When Henry convoked the Council of Clarendon, he knew exactly what he intended to do. He meant to reverse his setback at the Council of Westminster and force Becket and the bishops to concede publicly his right to govern the Church in accordance with the ‘ancestral customs’. The proviso ‘saving our order’ was to be dropped and the archbishops and bishops were to promise to uphold the customs ‘in all good faith’ – the formula first used by Hilary of Chichester in an attempt to satisfy the king.
The palace, one of Henry’s favourites, which he had gradually transformed from a hunting lodge set deep in the royal forest into a fine residential complex of flint rubble and stone around a central courtyard, stood on a hill overlooking Salisbury. The great hall, where the council would assemble, warmed by blazing logs in a huge central fireplace, occupied the north range next to the king’s chamber, itself close to the east end of the hall. Set around the courtyard were smaller chambers for the king’s barons and knights, for his chaplains and confessors and for the more important royal household officials. Nearby were a mews and the stables, an almonry, a bakery and the kitchens. Some years later, the great hall had a roof held up by rows of stone pillars decorated with elaborate Romanesque sculptures, and the palace complex would include separate queen’s apartments, a chapel and apartments for Prince Henry. It may well be that these already had their simpler precursors when those summoned made their way through the snow to the palace a fortnight after Epiphany 1164.
Beginning on 25 January and lasting three or four days, the council was unusually well-attended. Almost all the bishops were there, notably Roger of Pont l’Évêque and Gilbert Foliot, and as many leading barons and royal officials as could conveniently be gathered in one place. Those whom John of Salisbury called the ‘untamed beasts’ of the court – Robert de Beaumont and Richard de Lucy together with the king’s uncle, Reginald, Earl of Cornwall, the most powerful men in England – took their places close to the king. Richard de Humez is not mentioned in the sources, but as he had sailed from Normandy shortly before the council and would return there soon afterwards, the chances are that he too was present. Also in attendance was John the Marshal, still seeking revenge for the archbishop’s seizure of his lands.
Flanked by Prince Henry, who was almost nine but must have felt utterly confused by the treatment meted out to his old mentor, the king opened the proceedings by asking Becket to redeem the promise he had made at Woodstock before Abbot Philip of l’Aumône ‘to observe the customs of the realm in all good faith and to obey the king in what is right’. The king’s peremptory tone put Thomas on his guard. Knowing Henry as he did, he was quick to suspect a trap. He had to convince the bishops to think and act unanimously; discord within their ranks would play into the king’s hands only too well. What happened next is uncertain since the sources give wildly conflicting versions, but it looks as if he turned for advice to his episcopal colleagues only to be met by a sullen response. They did not want to change their earlier replies at the Council of Westminster, which had included the ‘saving our order’ proviso. If Thomas now wanted them to submit to Henry unconditionally, he would need to say so, ‘because he was their head, and they were afraid to advise him to give way’.
This impasse caused a lengthy delay. Becket’s relations with his colleagues had rapidly deteriorated since the earlier council: they felt that he had boxed them into a corner so it was up to him to lead them out of it. If Gilbert Foliot is to be believed, Henry had the bishops locked up together for two full days in an attempt to cow them. His bullying was in vain: with Foliot urging them on, all stood firm apart from Jocelin of Salisbury and William of Norwich, who begged Thomas to yield, protesting that the king already had grudges to settle with them and that they would be the first to suffer his reprisals.
