Archbishop Theobald had planted his protégé at the heart of Henry’s court as the churchmen’s defence against the predatory barons. A strong king, he fervently believed, could only be a blessing for the Church after the pillaging and looting of King Stephen’s reign. And yet the primate, by now in his mid-sixties and anxious to devote what was left of his life to his pastoral work, also knew that Thomas had to satisfy a wilful, imperious, mercurial king determined to restore the power of the monarchy. A high price would have to be paid for the king’s cooperation in defence of the Church. What was Caesar’s must be rendered unto Caesar. But in Theobald’s eyes it would always be worth it – if, that is, Thomas could put the clock back to something approaching the golden age of Lanfranc, restoring the king’s traditional role as a patron and protector of the Church.
Nothing short of a high-wire act would be needed, and in the churchmen’s eyes Becket often failed to pull it off. Charged by Henry in 1159 with levying fresh scutage assessments to replenish the war chest for the Toulouse campaign, he earned himself widespread opprobrium, setting the basic rate as high as two silver marks for each knight whose service was owed and so leaving the wealthier bishops and abbots liable for sums in excess of £80. Even worse, he shifted the burden of taxation disproportionately towards the Church by demanding supplementary levies euphemistically called ‘gifts’ (dona), by far the largest from the higher clergy, so that five bishops (York, Durham, Lincoln, Bath and Winchester) were assessed at the astronomical sums of £333 each and three (London, Norwich and Worcester) at £133, while the abbots and abbesses paid between £5 and £146.
According to the chronicler Gervase of Canterbury, the combined yield of Henry’s war taxation was a punitive £180,000 or more than £95 million today. That figure – like many of the large numbers given by chroniclers – is not entirely to be trusted, but however the amounts are calculated, the Church paid six times as much as before. Defending Thomas from the accusation that he alone was to blame, John of Salisbury retorts, ‘I know it to be false – since I know that at that time he did not follow the counsel of greed, but the dictates of necessity.’ But he adds, ‘I do not doubt that he was the servant of wickedness, and I judge him to have fully deserved to be punished.’ While acknowledging that his friend was only following Henry’s orders, John does not attempt to deny his culpability. By consenting to such punitive taxation on the Church, he had ‘put the king before God’.
On the other side of the ledger, Becket enjoyed some success in talking Henry into making appointments to vacant bishoprics and abbeys promptly instead of freezing the posts for several years to enjoy their revenues. Even after their quarrel in the council of war at Toulouse, Thomas still had more than enough influence to handle a particularly tricky situation in a manner that Theobald could only applaud. It arose when Henry sought to appoint Henry, dean of Mortain, to the bishopric of Exeter. An illiterate nonentity, the dean was the illegitimate son of Robert fitz Harding, a baron to whom Henry owed a favour and who sent his men to badger the ageing archbishop about the case while he was sick in bed. Theobald wanted Bartholomew, archdeacon of Exeter, one of his former clerks and a friend of John of Salisbury, to have the post, but he was getting nowhere until Becket went into action, arranging for Bartholomew’s consecration. Other worthy candidates whom Thomas assisted included Robert of Melun, his old Paris teacher, who was made bishop of Hereford, and William, prior of St Martin-des-Champs near Paris, who became abbot of Ramsey.
While he was working his magic for Bartholomew, Thomas attempted at some personal risk to block a scandalous marriage between Matthew, younger brother of Henry’s cousin and former ward Count Philip of Flanders, and Mary of Blois, King Stephen’s daughter. Always on his guard where the house of Blois-Champagne was concerned, Henry wanted Mary safely married off to someone he could trust. A fine catch, she had become sole heiress to the county of Boulogne after her brother, William, many of whose castles and estates Henry had already confiscated, had died of malaria on his way home from the Toulouse campaign. If the marriage went ahead, Count Philip’s brother would become the new count of Boulogne in the right of his bride, enabling Henry to interfere in Picardy and Boulogne. The difficulty was that she had become a nun. Rising to be abbess of Romsey in Hampshire, she had taken a vow of chastity which required a dispensation from the Church to override.
When Becket protested against the wedding plans, calling them ‘profane’ and ‘abominable’, Henry ordered him to be silent. No more was he going to be lectured on an inconvenient point of canon law than on military strategy outside the gates of Toulouse. Judged as equivalent to incest, the marriage plan aroused a chorus of opposition from the Church, but Henry insisted on having his way and the marriage took place in May 1160, when Mary was dragged from her convent.
