By the time Theobald thwarted King Stephen in his plans to crown Eustace, Thomas Becket held an uncontested position as his right-hand man. Not yet in holy orders, tonsured as a clerk but not subject to a religious vow, he was still a layman – which did not prevent Theobald from giving him a generous share of church patronage or encouraging others to do so. As a reward for his work at the Council of Rheims and for obtaining the papal legacy for Theobald, he received the revenues of the parish church of Otford in Kent, followed by those of St Mary-le-Strand in London and of Bramfield in Hertfordshire. Next, Thomas became a prebendary of St Paul’s and Lincoln Cathedrals, receiving a ‘share’ (praebenda) of the income from the cathedral lands. Intended originally to supplement the salaries of working priests with pastoral obligations, such posts were rarely more than sinecures. In a few instances, a prebendary had some formal duties laid down by the cathedral’s statutes and Thomas did have contact with Lincoln. He got to know Philip de Broi, a fellow-prebendary of noble birth, quite well and about ten years later would be put on the spot when de Broi was charged with the murder of a knight.
The civil war, meanwhile, was ebbing to its close. When King Louis VII of France had recognized Henry of Anjou as duke of Normandy in 1151, which he did in exchange for a final tranche of what still remained of the old Norman Vexin, he had removed the threat to the young duke’s position on the Continent. Then just as Henry was poised to launch his invasion of England in the spring of 1152, there was sensational news. A church council at Beaugency had annulled the marriage of Louis and his wife, Eleanor of Aquitaine, on the grounds of consanguinity, even though they had cohabited for almost sixteen years and she had given him two healthy daughters. Since the couple were fourth cousins and related in a whole other tangle of ways within the prohibited degrees, the Church should either have barred them from marrying in the first place or granted them a special dispensation. That it had done neither was a mistake that would cost the Capetian monarchy dear.
Eleanor had been barely fifteen in 1137 when her father, William X, duke of Aquitaine and count of Poitou, died on a pilgrimage to the shrine of St James at Santiago de Compostela, leaving her as his sole heiress. The same year she had married the sixteen-year-old Louis shortly before he became king. A woman of truly exceptional qualities of intelligence and personality, she was famous for her sparkling black eyes and love of the sophisticated, courtly values of her ancestors, the counts of Poitou. At first she had enchanted Louis; but as a second son destined for a career in the Church until his elder brother’s horse had stumbled over a passing pig in the streets of Paris, throwing him fatally to the ground, he had been bred in the cloister. As he grew older, he became more devout and ascetic, his passion for Eleanor waning. For four years, rumours had been rife about the marriage. She, feisty and formidable, now turned thirty, had not borne him a son, raising doubts in his mind about her fecundity. This is more likely to have been his fault than hers, since she was overheard complaining how her husband was a monk, not a king. In 1147–8, when the ill-matched couple had travelled to Antioch on the Second Crusade, the marriage was already on the rocks. Rumour had linked Eleanor’s name romantically to that of her uncle, Prince Raymond, who ruled there, although it is far from clear that during the time they spent together she had done anything other than voice her concern for the fate of her relatives and fellow-countrymen in a dangerously vulnerable crusader territory. Quick to pick up on the gossip, however, John of Salisbury says they had been seen in each other’s company day and night, arousing Louis’s darkest suspicions.
Determined not to get sidetracked at Antioch and to fulfil his vow to go first to Jerusalem before campaigning elsewhere, Louis had announced his immediate departure. Instead of meekly accompanying him, which is what a medieval ruler expected of his wife, the furious Eleanor had quarrelled with him in public, threatening to stay in Antioch without him. It was when he had forcibly dragged her away from her uncle’s palace that she is said to have asked for a separation.
At first Pope Eugenius had personally intervened in an effort to reconcile the couple, meeting them on their return from the Middle East and making them sleep in the same bed. But Eleanor had demanded an annulment, and when it was granted the dashing young count of Anjou lost no time in making his suit. Salaciously hinting at a sexual motive, the chroniclers claim that Eleanor had first cast lascivious eyes on Henry when he came to Paris to do homage for Normandy. But this is very much a monkish perspective: their mutual love of power seems chiefly to have drawn the two together, for there is little solid evidence, at least at the beginning of their relationship, that it was a love match on either side.