Henry, meanwhile, was in a fury. He threatened to castrate or summarily execute anyone who resisted him, sending a cohort of royal knights and henchmen into the room where the bishops were confined, menacingly ‘throwing off their cloaks and thrusting out their arms’ while shouting violent threats. Robert de Beaumont and Earl Reginald came next to browbeat Thomas. When he stayed resolute, the king tried a different tack, sending the same Knights Templar who had accompanied Abbot Philip on his visits to Harrow and Woodstock, to beguile him with honeyed words. ‘For we know,’ they said, ‘that the king is planning neither fraud nor deceit against you, but to him it seems too harsh and unbearable if he is seen to be disobeyed by you over this formula.’ Repeating the papal envoy’s avowal that if the bishops were to satisfy the king verbally and ‘in all good faith’, they would ‘never again hear mention of these customs which you recoil from and detest so much’, the Templars even went so far as to stake their eternal salvation on Henry’s honesty. Why they would be willing to do this is difficult to imagine, but bribery or threats may be suspected. Their leader, Richard of Hastings, the Master of the English Templars, was a kinsman of Ralph of Hastings, one of Eleanor’s leading household servants, and of William of Hastings, one of Henry’s own inner circle. Henry was himself a patron of the English Templars, giving them gifts of gold and the land in London on which they would shortly build their ‘New Temple’ to replace the Old Temple in Holborn.
During the later stages of his quarrel with the king, Becket could sometimes act impulsively, jumping prematurely to the next level of hostilities in his attempts to force matters to a head, but not at Clarendon. After informing his fellow-bishops that his decision was to obey the king, he bowed before Henry, saying, ‘I freely consent to your demands and I declare that I will keep the customs of the realm in all good faith.’ It would turn out to be one of his biggest regrets for the rest of his life. For Henry had lied, and despite all Becket’s experience of the king’s oath-breaking, the former chancellor had been too trusting to see what was coming.
Triumphant at his success, the king ordered the bishops to follow suit, which they all did – they had little choice, since their leader had cut the ground from beneath their feet. But no sooner had the last man finished speaking than Henry doubled the stakes again, demanding that a delegation of senior barons should ‘go outside with my clerks and make a record of the laws and customs of my grandfather, King Henry. And when they have been carefully written down, let them be brought quickly to me.’ His reassurances to the pope’s representative and the Templars that a simple verbal assent to the customs would suffice, and that once it had been given, the matter would never be heard of again, had been hollow. He had all along intended to put everything into writing.
The barons and clerks withdrew and soon returned with a memorandum. Richard de Lucy, John of Oxford, a royal chaplain, and Jocelin de Bailleul, a knight formerly in the service of Henry’s mother and now a key figure in Eleanor’s household, took the lead: for their pains Becket would later excommunicate all three. Maybe a working template had been prepared in advance, since the memorandum was ready at lightning speed. Henry even ordered it to be read aloud without reading it first himself, saying, ‘See, these are the customs which have been conceded to me. Therefore, lest a disputed point arise from now on in relation to them, or perhaps new points of law emerge, we now wish the archbishop to affix his seal to them.’
But as the clerk read through the document, Becket’s face turned ashen white. Although a number of the clauses were genuine ‘customs’, others were innovations in whole or in part, ingeniously constructed to create the impression that each of them had the ring of authenticity, and yet collectively they amounted to a flagrant attack on the Church. Far more corrosive, however, was the fact that they were now codified in written form, expertly crafted by de Lucy and his legal team so as to forge general rules out of exceptional instances and exploit every loophole and ambiguity in canon law and feudal custom in Henry’s favour.
On the most contentious issue of criminous clerks, the phrasing was as slippery as it was ambiguous, but no one could doubt that its effect would be to emasculate the Church’s claims. According to this clause, all priests or clerks accused of crimes against the king’s peace should first be summoned before a royal court, where their cases were to be registered, and from there be sent to the church court, where they were to be tried, unfrocked after conviction in the presence of a royal officer and then sent back under guard to the king’s court to be punished as a layman. Henry’s intention was to win control of both the opening and the closing stages of every trial and to make unfrocking and delivery of criminous clerks to the secular power for capital punishment or mutilation the automatic and invariable sentence, so that the royal judges should not be handicapped by the Church in any way. What had very occasionally been allowed in highly exceptional cases was now to be turned into a general rule. From the Church’s viewpoint, this was not a compromise but a rout.
