After leaving Colchester in May 1157, Henry and Becket spent a further six weeks in Essex, staying among other places at Waltham Abbey, close to where Eleanor had some of her lands, and where the clerk collecting her ‘queen’s gold’ came from, before riding sixty miles north to Northampton. There, at a great council of the barons beginning on Wednesday 17 July, Henry announced a summer campaign to crush the most powerful of the northern Welsh princes, Owain of Gwynedd. Only partially colonized by the Norman settlers after 1066, Wales had been pacified up to a point by Henry’s grandfather, when several of the local princes had done him homage. But little of his authority had survived the anarchy of Stephen’s reign, especially in the north. Only in Powys in central Wales had the princes been willing to make terms, and with Owain taking the lead in harassing the settlers, it was time to teach him a lesson.
Becket strongly supported this declaration of war, but was clearly anxious about it. The venture was risky and to John of Salisbury’s unconcealed disgust, since he loathed such people, his friend consulted soothsayers to advise on the most propitious moment to attack. On their advice, Henry and Becket ordered the feudal host to muster on the saltings south of Chester within two weeks, from where it was to march up the coast of the Dee estuary while a fleet quietly shadowed it offshore and carried its provisions and equipment.
Edward Grim would ruefully reflect on the change whereby, over the next two years, Becket would reinvent himself as a swashbuckling warrior. ‘Who can tell,’ he asks, ‘how many suffered death at his hands, how many the loss of all their wealth? Surrounded by a valiant body of knights, he came to attack whole states, destroy cities and towns, give villages and farms to the devouring flames without one thought of pity, and prove merciless to the enemies of his lord the king.’ But such sentiments are anachronistic. Becket surely took as his working model the example of the Capetian chancellors, who assumed a command in the army as easily as they sat in judgement in the royal courts. And there was a notable English precedent. Early in Henry I’s reign, the warrior-chancellor Waldric, who also loved hunting and falconry, had put on chain-mail and fought at the battle of Tinchebrai, personally taking Robert Curthose prisoner – this despite being ordained a deacon like Becket. Even after his consecration as bishop of Laon in Normandy, Waldric could not stop fighting, culminating in his murder in his cathedral close, where an angry citizen of the town, Bernard des Bruyères, sliced off the top of his head with an axe. Nor while at the Council of Rheims with Theobald in 1148 could Thomas have failed to notice the fabled Albero von Montreuil, archbishop of Trier, seated in a place of honour by Pope Eugenius despite having led knights bravely into battle in Italy and northern Germany earlier in his career.
Sorely disappointed with his friend, John of Salisbury fell back on his wit, joking ironically that even such important Angevin saints as St Martin, the patron saint of Tours, had gone into battle – knowing very well that Martin, according to one account, had been forcibly conscripted into the Roman army as a teenager under the Emperor Julian, but when put to the test as a Christian and ordered to fight had declared himself a conscientious objector. In a closely-related vein, John renewed his criticism of his friend for his love of blood sports. The Church frowned on hunting almost as much as it frowned on warfare, arguing that far from being the sport of kings or gentlemen, it undermined human reason as powerfully as madness or intoxication and debased human nature, encouraging men to kill one another instead of beasts or fowl.
As John had predicted, Becket’s soothsayers were fraudsters, their prophecies no more than empty words. Henry’s fleet, looking for plunder, was severely mauled when it put into Anglesey and the king, who had marched his army into Flintshire, was ambushed in the pass of Coleshill, a densely forested, marshy area. Several barons were slaughtered when the Welsh, with the most terrifying shrieks and cries, leapt from the trees that lined the steep, rocky sides of the narrow pass and bombarded Henry’s men with rocks, arrows and other missiles. Henry of Essex, the royal constable and standard-bearer, made a bad situation considerably worse, causing a sudden panic by casting aside his banner, taking to his heels and proclaiming to all he met that the king was slain. The Welsh swiftly moved in for the kill and only Henry’s sudden reappearance after desperately fighting his way out of the thickets averted a massacre. The army then advanced more cautiously along the seashore, avoiding the higher ground, while Henry sent out raiding parties to cut down trees and carve out fresh paths, enabling his troops to criss-cross the countryside without exposing themselves to further unnecessary danger.
As Henry began advancing deeper into Snowdonia, the Welsh decided to sue for peace and in August their leaders came to his camp under a safe-conduct. Handing over hostages, including his son, as a gesture of good faith, Prince Owain did homage for his lands in Gwynedd, satisfying Henry’s demands for overlordship. Becket, on this occasion, cannot have marched very far with the royal army. While Henry was receiving Owain’s homage, his chancellor was still busy handling paperwork in Chester: the Welsh chronicles are silent as to his role in the fighting. Two years later, however, he would be in the vanguard of the army, fearlessly leading his own contingent of knights into battle. The flashpoint was Aquitaine, where Henry, to Eleanor’s delight, at last meant to attempt to enforce her ancestral claim to possession of the city and county of Toulouse.
