In late July 1163, while Henry and Becket were in London together, the archbishop preached a fiery sermon before the king, taking as his text ‘ “Look, Lord, here are two swords.” And he said to them, “It is enough” ’ (Luke 22:38). This text had been a classic way of discussing the respective powers of kings and popes since Peter Damian, one of the most powerful advocates of the ascetic reform movement, had first used it a century earlier. According to the Gospels, the disciples had shown two swords to Christ immediately after the Last Supper, before he had gone up to the Mount of Olives to pray. He had said, ‘It is enough’, and afterwards, in the garden of Gethsemane, he had commanded St Peter to sheathe one of these swords.
When Lanfranc had been alive, the allegory was taken to mean that the pope governed in partnership with secular rulers, the one tending to the needs of the spirit, the other to the needs of the body. But Becket, following the militant church reformers, interpreted it to mean that the pope – as vicar of St Peter – has a controlling authority over both Church and State because the material sword must be unleashed by the secular ruler at his command. His sermon is another landmark in his intellectual development, since under Herbert of Bosham’s direction he had now secured a copy of a letter of St Bernard to Pope Eugenius III, otherwise known as the Exhortation, in which on the eve of the preaching of the Second Crusade the saint had famously declared, ‘Both swords must now be drawn in the passion of Christ, for Christ is now suffering again where he suffered before. By whom are they to be drawn, if not by you? Both are St Peter’s, and are to be drawn when necessary, one by his own hand, the other at his beckoning.’
It was not in Henry’s nature to pay much attention to sermons, but this was different. As Becket’s argument unfolded, the king ‘took note of each of his words and … did not receive his sermon with a placid spirit’. He saw instantly how far his archbishop had shifted from his earlier opinions as royal chancellor.
A few days later, king and archbishop quarrelled over the case of Philip de Broi, a priest whom Thomas had first got to know at the end of King Stephen’s reign. A fellow-prebendary of Lincoln Cathedral, he had been accused of murdering a knight, but had been acquitted in the bishop of Lincoln’s court. At first both Henry and the victim’s relatives had accepted this verdict and the matter appeared to be closed until Simon fitz Peter, one of the circuit judges for Bedfordshire, where de Broi had his main home, sought to reopen the case. Summoned to appear before him, de Broi refused to enter a plea, and when ordered to do so, hurled abuse at Simon, who rode post-haste to London to complain to Henry.
With the words of Becket’s sermon still ringing in his ears, Henry chose to interpret the insults levelled against Simon as a personal attack on himself. Swearing his familiar oath ‘By God’s eyes’, he ordered a fresh trial, but Becket intervened, saying, ‘This will certainly not be done, for laymen cannot be judges of clerks and whatever this or any other member of the clergy has committed should be judged in a church court.’
Stifling his objections for the moment, Henry grudgingly agreed to commit de Broi for trial before a committee of bishops at Canterbury. There, the accused priest successfully pleaded that he was not obliged to enter a defence for the murder, since he had already been acquitted in a previous trial. But he refused to answer to the charge of insulting a royal judge, claiming that it was ‘beneath his dignity to engage in this quarrel, for he was a great man and from a great family’.
At this, Henry’s lawyers leapt forward, crying, ‘We demand judgement upon an evident injury that has not been denied.’ The archbishop reluctantly agreed, sentencing de Broi to be deprived of all his church livings for two years and the income given to the poor. He was to serve his sentence in exile and before leaving the country was to be handed over to the sheriff of Kent, to receive a public flogging in the presence of the judge he had defamed.