More successfully, Thomas pulled strings to help John of Salisbury when he fell foul of Henry for getting too close to Pope Adrian IV. The only Englishman ever to occupy the chair of St Peter, Adrian – born plain Nicholas Brakespeare and the illegitimate son of a priest from Abbots Langley in Hertfordshire – had been chosen a fortnight before Henry was crowned, creating a unique opportunity for the new king, who sent a high-level delegation to him led by Arnulf of Lisieux. Naturally he had a hidden agenda, this time in Ireland, where the Normans had so far rarely ventured except to deal with pirates and buy furs. Building on his mother’s ties to Dermot MacMurrough, king of Leinster, Henry sought the overlordship of Ireland for his youngest brother, William, floating the idea at a great council at Winchester in September 1155, but soon realizing that for it to succeed, he would need the backing of the papacy just as the pope had backed the conquest of England in 1066.
Theobald, meanwhile, had already sent John of Salisbury to Adrian, who was then at Benevento, a papal enclave in southern Italy, sixty or so miles north-east of Naples. Just as he had planted Becket at Henry’s court, so also he aimed to plant John at the curia to win concessions for the English Church, and since John and Adrian were oldest and best of friends, John dined at the pope’s table throughout his stay, enraging Henry’s ambassadors, whom he completely outshone.
Unfortunately for John, Arnulf was his inveterate enemy, his ‘hammer of iniquity’ as he puts it. At first, their squabbling seemed to be rather a joke, but when Arnulf sent back scurrilous reports to Henry, John started to panic. As he complained to Peter of Celle:
The indignation of our most serene lord, our all-powerful king, our most unconquerable prince, has grown hot against me in full force … I alone in all the realm am accused of diminishing the royal dignity. When they define the act of offence more carefully, these are the charges that they hurl upon my head. If anyone among us invokes the name of Rome, they say it is my doing. If the English Church ventures to claim even the shadow of liberty in making elections or in the trial of ecclesiastical causes, it is imputed to me, as if I were the only person to instruct the lord bishop of Canterbury and the other bishops what they ought to do. On these counts my position is shaken to its foundations, and they are so pressing that it is thought that I am in danger of banishment.
John’s chief offence was that, to score points off Arnulf, whose diplomacy was floundering, he had secured from Adrian a green light for Henry’s plans in Ireland, but on terms that the king found obnoxious. Claiming that the papacy had an ancient jurisdiction over all islands that could not be revoked, Adrian declared that Henry could colonize Ireland and possess it by hereditary right, but only as a vassal of the pope. To this end, he gave Henry a gold ring along with a parchment authorizing his investiture as ‘lord of Ireland’. Perhaps a little anxious from the outset at the wording of this document, John had the ring specially adorned with a fine emerald at his own expense, crossing his fingers that all would be well.
But if Henry pocketed the ring, he refused – on Arnulf’s urging – to accept the parchment. Not simply did he repudiate the idea that the pope had jurisdiction over island kingdoms which he saw as a threat to his sovereignty, he refused to demean himself by becoming a vassal to one of his own subjects – and an illegitimate one to boot – even if this man happened to occupy the stellar position in the Church. For Henry, the social divide alone was far too great. At least the chancellor, low-born as he was in the king’s eyes, had been born in lawful wedlock.
Inflamed by Arnulf’s reports, Henry raged against John, calling him a traitor, even threatening to put him on trial. Unable to extricate himself by throwing himself on the king’s mercy, John turned to his friends. Besides seeking Theobald’s assistance, he appealed to Becket. ‘If the memory of our old familiarity still counts for something,’ he pleaded, ‘if the onslaught of fortune does not undermine the loyalty of a tried and trusted friendship, then do what you can to assuage the indignation which our most serene lord the king has conceived against me without a cause, so that I may make good my innocence in his sight.’
Problems of distance would make John’s efforts to rehabilitate himself doubly difficult. When he sent out his appeal, Becket was in Normandy and Henry was with Eleanor in Aquitaine, where they had hastened after suppressing the revolt of Geoffrey of Anjou. Becket’s answer to John has not survived, but the uneven and haphazard way in which letters were dealt with when the court was on the move makes it unlikely that it would have. But another of John’s letters to Peter of Celle reveals that as soon as Thomas returned to England, he reassured his friend that he would survive his chastening experience more or less unscathed. He had even managed to get Eleanor on to John’s side, for she too told him that ‘the storm … has abated’, suggesting that this may have been one of the very rare occasions on which the chancellor was able to play off Henry against his wife. Ordered never again to enter Henry’s presence unless accompanied by an official minder, John was allowed to retain his post in Theobald’s household and his salary as a canon of Exeter until Becket quarrelled with the king in earnest. Then he would show himself the first to reciprocate for earlier kindnesses.
