Never one to accept defeat, Henry struck back when his envoys returned empty-handed from the papal curia at Sens. After hearing their report on Christmas Eve 1164 at Marlborough in Wiltshire, he was indignant that Pope Alexander had thwarted him by allowing Becket to establish himself unmolested at Pontigny. He could be heard dropping broad hints that he was ready to renounce the pope and his ‘treacherous cardinals’. And he decided to take vicious reprisals designed to irritate the pope and make the lives of Thomas and all those connected with him as miserable as possible.
On Christmas Day he sequestrated the archbishop’s property and that of his clerks, taking the lands and revenues of the church of Canterbury into his own hands. Then, on St Stephen’s (Boxing) Day, he ordered the deportation and exile of Thomas’s relatives and servants and their families, whether men, women or children, and anyone else who was known to have harboured or assisted him during his flight. All incomes owed to his clerks or family members were to be withheld, reducing them to penury. The receipts of all revenues due to the pope were to be frozen in the Exchequer, all appeals or visits without royal permission to the papal curia were forbidden and anyone found bringing letters into England from the pope or the archbishop was to be summarily hanged or cast adrift by the sheriffs from the seashore in an open boat without oars.
Henry appointed his crony and whoremaster Ranulf de Broc as his chief sequestrator. Already illegally occupying Saltwood Castle, this flunkey had been among those shouting insults at Becket as he strode out of the great hall at Northampton. Wasting no time, de Broc, his nephew Robert, an apostate Cistercian monk, and their henchmen gleefully set to work next day. Divided into small teams, they seized the Canterbury court rolls and organized a purge of Becket’s relatives and servants, rounding up several dozen in London, including his married sisters Agnes and Rose and their children, whom they imprisoned in thieves’ gaols overnight or frogmarched directly to the coast. Put on board ships bound for the Continent, they were ordered to keep walking until they arrived at Pontigny. Those whom de Broc personally arrested were required to take an oath that they would not attempt to return. It was, says William fitz Stephen, ‘a most harrowing exodus’ with infants ‘some in cradles, others clinging to the breast’, treated as harshly as the rest. Only victims able to pay huge fines or bribes of £200 or 100 silver marks would be excused.
As many as 400 people were deported, but few reached Pontigny, where guest accommodation was in any case in short supply. When the exiles landed in France, many of the women and children were taken in by nuns, while their menfolk found employment with sympathetic bishops or nobles. To score more points off Henry, King Louis himself found places for a favoured few; others, including one of Becket’s nephews, a boy named Gilbert after his grandfather, took refuge as far south as Sicily. Faced by the prospect of a long and painful exile, some of Becket’s servants decided to reconcile themselves to Henry, fitz Stephen among them. After much soul-searching, he knelt before the king in the chapel of a hunting lodge at Brill, near Aylesbury in Buckinghamshire, and presented him with a long verse prayer. Quite why this should have worked is hard to judge, since if Henry had bothered to read the prayer he would have seen that in it he was made to confess to the sins of pride, adultery and covetousness. That the gift was acceptable shows how eager he was to come to terms with those prepared to cut their ties with Becket. Not that fitz Stephen really did so, as a few years later on a mission to the pope he took a detour to visit Thomas. And late in 1170 he would switch sides again, being one of those closest to the archbishop in Canterbury Cathedral when he was murdered.
With the expulsion of Becket’s relatives and supporters complete, Henry took the fight to the Continent. Unsettling him was the close entente between Louis and Pope Alexander that had led to both the pope and Becket taking sanctuary on French soil, which he meant to sabotage. He also harboured a deep and continuing resentment at the Capetian king’s third marriage to Adela of Blois-Champagne, King Stephen’s niece, which threatened his dynastic plans. In 1164 Louis had buttressed that threat by provocatively marrying his daughters by Eleanor of Aquitaine, Mary and Alice, to Adela’s brothers, Count Theobald V of Blois and Count Henry of Champagne.