Such a harsh punishment ought to have been sufficient for opprobrious words, had Henry not been spoiling for a fight. As it was, he ranted and raged, crying, ‘This judgement has failed to respect my honour.’ He demanded nothing short of the death penalty and, on failing to obtain it, rounded on Gilbert Foliot, causing him to squirm, exclaiming, ‘By God’s eyes, you are going to confirm to me on oath that you have given a true judgement and have not spared this man because he is a clerk.’ But by calling for such an oath from the bishops, he went too far. It was almost as if he was making what he knew to be an unreasonable demand in the expectation that the bishops would refuse, since when they agreed to take the oath, he became even angrier. ‘He did not know what to do or to whom to turn for fury.’ Finally, after consulting the barons, he resolved to settle the matter of criminous clerks in his favour once and for all.
But before he could do so, tempers would rise further. As archbishop, Becket claimed the right to appoint new priests to all the vacant churches on his manors and hence had given the church living of Eynsford in Kent to a clerk called Lawrence. So when William of Eynsford, one of Henry’s tenants-in-chief, objected and expelled Lawrence’s men, Becket excommunicated him, knowingly flouting William the Conqueror’s decree that a tenant-in-chief could not be sentenced by the Church unless royal consent was first obtained. Speechless with rage when he heard the news, Henry was now willing to communicate with Becket only through intermediaries. Thomas had little choice but to absolve William, since his episcopal colleagues were unwilling to support this sort of outright defiance. Soon after this latest spat, Henry rode to Windsor, where he said of Becket, ‘Now I have no more love for him.’ Their duelling would soon begin in deadly earnest.
Henry struck at a council of the English Church convened at Westminster Abbey on Sunday 13 October 1163, the date chosen for the removal of the body of King Edward the Confessor from his existing tomb beside the high altar to a reconstructed shrine on the same spot, but above rather than below ground, following his canonization in part-exchange for Henry’s recognition of Pope Alexander. With the Confessor’s remains freshly exhumed and wrapped in a precious silk cloth, Henry and eight leading barons came into the abbey and watched while a new wooden coffin was sealed. They then processed around the cloisters bearing it on their shoulders in the presence of the monks, before placing it safely in its shrine.
No better piece of theatre could possibly have been choreographed by the king. The ritual made it plain that his royal predecessor was a saint whom the pope had confirmed could work miracles. Who could doubt that such a sacred monarchy was well-suited to preside over the English Church? Becket was deliberately sidelined at this event. The master of ceremonies was the abbot of Westminster; the principal actors were the king, the barons and the monks. Perhaps steeling himself for what he knew was still to come, Thomas sought comfort from a holy relic that he requested as a gift from the abbot: the stone to which it was believed St Wulfstan’s pastoral staff had once been transfixed. His choice was significant: St Wulfstan was the one Anglo-Saxon bishop who had successfully resisted William the Conqueror’s attempts to oust him. According to a legend of the Westminster monks, Wulfstan had come to Edward the Confessor’s tomb and said, ‘Edward, you gave me my staff and now I cannot hold it because of the king, so I commit it to you.’ He had rammed the staff into the gravestone, where it had miraculously stuck until Wulfstan himself had released it.
Little good would the relic do Becket. When at last the business of the council began, Henry made a threatening speech upbraiding the bishops for their lack of respect and demanding that the secular judges punish criminous clerks in future. Becket withdrew with his colleagues to consult and soon disagreements arose between them. A majority, for once rallied in his support by Roger of Pont l’Évêque and Gilbert Foliot, fully agreed with Thomas that the church courts alone should continue to try the cases of criminous clerks, but some of the more timid bishops argued that canon law already permitted a convicted priest to be returned for punishment to the secular arm at the bishop’s discretion in cases so notorious that they endangered the entire community.
Determined to give a firm lead to the waverers in the face of Henry’s bullying, Becket went on to the offensive, moving into hitherto uncharted waters, seeking to close a possible loophole in canon law by citing the maxim ‘God will not judge twice for the same offence.’ Here he had moved on considerably from his earlier thinking, claiming that ‘double jeopardy’ in cases involving criminous clerks was always morally wrong. The maxim ‘God will not judge twice for the same offence’ had never been a part of strict canon law, but this did not stop Thomas citing it now in ways suggesting it had. Deriving not from a papal decree or decision of a church council, but from a commentary by St Jerome on a passage in the Greek Septuagint, a translation from Hebrew into Greek of portions of the Old Testament made in about 250 BC, it was a theological, not a legal argument saying that ‘A mere man should not exact a twofold vengeance for one single fault, when God, judge of all men, as it is written, judges no one twice for the same offence’.