As to the remaining ‘customs’, they included draconian restrictions on the church courts in cases involving debts or church livings, which were to be settled exclusively in the royal courts. Other cases involving the property rights of the higher clergy were to be subject at all times to judicial review in the royal courts. Appeals to the pope were to be severely curtailed and not to proceed without the king’s licence in every case. Sentences of excommunication or interdict against the king’s tenants-in-chief were not to be given without royal approval. No bishop or priest was to travel overseas without first obtaining a royal licence and giving security that he would attempt nothing against the king or the kingdom. The revenues of vacant bishoprics and abbeys were to continue to be disbursed at the king’s sole discretion. Elections to vacant posts were to be held in the king’s own chapel and only with his consent, placing novel restrictions on the process. Lastly, the sons of villeins were not to be ordained without the consent of the feudal lords on whose lands they were born, a maverick clause likely to have been inserted by the barons to prevent labour shortages on their estates at harvest time.
As the wider implications of this mischievous document began to sink in, Becket started to panic. He knew that Roger of Pont l’Évêque and Gilbert Foliot in particular would believe he had betrayed them, since they had vehemently opposed several proposals similar to those now read out in their earlier discussions. So he leapt to his feet, playing for time by protesting that he was unsure of how to respond to some of this material: he was too young, he said, to have sufficient knowledge of the ‘ancestral customs’ and would need to take advice. Since the hour was late, the session was accordingly adjourned.
But this was simply a breathing space. Henry returned to the attack next day, demanding that Becket seal the memorandum without further debate. Faced by intimidation on this scale, the rebel’s impulse in Thomas took over and he cried out, ‘By Almighty God, never while I am living will my seal be put to these!’ And yet no sooner had the words left his lips than he began to have second thoughts: he had already promised on his word as a priest to observe the customs. It appears that he vacillated for several hours, consulting the distraught bishops again but finding them obdurate, as they claimed that a written document did not need to be sealed when their earlier, verbal agreement to the customs – foisted on them by Becket himself – had bound them hand and foot.
This left Thomas trapped in a vice. Outflanked and outgunned by Henry and unable to take the pressure, he was finally realizing the gravity of his position and badly wanted to draw a line under the affair. Misled by the entreaties of the pope’s representative and the Templars, he had allowed his heart to rule his head and been outwitted. He had promised verbally to follow the customs ‘in all good faith’, but had taken that decision unilaterally, losing the support of his fellow-bishops. Now he was on his own and had to choose. Should he retreat and change his mind, in effect committing perjury, or be accused by his rivals of betraying the Church into slavery?
Henry, ironically, offered what at the time Becket naively regarded as a lifeline. He ordered his clerks to prepare a chirograph – a type of legal or diplomatic document that did not need to be sealed in order to be valid – in which a record of the council’s business including the memorandum of the customs was written out three times on a single skin of parchment with the word ‘CIROGRAPHVM’ in block capitals separating each of the individual copies. The scribe then cut horizontally across each example of the separating word with a knife, making a jagged edge along the parchment so that anyone questioning the authenticity of any of the copies would be able to see if it fitted back neatly together with the others. A tripartite format was the commonest, and as everyone made ready to leave the palace on 29 January, Henry handed one copy to Becket, one to Roger of Pont l’Évêque and kept one for himself.
By receiving a copy of this record from Henry’s hands, Becket was understood to have approved it, since both canon and common lawyers agreed that the mere physical acceptance of such a document by an interested party was legally binding. Afterwards, Thomas claimed that codifying the customs in writing after he had undertaken to observe them verbally had violated every promise that had been given to him, entitling him to change his mind. He had taken the document purely for information and for use as evidence in his future appeals to the pope. As Roger of Pontigny reports his words, he had told Henry, ‘I accept it not as consent or approval, but as precaution and defence of the Church, so that by this evidence we may know what is to be done against us.’
But this is shameless spin, devised retrospectively to exonerate Becket. Not even his staunchest supporters would find it easy to condone his acceptance of the chirograph: several compare it to the fall of St Peter, who after leaving the Mount of Olives denied Christ three times before the cock crowed next day. Nevertheless, Henry comes out worst from the encounter. He had sorely deceived the pope’s ambassador at Woodstock. He had either bribed or threatened the Templars. Vivid proof of the significance of the distinction between a verbal and a written undertaking comes from a remarkable letter Becket would afterwards receive from Nicholas of Rouen, who with Herbert of Bosham would show Becket’s copy of the chirograph to Henry’s mother, Matilda, in Normandy.