Herself one of the main driving forces behind this new campaign, Eleanor had first raised the matter with Henry some years before, after the powerful Languedoc warlord Count Raymond V, who occupied Toulouse, had married King Louis’s sister, Constance, the widow of King Stephen’s son, Eustace. With Louis as his ally and no fewer than three young sons by Constance available to succeed him, Raymond felt supremely confident that he could hold the Angevins at bay for ever. Not without reason, Eleanor could see the opportunity to regain her lost territory fast slipping away. For her, it was a case of now or never to reclaim her rightful inheritance. And Henry agreed, especially while she was continuing to play her own queenly role to perfection. Well aware of the dynastic significance of her fecundity, she would bear him seven surviving children over the course of little more than a decade: Henry and Matilda, born respectively in 1155 and 1156, Richard born in 1157, Geoffrey in 1158, Eleanor in 1161, Joanna in 1165 and finally John two years later.
As in 1156, Henry chose to lead only an elite cohort of around 1,500 knights across the Channel on the first stage of their long journey south and to place a greater reliance on the mercenaries he would be able to hire closer to the seat of the action. The feudal hosts of Normandy, Anjou and Aquitaine supplied further reinforcements, which, when everyone assembled at Poitiers at midsummer 1159, made up a combined army perhaps amounting to over 4,500 knights with some 10,000 supporting troops, who would have needed more than 1,500 wagons for their tents and equipment and another 600 for their supplies of food and barrels of beer.
Before unleashing his forces, Henry met Louis at Tours, urging him to advise his brother-in-law to surrender peacefully while he still had the chance. He then took a detour to Blaye on the Gironde estuary, some thirty miles north of Bordeaux, to make a pact with Raymond’s bitter rival, the count of Barcelona. When these moves failed to impress Raymond in the slightest, Henry flanked by Becket led his troops at a leisurely pace through Périgord in the direction of Quercy, a county famous for its rolling countryside and fertile soil, traditionally part of the duchy of Aquitaine, but cheekily claimed by Raymond. He meant to overawe this upstart count, showing him that he had more than sufficient forces to annihilate him whenever he so chose.
After halting briefly at the town of Périgueux about 30 June to obtain fresh provisions, Henry marched south to besiege the ancient walled citadel at Cahors. An old Roman fortress set on a rocky height overlooking a wide bend in the River Lot as it meandered slowly down through Quercy towards the Garonne, Cahors had once been defended by its towering barbican and encircling walls, but these had fallen badly into disrepair. In consequence, the citizens opened their gates without a fight. Unwilling to waste time there while Raymond gathered his forces, the Angevin king continued on swiftly south towards Toulouse, where by the second week of July he had pitched his camp outside the southern walls of the cité, possibly near the Porte Montoulieu about 500 yards east of the Château Narbonnais.
With Henry keen to make the expedition a speedy success, Becket had thrown himself into his new military duties with gusto: a select force of 700 knights from the chancellor’s own household was among Henry’s crack troops. While the army waited for its orders, Louis arrived to parley. He proposed acting as an impartial umpire, but when Raymond denounced Henry as the aggressor and appealed to his brother-in-law to save him and his three young sons from capture and ransom, the Capetian king put his family ties before his obligations to Henry, withdrawing his offer and disappearing without more ado inside the cité, where he took charge of its defences.
This move deadlocked the siege. With neither an army nor weaponry at his disposal, Louis might have been overwhelmed, but he was Henry’s feudal overlord. Militarily, it could also have been extremely dangerous, since to besiege Toulouse was no simple task. Protected on one side by the River Garonne and around the others by high brick walls, ditches, towers and fortified houses, the cité was virtually impregnable and its citizens well prepared. Siege weaponry, such as battering-rams and high platforms on wheels, trebuchets and mangonels to sling heavy rocks against and over the walls, would have been required: it may well have been around this time that Becket sent for the duplicate copies of the famous classical manual on military tactics and siege warfare, The Art of Warby Flavius Vegetius, later discovered in his library and that often included diagrams. Even had Henry’s army been able to penetrate the cité, there were chains at every crossroads, with catapults stationed on the tops of the towers guarding the narrow cobbled streets. The Château Narbonnais, to which Louis had retreated, was a notoriously difficult target. A formidable fortress, it was integrated into the walls of the cité, further protected by massive earthen ramparts.