His critics regularly assert that Thomas plucked this general rule against ‘double jeopardy’ out of the air. In reality, the idea had already been planted in his brain by Herbert of Bosham and John of Salisbury; all he had to do was to pick it up and run with it. Herbert, who agreed with the most zealous of the ascetic reformers that the clergy formed a separate order of society accountable to Christ alone, turned to a theological argument in the absence of a legal precedent. John’s precise reasoning remains unknown, but discussing the penalties for criminous clerks four years before in his Policraticus, he had forcefully argued that ‘it always obtains that no one is to receive two punishments on account of the same case’.
But by voicing in public an argument he had so far been debating with his advisers only in private, Becket had come to deny what he had previously once allowed: the transfer of criminous clerks from the church court to the secular court after conviction for further punishment with the bishop’s consent in a few exceptional cases. Now such transfers should always be prohibited.
With his fellow-bishops rallying behind him, the archbishop returned to the king. ‘Let it be our unfeigned desire,’ he said, ‘to honour and worshipfully to heed your will in all things, my good lord, if it turn not against that which is right. But if it setteth itself up obstructively against the will of God and the laws and dignity of the holy Church, we neither may nor dare give our assent to it.’
Seeing that he was outmanoeuvred, Henry decided to pursue a different tack. He knew that most of the bishops were weak: ‘not pillars, but reeds that swayed and quivered in the wind’. If pushed, and especially if questioned individually, they might give way. Holding in his hand a charter of Henry I for maximum effect, he therefore demanded that they answer on their allegiance ‘whether they would obey his ancestral customs’. This put an entirely different, far more sinister spin on the matter. It was a much broader question, which to answer in the negative could be treasonable.
After taking counsel, Becket replied, ‘Yes, in every way – saving our order’ (salvo ordine nostro). It was a bold, defiant answer, implying that anything contrary to canon law or to his position as a churchman would be excluded from his assent.
Henry then put the same question to each of the bishops individually, who all gave the same answer except for Hilary of Chichester. On the receiving end of Henry’s fury in the Battle Abbey case, he lacked the stomach for further resistance and so substituted the words ‘in all good faith’ (bona fide) for ‘saving our order’. But if he hoped to mollify the king, he abjectly failed. Henry burst into a tirade, before turning to Becket and accusing him of conspiring against him. ‘Poison lurks in that phrase “saving our order”,’ he snarled. ‘It is nothing more than sophistry.’ He demanded that all the bishops should absolutely and unreservedly swear to observe the ‘ancestral customs’. ‘By God’s eyes,’ he expostulated, ‘you shall not say anything of “saving your order”, but shall agree outright and expressly to the customs.’
Becket tried in vain to remind him that the very same proviso was already etched into the oaths each of them had taken to him before their consecration, when they had sworn fealty to him ‘in life and limb and earthly honour saving their order’, and that the words ‘earthly honour’ already covered the ‘ancestral customs’. But Henry would not listen, repeating his demand for compliance. When Becket refused, the king turned on his heel and left the chamber without bidding him farewell. And next morning, he shamed the archbishop by ordering him to surrender all the castles and estates that he held from the crown and by removing Prince Henry from his household, much to the eight-year-old boy’s distress. He then departed for the Midlands, leaving the bishops in disarray. Bishop Hilary was in the worst case, since besides being snubbed by Henry he was rebuked by Becket for unilaterally altering the formula agreed by his colleagues.