When Nicholas read the document to her in Latin and then translated it into French, she remarked that it had been a great mistake ever to put the customs into writing and require the bishops to swear to uphold them. ‘That woman comes from a race of tyrants,’ declared Nicholas triumphantly, but despite praising her son for his zeal for justice, she ‘disapproved of many of the clauses, and she was particularly displeased that they had been set down in writing … for this was not required of earlier bishops’. Her view was that Henry’s personal loathing for Becket had caused him to bungle the affair. He should, she said, have handled it ‘in such a way that the ancient customs of the realm would be observed without formal promise or written record, and with the addition of a balancing proviso that the secular judges would not take away the Church’s liberty, nor the bishops abuse it’.
As Becket rode home with his clerks from Clarendon, he was uncharacteristically silent, not speaking to anyone as he went over and over the events of the council in his mind. Asked what the matter was by Herbert of Bosham, he replied, ‘I begin to see that it is through me, and because of my sins, that the English Church is reduced to slavery.’ He bitterly regretted where his initial naivety had led him. His most serious mistake had been in accepting a copy of the chirograph, which had allowed Henry to believe that he had capitulated and would lead to accusations of treason and betrayal afterwards. He must also have reflected ruefully on how he had alienated his fellow-bishops by first cutting the ground from beneath them and then changing his mind. Yet his offences were vacillation and weakness rather than deliberate perfidy. He had never meant to commit perjury, but this is what he believed he had done, because deep down in his conscience he knew that the ‘ancestral customs’ were wrong.
A number of his clerks were equally dispirited, beginning to murmur against him and preparing to leave his service. His cross-bearer, Alexander Llewelyn, remained loyal but voiced his opinions freely. ‘The secular power,’ he said, ‘disturbs everything. Iniquity rages against Christ Himself. The synagogue of Satan profanes the sanctuary of God. Princes have sat and gathered themselves together against the Lord’s Anointed. No man is safe who loves equity.’ These were extreme opinions characteristic of the Cluniac wing of the ascetic reformers, but Llewelyn came closer to the mark when he asked, ‘What virtue is left to a man who has betrayed his conscience and his reputation?’
For his humiliation, Becket blamed Hilary of Chichester, who by first offering to obey the customs unconditionally at Westminster had put the idea in Henry’s head. When on the road home Herbert of Bosham pointed out Hilary to Thomas, he turned directly towards him, saying, ‘Get thee behind me, Satan.’ But he chiefly blamed himself, fasting, doing penance wearing sackcloth and ashes, and suspending himself from saying mass. This was to become one of the lowest points in Becket’s career before his murder, a cathartic moment he would never forget, from which he discovered how genuinely ill-prepared he had been for the role of a pastoral leader.
He did, however, reluctantly join Henry and Roger of Pont l’Évêque in asking Pope Alexander to confirm the customs. With no other option available to him, there was always the hope that Alexander would refuse, lifting the burden from his shoulders. To this end, he sent the pope a letter of his own, confessing his mistakes. The papal curia was still in sanctuary at Sens, so Becket’s messenger returned quickly, bringing with him a letter that must have brought him both hope and relief. ‘We direct and order,’ wrote Alexander, ‘that if the illustrious English king has at any time required from you anything hostile to the liberty of the Church, you should not attempt to render it to him in any way … If, however, you are aware that you are bound to the said king in anything of this kind, you should not in any way observe your promise, but rather take care to revoke it and strive to make your peace with God.’
