Thomas Becket was nominated as Henry II’s chancellor during the king’s Christmas celebrations held at Bermondsey Abbey immediately after the coronation and had been appointed to the post within a month. Theobald wished to plant his own right-hand man at the heart of the king’s inner circle in the Church’s interests, recruiting two of Henry’s most experienced Norman councillors, Bishop Arnulf of Lisieux and Bishop Philip of Bayeux, to lobby on his protégé’s behalf.
Roger of Pontigny, to whom Becket would later pour out his heart in exile, explains how Theobald feared for the future:
There was no little trepidation in the Church … on the one hand because of the worrying youth of the king, and on the other because of the well-known antipathy of his courtiers towards the Church’s right to liberty … The archbishop of Canterbury, then, as troubled by the present as he was fearful for the future, planned to raise some defence against the evil which was thought imminent. And it seemed to him that if he could introduce Thomas to the king’s councils, he could therefore provide calm and peace.
The ‘evil’ against the Church that Theobald is said to have foreseen is often assumed to be Henry’s own, in which case he would swiftly have come to repent of his role as kingmaker. But Robert of Cricklade, who knew and understood the archbishop, declares that at this early stage it was the barons, not the king, whose designs he wished to prevent. As Theobald himself explains in a letter to Henry, ‘the sons of this world counsel you to lessen the authority of the Church so that your royal power may be increased’.
The Church had been heavily pillaged in Stephen’s reign and the barons were largely responsible. Theobald, now in his mid-sixties, would never lose sight of the fact that the young king’s grandfather had successfully stamped his authority on the barons. The new king, he believed, was the only credible guarantor of public order, and if order was lacking then the Church was at a greater risk than if it went its own way. The restoration of a strong king who was also a lover of law and order could only be a blessing for the Church. That blessing, Theobald knew, must come at a price, but he was at heart a pragmatist, a staunch advocate of cooperation between Church and State in the mould of his distinguished predecessor Lanfranc. Most likely, he considered his own politicization of the primacy in Stephen’s reign to be an aberration – a necessary evil driven by the exceptional circumstances of the civil war; one that could be reversed by placing his own man at the heart of the royal court to steer the king into pathways sympathetic to the Church. Clearly, by restoring the power of the monarchy, Theobald imagined that he would also be able to restore the king’s traditional role as a patron and protector of the Church. Then, he would be free to devote himself fully to his pastoral work before he died.
Aged thirty-four when he arrived at court, Thomas was still as slim and fit as when he had ridden out from Pevensey Castle with Richer de l’Aigle as a teenager. The hair around his tonsure was as yet untouched by flecks of grey; his face, once thin, had filled out, although his broad brow, aquiline nose and large, bright eyes were just the same. His slender, tapering, white fingers contrasted sharply with the rough hands of the men-at-arms who surrounded him. Now mainly occupied with his official duties, he had not yet lost his passion for outdoor sports. He still pursued them eagerly, riding out with his favourite hawks, falcons and hounds almost as often as before. And in the long winter evenings he relaxed over a leisurely game of chess. A brilliant player, the same memory skills that helped him to recall the winning moves enabled him to quote charters and official documents at will, remembering the smallest, most intricate details of his dealings with the king.
William fitz Stephen, who entered the new chancellor’s household as a lawyer and clerk soon after his appointment, vividly describes Thomas’s intimacy with Henry, claiming that the two men worked closely together from the outset, forming an extraordinary bond of friendship, so that when they had finished their day’s business, they would play together like boys of the same age – in hall, in church, or wherever else they happened to be. Henry would often call at the chancellor’s house at dinner time, even arriving bow in hand from the chase, when he would ride his horse directly into the chancellor’s hall. Sometimes he would merely take a drink, then leave after chatting to Thomas; at other times he would stay to eat, vaulting over the tables to sit down beside him while those around made space. Such was their mutual rapport that Becket could one day apparently boast, ‘I know my lord king inside out.’ ‘Never,’ concludes fitz Stephen, ‘in the whole epoch of Christian history were two men more of one mind or better friends.’
This verdict has dominated writings on Thomas Becket for 900 years, but niggling doubts arise from fitz Stephen’s deep reluctance to illustrate his case in any specific detail – bland assertions are all that he can muster. Despite painting a glowing picture of a relationship of near-equals, as if Henry and Thomas were blood brothers, he is unable to conjure up a single credible anecdote describing the happy times the king and his chancellor spent together, spinning his tale after Becket’s murder to justify his canonization by the pope, seeking to cast all the blame for the two men’s estrangement on to Henry’s shoulders, milking their earlier familiarity for all it is worth to castigate better the king’s subsequent behaviour.
