Slowly but surely in the months after Thomas’s defiant run of excommunications at Vézelay, Henry regained the upper hand. With Frederick Barbarossa’s troops advancing ever closer to Rome, an anxious pope knew he might soon face ignominious flight or a humiliating appeasement of the German emperor; and either would mean appeasing Henry too. And while Becket had excommunicated some of Henry’s staunchest supporters, notably Richard de Lucy, John of Oxford and Ranulf de Broc, and afterwards sent a letter to Alexander describing the king as a ‘wicked tyrant’, he had not excommunicated Henry himself. As his friend John of Salisbury had cautioned him, the prudent course was always to blame the ‘untamed beasts’ rather than attack the king directly. Thus if Henry had erred, the fault lay more with his advisers than with himself. It was admittedly both a fiction and a pretence, but one generally adhered to in an era where the stereotype maintained that the king ruled in the image of God and his will was law. There were only so many shibboleths that Becket could challenge all at the same time.
Henry had no such scruples. When asked by his doctors how he was recovering from his sickness, he snapped back that his chief problem was Becket and that he could only be cured if they had a medicine that could soothe the ‘rancour and indignation’ he felt because of him. His other problem sprang from his vassal Conan IV’s inability to keep order in Brittany. After suppressing a baronial uprising there during the summer and early autumn of 1166, Henry lost patience with Conan, forcing him to abdicate and betrothing his own youngest son, Geoffrey, now rising eight, to Conan’s daughter and heiress. On returning to Rouen, he signalled his contempt for Becket by imprisoning and torturing one of the archbishop’s couriers, a young boy whom Herbert of Bosham had sent to deliver a letter: his gaolers clawed at the boy’s eyes with their fingernails until the blood flowed, then poured boiling water into his mouth, scalding him and scarring him for life.
Not for the first time, Becket began to fear for his own safety. Henry, as John of Canterbury reported, had somehow managed to obtain a copy of the archbishop’s letter denouncing him as a wicked tyrant. Now his aim was to capture Thomas and put him on trial again, not this time in a royal court as at Northampton, but before papal judges who would appear to be fair, but in reality would be his own nominees. Eager for the trial to begin, Henry ordered his officials to start gathering evidence and searching for witnesses prepared to testify against Becket. ‘I counsel you,’ John of Canterbury urged his friend, ‘to take action by whatever means you can, while you still have time.’
Henry, however, had been thwarted in his plan to send Roger of Pont l’Évêque and Gilbert Foliot to the papal curia, since both were unwilling to face Alexander in person. Instead, the more intrepid and irrepressible John of Oxford led a delegation asking for Becket to be deposed by the pope or else suspended until he could be tried and condemned before papal judges. While John was conducting his diplomacy much of it through bribes, the king withdrew to spend Christmas at Poitiers alone with his children. Eleanor, who left Angers in the autumn and returned to England, was pregnant again, giving birth to her youngest son, John, probably at Oxford, early in the New Year. Something of a chill was developing in Henry and Eleanor’s relationship: for his part Henry powerfully resented the influence of his wife’s maternal uncle, Ralph de Faye, the high steward of Aquitaine, in reinforcing her commitment to a pro-Poitevin policy, while on her side she was finding it difficult to adjust to her husband’s infidelities, fast increasing now that he was thirty-three and she approaching forty-five. Such burgeoning marital discord might have provided a wonderful opportunity for the exiles, but for them the cooling of Henry’s passion for his queen would bring no comfort. By excommunicating Jocelin de Bailleul, Eleanor’s leading household knight, at Vézelay for his share in drafting the memorandum of the ‘customs’ at Clarendon, Becket had turned Eleanor into an intransigent opponent, making it impossible for the exiles to drive a wedge between the royal couple just as their marriage was beginning to falter. ‘I wish you to know,’ John of Canterbury warned Thomas, ‘that you can hope for no help or advice from the queen.’