The pope gave Becket a clear line to follow. He also dealt unwaveringly with Henry’s messengers, condemning as ‘obnoxious’ all the disputed customs where he believed the king had infringed the liberty of the Church and neatly sidestepping the king’s request that Roger of Pont l’Évêque be appointed a papal legate with authority over the primate. A separate decree instructed Roger not to have his cross carried before him in Becket’s presence, a calculated snub to the king as well as to Roger. But Alexander did not make either of these crucial decisions public, for he did not wish to provoke Henry unnecessarily. Unwilling to throw the Angevin king into the arms of Frederick Barbarossa, he even hinted that he might one day tolerate a handful of his ‘customs’, although not those involving criminous clerks or ecclesiastical appeals, or the right of the prelates to visit the papal curia.
Alexander, now settled safely under King Louis’s protection, was learning how to survive and thrive, carving out a path that kept as many forces as possible at bay for the longest amount of time. To weather the storm himself, Thomas would need to follow his example. ‘Since the desires of princes should be respected,’ the pope cautioned him, ‘we advise, counsel and exhort you, as a prudent and discreet man, to weigh the danger of the times and truly consider what is necessary to protect yourself and your church from harm.’ This, he absolutely insisted, meant keeping the lowest possible profile, striving not to offend Henry and even deferring to him ‘saving the honour of your ecclesiastical status’.
But if Alexander clearly regarded Becket as a loose cannon, he never doubted his integrity and dedication to the cause of the Church and its freedom. ‘As soon as I can,’ he concluded, ‘I shall do whatever is possible to increase your honour and standing in the eyes of the king and ensure that the rights and dignities of your church are preserved.’
As Easter drew near at Canterbury, Alexander quietly absolved Thomas for his failure of leadership at Clarendon and the archbishop resumed saying mass. ‘What proceeds from the exercise of free will,’ the pope had written, ‘is recognized to be different from that which proceeds from ignorance, as it is called, or the compulsion of circumstances.’ ‘Ignorance’ and ‘compulsion’ had been the causes of Becket’s misjudgements, but God would forgive him and his conscience could be set at ease by confessing his sins to a priest.
Within a month, the pope’s own potential for exercising decisive leadership in the Church would be dramatically transformed when his rival, the schismatic Victor, died suddenly at Lucca. A gleeful John of Salisbury, who had travelled from Paris to Sens, wrote to Becket with the news. Victor had lost his wits for a fortnight before he died and was so deranged he could remember neither God nor his own name. At first no one had been willing to bury him, but at length his body had been taken to a monastery outside the walls of the city.
John, however, was pessimistic for the future. The pope, he thought, might be his own master for the moment. Frederick Barbarossa was sick with a virulent strain of malaria, but what would happen when he recovered? Who could tell whether a new antipope would be elected and which way Henry’s mind would turn? The Angevin ruler’s latest envoys at the papal curia, sent to replace Arnulf of Lisieux, John believed to be the masters of deception. Spreading lies far and wide about Becket, they were also sending scurrilous reports to Henry about how recklessly he and his friends were slandering the king. ‘I urge and advise,’ John fearfully pleaded, ‘that no matter what the twisted mind of wicked men contrives against your honour, you should strive to obtain and keep the king’s favour for yourself as far as you can … I cannot see that you can achieve anything worthwhile as long as things remain as they are and the king opposes you in everything – especially since the Roman Church can receive nothing from you except words, and whatever loss it suffers on account of others it ascribes to you.’
John was never the stuff of which martyrs are made. Nor at this stage was Thomas. In July he rode again to see Henry at Woodstock in an attempt to patch up their relationship, but the gates were slammed in his face. The court was in mourning for the death of the king’s youngest brother, William, who had allegedly pined to death at Rouen as the result of Thomas’s refusal to license his wedding to the widowed lsabel de Warenne. His loss had crystallized Henry’s hatred for his archbishop. William had been a favourite of both the king and his inner circle: they could never forgive Thomas for what they saw as an action equivalent to poisoning.
