When Thomas Becket had fled into exile in his haste to escape from Henry’s clutches, he had crossed a second Rubicon even wider and deeper than the first when summoned to court to become the king’s chancellor. At the Council of Northampton in 1164 he had appealed to Pope Alexander without first seeking royal approval as the ‘ancestral customs’ codified at Clarendon had explicitly required, surely his most heinous offence in Henry’s eyes. And by his indecision and sudden changes of tack at both Clarendon and Northampton he had antagonized his rivals Roger of Pont l’Évêque and Gilbert Foliot, also severely testing the patience of those who would otherwise remain his supporters, such as Henry of Winchester.
Given the waves he had created, it is hardly surprising that the slippery Arnulf of Lisieux should now step out of the shadows to admonish him. Always eager to defend the liberties of the Church while staying on the right side of Henry, he began his widely-circulated critique by praising Thomas for seeking to protect the righteous but ended by urging him to compromise, equivocate and dissemble. Rebuking him for his sudden flight across the Channel, Arnulf mocks him for his naivety in assuming that he had successfully made his escape through his own efforts. Had the king wished to prevent it, ‘no calm breeze, no favourable winds, no peaceful sea, no diligent sailors would have carried you away, for everywhere the hand of royal power would confront you’. Arnulf urges Becket to stop playing games and consider the awesome power of the ruler he has chosen as his adversary. Is he not aware that Alexander and the cardinals – far from being eager sympathizers set on joining him in his fight for ‘liberty’ – find him to be tiresome, frankly a thorough nuisance who was a repeated obstacle to harmony between Church and State?
Associating Henry implicitly with Christ himself, Arnulf asks how Thomas could turn against a divine-right king as if he were an unruly son rebelling against his father or a disobedient sheep rebelling against its shepherd, and with such uncloaked rancour. Does he not realize that, if by any mischance he were actually to gain his ends and successfully weaken or destroy Henry’s kingship, neither the name of ‘liberty’ nor any semblance of it would survive, since so much confusion would ensue that civil order would instantly yield to anarchy?
Becket, continues Arnulf, is doubtless aware that he has made himself into something of a people’s darling for his outspoken resistance to the king. But he should never rely on the support of mere commoners. He should know that ‘none of them would dare to confess himself your friend’. Instead, to avoid public outlawry or deportation like Becket’s own relations, ‘they will bring up old causes of enmity against you, so that their hatred of you will be more readily believed’. As to the great and the good, upon whom Becket had lavished such care and attention as chancellor, he will never succeed in converting them to the vision of the world for which he stands, for they will form a ‘confederacy’, stopping at nothing to advance their own interests or increase their wealth.
The archbishop’s blind spot, Arnulf suggests, is that he simply cannot grasp how unwise it is to upset so many important people all at once. Invoking the old superstition that resistance to the king is both treason and sacrilege, he argues that after Thomas had resigned the chancellorship and begged Henry to mend his ways, he should have left it to God to do the work of reformation. ‘Make peace with the king and do not appear to be quibbling in a pettifogging way’ is the gist of his message. ‘Justice’ and ‘virtue’ are all very well, but ‘fortune’ and ‘person’ should also be taken into account. ‘If there is any debate about peace, do not discuss each clause with excessive subtlety, for exactness produces contention and contention excites and ignites the dangerous flames of hatred.’ Consider the bigger picture and the damage that will accrue to the Church if you persist in your quarrel, he cautions. Otherwise, the inference will be that you are psychologically driven to make it appear that nobody is able to resist your power or will, making it seem that you are as much a tyrant as you claim Henry to be, driven by the old pride and egotism of which you were once accused as chancellor.
Although searing for its recipient, Arnulf’s critique would be the mere tickling of a feather compared to that of Gilbert Foliot. Now Henry’s chief spiritual guide and the most intellectually daunting of Thomas’s opponents, Foliot was nicknamed ‘Judas’ by Becket and compared to Achitophel, King David’s wicked councillor in the Old Testament, by John of Salisbury. An archetypal villain driven by a mixture of jealousy and ambition, Achitophel had advised the king’s son Absalom, to whose faction he defected, to commit open incest with his father’s wives, followed by armed rebellion and patricide. When he knew his plot was doomed, he had returned home and hanged himself (2 Samuel 16–17). According to John, he had now risen again from hell in the guise of Foliot to plague the faithful.