With Frederick’s troops pouring into Italy and poised to march down the eastern route to besiege Ancona, Pope Alexander responded to Henry’s intimidation in the only way he thought he could, granting him much, although far from all, of what he asked for by revoking the archbishop’s powers of excommunication and interdict for a second time, by absolving John of Oxford from his sentence at Vézelay and by commissioning two papal mediators. One was to be the king’s first choice, William of Pavia, none other than one of the earlier papal emissaries who with Henry of Pisa had granted the licence for Prince Henry’s wedding to the French king’s daughter while both parties were still children. His colleague, Otto of Brescia, whose commission gave him equal powers, was a more impartial choice, but Becket would soon be complaining vociferously that their mission could only turn him into ‘a figure of shame’ and that all William was likely to offer was ‘the semblance of honey in the beginning, poison in the middle and oil at the end’.
To Thomas, Alexander wrote beguilingly, pledging a renewed effort to force Henry to the negotiating table. Until then, the exiled archbishop was to be patient and not act provocatively. His disciplinary powers, the pope promised, would be restored should Henry persist in his obstinacy, but as this fact was to be kept a closely-guarded secret, it raised more fears than it dispelled – not least since, shortly after reading this letter, Becket discovered that the pope had written separately to Henry confirming the final arrangements for the mediators in such obsequious terms that Gilbert Foliot exclaimed with delight, ‘Thomas will no longer be my archbishop!’
Becket felt doubly betrayed, because Henry’s attack on the Cistercians had yielded handsome dividends. On 11 November 1166 he and his fellow-exiles had been politely, but firmly expelled from their sanctuary at Pontigny and forced to seek refuge at the Benedictine abbey of Ste-Colombe at Sens under King Louis’s personal protection. The exiles cried ‘foul’, excoriating Henry for his bullying and mocking William of Pavia, calling him a stooge and ‘the cardinal of St Peter in Chains’ (a pun on his official title of cardinal-priest of S. Pietro in Vincoli). By the spring of 1167 such protests had moderated, for the exiles found the life of the Benedictines congenial, even luxurious in comparison to that of the Cistercians. More importantly, Louis had declared his hostility to the papal mediators. Still blaming William of Pavia for granting the shabby licence that had made possible his daughter’s wedding at the age of two, he had denied them permission to enter his lands and shown his contempt for Henry by stirring up more revolts in Brittany and Aquitaine, and by raiding the Norman Vexin, prompting Henry to retaliate by burning the castle of Chaumont-sur-Epte.
As it turned out, the mediators, who finally left Rome on 1 May, would be delayed for another five months. Otto had to bypass Frederick’s armies as he made his way north and William was diverted to Sicily to stiffen the resolve of the baronage against the antipope. With the imperial troops heading fast towards Rome, Alexander knew that he would soon have to flee south to Benevento. That moment came in July, when in a swift and decisive swoop the city fell to superior German forces. After Frederick entered the holy city on the 22nd, the pope made his escape, enabling his rival, Paschal III, to be enthroned at St Peter’s Basilica. With Henry’s daughter betrothed to Frederick’s cousin and Saxon envoys preparing to escort her to Germany for her wedding, events were continuing to turn in the Angevin king’s favour. As soon as Alexander reached the sanctuary of Benevento, he urged his mediators not to be distracted from their task, since if Henry sided with the antipope, Christendom would be torn asunder.
Then exhilarating news reached Benevento. On 2 August a violent rainstorm followed by the searing summer heat had accelerated a lethal combination of bacillary dysentery and the deadly malaria of the Roman Campania that struck down the imperial forces as they camped in their tents. Among several thousand dead were the imperial chancellor, Rainald of Dassel, six other bishops and a high proportion of the nobility. Frederick was forced to retreat over the Apennines with the enfeebled survivors, only to find the roads to the north barricaded against him by the rebellious Lombards. With great difficulty, he managed to reach the shelter of Pavia by alternative routes.
Becket, who had this news in late September or early October, was triumphant, seeing God’s hand in the rout and interpreting Frederick’s retreat in apocalyptic terms: ‘Look,’ he wrote triumphantly to Alexander, ‘at the man who did not make God his support, but relying on his own power, he expired in all his pride.’ And referring pointedly to the approaching mediators, ‘Who will dare in the future to obey the will of princes to the Church’s shame, by not punishing wrongdoers? Let him dare it who will!’