But for as long as Henry’s favour lasted, Thomas would enjoy a life of luxury and conspicuous consumption. Always ready to flaunt his success, he maintained a household said by his friends to be second only in size to the king’s and by his enemies to be larger and more sumptuous. The exact size of his retinue is unknown, but since he kept six ships on regular standby for crossing the Channel in comparison to Henry’s twenty-five, it is likely to have contained a core of around 150 knights plus their servants. To entertain his guests, he assembled a travelling zoo, purchasing troupes of monkeys together with parrots and other exotic birds from Africa. He even kept a pair of wolves for use as hunting dogs. Unsurprisingly, his lifestyle attracted charges of hypocrisy from those affronted by his excess: heavily criticized were his expensive furnishings and fashionable clothes, including silks and furs; so were his armies of servants and throngs of guests, among them several who brought their mistresses to dinner.
For a newcomer to the chancellor’s role, a magnificent household would prove to be essential to the job, since apart from being one of the principal ways in which he could establish his position as a power broker, it was also his duty to keep open house for the king and his friends. Generous hospitality was a social obligation. It is, however, equally true that a chancellor who was a born aristocrat would not have felt the need to entertain so lavishly. As a middle-class Londoner and an upstart in the eyes of genuine aristocrats, Thomas was determined to have the very best of everything and to impress, so that no expense was spared. He also meant to keep the company of aristocrats, inviting earls and barons regularly to dine in his hall. When they arrived, he would prove to be the most courteous and considerate of hosts, greeting each of his guests individually as they arrived and correcting in an instant the slightest oversight in the seating arrangements. His table glittered with gold and silver plate. He served the most expensive delicacies and the rarest wines – no price was too dear to deter his purveyors or his cooks. A single dish of eels, which rumour said he had purchased at a market near Paris for the fabulous sum of £100 – enough to keep whole families of labourers in comfort for a lifetime – was long remembered as an example of his prodigality.
Henry might have taken exception to his chancellor’s displays of grandeur and ostentation, calling them presumption, but if fitz Stephen’s version of the story is to be believed, no such petty thoughts yet crossed his mind. Given control over a significant proportion of the royal revenues, Becket was free to spend money in ways he felt were consistent with the king’s greater glory, which is how he could afford to live as he did. With Henry’s confidence in him seemingly unbounded, he chose to position himself as close to the king as he could, representing himself to the world as the nearest thing to Henry’s alter ego, exercising powers that placed him above all others save members of the royal family.
Although four or more inches shorter than Becket, Henry too was well above average height. With broader shoulders and a stockier frame than the chancellor, he also had a larger, rounder head. His reddish-brown hair was close-cropped, his complexion ruddy and his skin freckled from constant travelling in the wind and rain. His arms were strong as a wrestler’s, his legs sturdy but bowed in later life from riding for days and weeks on end. Said to be perfect for the stirrup, his feet were highly arched even if an ingrowing toenail could make him walk with a limp. A hearty eater, prone to put on weight like his grandfather if he was not careful, his greatest fear was that he would one day grow too fat to mount his horse. His most distinctive features were his blue-grey eyes, ‘dove-like and guileless’ when he was calm, but ‘shimmering with fire and like lightning’ when he was angry. It was said that they ‘grew fiery and bloodshot when he was in a frenzy’.
Always outgoing and gregarious, Henry was utterly self-assured, hence careless of his personal appearance or reputation as a host. In his hall, says Peter of Blois, the secretary upon whom he would chiefly rely at the height of his later quarrel with Becket, many of the lesser courtiers had to eat inferior meat or fish that was four days old, endure gritty bread and drink sour wine or muddy beer, which might explain why people flocked to dine in droves with the chancellor. He took little interest in his clothing: often it was impossible to distinguish him from his servants. Dressed for much of the time in riding gear, his legs were bruised constantly from the kicks of his horses. How casual of his appearance he could be is shown by his hands, unlike Becket’s coarse and rough. According to Peter, he wore gloves only for hawking.