In late October Henry tried again to cow Becket by summoning him peremptorily to a rendezvous outside Northampton, possibly the ground beside the River Nene still known today as Becket’s Park, close beside Derngate, refusing him entry to the town on the grounds that it was already full with his own courtiers and their servants. At first they could not even approach each other easily. Both rode stallions that reared and pranced until they were forced to change mounts. Once new horses had been found and they had separated themselves from the gathering crowd, Henry reproached Thomas for his ingratitude, using arguments he would repeat again and again over the next few years. ‘Have I not raised you from a poor and lowly station to the pinnacle of rank and honour?’ he began. ‘How comes it that so many benefits, so many proofs of my love for you, well known to all, have so been erased from your mind that you are now not only ungrateful, but obstruct me in everything?’
‘Far be it from me, my lord,’ answered Thomas. ‘I am not unmindful of the favours which, not you alone, but God, who dispenses all things, hath condescended to confer on me through you: wherefore, far be it from me to show myself ungrateful or to act contrary to your will in anything, so long as it accords with the will of God.’
Barely were the words out of his mouth when Henry cut him short. ‘I don’t want a sermon,’ he snapped. ‘Are you not the son of one of my villeins? Answer me yes or no.’
‘In truth,’ said Thomas, stung by the swipe against his middle-class ancestry, ‘I am not sprung from royal ancestors, but neither was St Peter, the prince of the Apostles, to whom the Lord deigned to give the keys of the kingdom of heaven and the primacy of the whole Church.’
‘True,’ said Henry scornfully, ‘but he died for his Lord.’
‘And I,’ retorted Becket, ‘will die for my Lord when the time comes … I trust and rely on God, for cursed is the man that puts his hope in man.’ Or this – at least – is what the hagiographers claim that he replied. Maybe he did, but if so, he spoke in the heat of the moment and there is no reason to believe he was making a serious threat or courting martyrdom, for he still believed that he could win. Calming down after a few moments, he added more soberly, ‘I answer, as I did before, that I am ready to please and honour you saving my order.’
The interview continued in this vein for about an hour until Henry, wholly exasperated by hearing the archbishop’s proviso repeated like a mantra, lost his temper and insisted that it ‘be entirely dropped’. When Becket refused, the two men spurred their horses and rode away.
Now Henry began to show his true colours. He had been provoked, but had himself behaved in ways that were highly provocative. The quarrel had become personal, but after considering the matter more soberly, he believed that many, perhaps most, of the bishops could be suborned. Most had been seriously alarmed by the turn of events at the Council of Westminster; many regarded Becket as at best unqualified, at worst a cuckoo in their nest, and it should not take much to silence them.
Henry’s agent was the slippery Arnulf of Lisieux, who advised him to court the bishops assiduously as the prelude to Becket’s isolation and suspension by the pope. With his finger firmly on the pulse, he knew that Roger of Pont l’Évêque had his eye on an appointment as a papal legate so that he could laud it over the primate, while Gilbert Foliot sought Becket’s suspension or deposition so that he could replace him at Canterbury. Hilary of Chichester was another easily suborned, as was Robert of Melun – clearly he decided that his revolutionary ideas of resistance to tyrannous rulers were only for use in the classroom after all. John of Salisbury was scathing. Such men, he insisted, were careerists consumed by ambition and with ‘the face of a whore’. And he denounced Robert as a man he had always secretly suspected to be an academic fraud, a sycophant deluded by pride.
With the nucleus of a royalist party established, Henry sent Arnulf to the papal curia, now in sanctuary at Sens in French territory beyond the Angevin king’s reach. Criss-crossing the Channel as many as six times, Arnulf put a flurry of diplomacy in train aimed atsecuring Pope Alexander’s approval of Henry’s so-called ‘ancestral customs’. To counter this, Thomas sent two of his most trusted friends and allies, John of Canterbury (now bishop of Poitiers) and Henry of Houghton, to lobby the pope and cardinals. His letters to Alexander around this time reveal his talent for vivid, fiery oratory. ‘We see nothing but shipwreck hanging over us,’ he began one of them somewhat melodramatically, ‘and no course left, except to arouse Christ, seemingly asleep in the vessel, by calling out with all our strength, “Save us, O Lord, we are drowning.” ’ And when explaining why Henry was a dangerous man, he says, ‘That which Jesus Christ has purchased with his blood is being torn from him; secular might is stretching forth its hand to Christ’s own inheritance.’ In his mind, the struggle was fast turning into a battle to protect the Christian faith itself.