Becket believed that the tables were about to be turned. Now was the time, he predicted, that ‘the presumption of tyrants, which seemed to have gained the day, may expire’. The relief he felt was manifest, but would his optimism be justified by events?
Both sides placed their hopes on the papal mediators, but the negotiations were predestined to fail. Even before their meetings could begin, Henry was vehemently denouncing Becket as a traitor who had incited Louis to make war against him. And his refusal either to meet Becket or even to grant him a safe-conduct to enter his dominions meant that the mediators had to see him separately close to the Norman frontier, between Gisors and Trie. There, on 18 November 1167, they begged him to be reconciled to Henry without either preconditions or reference to the ‘ancestral customs’. The way forward, they suggested artfully, would be for Henry quietly to implement the customs and for Thomas to pretend not to notice them – such conditions, they said, arose out of political necessity.
Herbert of Bosham, who alongside John of Salisbury and Alexander Llewelyn was representing the exiles at these preliminary conversations, was indignant: the customs, he insisted, ‘were the entire cause of the dispute [and] the root of all evil’. At the Council of Clarendon Becket ‘had been cheated and seduced to give his assent to them’. Reconciliation could only be achieved by establishing ‘what had been wrongly done, according to the rule of civil law’. So amazed was John of Salisbury at the idea that Becket should simply dissemble and tolerate the offending customs, he wondered whether the pope’s envoys were being deliberately provocative, hoping that Thomas would lose his temper and so yield the high moral ground.
But if William and Otto believed they could cajole or bludgeon Thomas into submission, they would be disappointed. Set-piece encounters were the arena in which Becket had thrived since first representing Theobald at the papal curia in King Stephen’s reign. Long accustomed to mingling with kings, popes and cardinals, he relished this opportunity to state his case, speaking at length and in calm, eloquent Latin, offering to grant Henry whatever ‘was consistent with God’s honour and the Church’s liberty’ before cutting straight to the heart of the matter.
The fact, he said, was that the king was seeking the confirmation of the ‘ancestral customs’, right or wrong. And yet none of his predecessors as archbishop ‘had been compelled to make such a profession’. Had not Pope Alexander condemned the most obnoxious of the customs at Sens two years before? ‘I have followed the pope’s authority,’ Thomas declared, and will ‘never promise to obey customs patently opposed to God’s law, repugnant to the privilege of the Holy See [and] destructive of the Church’s liberty’. Nor would he accept a settlement which obliged him to turn a blind eye to the customs. ‘It is a proverb of our people,’ he reminded the mediators, ‘that “silence implies consent”, and since the king would seem to be in possession of those customs, and would compel the Church to observe them unjustly and by force if the onslaught on them already under way ceased by my silence … it would instantly appear to the king and to other folk that he had won his case.’ He then denied in the strongest terms that he had attempted to incite war between Henry and Louis, as had been alleged.
Fresh from his canon law lessons at Pontigny with Master Lombard of Piacenza, Thomas then invoked an argument known as exceptio spolii (‘defence of despoliation’) designed to checkmate Henry, claiming he would not give any further answers until the sequestered lands and goods of the Canterbury exiles had been restored to them. When the king had made full restitution, he would gladly submit to whatever legal process the pope or his mediators decreed, but in the meantime he and his followers ‘could not be pressed to enter legal process, nor had they resources sufficient for the task’. His plea stymied the papal envoys, who next day sought an interview with Louis, who swore on oath that Becket, far from encouraging him to wage war, ‘had always given him counsel aimed at preserving peace’. Unable to discredit Thomas by accusing him of disturbing the peace of Christendom deliberately, William and Otto had no choice but to return empty-handed to Henry, who had moved to Argentan. Hearing of their approach, he rode out to meet them, smiling broadly in anticipation of victory before escorting them to their lodgings. Next day, they were admitted to his chamber for two hours, where on hearing how Becket had outwitted them, he was first speechless with rage, then in a blind fury until he finally stormed out, shouting, ‘I hope that I may never set eyes on a cardinal again.’