Impatient of royal etiquette, Henry did what he wanted when he wanted, night or day, rather than pleasing others for the sake of it or working to a plan. Burning prodigious quantities of candle wax while consuming equally phenomenal amounts of wine, he would sleep next day until noon. Walter Map, a chaplain entering his service shortly after Becket’s murder, compares his uncouth habits unfavourably with his grandfather’s. Whereas, he says, Henry I maintained discipline in his court, which he ran like clockwork, reserving mornings for work and afternoons for pleasure, announcing in advance his travel plans and the dates and places of the various stops along the route, his grandson did everything almost literally on the hoof, imposing his authority by his constant movements from place to place. And whereas the older Henry made himself accessible at fixed times before dinner, his younger namesake shunned regular hours. One messenger granted admission after waiting three days and nights found him lying propped up on one elbow, dozing as a servant massaged his feet. Another visitor found him sitting on the ground surrounded by his courtiers, sewing up a bandage after a minor hunting accident.
Famous for its yelled instructions and disruptive horn calls announcing hunting expeditions, Henry’s court was likened by eyewitnesses to a variety of earthly hell. As Peter explains:
If the king has promised to spend the day in a place – and particularly if he has announced his intention publicly by the mouth of a herald – you may be sure he will upset everyone’s plans by starting off early in the morning. Then you may see men rushing about like madmen, beating packhorses, running carts into one another – in brief, giving a perfect imitation of hell. If, on the other hand, the king announces that he will depart early in the morning, he will be sure to change his mind and you may take it for granted that he will sleep until midday. Then you will see the packhorses loaded and waiting, the carts standing idle, the drivers dozing, the purveyors worrying, and all grumbling to one another. People run to the prostitutes and the doorkeepers of the court to ask of them what the king really intends to do, for a royal court is always followed most assiduously by minstrels, harlots, dicers, flatterers, confidence-tricksters, pickpockets, actors, barbers or clowns, and those sorts of people often know its secrets.
A restless spirit always looking for a fresh challenge, Henry was never idle, working as need required or his mood dictated, sometimes late into the night. Described as a ‘human chariot dragging all after him’, he would mount his horse at daybreak, come back in the evening after a hard day’s riding and then exhaust his companions by keeping them on their feet until midnight. His favourite recreation was hunting. ‘He has,’ says Peter, ‘for ever in his hands bows, arrows, hunting nets and swords.’ A man of boundless energy, he travelled more widely than any of his contemporaries, rarely sitting down except at meals or when in the saddle. In public or in private, in chapel or in council, he stood or paced to and fro. ‘He was intolerant of quiet,’ says Walter Map, ‘and did not hesitate to disturb almost half of Christendom.’
But Henry’s punishing schedule cannot by itself explain how he could govern at a pace and with an intensity never seen before in his dominions. He could do so partly because, like Becket, he had a highly retentive memory. It was said that he would never forget a face and could recall anything that he had heard that was worth remembering. An excellent linguist, fluent in Latin as well as French, he had a basic working knowledge of most of the dialects spoken in France, including Occitan, the vernacular of Aquitaine. Surprisingly unable or unwilling to converse in English, he spoke to his English subjects in French. Said to be a proficient reader, not merely a competent one, he knew more than enough to check what his advisers or secretaries had written, ensuring that his more important writs or charters met his requirements.
His sexual life, if tainted by bouts of debauchery, looks to have been more restrained while Becket was alive than it afterwards became, even if he would talk openly to his courtiers of his erotic dreams. Although the royal doorkeepers in England and Normandy doubled as Henry’s whoremasters, evidence in the early years of his reign as to how often he called upon their services is hard to find. Rumour had it that his first son, William, who died at the age of three, was a prostitute’s child, but since Eleanor always accepted the baby as her own, it seems an unlikely tale. An irregular succession of casual affairs, especially when Eleanor stayed as regent in England and Henry was on the Continent, is the most likely scenario. One of these flings was with a noblewoman named ‘Avice’ in Staffordshire. Another was with the sister of Roger of Clare, Earl of Hertford. And a biological daughter called Matilda by an unknown woman would be made abbess of Barking on his instructions after the death of Becket’s youngest sister, Mary.
Henry’s chief weakness was his temper, which could flare up in seconds like a whirlwind. His favourite expletive – the one to which Becket would become accustomed – was par les olz Dieu, ‘by God’s eyes’, or, when he was especially roused, ‘by God’s eyes and throat’ or ‘by God’s eyes and testicles’. Peter of Blois quoted the Bible: ‘The king’s wrath is the harbinger of death.’ Entering the royal bedchamber every morning, says Peter, he would first look at the king’s face before daring to speak to him, afraid that anything he said might further inflame Henry if he was in a difficult mood. ‘To speak to an angry prince,’ he confides, ‘seems to me to be like casting fishing nets in a hurricane. He who does so, and will not wait until the storm is over, destroys himself and his nets.’ Unlike Becket, who relied on charisma and his quicksilver oratory to get his own way, Henry was a bully relying on threats and taunts. The difference was reflected in their voices. Becket usually spoke in the softer, more measured tones that he had learned to overcome his stammer, whereas Henry’s voice was harsh and cracked from constantly barking out orders on horseback.