Sailing for Normandy in the latter part of February 1165, Henry was determined on a two-pronged strategy. Hoping to win his cousin Count Philip of Flanders to his side, he meant to drive a wedge between Louis and Pope Alexander, but also needed a quick result so he could return across the Channel where Prince Owain of Gwynedd was in revolt again. To buy time before marching into Wales, he was willing to trade reconciliation with Becket for an Anglo-French peace. Seeing the diplomatic possibilities, Arnulf of Lisieux secretly urged Becket to settle the quarrel while he could. Henry, he said, ‘is coming, so they say, with a gentler mind than usual, because although he pretends otherwise, he thinks the omens for the future could be bad’. Besides the rebellion in Wales, he faced fresh upheavals in Brittany, Poitou and Aquitaine stirred by Louis. ‘Because of this,’ concluded Arnulf, ‘he has resolved first to approach the French king with certain proposals.’
Precisely what these were, Arnulf would not say. But Becket, genuinely seeking a rapprochement, moved quickly, putting out feelers to Henry’s mother, Matilda, asking her for help in brokering a peace. Now turned sixty-four, she had been seriously ill, but agreed to mediate. Already dismayed (as she had told Herbert of Bosham and Nicholas of Rouen) at her son’s attempt to codify the ‘ancestral customs’ in a written document, she would first write to Henry to ask how he meant to proceed. ‘When I know his will,’ she said, ‘if I think that my labour can bear fruit, I shall strive as much as I can for the Church’s peace and his.’
She was as good as her word. John of Salisbury, still in Paris and worrying about money but as busy as ever on his friend’s behalf, reported that she had sent him a reassuring message. She ‘promises that she can easily induce the king of England to accept the pope’s wishes if the pope is willing to make a treaty between the kings, as has long been sought’. Louis, it seemed, had agreed to the plan and Alexander had summoned him to Sens.
Becket turned next to his old secretary, Master Ernulf, in an attempt to arrange a meeting between himself and the two kings in the French Vexin. While Henry pursued his own diplomacy, Ernulf obtained an audience with Louis at Senlis in late March, where the idea of a conference was discussed and Louis, after further consultations with Alexander, invited Becket to a rendezvous at the Cistercian abbey of Le Val-Notre-Dame, near Pontoise. But the plan came to nothing. The pope rode to Paris in readiness. Becket also made the journey, but when Henry realized that the pope was likely to be present, he refused to proceed, leaving Thomas in limbo. It could hardly have been otherwise, for Henry feared that Alexander might repeat his condemnation of the ‘ancestral customs’ or even threaten to excommunicate him if he failed to settle with Becket. To meet the pope, therefore, would be at best pointless, at worst counter-productive.
On 11 April Henry met Louis alone on the frontier at Gisors. He then rode to Rouen, where he talked privately with his cousin, Count Philip. But whatever he offered, it was not enough for Louis. No sooner had his cousin departed than Henry dramatically changed tack, aiming to spite his rival and the pope simultaneously by entertaining a magnificent embassy from the pope’s arch-enemy, Frederick Barbarossa, led by the imperial chancellor, Rainald of Dassel, archbishop-elect of Cologne. He proposed a fresh dynastic alliance to counter his earlier one with Louis: his eldest daughter, Matilda, rising nine, was to be betrothed to Frederick’s cousin, Henry the Lion, duke of Saxony and Bavaria; her sister Eleanor, not yet four, was to be betrothed to Frederick’s son, another Frederick, as yet barely a year old, cutting Louis out of the picture completely.
Queen Eleanor also welcomed these ambassadors, but to Becket’s delight her mother-in-law, Matilda, the Angevin matriarch, refused to receive them, protesting that they were schismatics and persisting in her efforts to mediate on the exiled archbishop’s behalf. Her son was undaunted, binding himself on oath to fulfil the betrothals and sending John of Oxford, fast becoming one of his leading councillors, and Richard of Ilchester, archdeacon of Poitiers, to Germany, where they attended the schismatic Council of Würzburg. On 23 May these envoys, presumably egged on by Henry, even got sufficiently carried away to join in an oath renouncing Pope Alexander and recognizing the new antipope, Paschal, on behalf of his territories.