Henry faced a stark dilemma. If he risked an attack and stormed the cité, he could incur huge losses, only to end up saddled with his overlord as his prisoner. With his treaty with Louis only recently concluded, he had his dynasty’s succession to the French throne through his young son’s future bride, Louis’s infant daughter, to consider, since the Capetian king still had no male heir. This was hardly the moment to turn his new-found amity with France upside down.
A serious quarrel – the very first in their relationship – now took place between Becket and Henry. The occasion was a council of war attended by all his barons and captains at which Henry stated his dilemma baldly: should he attempt to storm the cité, or watch and wait to see if Louis would withdraw? The barons veered strongly towards the side of caution, but Becket accused them of cowardice, believing them to be deceiving Henry to save their own skins. Concerned also for the effects on his own 700 knights of idling away their time in the blistering summer sun, he argued that Louis had forfeited his rights as a feudal overlord by openly supporting Henry’s enemies. ‘By standing against him there,’ he insisted, ‘the king of France has abdicated his position as his suzerain.’ The attack should go ahead.
Henry sided with the barons, and when Becket stood his ground, believing his arguments were valid, the king ordered him to be silent. Only when reinforcements arrived from France for Louis was the matter put beyond all doubt. Determined not to waste any more time, Henry ordered his army to decamp, besieging other castles and towns in the vicinity of Toulouse and razing them to the ground, laying waste the countryside as he went along in the hope of tempting Louis to leave his lair. He then faced a second major setback, when his army became ravaged by dysentery and malaria. In late September, he retreated first to Cahors and from there back to Normandy, but left garrisons in several of the hill-top towns he had captured in Quercy. Louis, for once, had successfully outwitted and outmanoeuvred him, judging correctly that, for all his weaponry, his rival would not dare to attack his feudal overlord.
After making emergency repairs to the walls of Cahors, Henry entrusted the citadel to Becket – but the town remained difficult to defend and the assignment was a poisoned chalice. Moreover, still smarting from his chancellor’s outspoken objections in the council of war, the king denied him the money he needed to pay his troops or buy provisions, merely offering to lend it to him instead for repayment at a later date. Overall command of his other Quercy garrisons he assigned to his disgraced former standard-bearer, Henry of Essex, strongly reinforcing the idea that he meant such a task to be more of a punishment than a privilege. Yet because these towns and castles were all that Henry had to show for his Herculean efforts and colossal expenditure and he did not want to lose any of them, Becket was left under no illusion as to what was expected of him.
‘All the other barons had excused themselves’ when asked to take on these commands, a rare insight into the internal politics of the council of war, itself none other than the king’s great council on the march. Luck, fortunately, was on Becket’s side. In his zeal to guarantee the security of Cahors, he took an extraordinary personal risk, suddenly leading his 700 knights out of the citadel and storming three heavily fortified castles nearby in helmet and hauberk, riding at the head of his own troops and galloping after his opponents to the far side of the Garonne without adequate protection in the rear. His bravery has all the thrilling echoes of an action movie, but the reality is more chilling, for he had risked leading his crack troops straight into an enemy ambush: his irrepressible urge to win his spurs in a decisive encounter further illustrates his inexperience in the practical art of warfare. The same tendency had almost cost him his life as a teenager after he fell into a millstream while out hawking with Richer de l’Aigle. Once again, it seems he was a newcomer aspiring to be an insider.
Becket did not rejoin Henry in Normandy until the county of Quercy had been secured, by which time another difficult challenge awaited him. As he crossed the Norman frontier, he discovered that fighting had resumed between Louis and Henry in the Vexin and that French troops had invaded Normandy. Henry had retaliated by invading France, razing the town of Beauvais to the ground before laying siege to the castle of Guerberoi and levelling it. He then attacked Count Simon of Evreux, forcing him to abandon his castles at Rochefort, Epernon and Montfort, which effectively sliced the French royal demesne in two, giving the Angevins control of the main road between Paris and Orléans.
As soon as Becket reappeared, Henry sent him to join in the fray. He could not seriously have expected to hold such an exposed position for long, but with a series of sharp frosts already announcing the arrival of an unusually cold winter, he was determined to grab whatever he could before a truce was agreed. The chancellor was assigned 1,200 mercenaries to supplement his own 700 knights plus around 4,000 others hired to serve them and attend to their horses. As in Quercy, the costs of so large a battalion quickly rocketed, since each knight required £3 per day for the keep of his men and horses. Becket had to borrow heavily again, this time from a Jewish moneylender on Henry’s guarantee. As before, he had little choice, but these obligations, together amounting to 1,000 silver marks, worth around £400,000 today, proved to be a serious liability for him, as he never repaid them and Henry would never forget them.