Normally his wrath subsided as swiftly as it arose. If he bawled people out in the morning, he would carry on as if nothing had happened in the afternoon, especially if their failings had been for reasons beyond their control. Often lenient towards honest opponents, on a few occasions he caused himself a great deal of unnecessary trouble. But disloyalty or breach of trust he could not tolerate. Once his enmity was stirred, he would never forgive and forget. ‘If he once forms an attachment to a man,’ says Peter, ‘he seldom gives him up. If he has taken a real dislike to anyone, he rarely admits him afterwards to any familiarity.’ Disloyalty not only rankled, it caused him to brood. His tirades against ‘traitors’ were legendary; he would shout and swear and throw things around the room, as at Caen in 1166, when he upbraided the constable of Normandy, Richard de Humez, who had dared to speak in favour of someone with whom Henry had just quarrelled. Burning with rage, he ‘tore his hat from his head, undid his belt, hurled his cloak and the clothes he was wearing far away from him, tore the silken covering from the bed with his own hand, and began to eat the straw on the floor, as if he were sitting in a ditch’.
Henry’s most shocking vice was sacrilege. He visibly lacked piety and was said to enter his private oratory to sketch or whisper to his friends instead of to pray. And he was more than happy to take a solemn oath without much intention of keeping it. His oath-breaking would first come to light in 1157, when he did it three times. On the first occasion, he stripped Stephen’s younger son, William, of those castles and estates guaranteed to him by the oaths linked to the treaty of Westminster. Skilfully exploiting William’s ongoing feud with Hugh Bigod, he confiscated all his properties without warning, returning only those which William had possessed on the day of Henry I’s death. He afterwards softened the blow somewhat with smaller marks of favour, knighting William when he fell back into line – but nothing could cloak his perjury. When he then refused to restore Devizes Castle to Jocelin of Salisbury in defiance of his oath before Theobald, it seems as if a pattern had been established.
In July of the same year, he broke another oath made before he had become king to cede Newcastle and the whole of Northumbria to Scotland in return for aid against Stephen. When the day of reckoning came, he chose to default and was lucky to get away with it when the Scottish king rode south to redeem the pledge. Henry put it to him bluntly, man to man, that he either had to break the oath or else abandon his plans to restore the status quo as it had existed in his grandfather’s lifetime. ‘Necessity,’ he said, required the former, claiming that his ‘ancestral rights’ could not be alienated and that he had an overriding duty to protect them. Grudgingly accepting the earldom of Huntingdon as a consolation prize in the hope of better things to come, the king of Scots swore fealty to him and became his vassal, a result that was typical of Henry’s flair for talking his way out of trouble.
Very little beyond legends can be discovered about Eleanor’s personality and daily life, despite over a hundred references to her in the chronicles, more than 150 charters issued in her name and several dozen accounts of her expenditure. Such perennially fascinating questions as whether she was a bad wife and mother, whether she liked vernacular French poetry and so was an eager patron of Poitevin poets like her grandfather, and how large her independent household was are as impossible to answer as whether she was ever truly in love. Romantic fictions about her abound, returning to haunt her from generation to generation like trick birthday candles that cannot be extinguished. One claims that she presided over ‘Courts of Love’ at Poitiers, pronouncing verdicts on the correct behaviour for lovers according to the rules of courtly love. Another is that she led a battalion of 300 women dressed as Amazons into battle in the Second Crusade.
Her charters and the fiscal evidence confirm that she was an extraordinarily wealthy woman. Besides her income from ‘queen’s gold’ (a levy of one mark of gold for every hundred marks of silver on certain payments to the king) and the revenues of Exeter in Devon and Waltham in Essex, she had lands in Hertfordshire, Berkshire and Hampshire. That Henry granted her an independent household, which unlike his own included Poitevins, is almost certain, since his payments to her for its maintenance ran at around £600 a year, a substantial sum and far more than could be collected in annual rent from thirty fertile manors. Such payments suggest she lived in extravagant luxury, spending significantly on herself, her children, her knights and ladies, her children’s nurses and household servants. She paid regular salaries to her chaplain, chamberlain, steward, constable, almoner and clerks. She had building works carried out on her chapel, houses and gardens, and spent money on clothing and shields for her attendants. She even had her own ship on standby ready for Channel crossings.