Now Becket resumed his earlier enquiries into possible escape routes into exile, listening carefully to his friend John of Canterbury, who a month or so earlier had identified the Cistercian abbey of Pontigny in northern Burgundy, thirty miles south-east of Sens, as an ideal refuge. ‘I advise you,’ said John, ‘to establish a closer friendship with the abbot of Pontigny, either in person, if you can come to France yourself on the pretext of pursuing your case, or at least by letter if you cannot secure a licence to leave the country.’ The abbey ‘is ready to serve you even in temporal affairs if it should be necessary’. And John added in a confidential aside he marked as for Becket’s eyes alone, ‘I have chosen Pontigny as my own place of exile, when I am no longer able to bear the torments of our torturer.’
With nowhere else he felt he could turn, Thomas by the beginning of August had decided to take this advice. From his manor of Stowting, near Hythe in Kent, he rode early one morning before dawn with Herbert of Bosham and a few trusted companions to Romney, where he hired a ship and attempted to cross the Channel. But when the vessel was some way out to sea, the sailors under the command of Adam of Charing, a well-known figure in Kent and founder of the leper hospital at New Romney, mutinied, fearing Henry’s reprisals. Becket was given the excuse that the wind was in the wrong direction and the sailors put back into port. No more successful was a second attempt: Thomas had no choice other than to retrace his steps to Canterbury, which he found almost deserted as most of his clerks had returned to their own homes on discovering their master gone.
Next day, the king’s henchmen arrived at the palace, declaring that they had heard of the archbishop’s flight and had come to confiscate his goods, but they withdrew in confusion when he suddenly appeared to greet them. Henry was furious at Becket’s efforts to abscond, ‘for he greatly feared that by his going to the lord pope, the kingdom would be placed under an interdict’. Adam of Charing would shortly pay a hefty fine of 100 silver marks for his role in the affair. Although Becket’s attempted flight had directly contravened the clause of the ‘ancestral customs’ that required any bishop or priest who wished to leave the country first to obtain a licence from the king, Henry chose this time to step back from the brink. Instead, he summoned Becket to return to Woodstock, where he entertained him for several days in a display of studied politeness. His only reference to the escape attempt was to enquire sarcastically, ‘So, my lord, you wish to leave my kingdom: I suppose it is not large enough to hold both of us?’
But if Becket thought the matter had been overlooked, he could not have been more wrong. On the contrary, Henry was biding his time, avoiding a clash with Alexander, who at last was free to censure him if he attacked the archbishop on a matter connected to the ‘ancestral customs’ or the liberty of the Church. Henry had to choose his moment and his pretext carefully. And he did not have far to look or long to wait. John the Marshal was standing nearby and (probably with Henry’s connivance) took his opportunity to appeal to the king against Becket’s handling of his case to recover his lands in South Mundham. John relied on the clause of the ‘ancestral customs’ which made the property rights of the higher clergy subject to judicial review in the royal courts, obtaining a writ summoning Becket to appear before the king and his judges on 14 September.
Thomas refused to appear to answer the summons, sending four knights with letters from himself and the sheriff of Kent, pointing out the ‘wrongs’ committed by John the Marshal and the inadequacy of his pleadings in the archiepiscopal court. It was nothing like enough, for Henry was bent on bringing the quarrel to where he could control it in person as decisively as in the Battle Abbey case. Presiding in court on the day on which Becket had declined to appear, he ruled, after bawling out the archbishop’s messengers, that since Thomas had neither answered the summons in person nor sent a valid excuse, he had insulted the king. For this, he should be severely punished and John the Marshal granted a fresh writ, ordering Becket to appear again on 6 October at a great council at Northampton. There, before all the barons, bishops and great men of the realm, he was to be put on trial in a blaze of adverse publicity.
Henry had decided to humble Becket as he had humbled Hilary of Chichester in the Battle Abbey case. Both men had clearly changed with age. Now in his early thirties, Henry was more obstinate and capricious than before, while Becket in his early forties had decided that he could not go on vacillating as he had at Clarendon. Henry believed he had been deceived; Thomas believed Henry had become a tyrant. Henry meant to break him, if possible by convicting him of a serious crime, for his conduct in John the Marshal’s case was still only a pretext for the new council. The king’s officials were already trawling back through the records of Becket’s seven years as chancellor, digging for dirt.
And they intended to find it.