For rather more than a year after his flight into exile, Thomas, despite their venomous clashes at Northampton, had nursed hopes of reconciling himself to Gilbert, attempting to appeal to the spiritual side of his character. ‘Choose to take pride in Christ rather than in the things of the earth, to put greater trust in the Lord than in the seductions of the world,’ he had entreated him early in 1166 from Pontigny. And there were reasons why Foliot should have been able to respond. Never an ultra-royalist, notably where criminous clerks were concerned, he shared many of the same principles as John of Salisbury and Herbert of Bosham, helping to lead the assault on Henry’s interpretation of the ‘ancestral customs’ at Clarendon until Becket cut the ground from under his feet.
Personalities were the root of the problem. Foliot loathed and despised Becket, saying of him at Northampton, ‘he always was a fool and always will be’. His enmity would prove lethal, since (as contemporaries remarked) Foliot was ‘armed with eloquence’. After the Vézelay excommunications in June 1166, when, on Henry’s orders, he had led the bishops in appealing to the pope to annul Becket’s sentences, he attempted to discredit the archbishop in the eyes of all Christendom, sending him a humble petition that in reality was a coruscating manifesto denouncing him. Widely circulated and surviving in multiple copies, this document purports to be a collaborative effort by all the bishops and clergy of England, but John of Salisbury saw immediately from its slick style and selective quotations that it was Achitophel’s handiwork alone.
From its opening sentence onwards, the piece is thoroughly disingenuous. Or at least, so it appears now to anyone with access to all the available source materials. At the time, to the many uninitiated onlookers, and especially to those in the Angevin dominions who were only able or allowed to hear Foliot’s version of the story, his arguments seemed devastating in their force. ‘We were hoping,’ his manifesto begins grandiloquently, ‘that what was thrown into confusion at the beginning of your unexpected departure to distant parts would, with the help of God’s grace, be restored to its original serenity through your humility and prudence.’ Foliot explains how word has reached him that Becket is applying himself diligently to reading and prayers during his ‘self-imposed’ stay at Pontigny, ‘redeeming the loss of past and present time with fasting, vigils and tears’. What a disappointment it is, therefore, to discover that, for some unknown reason, Henry has received a threatening letter from him, followed by the unfathomable suggestion that he, too, might shortly be excommunicated.
How can that be, when Henry is the living embodiment of sweet reasonableness, a man renowned for his piety and gentleness, justice and courtesy, whose generous heart desires nothing more than to be told if and when he has done something wrong? ‘We do not say that the lord king has never sinned,’ claims Foliot in a much-vaunted passage taking sycophancy, understatement and the art of rhetorical redescription to heights hitherto unexplored, ‘but we do say and confidently proclaim in public that he is always prepared to make amends to the Lord.’
A well-connected Norman aristocrat with cousins in high places all over Henry’s empire, Foliot concludes with a thinly-veiled sneer at his adversary’s lowly parentage. Everyone has heard ‘how kind our lord the king was to you; to what renown he raised you up from poverty and received you into his intimate favour’. How can Thomas find it within himself to show such ingratitude in return? Would he not do better to resign his archbishopric and continue to be praised for ‘voluntary poverty’ than to be universally condemned for hypocrisy? Has not Henry raised him up from nothing, hoping to thrive with his counsel and support? ‘If instead he receives a battle-axe where he was hoping for security, what reports of you will be on everyone’s lips? How will the story of such an unprecedented betrayal go down in history?’
On receiving a copy of this feline document from a close friend, John of Salisbury did not mince his words. How, he asks with knowing irony, could anyone find it in his conscience to be so bold, so impudent and so meretricious with the facts as to maintain Henry’s innocence, ‘when his injustices are in everyone’s mouth, whose acts of craft and violence the whole world knows’? Such an author scripts lines that a professional jester cannot speak without shame. Achitophel, like his Old Testament counterpart, is so brazen, he condemns himself out of his own mouth.
John felt nothing but contempt that a man of Foliot’s intelligence and erudition could seriously envisage anyone being simple or naive enough to be fooled by his spider’s web of deception. Has he not the lewdness of a prostitute, the impudence of a charlatan, the hide of a rhinoceros not to blush when he proclaims that Henry desires nothing more than to be told if and when he has done something wrong, when his acts of oppression are abominated by the whole Christian world?