Alarmed by the resulting furore which assailed him from all sides, Henry stepped back from the brink, firmly denying that any such oath had been taken; if it had, then his envoys had exceeded their authority. By that time, he had already returned to England, leaving Eleanor, who was pregnant again, at Angers. In an attempt to douse the flames, he ordered John of Oxford to swear that he ‘had done nothing against the faith he owed the Church and the honour and advantage of Pope Alexander’. But when Frederick, in a letter ‘to all people over whom our imperial clemency rules’, gave him the lie and insisted that he had, Becket hit back, accusing John of ‘impious’ and flagrant perjury.
On 20 April Alexander had left Paris on his way home to Rome. With Frederick’s troops rampaging through Tuscany and the Roman Campania, burning and flattening everything in their path, the citizens of Rome had begged him to return. As John of Salisbury informed Becket, the soldiers had devastated the countryside and set fire to the towns: ‘there is nothing left for the Romans beyond the walls of the city, neither in the fields, nor in the olive groves, nor in the vineyards.’ The citizens were preparing to oust the antipope from his palace at the Lateran and Alexander’s presence, he said, would make all the difference to their morale, since Frederick’s power was not as great as he believed it to be.
Travelling by way of Bourges, Clermont and Montpellier, Alexander had originally planned to sail with his cardinals directly across the Mediterranean to the port of Ostia near Rome, avoiding the coast of northern Italy. He already knew from his spies that the Pisans, Genoese and the pirates of Arles had received Frederick’s orders to intercept him. Even despite taking all the necessary precautions, he would have the narrowest of escapes. When his vessels finally set sail, one carrying many of the cardinals was intercepted and boarded by Frederick’s men. In the nick of time, Alexander managed to flee in another, smaller boat to Messina, where King William I of Sicily gave him a military escort back to Rome.
Becket had left the abbey of Le Val-Notre-Dame for Paris as soon as he had heard of Alexander’s impending departure, riding south with him on the first stage of his journey as far as Bourges. As it slowly began to sink in that there would be no quick fix and that his exile could be a long and bitter one, his spirits flagged. Trapped in a dark hinterland from which he found it impossible to escape by his own efforts, he badly needed a psychological boost. He desperately wanted the pope to do more for him before disappearing into the abyss of Italian politics.
It was not to be. Like his ally King Louis, the pope had too much else on his mind. At their parting at Bourges, while the issues were still fresh in his mind, Alexander exonerated Thomas from the sentences pronounced against him at the Council of Northampton. And shortly after reaching Clermont, he sent a stiffly worded letter to Gilbert Foliot ordering him to instruct Henry to cease his attacks on the Church. But as he approached Montpellier, he did a volte-face, urging Becket to reconcile himself to Henry and temporarily revoking the archbishop’s right to impose sentences of excommunication on any of his opponents until Easter the following year, thereby rendering him powerless. Fast running out of cash as his entourage travelled south, the pope badly needed Henry to release the papal revenues he had frozen in the Exchequer. ‘Since these are evil times,’ he warned Thomas, ‘we ask, advise, counsel and exhort you to act with caution, prudence and circumspection in everything concerning your own and the Church’s affairs. Do nothing hurriedly or precipitately, but only soberly and maturely, and labour and strive to recover the grace and goodwill of the illustrious English king by all possible means … while preserving the Church’s freedom and the honour of your office.’
However unwelcome to Thomas, who looked for a far more decisive intervention from the pope, this would be sage advice, since the winning streak enjoyed by Henry for the past fifteen years was finally coming to an end. His second invasion of Wales, undertaken in July and August 1165, would turn into an even greater disaster than the first, eclipsing everything else on his mind for the rest of the year and sidelining his quarrel with Becket. After summoning the feudal hosts of England and Normandy and shipping in mercenaries from Flanders, Henry marched his troops through Shrewsbury and Oswestry into the Welsh mountains, taking the route traditionally known as the ‘English Road’ until the Welsh, carefully tracking his position, blocked his path at Corwen at the westerly end of the Dee Valley. Between the two armies lay the densely forested Vale of Ceiriog, where a stand-off ensued.