Pope Adrian’s death in September 1159 marked the beginning of a long struggle for supremacy in Italy. At its heart was Frederick Barbarossa, the Holy Roman Emperor, who had once supported the pope against King Roger II of Sicily and his son, but more recently, fearing encroachments in his own territories, steeled himself against the claims of the ascetic reformers, modelling himself on his great-grandfather, Henry IV, who had defied Pope Gregory VII. In the papal election, Frederick ordered his supporters to choose Cardinal Octavian, who took the name of Victor IV, only to find that his enemies had successfully voted for Cardinal Roland Bandinelli, a leading reforming canon lawyer, who took the name of Alexander III. The result was a schism, with a pope and an antipope vying with each other for the right to succeed Adrian.
In such circumstances, it was the right of every secular ruler to recognize the pope of his choice. Thirty years before, Henry I had claimed such a right, which Theobald had no stomach to contest since he saw that Christendom would be rocked to its foundations by a divided response to the schism. Quickly asserting his authority, Henry forbade the bishops of England and Normandy to approve either claimant until he should give his final decision. Opinion gradually shifted in Alexander’s favour, and within six months Theobald was ready to endorse him, recommending him to Henry as the ‘more virtuous, more prudent, more learned’ of the rival candidates and advising him that a majority of the French bishops had already abandoned Victor.
In July 1160, shortly after Becket had sealed the peace between the two rival kings following the Toulouse campaign, Henry met Louis at Beauvais to agree on a coordinated response, but then stalled for another four months, insisting their decision be kept secret. To Theobald’s dismay, he was conducting his own backstairs diplomacy, refusing to recognize Alexander until the pope’s representatives agreed first to approve the long-delayed canonization of King Edward the Confessor to bolster the English monarchy’s divine-right credentials. And by the time the favour was conceded, Constance of Castile had died in childbirth and Louis had decided to marry Adela of Blois-Champagne, the cue for Henry to storm back to Alexander’s envoys to demand immediate approval for his young son’s wedding to Louis’s infant daughter as a further precondition to recognizing the new pope.
Becket at first saw no reason to meddle in the politics of the papal endorsement, unaware as yet that Theobald blamed him more than anyone for permitting Henry to extort what amounted to a ransom from the new pope. But as the episode dragged on, he went out on a limb, taking sides with two Norman prelates, Giles of La Perche, archdeacon of Rouen, and William, bishop of Le Mans, who had refused to condone the king’s behaviour and spoken out, leaking news of the decision in Alexander’s favour prematurely, for which Henry ordered the immediate destruction of their property.
Thomas appealed to him to relent, saving the archdeacon’s house from demolition by pretending that it was where he himself stayed when in Rouen. He could do nothing to rescue the bishop’s house in Neufmarché, which was ransacked and his goods thrown into the street. But he would prevent the burning of his castle at Le Mans, even though Henry had already dispatched fast riders, armed with writs that he had first brandished in the faces of his terrified courtiers, shaking his fist while shouting, ‘Forsooth, let the citizens of Le Mans know of the infamy of their bishop.’ Behind the king’s back, Becket ordered these messengers to take four days over their journey, instead of the usual two. Next day, he sent a delegation of bishops to intercede with the king, but they were rebuffed. Undaunted, he returned himself again and again, until finally on the third day Henry yielded, if only because he thought that enough time had already elapsed for his officers to raze the castle.
Instantly Becket’s own couriers galloped non-stop to Le Mans. Arriving breathless and in the nick of time – for the king’s writs had been handed that very morning to the civic authorities – the castle was saved. William fitz Stephen, ever partisan where Becket’s reputation is at stake, claims that Henry, once he had cooled down, thanked his chancellor for sparing him the shame and embarrassment of a fatal overreaction. Perhaps, but whatever he may have said in public, in private he can have only smouldered. Had a licence not subsequently been granted by Alexander’s representatives for the children’s wedding, his reaction would have been far less benign.