For the nineteen-year-old Henry, Eleanor’s attraction lay in the fact that she claimed descent from Charlemagne and was the sole heiress to an empire in south-west France carved out of the fragments into which the old Carolingian provinces of Aquitaine and Gascony had disintegrated. The prospect of gaining Aquitaine had a massive impact on the young Henry’s mind at a time when he had not yet been recognized as Stephen’s successor and other members of Stephen’s family of Blois-Champagne could block his expansionary aims. Admittedly with ill-defined frontiers that were difficult to defend, Aquitaine’s vast territories extended southwards from the Loire Valley to the foothills of the Pyrenees and westwards from the central heights of the Auvergne to the Atlantic Ocean. Larger and richer even than the lands of the French royal demesne, they were a magnet for Henry. Combined with his existing fiefs in Normandy, Maine, Anjou and Touraine, they had the potential to give him a continental empire that dwarfed the inheritance of the Capetian dynasty, a domain greater than had been held by any ruler since the disintegration of the Carolingian empire and with huge reserves of natural resources. For with Aquitaine united to Anjou, much of the trade and traffic in western and southern France, and especially between Nantes, Poitiers, Bordeaux and the Mediterranean, would fall into his hands. Only Duke William X’s failure to recover possession of the city and county of Toulouse stood in the way of a near-monopoly of the trade along the River Garonne connecting the Mediterranean and the Atlantic and along the old Roman road linking Narbonne and Bordeaux.
For Eleanor, the attraction of marrying Henry seems to have lain in her unwavering, if perhaps naive belief that he would fill the power vacuum caused by her father’s death and so restore Aquitaine to the glory it had enjoyed under her grandfather Duke William IX. A daring and intrepid ruler, educated and hard-working, William IX had led a large, loyal retinue of knights fearlessly into battle against the Spanish Muslims while building a reputation as a lyric poet and (on the downside) a lecher: it was said of him that he ‘wallowed in every kind of vice’, founding a ‘convent of prostitutes’ near the castle of Niort and painting the image of a viscountess on his shield, saying he wanted to bear her into battle in the same way as she used to bear him in bed. Deeply etched into Eleanor’s consciousness was a determination to persuade her new husband to preserve Aquitaine’s historical and cultural independence. She saw herself as an advocate for what was nothing less than a pro-Poitevin policy leading, one day, to a full-scale military campaign to recover Toulouse. Perhaps she felt she would be able to dominate Henry or sway his judgement, as she had clearly often dominated the far weaker and impressionable Louis. If so, she had fundamentally miscalculated.
The couple were married on Whit Sunday 1152 at Poitiers after exchanging messages by fast riders barely eight weeks after Eleanor was single again. The speed of their marriage caused another monkish flurry, but may equally be explicable as the dilemma of a woman whose other prospective suitors had made no secret of their intentions to ambush and rape her on her way back to Poitou in order to stake their claim. Less than a month later, Henry was in Normandy again and ready to invade England. His sheer verve and audacity enraged King Louis, who considered himself doubly insulted, for not only had Henry married his ex-wife and in unseemly haste, but he had also slighted him by failing to ask his permission as his feudal superior. ‘The marriage,’ said the chroniclers, ‘caused great dissensions, fomented into hatred, between the King of France and the duke’, a hatred soon compounded by jealousy when Eleanor became pregnant with a son, named William after her father and grandfather.
Louis still had a winning card to play. Some ten years before, his sister Constance had married Stephen’s son, Eustace, whose cause he now decided to aid. The marriage had been loveless and childless, and far from his bride bringing him a princely dowry, Eustace had been forced to spend the treasure his father had looted from Roger of Salisbury to buy her hand. But when invited by his brother-in-law to pre-empt Henry’s invasion by joining him in a two-pronged counter-attack on Normandy, he quickly seized the chance. The more his thoughts dwelt on Henry, the more Eustace saw his own future as bleak, making the Capetian king’s siren call irresistible. Moving at impressive speed, the allies invaded the duchy in the summer of 1152, laying siege to Arques, near Dieppe, and digging in at Neufmarché on the River Epte. Henry’s troops retaliated in the French zone of the Vexin, reinforced by a crack unit of Breton mercenaries. So successful was he that Louis retreated to the safety of Paris. After little more than six weeks, Eustace was isolated and forced to return home.
By the second week of January 1153, Henry felt he could delay no longer and embarked for England from Barfleur. Braving a winter gale, his fleet of thirty-six ships carrying a force of 140 knights and 3,000 infantry landed safely at Wareham, where he had arrived five years before on his abortive raid to help his mother. After first relieving the garrison at her old headquarters at Devizes Castle, he launched a surprise attack on Malmesbury, where his troops entered the town and the outer bailey of the castle, but failed to storm the keep. There followed a siege and an uneasy truce lasting for six months while Henry travelled from Bristol to Gloucester, where on 19 April he held his Easter court and loudly proclaimed his new title of duke of Aquitaine. Afterwards he marched around the Midlands, capturing castles or forcing their occupants to surrender them.