Whereas Henry managed to stay cool and calculating, Becket’s responses were rooted more in his emotions. For all his fabled tantrums, the Angevin king could usually curb his passion when it was really necessary. His next move was to send Hilary of Chichester to visit Becket at his manor of Teynham in Kent. After first threatening him, warning him that the king already had the power to do as he wished, Hilary adopted a softer tone, saying enticingly that if Thomas would agree to honour the ‘ancestral customs’, then Henry would consent never to enforce them in a manner detrimental to canon law.
To this Becket retorted shrewdly that it was an empty pledge and meant nothing, for while the king could hold the clergy to their promise, neither they nor anyone else would be able to hold him to his. Under John of Salisbury’s influence, Thomas was already beginning to debate whether Henry was becoming a tyrant who merely pretended to champion the law, but in reality meant to subvert or ignore it whenever it suited him. ‘Justice’ might be his slogan, but his intentions were thoroughly evil. To treat with him would be to sup with the devil. ‘Far be it,’ Thomas exclaimed, ‘that I buy back the favour of an earthly king through such a bargain!’
Hilary protested, ‘I ask you, what is this evil that is so great and appalling that you alone see and understand it, and no one else?’ But Becket would not budge. He thought he knew Henry better than anyone, certainly better than Hilary. ‘For this,’ he added with a conviction based on his eight years’ experience as chancellor, ‘you will most certainly discover, that the king exacts from you whatever you promise him, but you cannot force him to stick to his own promises.’
But even if Becket was for the moment intractable, the ground was shifting beneath his feet. Superficially, his envoys at the papal curia appeared to be successful. John of Canterbury relayed to him Pope Alexander’s satisfaction that at last someone was prepared to speak honestly to the princes of this world, but warned him that Henry was still in high favour. ‘So far as human aid is concerned,’ he said, ‘you should not expect from the curia anything that might offend the king.’ From the pope’s viewpoint, Becket was indeed something of a liability. Alexander even wrote to Gilbert Foliot, urging him to use his influence with the king to settle the dispute swiftly. He also wrote to Thomas, commending him for being such ‘a steadfast and able defender of the Church’ before ordering him to lie low. ‘We direct and order your fraternity,’ he said, ‘to return to the church of Canterbury and travel as little as possible about the country, and keep with you only the smallest number of attendants which you absolutely need.’ And he concluded worryingly, ‘We are giving you this particular advice so that you may not be compelled to renounce the rights and dignities of your church by any fear or misfortune which may befall to you.’
That did not bode well, and when in December Alexander sent an envoy, Abbot Philip of l’Aumône near Blois, a prominent Cistercian who had been prior of Clairvaux under St Bernard, to visit the archbishop at his manor-house at Harrow, carrying letters from himself and the cardinals that begged him to reconcile himself to the king, Thomas was already feeling vulnerable. Escorted by Robert of Melun and the same Knights Templar who had taken custody of the disputed Vexin castles in 1160, the envoy had already called on Henry, who, as he reassured Thomas soothingly, had said he would now be willing to accept a simple verbal assent to the ‘ancestral customs’ rather than an oath. All Becket had to do in return was to abandon the proviso ‘saving my order’. ‘If that were done,’ he said, ‘he and the English Church would gain the king’s full peace and favour’ – a crisis would be averted.