By June 1160 Theobald was seriously ill and had to be carried about from place to place in a horse-litter. Some years before, he had succumbed to a chronic disease described as ‘a grievous malady [that] brought me nigh to the gates of death’, a complaint diagnosed by John of Salisbury as a stomach ulcer. Seeing his end approaching, he vowed to make restitution to anyone he had wronged, ‘to make satisfaction’, as he poignantly said, ‘to the Scourger and to avoid the everlasting scourge by chastisement’. Soon afterwards he wrote to Becket, saying that he wanted to abolish the bad custom of ‘second aids’ introduced by his brother Walter while archdeacon of Canterbury. A discretionary levy on the incomes of parish churches for the archdeacon’s personal benefit, the proceeds were lucrative and Thomas, whose expenses by this time may have been exceeding his income, strongly resisted the suggestion.
On the move in Normandy when the archbishop’s letter was dispatched, Thomas claimed that he did not receive it for several months. John of Salisbury wrote to warn him, ‘You charged me to watch over your interests … Our lord archbishop has ordered that the tax which has been paid by his own churches should be withdrawn from you. Though others resisted me, I struck out in vain against the rushing stream.’ Theobald, however, was unmoved. He knew the levy was morally wrong. ‘What little,’ he insisted, ‘would it profit us if we should gain the whole world and lose our own soul?’
He particularly blamed Becket for not reproaching Henry for his delay in recognizing Pope Alexander, accusing him of betraying his trust and withholding essential information. Given that the chancellor had by now risked his position with Henry on several occasions to help the Church, this seems unreasonable. What Theobald simply could not see was that Thomas had his own dire predicament to contend with. For he had been set by Theobald to serve two masters, a nigh-impossible task given Henry’s character. In any case, triumphant from his success in extorting such large concessions from Alexander’s representatives, Henry was daring to believe he had the new pope in his pocket, in which case anything Thomas said would be irrelevant.
Matters finally came to a head when Becket ignored Theobald’s further appeals over ‘second aids’ and the archbishop sent him a scathing rebuke. ‘You have often been recalled,’ he wrote, ‘and you ought to have returned in answer to a single summons of your father, now old and ill. Indeed it is to be feared that God may punish your tardiness, if you shut your ears to the call of obedience, forgetting the benefits you have received and despising your father whom you should have carried on your shoulders in his sickness.’
Mindful that death was approaching, Theobald also wrote several times to Henry. ‘On every side,’ he protested, ‘we hear the clash of kingdoms, new shapes of things swim into view and, owing to our sins, evil increases ever more and more.’ He implored the king that ‘since the evils of these days deny us your bodily presence, you would at least allow our archdeacon to return to us … He ought to have come even without our summons and would have been convicted of disobedience before the eyes of God and men did not your needs excuse him.’
But Thomas never came. John of Salisbury reports that Theobald had tried to summon him on pain of excommunication, but the order was countermanded after a royal messenger arrived to insist that Henry needed Becket constantly on the Continent and he could not be spared. The primate, rightly, smelt a rat. Henry and Becket, John hesitatingly dared to caution his friend, had offered different, potentially incompatible reasons for why Thomas could not return, suggesting that one of them was lying.
John was slower to doubt his friend, remembering his own bruising encounter with Henry over the Irish affair. ‘I think,’ he confided, ‘I have an inkling of the truth and realize almost as vividly as if I were on the spot what your situation is in the midst of your labours in a distant land.’ Had not St Matthew hit the nail on the head in the New Testament? ‘No man can serve two masters: for either he will hate the one and love the other, or else he will hold to the one and despise the other.’
John did not dare to complete the second half of the quotation, but his meaning is plain. Becket had begun his career in the Church as Theobald’s clerk and risen to be his fixer and right-hand man. He had been planted by the primate at court, where he had enjoyed the highest favour and the richest rewards. But as the years passed by, whether deliberately or not, he had weakened his ties to Theobald. He had very little choice after the pulp had gone out of his relationship with Henry at the gates of Toulouse, when he became subject to many of the same controlling tactics that Henry used against all his courtiers. There was only so much that even an experienced high-wire artist could do. He could help the Church, as he had done several times by mitigating royal policy at the margins, but that seemed to be all. The golden age of Lanfranc was no more. As Henry increasingly imposed his will on his chancellor, Thomas knew he would have to bend.
On 18 April 1161 Theobald died without ever seeing Becket again. His last remaining hours were spent with John of Salisbury, who sat faithfully at his bedside and fed him with a spoon. The chancellor, significantly, is not named as one of the executors of his will. He is not even mentioned in the document. Nor did he receive, as Henry himself would do, a parting letter containing a final blessing and homily from the archbishop. So absolute was the rift between Theobald and his former favourite, it was as if Thomas had never been born.