Returning south at the end of July, Henry planned to base himself at Wallingford in Oxfordshire and open up the bridge across the Thames. First, however, he had to lay siege to Stephen’s fortress at nearby Crowmarsh, which he had so far failed to take. Then he was forced to prepare himself for battle, as Stephen and Eustace arrived on the opposite side of the river to besiege Wallingford. For all his human failings and evil deeds, Stephen was a fine warrior and did not lack courage. A headstrong man who moved in fits and starts and was driven by the heart rather than the head, he was eager to fight a pitched battle for his son’s sake as well as his own – but neither side’s barons would fight. Most of these barons held multiple estates on both sides of the Channel; if a battle should turn against them or if they should lose their feudal overlord’s favour, their lands could be confiscated either in whole or in part. Voting with their feet, they chose to avert the losses to themselves that they knew would follow if their leaders stayed at loggerheads.
Neither Henry nor Stephen wanted this outcome and both bitterly attacked the selfish motives of their leading men. Eustace, who saw clearly that any accord with Henry would spell the end of his hopes to succeed his father on the English throne, violently upbraided his men for their cowardice but was powerless to act.
In a last-ditch effort to settle things between themselves, Stephen and Henry held a ‘private conference’, shouting at each other, man to man, across a narrow reach of the Thames at Wallingford. They tried to agree on terms that would leave them free to fight another day but failed. Both then withdrew while delegations from each side met to negotiate a final accord. Henry went off to attack Stamford and Nottingham, while Stephen marched to Ipswich, where Hugh Bigod had captured the castle. As to Eustace, Gervase of Canterbury says that after ranting against his father for being prepared to allow the barons to sacrifice him ‘to a vain shadow of peace’, he rode away in disgust towards Cambridge, where he mustered a fresh force and set out for Ipswich himself. Halting along the way at the abbey of Bury St Edmunds, he demanded food and money for his troops. When the monks refused, he gave the order to pillage their abbey and its lands: despoiling the Church ran in his family and held no terrors for him.
In the opinion of the author of the Gesta Stephani, Eustace got his just reward when God struck him down for his sacrilege. On about 17 August at the age of twenty-four, he died of a sudden heart attack, described by the chroniclers as ‘a burning frenzy’. His death removed the final obstacle to an accord, and the chroniclers joined the monks of Bury in rejoicing over the death of a man whom they regarded as a chief persecutor of the Church and a greater, crueller tyrant than his father.
The peace was brokered by Theobald, who emerges as the towering figure in politics and effectively kingmaker. Throughout these delicate discussions, Becket was constantly by his side, rapidly emerging as an adept and determined fixer whom Theobald afterwards described as ‘my first and only councillor’. Both had arrived at Wallingford shortly before Eustace and Stephen had left for Ipswich; it was an open secret that they had been in communication with the principals on either side for several months. Theobald had begun by visiting Stephen. He and Thomas then met Henry during the siege of Crowmarsh. Loosely attached to the Angevin court since 9 April, when he had mediated in Henry’s ongoing quarrel with Bishop Jocelin of Salisbury over which of them should have Devizes Castle, Theobald had decided to push for a political settlement in which Henry ended up as king. It was, as Becket remembered afterwards, a highly fraught few months. Theobald, he recalled, had endured ‘hardships beyond number’, for had he dealt his cards in the wrong order, Stephen might easily have accused him of treason.
In persuading the archbishop to switch his allegiance from Stephen to the Angevins, the affair of Devizes Castle and its surrounding lands played a crucial part. When Henry offered to swear an oath to restore such a valuable and strategically placed property to the Church within three years as the pope had commanded, he created the impression that he would be willing to restore to the Church the lands that Stephen and the barons had so shamelessly pillaged. By now an older and wiser man, Bishop Henry of Winchester had come to regret his part in his brother’s usurpation and was ably assisting Theobald, coaxing his brother into reaching an agreement and leaving the archbishop free to concentrate on Henry.
Becket knew every intricate detail of the Devizes Castle business backwards and in later years would come to rue it as a portent of what was to come. In 1157, by which time the castle should have been restored, Henry defaulted and forced Bishop Jocelin to abandon his claim to it and the adjacent parkland in exchange for a pittance. Writing to the pope in 1168, when his quarrel with the king was approaching its climax, Thomas cited this as just one of innumerable examples of Henry’s perfidy. ‘If I wished to run through the similar encroachments which he has made,’ he complained, ‘when properties were taken away from others in the same way, and liberty was taken from all in common, so that not even the hope of freedom is left to anybody, a whole day would not be long enough.’
None of this could have been foreseen. After six months of meticulous diplomacy, Theobald and Becket would broker a reconciliation between Henry and Stephen that was a source of wonder to the chroniclers. On 6 November 1153 the two rivals met at Winchester and announced that they had settled their differences. It was little short of a miracle, ‘withdrawing the scourge which had long tormented England’. Stephen led Henry through the streets in a grand procession of bishops and nobles, culminating at the king’s palace within the castle walls, where in a great council Stephen declared Henry to be his ‘son and heir’ and the lawful successor to the crown. In return Henry conceded that Stephen should rule England for the rest of his life, provided he and each of the magnates took a solemn oath excluding Eustace’s younger brother, William, from the throne. In addition, all those lands and castles that had changed hands by force during the civil war should be returned to their legitimate occupiers in the reign of Henry I – the first indication that the future king was determined to restore the status quo as it existed in his grandfather’s lifetime.