Now the mediators saw Henry in his true colours. Left to find their way back alone to their lodgings on borrowed horses, they were all but imprisoned for several days, until on 29 November – while the king deliberately went out hawking at the crack of dawn so as to snub them – a delegation led by Roger of Pont l’Évêque, Gilbert Foliot and Hilary of Chichester arrived. Describing the scene with unconcealed relish, John of Salisbury says that Foliot delivered a violent, graceless, tactless speech, attacking the incredulous William and Otto for their ignorance or incompetence in failing to call Becket to account, adding that Henry intended to take matters into his own hands by reviving his old charges of embezzlement and false accounting against him. As at the Council of Northampton in 1164, he demanded £30,000 – the entire sum that Thomas was believed to have handled as chancellor under the licence allowing him to handle money without filing detailed accounts. In a clumsy attempt at black humour, Foliot quipped that Becket was so arrogant, he seemed to think that ‘just as sins are forgiven in baptism, so debts are waived on promotion’. No one laughed, but when the mediators were at last permitted to leave on 5 December and Henry belatedly put in an appearance, weeping crocodile tears in one last effort to persuade them to depose or suspend Becket, Otto barely managed to suppress a guffaw.
The trouble, John of Salisbury warned his friend, was that it was no laughing matter. Even if Henry had been checkmated this time, it counted for nothing, since he was so angry, he ‘seems to want nothing else but your head on a plate’. If anything the position was worse than a year before: this really might become a struggle to the death. Otto wrote to Pope Alexander to say that he was so shocked by Henry’s attitude, he would take no further part in any attempts to suspend or depose Becket, but the envoys, before they left, did succumb to Henry’s plea to absolve those excommunicated at Vézelay without forcing them to restore their sequestrated church property. To Becket, this was scandalous, but he could do nothing about it.
When the mediators departed, the initiative reverted to the papal curia. Becket could only watch helplessly from the sidelines as Henry was distracted throughout 1168 by fresh revolts in Poitou, where the barons resented his efforts to replace local administrators with his own officials and change their customs in favour of those of Normandy. Raising an army of mercenaries, Henry attacked the rebel strongholds, laying waste the countryside with fire and the sword before placing his garrisons in strategic places and returning to Poitiers. There, he left Eleanor, now past the age of child-bearing, to rule as regent in his absence under the watchful eye of Patrick, Earl of Salisbury, one of the greatest landowners in the south-west of England, who had long supported the Angevins – but as Easter approached, she was ambushed by the rebels while out riding. Saved by Earl Patrick’s bravery, she managed to escape, but he was captured and assassinated, killed ‘the Poitevin way’ by a sword-thrust in the back.
In Italy, meanwhile, the Lombard League opposed to Frederick Barbarossa gained in strength, culminating in an ambush by the citizens of Susa, forcing him to flee to Savoy under cover of night across the Mont Cenis Pass, disguised as a servant. Still fearful of his own safety with the Germans on the loose, Pope Alexander would remain in the safety of Benevento for two more years, but his confidence was rising as support for the antipope Paschal waned. Beleaguered in Rome, Paschal’s future now lay in the hands of the Lombard League. Seeing what was shortly to come, Frederick briefly contemplated switching sides: in the event he decided to continue the schism, but when Paschal died and Calixtus III was nominated in his place, few votes would be cast in his favour.
Frederick’s enfeeblement further weakened Henry, enabling Alexander to fend off another of his embassies. The Angevin king’s response was typically to bribe and threaten his way out of a corner, offering money to the cardinals and cities of the Lombard League, smooth talk and cash subsidies to the pope. And when these failed, his ambassadors turned to threats and unashamed blackmail, pretending that Henry would convert to Islam if Thomas were not deposed or suspended as archbishop. Incensed by this, Becket sent two of his clerks to the papal curia to protest, but to his chagrin they too were kept at bay. Alexander still had to prevaricate: he was only strong enough to act as a juggler. To Henry, who faced yet another revolt from the Bretons after returning from the south, he offered just enough, extending the revocation of Becket’s disciplinary powers for another year and wondering aloud whether he might be able to move him voluntarily to a different diocese. To Thomas, he gave a counsel of perfection: the archbishop was not to agree to anything ‘which leads to the abasement and reduction of the Church’s liberty’. Instead, he must strain every nerve to make his peace with Henry and recover his love, surely impossible in the current state of play.