Reading Foliot persuaded John that Henry was being advised by wolves in sheep’s clothing, men who would settle for nothing short of Becket’s destruction and the Church’s enslavement, leading him to drop many of his earlier reservations about his friend’s more impetuous or ill-advised actions. Unnerved by the lengthy diplomatic deadlock after the excommunications at Vézelay, he had been urging Thomas to recapture the initiative by summoning Henry of Winchester and some of the other more sympathetic bishops to his presence, so he could explain to them face to face the frustrations he had suffered in his efforts to bring Henry to the negotiating table, while at the same time educating them in the king’s many tricks and subterfuges.
Becket, however, was ahead of him, publishing his own pièce justificative that answered Foliot’s accusations one by one, and in the process gave a long and detailed history of the quarrel since its inception. This he quickly followed up with a shorter, more personal letter, a document he made sure would be leaked by his clerks so that everyone could read it, ratcheting up the pressure by including a vitriolic accusation of cowardice against Achitophel that, more than anything else he had said so far about him, was meant to lance. What it seems had stung him most were Foliot’s swipes against his parentage.
‘It’s a matter of the greatest astonishment, stupefying in fact,’ Thomas begins, ‘that someone like you, a prudent man, ostensibly learned and a monk, should so blatantly – not to say irreverently – deny truth, resist justice, and in every possible way ignore the difference between right and wrong.’ You call yourself a follower of Christ? You will find that it is not so. ‘A fierce storm is violently shaking the boat. I hold the tiller and you call me to sleep. You conjure up and place before my eyes the favours conferred on me by our lord the king, and you remind me that I was raised up to the heights from poverty.’ What poverty were you thinking of? What lowly ancestry?
As to the charge of ingratitude, ‘I call God to witness that I put nothing under the sun before the king’s grace and salvation.’ Foliot, Becket avows, is like a blind man giving directions to the sighted. ‘You say that the king is ready to make amends and always has been: this you state with confidence, this you say you are proclaiming. So hold still for a moment and answer this question. In what sense do you understand your proposition that he is “prepared to make amends”?’ All the world, says Thomas, can see the treatment meted out to the exiles by Henry, who has dragged innocent orphans, widows and children from their homes, sent priests and clerks penniless across the sea and then pillaged their property. ‘You remain mute; you see your mother, the church of Canterbury, despoiled of her goods, and you do not resist. You see me, your pastor, having scarcely escaped the swords hanging over my neck, and you do not grieve – but what is far worse, you do not blush to stand with my persecutors against me.’
Never a man to be reproached by someone he regarded as an upstart, Foliot returned to the attack with a blistering broadside. Not rediscovered until the eighteenth century, it would first be published in full by George, Lord Lyttelton, in an appendix to the fourth and final volume of his History of the Life of King Henry the Second (1767–71), since when it has been seized upon by generations of lazy historians who ought to have known better as a conveniently pre-packaged, purportedly independent assessment of the Becket quarrel by an educated eyewitness. An anticlerical politician whose hero was Henry, Lyttelton could hardly believe his luck in being one of the first to stumble into such a trophy in the voluminous collections of the famous Jacobean antiquary Sir Robert Cotton. He believed what the document said, but publication stirred up a hornets’ nest and its authenticity was hotly contested. Subsequently denounced by Catholic or Anglo-Catholic writers as a brilliant forgery, its credibility was questioned as late as 1943 by an eminent French scholar, who claimed it to be a parody or literary squib (possibly by John of Salisbury) in the style of Jonathan Swift. Only in 1951, when copies were traced back to reliable twelfth- and thirteenth-century manuscripts in Oxford and the British Library, was it finally accepted as genuine.
Presented in the form of a classical declamation or speech meant to win over its audience by its sheer force of eloquence, Foliot’s tirade, usually known by its opening words as Multiplicem nobis (‘A labyrinthine argument before us’), is a triumph of the rhetorician’s art. Unlike many of Becket’s own more rambling narratives, its story has the beauty of elegant simplicity.