Attempting to profit from his earlier experience of fighting in the mountains, Henry ordered his troops to cut down the trees that separated the opposing armies in order to pre-empt an ambush. Instead the Welsh charged and a pitched battle ensued. Both sides took heavy casualties, but the Welsh line held, forcing Henry to retreat into the Berwyn mountains. Suddenly a torrential thunderstorm caused a flash flood that swept away his carts and left men and horses floundering in deep pools of mud and water. When his supply lines failed, he was forced to flee, with huge losses of men and equipment. In retribution, he ordered many of the Welsh hostages he had taken in 1157 to be castrated and blinded, among them Prince Owain’s young son. Rather than blame himself for the calamity, he chose to turn his fury against his helpless captives.
After recuperating with the remnant of his army near Chester, Henry returned to London in September, where more bad news awaited him. Adela, the French queen, had given birth to a son named Philip. Gerald of Wales, then a student in Paris, relates that one hot Saturday in late August, he had been awakened shortly after midnight by a cacophony outside his lodgings. Trumpets were blaring and bells ringing: at first he thought the city was on fire, but when he put on his shirt and leaned out of the window, he saw citizens and students rushing towards the royal palace carrying lanterns and torches, shouting and cheering. Two old women, passing by with tapers, told him that the queen had borne a son. King Louis, who had longed for this day since he had first married Eleanor of Aquitaine, had at last settled the succession to his kingdom. Prince Henry’s marriage to a French princess, purchased at such a high price, was now nothing more than a sideshow.
In the last week of March 1166, as the Easter festival was approaching, Henry returned to Angers, where Eleanor had remained with their new daughter, Joanna. When the Easter candles were lit and mass celebrated on 24 April, the pope’s suspension of Becket’s powers of excommunication expired and he was once more free to strike. All efforts at mediation by the Angevin matriarch had failed and, in an attempt to assist Becket, Louis visited Henry, but the most that he could achieve was to persuade him to grant an audience to some of Thomas’s clerks in the hope that they might be able to recoup their lost incomes.
John of Salisbury was the first to be seen. Never a willing exile, his hope, utterly unrealistic, was to regain Henry’s goodwill and return to his old haunts (and church livings) without abandoning his friend or his ideals. As he informed the bishop-elect of Bayeux in a chatty newsletter, he would always keep faith with the exiled archbishop, but loyalty had its limits. ‘I am prepared to show,’ he said, ‘that neither the honour due to the king nor his interests have in any way suffered from me … There is nothing consistent with the integrity of my reputation and my conscience which I would not do, and willingly, to make my peace and recover his favour.’
A bruising interview on 1 May proved to him that this balancing act would be impossible. By demanding that John swear an oath to observe the customs published in the chirograph at Clarendon and break his ties with the exiled archbishop, Henry showed the true nature of what was at stake and gave a glimpse into the workings of his mind. Once again he was doubling the stakes, demanding fealty to the ‘ancestral customs’ as well as to himself, using oaths to secure the allegiance not simply of the hearts of his subjects but also of their minds. A philosopher like John, for all his fear of physical violence, could never accept a demand like that in honour and good conscience. He told Henry that he could abandon neither the church of Canterbury nor Thomas; he could not agree to observe any customs not sanctioned by the pope or the archbishop. The most that he could do, he said, was ‘to accept what they accepted and reject what they rejected’.
Hardly likely was it that Herbert of Bosham would succeed where John had failed. Now in his mid- to late thirties and as tall and svelte as Becket used to be before stress took its toll, he strode in wearing his new green suit and cloak, causing Henry to exclaim, ‘See, here comes a proud one!’ Interviewed in a similar way to John, he gave the same answers until the subject of the customs arose, when he tried casuistry, saying, ‘He alone is faithful to the king who does not allow the king to err, when he can be restrained. For he who tries to appease the king when he speaks to him and glosses over his sin, if that is what it is, and supports it with silence, is not true to the king, but rather neglects faith.’