Resuming the search for a settlement on 22 May 1168, Alexander identified a pool of eminent monastic leaders to begin a fresh round of arbitration. Overseen chiefly by Simon, prior of Mont-Dieu, a friend and correspondent of John of Salisbury, and Bernard de la Coudre, prior of Le Bois de Vincennes, whom Henry already knew and respected, they were armed with letters that included a papal ultimatum, to be handed to the king at their discretion. But with the pope still in Benevento, Becket at Sens and Henry with his army on the road, the time needed for couriers to shuttle between them all was several months. Even while the pope was still framing his plan and long before the necessary documents could be delivered, Henry was again at war with Louis, who had begun to cherish the hope of the disintegration of the Angevin empire by entering into a dangerous confederacy with his rival’s rebels.
The breakthrough came at Epiphany 1169 (6–7 January), when Louis decided that Henry had pummelled him enough and the arbitrators brought Thomas before the two kings at their peace conference. Camping outdoors in a field beneath the hill-top frontier town of Montmirail, forty or so miles equidistant from Le Mans and Chartres so that neither would be dependent on the other’s hospitality, the two kings pitched their pavilions on level ground at opposite ends of the field, aiming to settle relations between them for the next generation. With their retinues camped in tents nearby in the shadow of the castle with its thick walls and notorious dungeons, the entire area was swarming with men, horses, carts and equipment, the air for miles around thick with smoke from the camp-fires as it was a freezing winter.
Frederick sent a German delegation to the conference, led by Henry the Lion, duke of Saxony and Bavaria, whose marriage to Henry and Eleanor’s eldest daughter, Matilda, had now been celebrated. With the emperor lobbying for the Angevins, the pressure was on Louis to make concessions, but Henry too wanted peace. Although only thirty-five and at the height of his powers, he was eager to settle the succession to his vast empire and had decided to divide it between his three eldest sons, who were all present. By artfully playing the role of a suppliant, offering to renew his homage for his continental dominions to the impressionable Louis while ingeniously hinting that, if only a reconciliation with Becket could be reached, he would take the cross and journey to the Holy Land, he smoothed relations between them. The result was a dynastic accord whereby Prince Henry, rising fourteen, and his French bride would inherit England, Normandy, Maine and Anjou. Richard, who was to be betrothed to Louis’s daughter, Alix, sister of Prince Henry’s wife, Margaret, would succeed to his mother’s lands in Aquitaine. Finally, Geoffrey would have Brittany, but would first do homage for it to the younger Henry. In return, Louis agreed to legitimize Henry’s conquests in Brittany and stop sending aid to his Poitevin and Breton rebels, while to put the seal on the settlement Henry promised to expedite the coronation of Prince Henry and his wife.
Such a wide-ranging agreement promised the younger Henry and his Capetian wife the peaceful succession to all the Angevin territories except Aquitaine, while offering Louis the enticing prospect that his young son, Philip, would one day preside over a family consortium controlling a significant proportion of France. That is why, after a lull lasting just over a year, a reconciliation with Becket had suddenly become extremely urgent: it was the primate’s undoubted right, despite Roger of Pont l’Évêque’s counter-claims, to crown the younger Henry and his bride. Without this final piece of the jigsaw, the terms of the accord would always remain contested and incomplete.
In readiness for his audience before the two kings, Thomas had to be carefully coached, for the papal arbitrators were painfully aware that Henry would insist that his ‘honour’ be upheld. Becket would need ‘to submit himself in every way to the king’s will and mercy … and unreservedly so’. In particular, he had to agree – much against his better judgement – to observe the disputed customs ‘if only verbally’. Exerting maximum moral pressure on him while they had him in their care, the arbitrators kept insisting that the peace and security of Christendom, not to mention Pope Alexander’s reputation, depended on his compliance. If things went wrong and Thomas fluffed his lines, there would be no safety net for the Church.