As Foliot claims, Thomas, after corruptly obtaining the chancellorship despite his lack of qualifications, coveted the primacy, persuading Henry to abuse his kingly power by ordering his selection at unprecedented speed, so that someone whose chief credentials were to have ‘plunged a sword deep into the bowels of holy mother Church’ by levying taxes and scutages to lead an army to Toulouse would be chosen. Thus it was that someone ‘fresh from the enjoyment of birds and hounds and the other delights of the court’ would almost the very next day be celebrating mass in his own cathedral, presiding over the church courts and issuing spiritual guidance to the most learned priests and bishops of the realm, despite his own fabled ignorance of theology.
Scarcely had a few months elapsed, resumes Foliot, than Becket, rash, brash, arrogant and supercilious as he was, allowed his obsessions to run riot, turning everything topsy-turvy and creating sparks that soon flared up into an inferno. To calm things down, ‘meetings were assembled and councils called’. Chief among these was the Council of Clarendon, where Henry had attempted to restore order by calling for observance of some ‘customs’. These, Foliot candidly concedes, ‘appeared in some cases to stifle the liberty of the Church’ and Henry ‘vehemently demanded that we promise to observe them without any reservation’. Accordingly the bishops stood fearless and unwavering against them. Even when locked up for two full days and threatened with physical violence, they had refused to bend. And yet, crows Foliot, ‘What was the response to this? Who fled? Who turned tail? Whose spirit was broken?’
Far from the bishops showing cowardice, it was ‘the captain of the army’ who yielded to Henry’s intimidation. ‘The leader of the camp fled, the lord of Canterbury withdrew from the association and advice of his brethren and, after reflecting on the matter on his own, he returned to us later and burst out with these words: “It is Christ’s will that I should forswear myself; I submit for the present and incur the guilt of perjury, to do penance in the future as far as I can.” ’
Scandalous as that volte-face may have been, at least (Foliot maintains) it brought a prospect of peace, raising hopes that ‘what our lord king was demanding under the temporary sway of anger would be restored to a good state … when his passion had cooled’. Becket, unfortunately, is a warmonger unable to restrain himself: swiftly recanting his concessions and attempting to flee abroad, he flouted one of the cardinal ‘customs’ to which he had just bound himself – that he should never leave the country without a royal licence. No one, on hearing of this betrayal, could have been more taken aback or disappointed than Henry, not least since such a move could damage his reputation. Would not the commoners, in their woeful ignorance, begin to wonder whether – in a fit of rage – he had become a tyrant and exiled his archbishop out of hatred for Christ? Whereas in reality, claims Foliot, the true extent of the king’s moderation would be proved when, with the archbishop’s vessel forced to return to shore by unfavourable winds (in reality the sailors under the command of Adam of Charing had mutinied for fear of royal reprisals), Henry had welcomed him back ‘with kindness’ rather than severity, allowing him safe passage home to his church at Canterbury ‘honoured with fitting respect’.
‘When,’ asks Foliot – now conveniently forgetting everything he has said earlier about Henry’s bullying tactics at Clarendon – ‘did the king ever give way to his anger or his power or act unreasonably against you, or even say anything harsh?’
Foliot portrays Henry as an affable prince ‘whom the sweetest children, the most noble and honourable wife, the many realms subject to him’ can scarcely restrain from his overwhelming desire to abandon the world and all his goods and ‘go naked after his Lord Jesus carrying his cross’. Such a man asks no more of his archbishop than that he should ‘show him the affection and kindness of his heart’. Like a disobedient child, however, Thomas sulks and squirms, spoiling for a fight, so that when John the Marshal makes a ‘reasonable’ claim in the Canterbury court, the archbishop brushes him aside like the autocrat he always is, forcing Henry to call him to account before a great council of the barons in the castle at Northampton.
Steadily moving in for the kill, Foliot slams Becket for submitting himself to the king’s judgement and finding sureties in John the Marshal’s case, accusing him of defying the very same principles upon which he and Thomas were once perfectly agreed, that criminous clerks are immune from secular jurisdiction. He then harangues him for failing to mollify Henry, as he ought to have done as a loyal archbishop and former chancellor, on the more serious charges of embezzlement and false accounting before finally appealing to Pope Alexander.