Quite what Becket’s men did in the Vexin campaign is not clear, since a gap exists in the sources. But on at least one occasion Thomas repeated his recklessness at Cahors, riding at a gallop at the head of his men towards the enemy with his spurs digging into his horse’s sides and his sword raised. Engaging a famous French knight, Engelram of Trie, in single combat, he succeeded in knocking him off his horse and claiming his charger as a prize. With his adrenalin high and his concentration closing out everything but his desire for victory, it seemed as if warfare was becoming his true vocation.
When spring returned and a temporary truce expired, a peace was agreed. Thomas led the negotiations on Henry’s side, exploiting his cordial relationship with Louis to secure terms that were extraordinarily favourable in the circumstances. The Capetian king first confirmed to Henry all his conquests in Quercy in return for withdrawing his occupying forces from France. He then did what Henry had always really wanted, returning the lands of the old Norman Vexin to him, holding back only Gisors and some other strategically important castles. Summoning to his presence three leading Knights Templar who were already familiar figures in Paris and London, Richard of Hastings, Osto of St-Omer and Robert de Pirou, he swore them to act as neutral guarantors of the peace, holding the coveted castles in trust until his daughter’s wedding day, when they would revert to Henry as the final element of her dowry settlement.
In this way Becket salvaged the dynastic alliance on which he had spent so much time and effort, although Louis clearly did not expect his daughter Margaret, who was still barely two, to be married for another ten years or more. Henry, on the other hand, was never one to be content with a settlement, however generous, that did not give him everything he wanted, and he still had Gisors to reclaim. The chronicler William of Newburgh describes him as ‘impatient with delay’ over the return of the Vexin. Now twenty-seven and supremely confident of his ability to gain his aims, he intended to strike, to win a fait accompli – even if he used underhand methods. Nothing, simply nothing could be allowed to stand in his way. All he needed was a pretext.
He got his excuse in September 1160, rather sooner than he expected, when Constance of Castile died and Louis announced within a fortnight his decision to take a third wife, Adela of Blois-Champagne, King Stephen’s niece. Determined to father a son and heir as soon as possible, Louis had chosen a bride from a family able to trace its descent from William the Conqueror and so stake a claim, however flimsy, to the kingdom of England. Inflamed by this provocation, Henry meant to answer in kind. Canon law strictly forbade weddings of children under twelve, but Henry would engineer one, extorting a clandestine licence from papal representatives. On 2 November, the younger Henry would marry Margaret in Normandy, where she had been living for the past two years as Henry’s ward and where she would continue to live until the age of twelve. In consequence, the Templars, according to their oaths, were honour bound to hand over the castles in their care to Henry, who was triumphant. Louis, however, was indignant, accusing Henry of fraud and the Templars of ‘outright treachery’. Assisted by his new wife’s relatives, he crossed the frontier and harried Touraine, but Henry stormed the castle of Chaumont on the Loire and the result was a score draw.
Becket, meanwhile, whose rash choices on the battlefields of Quercy and Normandy had paid handsome dividends, had safely come through what may, after his searing experiences at the gates of Toulouse, have seemed more like a baptism of fire. Thanks to him, Henry’s territorial gains in Quercy had been secured, while after the peace settlement, the king – using methods as foul as they were fair – had recovered the whole of the Norman Vexin, as he had long sought to do. Against this, the original aim of the campaign had not been achieved. To Eleanor’s increasing dismay, Henry would gradually allow her claim to outright possession of the lands occupied by Count Raymond to fall into abeyance, replaced instead by a more nebulous demand for homage and proving that, where his continental empire was concerned, he would always put Norman interests ahead of Poitevin ones.
But the pulp had gone out of Henry and Becket’s relationship, even if the chancellor was hardly to blame for what had gone wrong. Thomas still retained much of his old influence, but found that after their quarrel in the council of war, Henry would deploy many of the same controlling tactics against him as he used against everyone else. In the short term, his reputation would recover and it would seem to the world as if all was still well. He sat in a place of honour at Prince Henry’s wedding and was still sufficiently high in the king’s favour that the boy would now be placed in his household to be educated with the other sons of the leading barons who served as pages there. It may even be that his jingoistic behaviour and ostensible lack of moral scruples at Toulouse had persuaded Henry of his chancellor’s lack of religiosity, foreshadowing things to come.
But if Thomas found himself in another tight corner, would he have sufficient wriggle room to escape? Perhaps, but only if Henry was content to play by the normal rules. And as the king matured and discovered not just what he ought to do but what he was able to do, that was likely to become an increasingly tall order.