Although by now physically and mentally worn down, the exiled archbishop was only too aware that this formula was exactly the same as the one offered to him at Woodstock by Abbot Philip of l’Aumône on the eve of the Council of Clarendon that Henry had signally failed to honour and arguably worse than the one put to him by William and Otto when they had suggested he should simply turn a blind eye to the ‘ancestral customs’. So, mindful of Pope Alexander’s counsel of perfection, he said he wanted to add the proviso ‘saving God’s honour’ to the words of assent. The arbitrators were dismayed, painfully aware from their discussions with Henry’s advisers that he saw no difference between that phrase and ‘saving my order’ – the mantra that had already driven him to apoplexy. After going round in circles for several hours, with the arbitrators cajoling and threatening, wielding carrot and stick, they finally won Thomas over.
He yielded only because, unlike William and Otto, these were spiritual leaders of genuine charisma and distinction, and because, after the long years and months since his flight from Northampton, he had become a shadow of his former self. Although but forty-eight, he was pale and gaunt-faced, thin as a knife, prone to bouts of depression and ravaged by a crippling sense of failure and isolation. Yet despite his willingness to buckle under pressure, he also felt a deep sense of foreboding.
To Thomas, this was now only partly a dispute over the ‘ancestral customs’ and increasingly a quarrel about Henry’s innate assumption that his will was law. As Arnulf of Lisieux had predicted, the Angevin king had only to consider something hotly contested – such as the ‘ancestral customs’ – to be essential, for him automatically to assume it must be legal. His speeches in the Battle Abbey case had already shown that he had a vision of the world in which the Church, and even perhaps the pope, must submit to him whenever their opinions clashed with his own. Becket believed fervently that, if someone did not take a stand, Henry’s legacy would become a scourge to future generations. He had already told one of his clerks that, if the king’s ideas went unopposed, the fruits would be transmitted to his heirs, from whose hands it would be impossible to wrest them. ‘We do not know yet,’ he mused, ‘what the end of it will be … since there will be no one who can hold in check or limit the crimes of the tyrants, whose whole aim at present is to attack God’s Church and its ministers: nor will they desist until they have reduced them to slavery.’
So when the time came for Thomas to be escorted down to the field to face Henry on his knees in the presence of Louis and their assembled advisers, he knew that he had to be true to himself. When Henry said that no more was expected of him beyond his verbal consent to the ‘ancestral customs’, he began the memorized speech that had been so carefully scripted for him by the arbitrators: ‘On the subject which divides us, my lord king, I throw myself on your mercy and your pleasure, here in the presence of our lord king of France and the bishops, nobles and others standing here.’ He said he was prepared to observe the customs to win peace and favour, and to do all that he could in accordance with Henry’s will. But then, to general shock and astonishment, his tone of abject humility suddenly changed to one of defiance as the ascetic, rebel’s instinct in him once more asserted itself and he added the forbidden words ‘saving God’s honour’. Precisely when he decided to do this, we do not know, but it was probably at the very last moment after Herbert of Bosham whispered something into his ear.
Henry, feeling utterly humiliated, inveighed against him, bawling insults, accusing him of being proud, vain and forgetful of his generosity. ‘I will never accept these words,’ he fumed, ‘or it will appear that the archbishop wishes God’s honour preserved and not I – though I really want it preserved more than he does.’ And addressing Louis, he declared:
See how foolishly and proudly this man has deserted his Church, not driven out by me, but secretly running off by night. He would persuade you that he is a champion for the Church, and by this ruse has deceived people both many and great. But I have always allowed and wished, as I still do, that he should hold and govern the Church over which he presides in the full liberty in which any of his five saintly predecessors ruled.
He then called Becket a traitor. At this Louis scowled, seeing his daughter Margaret’s coronation as a future Angevin queen fast disappearing into the distance and asking Thomas tersely, ‘Lord archbishop, do you wish to be more than a saint?’
For a fleeting moment until Becket uttered the fatal proviso, it had seemed to the exiles as if a settlement would be reached and they would be allowed home, but their hopes had been cruelly dashed. Aghast at the scene they had just witnessed, many burst into tears and criticized Thomas bitterly, but the truth is that failure was almost inevitable. Neither king nor archbishop had set eyes on one another since their fiery clashes in the great hall at Northampton. Neither was sufficiently prepared to set aside their differences, since neither could yet bring himself to modify his own preconceived vision of the world.
