
Theobald was not long in this, his final exile. Safely reaching Dover and embarking once more for Flanders, where he landed on 6 April 1152, he had been recalled to his own cathedral by the end of August, when his lands were restored to him. King Stephen finally backed down, accepting that the Church had defeated him. His son Eustace would never be crowned, and in Gervase of Canterbury’s view, ‘the whole of this was done by the subtle foresight of a certain Thomas, a clerk, of London’, who had gained the papal legacy for his archbishop.
True or not, a milestone had been passed, for by his missions to Rome and proximity to Theobald during his long tussle with the king, Thomas Becket had completed his apprenticeship in more ways that one.