She clearly liked clothes: vast sums were spent in acquiring and transporting them on her behalf. She may also have enjoyed dicing, as one of her clerks had to pay her an annual rent of three ivory dice for lands he held from her. Otherwise, her most frequently itemized purchases, apart from furnishings for her chamber, included incense, pepper, wine, cinnamon, almonds and chestnuts.
She did play an independent role as a literary patron. An Anglo-Norman translation of Geoffrey of Monmouth’s History of the Kings of Britain known as the Roman de Brut was dedicated to her in 1155. Mingling the fiction of the Celtic legends of King Arthur with the known facts of pre-Conquest Britain, it was scripted to provide Henry and his immediate predecessors with a genealogy older and more distinguished than that of the Frankish rulers descended from Charlemagne, so poking the Capetian monarchy in the eye. In addition, the celebrated Poitevin poet and troubadour Bernard de Ventadour came to England to address his lyrics to her and Henry. Such works were probably sung or read aloud on long winter evenings, even if the record of a grant of land Henry made in Suffolk to a jester called ‘Roland the farter’ for making a leap, a whistle and a fart annually at Christmas gives a more accurate impression of his own tastes.
Although Eleanor’s experiences were unavoidably conditioned by such male stereotypes as her fecundity, religious devotion and works of mercy and piety, she broke this mould at several key moments in her married life with Henry. While Becket was alive, however, her influence was neither uniform nor complete, operating chiefly as an adjunct to her husband’s kingly power. When she and Henry were together, her independent influence would be minimal. When he was away on the Continent and she stayed in England as regent, she had more power. Theobald reports her anger when her word was doubted or her wishes frustrated, but this scarcely touched Becket, since if, while he was chancellor, Henry went abroad, Thomas would accompany him and the two were seldom apart. One day Eleanor would shake the Angevin empire to its very foundations, but it would be as regent in Aquitaine, mainly after Becket’s murder, that her political ambitions would most sensationally come to the fore.
The first letter that Becket would discover in his in-tray after arriving at court was from Arnulf of Lisieux, to whom Theobald had appealed for assistance in his efforts to secure Becket’s appointment. No one understood Henry’s psychology better, for Arnulf, a slippery courtier-bishop, had been his chief adviser in Normandy for over four years. But if few others knew more about the backstairs politics of a princely court, with its many fawning flatterers and backstabbing cliques and factions, none apart from Thomas would have a more chastening experience there. Within a few years, Arnulf would be severely castigated by his colleagues in the Church for placing royal interests ahead of theirs, while Henry would never fully trust him, since during the civil war Arnulf had attached himself to those who had questioned his mother’s legitimacy by claiming that she had been dragged from a nunnery, a slight against his ancestry that the Angevin king could not forgive.
Arnulf’s letter, whatever his true motives for writing it, could not have appeared friendlier or more genuine. He well understood, he said, that he and the new chancellor could easily have become rivals, but Becket has assured him of his goodwill in an earlier letter (now lost) – one with which Arnulf professes himself delighted. Your cordiality, he unctuously insists, ‘seemed to me to drop honey and be redolent with the sweetness of affection. I was delighted to find that I had not lost the privilege of our early intimacy either by the wide distance which now separates us or by the pressure of business in which you are involved.’ But he strikes a note of caution:
Friendship is a rare virtue … and nowhere is it more rarely found than between those who are invited to give counsel to kings and to direct the affairs of kingdoms. To say nothing of other difficulties, ambition sits with a heavy weight upon their minds and as long as each fears to be outstripped by the vigilance of the other, envy springs up between them, which, before long, does not fail to become open hatred.
In idioms all too redolent of those Becket would use to his own followers ten years later, Arnulf – himself always jealous of the intimacy that sycophants enjoyed with the king – warns him of the dangers of smiling faces at court and of relying too much on Henry’s confidences, since the minds of rulers can be fickle. ‘If the favour of the prince is changed and he begins to look on a man with a furrowed brow, all the deference and support of his erstwhile colleagues will disappear and the applause and obsequiousness with which they once showered him will wither.’
No reply survives to this fascinating letter of advice, and what Becket’s reaction was we can only imagine. Arnulf did his best to heed his own advice, but despite giving his undivided allegiance to Henry in his efforts to marginalize Thomas once the chancellor’s struggle with the king began in earnest, he would one day himself be driven from court and the king would conspire with the clergy of his own cathedral in forcing him out of his bishopric. Unlike Thomas, however, he would die in his own bed.