The negotiations continued until after dusk, which in early January fell shortly after four o’clock in the afternoon, but the papal arbitrators, whom Henry cursed for allowing Becket to get away with a volte-face similar to the one he had performed at Clarendon, failed in their efforts to save the talks. When it was too dark to see any longer, the two kings rose abruptly, mounting their horses and riding from the field lit by torches. Thomas was left standing alone in the biting cold, for even his own clerks were reluctant to be seen in his company.
To Pope Alexander and the cardinals, Thomas gave a succinct explanation. It was, he said, a thing unheard of that any bishop should be compelled to bind himself to a secular prince beyond the limits of the formula of fealty. ‘It will set a dangerous example for other princes, not only in our own time but in our successors’ times … If the customs which he demands were to prevail, it is clear that the authority of the Apostolic See would either disappear from England or be reduced to a minimum.’ Becket had formed a view of Henry’s character that led him to believe it was his intention to dominate the Church to a degree not achieved even by Frederick Barbarossa. Anyone who got in his way he would seek to have removed.
And yet Thomas still yearned for peace, for the sake of his companions and their families as much as for himself, and most of all for the safety of his beloved church of Canterbury, which he knew was being systemically despoiled by cruel, greedy men of the world like Ranulf de Broc and his nephew. With this in mind, he wrote humbly to Henry reiterating his willingness to serve him faithfully ‘saving my order’. ‘I remember that I am bound by my oath of fealty to preserve your life, limbs and all earthly honour,’ he said, ‘and I am prepared to do whatever I can for you, according to God, as for my dearest lord. God knows that I have never served you more willingly than I shall in the future, if it should please you.’ The letter went unanswered.
Henry, predictably, cast all of the blame on to Thomas: since he had caused the wound, he said, he should offer the cure. The trouble was that the latest deadline set by the pope for restoring the archbishop’s disciplinary powers was fast approaching. What would Becket do? Would he make another grand gesture as at Vézelay, this time excommunicating the king? If he did, would Alexander support him and, if so, could he be outflanked? How would Louis react? And if the peace accord stayed intact, how was Henry to engineer his eldest son’s coronation?
As the exiles rode away, battered and bruised, to their refuge at the abbey of Ste-Colombe at Sens, they debated where they might seek shelter in the future, fearing that Louis would shortly withdraw his protection and expel them. The most popular suggestion was to move south to Provence in search of a sanctuary beyond either king’s reach.
Suddenly, in what seemed like a miracle, a messenger arrived, summoning Thomas to the French court. Unbeknown to the exiles, the peace accord was faltering as Henry, believing Louis to be safely neutralized, began to exact vengeance on those of his rebels who had aligned themselves to the Capetian king. In Aquitaine he stormed their castles, ignoring Eleanor, who was still technically regent, and leaving his prisoners to die of hunger chained to the walls of their dungeons, while on the frontier of the Vexin he ordered his troops to dig a great ditch to secure his lands from border raids.
With Henry’s stardust no longer in his eyes, Louis came to think that Becket had been right in the past to denounce the Angevin king as a man incapable of honouring the letter or the spirit of his agreements for longer than suited his purpose. Now he told Thomas that he believed the papal arbitrators at Montmirail, and perhaps Pope Alexander himself, had been equally blind or misled. ‘I promise you,’ he said, ‘I will not fail you or your people, as long as with God’s favour I live.’ And to everyone’s astonishment, he threw himself on his knees before the exiled archbishop, confessing that he alone had spoken the truth at Montmirail and requesting his forgiveness for having doubted him.
With Louis once more pledging his protection and fortune’s wheel spinning round again, Thomas recovered his spirits. He knew that he might go down, but he would go down fighting. Soon he would be writing to his friends at the papal curia to say that, in the cause of freedom, he would prefer to die in exile rather than see the church of Canterbury profaned, for in his mind Henry had become a latter-day King Stephen and there was no more room for dissembling. When a ‘greed inflamed with avarice’ like Henry’s, he declared prophetically, was allowed to run unchecked, then ‘dissimulation’ in the cause of peace, far from ending the dispute, would merely embolden the tyrant-king to engage in more of his evil deeds. ‘It would be better,’ said Thomas, ‘for us not to have been born than to have brought the contagion of so dangerous an example into the Church.’
The search for a settlement had failed: a trial of strength was still to come.