The offer seemed almost too good to be true, but such were the papal envoy’s credentials that Becket was persuaded to yield. He agreed to go with Philip and his fellow-intermediaries to meet Henry at Woodstock, where in a highly emotional speech he first begged the king ‘to destroy and abrogate for ever the abuses of tyrants and strive to associate himself with the merits and company of saintly kings’ before promising, without reservation, ‘from now on to observe the customs of the realm in all good faith and to obey the king in what is right [in bono]’.
A considerable effort was needed on Becket’s part to say this, since it not only marked a humiliating retreat but also required a high degree of trust, because no satisfactory method had yet been agreed for defining the ‘ancestral customs’. By promising to observe the customs ‘in all good faith’, he also used the very same phrase for which he had recently upbraided Hilary of Chichester. He had buckled under pressure from the pope’s representative, gaining little in return and would be stunned when Henry’s response was to double the stakes.
Far from regarding Becket’s submission as putting an end to the affair, the king declared that since the archbishop’s initial refusal to accept the customs had been in public, his assent to them must be equally so. ‘Everyone,’ he said, ‘knows how stubborn you showed yourself by using that proviso and how much you offended my honour by your defiance.’ And he gave orders for a fresh council to be convened in late January 1164 at his palace of Clarendon, three miles south-east of Salisbury, where all the bishops and abbots, and all the magnates and royal judges, could hear Becket’s words of unconditional surrender for themselves.
With that, Henry closed the interview, riding pointedly away to spend Christmas with Eleanor and their children in unusual splendour at Berkhamsted in Hertfordshire, one of the castles he had stripped from Becket the day after the Council of Westminster. All his old affection for his former chancellor had gone and, with Pope Alexander not daring to offend him for fear of Frederick Barbarossa, he was determined to show who was the master. Thomas himself suspected it, sending John of Salisbury across the Channel posing as a travelling scholar, instructing him to recruit allies and prepare an escape route should he decide to flee into exile.
John did his work well, arranging for an initial safe haven should it be needed at the abbey of St Bertin, where Theobald had taken refuge on being sent into exile after the Council of Rheims in 1148. He then rode to Paris, taking comfortable lodgings in accordance with Becket’s instructions and seeking King Louis’s aid. In what may have been his earliest report from France, John informed Thomas, ‘I went to the French king and expounded your case to him in full. Need I say more? He feels for you, and promises assistance: and he told me that he has written to the pope on your behalf, and he will write again if need be.’
By sending John to make these preparations, Becket was taking a massive risk, for Henry considered his tactics to be nothing short of treasonable. On his friend’s advice, John had gone to see Eleanor to ask if she would mediate or at least grant him a licence allowing him to leave the country legally, but she had flatly refused, complaining to Henry, who had promptly seized John’s revenues, leaving him almost destitute. Believing the pope still to be in his pocket, Henry sent Arnulf of Lisieux back across the Channel. Under his malign influence, Pope Alexander – here John in describing his own reception at Sens did not mince his words – was visibly veering towards Henry. John had even heard it said in mockery that ‘the pope will visit Canterbury Cathedral to knock your candlestick out of its place’.
Poverty did not agree with John: there was a gaping gulf between his strident demands for the liberty of the Church and his willingness to suffer for the truth. Forced to sell his horse to pay his rent, he implored Becket to settle with Henry if he could bear it.
But he pleaded in vain. When Thomas had been catapulted into the archbishopric by Henry, he had thought initially that he would be forced to choose between the values of his king and those of his new position. After their latest round of clashes, he would come to think that nothing could be that simple, because he was also beginning to convince himself that he was choosing between the values of tyranny and justice. Henry, meanwhile, had questioned his new archbishop’s loyalty and could never accept that there might be a code of conduct different from his own. Once Thomas understood this, the ascetic, rebel’s impulse in him, always there since his adolescent years, would reassert itself, after which he would steel himself to impose a moral principle on the world. Whatever his intentions had been as chancellor, now he would struggle as archbishop to become exactly as John of Salisbury had once imagined him: the ‘defender of liberty’ and the man ‘who cancels unjust laws’.