A tactic tried a thousand times by philosophers and conscientious objectors from the era of the classical tyrants to the Renaissance, this had predictable results. After interrogating Herbert for twenty minutes or so to make quite sure he could not be persuaded to take the oath, Henry’s patience snapped. ‘For shame,’ he expostulated to the barons around him, ‘why should my kingdom be disturbed and my peace unsettled by this son of a priest?’
To which Herbert indignantly rejoined, ‘It is wrong to call me a priest’s son. I couldn’t have been born to a priest, since my father wasn’t ordained when I was born – just as it would be wrong to call someone a king’s son if he wasn’t born to a king.’
Everyone held their breath, for this was an insult, a thinly-veiled allusion to the fact that Henry’s ancestors on his father’s side had never been more than counts of Anjou and his hereditary claim to the English throne came only on his mother’s side. In medieval eyes he was not of royal birth. Herbert’s riposte was cutting, clever and exceptionally dangerous. As all those within earshot marvelled at his wit and courage, whispering to their neighbours that they wished they had a son as brave as him, Henry fell silent, seething over the fact that he had been worsted in an argument by one of his villeins.
Herbert returned to Pontigny, but John of Salisbury retreated to the abbey of St Rémi at Rheims, where his friend Peter of Celle had granted him sanctuary when the lease on his lodgings in Paris expired. With all hope of a speedy reconciliation with Henry gone, John threw himself into his books while still aiding Becket, attempting to distance himself from his friend’s more unrealistic or extravagant claims, yet remaining a vocal, if dispassionate supporter and a fierce critic of those who attacked the liberty of the Church. A philosopher of a Stoic disposition, John believed that only studied objectivity and tranquillity of mind could give the victims of political persecution the inner strength to suffer tribulations while staying true to their beliefs. No longer did he see the contest as a struggle for power between individuals like Henry or Thomas; in his mind it had become one between the cosmic forces of right and wrong, God and the devil. The righteous would one day have their reward, but they might have to wait for it until the Day of Judgement.
Arriving on the outskirts of Rome the previous November, Pope Alexander had made a triumphant entry into the city. Once re-established at his palace at the Lateran, he felt able to take a tougher stand against Henry, whose eagerness to come to terms with the schismatic Frederick had put his safe return in jeopardy. By the time that his Easter deadline for the restoration of Becket’s disciplinary powers had expired, he was feeling uncharacteristically bullish, actively encouraging Thomas to punish those illegally occupying his Canterbury lands, provided they had first been suitably cautioned. ‘By God’s will,’ he reassured him, ‘we shall confirm and ratify anything you shall reasonably do in the matter.’ On 2 May 1166 he went even further, appointing Becket as papal legate for England on the same terms as those given to Archbishop Theobald in King Stephen’s reign, enabling him to issue sentences of excommunication and interdict without prior approval from the pope. The only condition was that he was to have no jurisdiction over Roger of Pont l’Évêque or the diocese of York, a restriction that had also applied to Theobald.
This move caused consternation at Henry’s court, which had travelled from Angers to Le Mans, and from there to Chinon. At a council summoned in late May, the king took advice from the barons as to how to silence Becket. When no one offered a solution, he threw a tantrum, thumping the table with his fist and crying out that they were all of them traitors ‘who had neither the zeal nor the courage to rid him of a single man’.
Henry knew Becket well enough to guess his likely intentions, and in the anxious days before the council, Thomas had sent him increasingly strident calls for repentance, the second with a gently chiding appeal to their old familiarity. ‘With longing,’ it began, ‘have I desired to see your face and speak to you, much indeed on my account, but more particularly on yours.’ If only they could meet in the flesh, said Becket, Henry would quickly recall his faithful and devoted service as his chancellor, while Thomas would once more be able to do his duty and offer his counsel as a loyal vassal. Abruptly shifting gear, Becket then sharply rebuked Henry for his predations against the Church, using the vivid, fiery rhetoric that had become his trademark. Henry, he said, might be his liege lord, but as archbishop of Canterbury he was his pastor and the king was his ‘spiritual son’. ‘I am bound,’ he said, ‘to reprove and restrain you by reason of my office.’ Rulers committing sacrilege or ignoring their religious duties and God’s law would be severely punished like the wicked tyrants of the Old Testament. Their glory would be extinguished, their power stripped away.