When Stephen and Henry rode together to London, the bells rang and the citizens cheered as they and their followers processed into the city in triumph. Six weeks later, after most of the smaller details had been sorted out by Theobald, the magnates came to Westminster for the king’s Christmas court and the treaty was sealed. Proclaimed in the form of a charter granted by Stephen to ‘all his liegemen of England’, the document fully described the agreements that had been made and the oaths that had secured them. Stephen formally adopted Henry and took an oath to maintain him as his ‘son and heir’. Henry and his men did homage to Stephen, and Stephen’s men did homage to Henry, ‘saving only the fealty that they owed to the king for as long as he lived’. William too did homage to Henry, who confirmed to him all the castles and manors which he had inherited, or which his father had conferred on him, or were due to him by marriage in England and Normandy. Neutral third parties took possession of the Tower of London and the castles of Windsor, Oxford, Lincoln and Winchester, swearing to return them to Henry on Stephen’s death. Finally, Theobald, Henry of Winchester and all the bishops and abbots took an oath to Henry at Stephen’s command, and promised to punish all infringements of the treaty on pain of excommunication or interdict.
Not only did the treaty of Westminster end the civil war, it laid the foundations for everything that was to come. While Thomas Becket is not included in the list of witnesses to the document, nobody below the rank of a bishop or prior is mentioned in it by name. But the new Angevin king owed his throne at least in part to Becket, given his role as Theobald’s fixer and right-hand man from the siege of Crowmarsh onwards. And he was certainly well rewarded, replacing Roger of Pont l’Évêque as archdeacon of Canterbury when Roger was sent north to be archbishop of York. With an income of at least £100 a year, more even than Roger would receive in his new post and roughly the same as the annual expenditure of an average baron, the archdeaconry was a far more significant position than its name suggests, fast-tracking Thomas and putting him alongside the bishops and abbots in wealth and status.
His new position required Becket to take holy orders as a deacon. No longer was he allowed to marry or (strictly) to bear arms, even if the second of these rules was acknowledged throughout Europe more in the breach than the observance. A deacon was unable to celebrate the mass, but could baptize children, assist the priests at the altar and administer the last rites to the mortally sick. The final pieces of the jigsaw fell into place for Thomas when Theobald appointed him dean of Hastings and recommended him for the provostship of Beverley. With these rich livings under his belt on top of the archdeaconry, his position as the man whom Theobald had marked out for a glittering future career could not be questioned.
What nobody could have predicted was how briefly he would have to wait. Among those marvelling at the turn of events was the chronicler Gervase of Canterbury, who describes how on 25 October 1154, ten months after the treaty of Westminster, Stephen suffered a violent pain in his lower abdomen at Dover Priory. Taking to his bed, he died within hours of a bloody flux. Henry, who had been briefly in Aquitaine and was now back at Rouen with Eleanor, raced to Barfleur to await a favourable wind. While everyone held their breath, Theobald assumed the regency until 7 December, when Henry and Eleanor landed near Southampton and were jointly crowned by the archbishop at Westminster Abbey on the 19th. Thomas Becket was there too: for nine years he had been Theobald’s clerk and right-hand man, involved in the most delicate and thrilling of poker games involving Church and State. During that time, the influence of the Church and the papacy had dramatically increased and the archbishop of Canterbury, for the first time since 1066, had entered the political arena, attending the Council of Rheims in defiance of the king, imposing a papal interdict on England, narrowly escaping assassination at the hands of a dozen of the king’s knights and refusing to crown Eustace.
Henry was now twenty-one, Becket just two days short of his thirty-fourth birthday. But what would clearly most amaze all the chroniclers was that, less than six weeks after Henry’s triumphal return, Thomas would be catapulted into the limelight as the new king’s chancellor, one of the highest offices in the realm and a meteoric promotion for a middle-class Londoner. At a stroke he became Henry’s confidant, with the right to attend all meetings of the king’s council whether invited or not. He had important financial and judicial responsibilities, and was chief custodian of the king’s seal besides being in charge of the royal scriptorium or ‘writing office’.
Gervase especially marvels that Henry’s decision to make Thomas chancellor was taken ‘at the very beginning of the reign’, as if it had already been settled in advance. Just how Henry came to make his choice has always been thought mysterious or inexplicable, but it is one of the most intriguing and important aspects of Becket’s story. As the king’s chancellor, he would be constantly by Henry’s side, but within a few years the different values and character flaws of the pair would begin to surface, culminating in a clash of titans that only one of them could survive.