When Henry roughly manhandled Becket’s courier, the Cistercian abbot of Cercamp, for his ‘impudence’ in carrying such messages, Thomas decided to hit back. He had given the king fair warning and, with Alexander falling in behind him, he now had his big opportunity. Psychologically driven to counter-attack, he was only too aware of the momentous implications. He had resolved on another of his grand gestures, but this time it was going to be different. Whereas before he had sometimes done things on the spur of the moment or without fully considering the consequences of his actions, this time it was eighteen months since his relatives and servants had been frogmarched from their homes. What was about to happen was not the result of a decision taken on an impulse. John of Salisbury already had an inkling of it, since he advised his friend on no account to think of excommunicating the king himself for fear that he would come to regret it. Thomas knew that he had to make careful preparations for what he was about to do, choosing a time and place that would secure him maximum impact.
On 29 May, after sending Nicholas of Rouen to explain to Henry’s mother that, regretfully, the time for compromise had passed and that ‘shortly, very shortly, if we live and God aids us, we shall unsheathe the sword of the Holy Spirit’, he left the cloistered serenity of Pontigny to ride 150 miles north to Soissons. There, among the pilgrims, he prayed for three nights at the shrines of the Virgin Mary, his mother’s favourite intercessor, St Gregory and St Drausinus, a seventh-century bishop who was the patron saint of those about to go into combat or fight a duel.
On 3 June he rode south again to Vézelay, only a day’s journey from Pontigny but almost 200 miles from Soissons. Set on the summit of a hill from where it was visible from all four points of the compass, the Benedictine abbey was approached by a steep, straight path from the village below, just as it still is today. Boasting the relics of St Mary Magdalene, the abbey-church was a popular staging-post on the pilgrim’s route to Santiago de Compostela, and it had been from here that St Bernard had famously preached the Second Crusade before King Louis and Eleanor of Aquitaine. Its Romanesque nave, narthex and chapel of St Michael had been recently completed and looked magnificent, but a fire in the crypt beneath the choir in 1165 meant that when Becket arrived the place was once more something of a building site.
On Whit Sunday (12 June) Thomas celebrated high mass inside the church, preaching a sermon to a packed congregation in which he gave the history of the quarrel and denounced Henry for his attacks on the Church and failure to respond to his reprimands. ‘Speaking,’ said Herbert of Bosham, ‘as if a man possessed’ (miro modo compunctus), he must have had something of the appearance of an Old Testament prophet, for loss of weight had made his cheeks hollow and he had grown a beard. Suddenly, to the astonishment of his clerks – he had concealed his plan from all of them, even Herbert, for fear of leaks – he condemned the hateful customs published at Clarendon. They were, he said, ‘perversities, rather than “customs”, by which the English Church is thrown into disorder and confusion’. His voice quivering with emotion as he fought back the tears, his youthful stammer perhaps briefly reappearing, he first issued a general excommunication against everyone enforcing or defending the customs and released his fellow-bishops from their obligation to observe them, while his audience gasped.
Individual excommunications followed: John of Oxford and Richard of Ilchester for their ‘vile oath’ to the German ‘schismatics’; Richard de Lucy and Jocelin de Bailleul for inciting tyranny and drafting the memorandum of the ‘customs’ at Clarendon with John of Oxford; and Ranulf de Broc and his henchmen for their illicit occupation of Saltwood Castle and the archbishop’s palace at Canterbury. By excommunicating de Bailleul, Becket made a lasting enemy of Eleanor, whose chief household knight he had become. In this comprehensive strike against the archbishop’s foes, only the king was spared, possibly because of John of Salisbury’s warning, more likely because a messenger from King Louis informed Becket during an overnight stop at Rigny on the road from Soissons that Henry was gravely ill at the castle of Chinon.
Before leaving the pulpit, Thomas called on the king to repent. He was ‘threatening to deliver sentence of excommunication against him shortly, unless he comes to his senses and makes reparations’. After the sermon, he sent one Gerard, a barefoot monk, to Henry, this time with a letter containing a veiled, but obvious threat. ‘If you are a good and Catholic king and desire to be one,’ warned Thomas, ‘it becomes you to follow the priests in ecclesiastical matters, not to go before them.’ History, as his old Paris master, Robert of Melun, had explained in his lectures, had compelling examples of the punishment of wayward kings and emperors. ‘Consider,’ concluded Thomas in a chilling memento mori, ‘where the emperors, kings and other princes are, where the archbishops and bishops are who have gone before us … Remember your last day, and you will not sin in eternity; and if you do sin, you will repent during the present life.’
Becket believed this time he had the edge on Henry, that he could rely on Pope Alexander, who duly honoured his Easter pledge by ratifying the Vézelay excommunications. But the pope’s position was about to weaken once again, for Frederick Barbarossa was determined to unseat him in favour of his antipope. As soon as he had dealt with a popular uprising of the Lombard communes, Frederick meant to march his army south across the Alps. Henry, meanwhile, on recovering from his sickness, sent orders to Richard de Lucy that the English bishops should appeal to the pope against Becket’s sentences. He meant to confront Rome directly, asking Rainald of Dassel for a safe-conduct through German territories for a fresh embassy to the papal curia led by Roger of Pont l’Évêque, Gilbert Foliot and John of Oxford. They were to give Alexander a verbal ultimatum, saying that, if he did not agree to depose Thomas, revoke the Vézelay sentences and recognize the ‘ancestral customs’ forthwith, Henry would switch his allegiance to the antipope. And in an accompanying letter, the king made his feelings all too plain, bluntly calling Thomas ‘my betrayer, formerly archbishop of Canterbury’.
Not content with this, he wrote next to Abbot Gilbert of Cîteaux, an Englishman, roundly upbraiding him for allowing his order to offer sanctuary to Thomas at the abbey of Pontigny and otherwise assisting him. He threatened to expel every one of the Cistercians from England and seize all their property if the order did not swiftly mend its ways. He also demanded Becket’s immediate expulsion from Pontigny.
Henry’s renewed attacks on him incensed Thomas, who complained vociferously to Alexander and the cardinals. The king, he said, was ‘abusing the patience of the Church’ and ‘subverting justice under the guise of law’. He accused Henry of hypocrisy for attempting to block normal appeals to Rome citing the ‘ancestral customs’, but himself ordering the English bishops to appeal to Alexander to revoke the Vézelay censures. It was time, said Thomas, to act – and yet he himself hesitated. Kings were called and anointed by God. When it came to it, not even Robert of Melun, whose lectures in Paris had argued that the ministers of the Church were entitled to discipline evil rulers, would be willing to put his own theory into practice. Robert, quipped John of Salisbury, ‘was once thought to be the man who should have redeemed Israel, with his contempt of the world and his skill in letters’. Now he was nowhere to be seen. He had, in fact, become a turncoat, joining Gilbert Foliot in setting his seal to the bishops’ appeal to the pope.
The trumps were still in Henry’s hands. By his retaliation at Vézelay, Thomas had precipitated a fresh crisis even greater than the first, merging his dispute with Henry into the wider conflict of the papal schism and ensuring his own speedy eviction from Pontigny. How Alexander would react to Henry’s new ambassadors was not yet known, but with Frederick’s troops about to cross the Brenner Pass, his nerve was likely to fail. After fleeing from Northampton, Becket had spent eighteen months on the defensive before fighting back. Once he had done so, his position looked worse than it had been at any time since he had crossed the frontier from Flanders into France.
The wheel had turned full circle.