Of course, there is a massive inconsistency here. If Becket goes against canon law by accepting judgement in Henry’s court in John the Marshal’s case, how can it also be that he is delinquent by refusing to be bamboozled by the king’s trumped-up charges of embezzlement? How, likewise, can it be that if he is pusillanimous and subservient at Clarendon for yielding to the ‘customs’ while the bishops stand firm like a rock, he is rebellious and intransigent at Northampton for standing his ground and appealing to the pope?
Foliot’s most credible and cutting claim is that by impetuously fleeing into exile, in disguise and by night, abandoning his pastoral obligations while encouraging others to risk their lives to save the liberties of the Church, Thomas has himself behaved like a coward. ‘What did you achieve by these actions, except that you very carefully avoided the death which no one thought to inflict?’ Here the accuser has a palpable hit: Thomas is like a shepherd who refuses to lay down his life for his sheep. Relentlessly pressing home his advantage, Foliot adds that by his excommunications at Vézelay, it would appear that Becket is more concerned for his lost lands and revenues than with caring for his flock. ‘Are your annual revenues so important to you that you wish to acquire them by the blood of your brothers? Even the Jews spurned Judas when he came to them with the price of blood, throwing it back in his face.’
Taking the high moral ground and assuming the mantle of a peacemaker, Foliot urges Thomas – as it would seem, more in sorrow than in anger – to reconsider the issues in a calmer, cooler, more discerning way. Surely, he insists, no question of faith or morals, ethics or the sacraments arises. Neither does heresy or schism. All that has really happened, he insinuates, is that Henry has sometimes allowed himself to get somewhat carried away by an innate but understandable desire to observe the ‘customs’ of his grandfather. To these, he clings like a clam from a well-intentioned, if occasionally misguided, sense of honour. Is this, Foliot enquires, the cause for which Becket is willing to turn his country and much of the rest of Christendom upside down?
For most of his contemporaries, Foliot’s argument here would have carried immense weight. Few were sufficiently versed in the true extent of Henry’s wheeling and dealing to be sure that Thomas had a genuine grievance. And by charging the exiled archbishop, here and elsewhere, with issuing threats and acting as tyrannically as he was himself accusing Henry of behaving, he touched a nerve. In the eyes of many laymen, Becket’s vulnerability was identical to that identified in the papacy by the more vocal critics of the ascetic reform movement. Although the popes since the time of Leo IX and Gregory VII had successfully rebranded themselves as the supreme leaders of a Christian community ordered by moral considerations, they claimed to be answerable to God alone for their own moral purity. They sought to liberate the Church from any interference in its internal affairs by the representatives of society at large, while at the same time claiming the right to interfere in the affairs of the secular kingdoms on moral and spiritual grounds.
Arguing the case for the monarchy, Foliot echoes Arnulf of Lisieux by reiterating that Henry is a divine-right king responsible to God for maintaining civil order. As he pungently chides Becket, royal and priestly power, properly exercised, must complement and support each other. Delivering what he believes to be the coup de grâce, he says that Thomas is a bishop who lacks ‘holy humility’. His zeal, his pride, his petulance, his obstinacy, his contempt for the views of others cause him to censure Henry for doing what any responsible ruler would rightly believe to be his prime kingly duty.
Written in energetic, forceful, supple Latin prose, Foliot’s broadside is a bravura performance, refocusing the controversy from Henry’s viewpoint and winning over many of the waverers to his side. Numerous facts are twisted, several arguments disingenuous or illogical, but the accusations levelled at the exiled archbishop that he was himself as cowardly and autocratic as he claimed Henry and his cronies to be would prove damaging and deeply embarrassing. Becket, so far as anyone is aware, simply refused to reply. Perhaps wisely, he realized that attempting to do so would only give wider publicity to Foliot’s case for the prosecution. Perhaps he also accepted that as a less proficient rhetorician and Latinist than his rival, he was outclassed. He may have calculated that as the waverers came to understand Henry’s true nature better in the stalemate years after the Vézelay excommunications, they would discover how misplaced, inaccurate and fundamentally dishonest Foliot’s underlying characterization of the royal tyrant really was.
Only John of Salisbury could have rivalled the ease and subtlety with which Foliot elides crushing attack with elegiac reproach, blending them like light and shade in the fashion of a landscape artist. But the closest he would come to referring to Foliot’s diatribe was to declare of the Old Testament Achitophel that he ‘has had many successors in his counsels, who pervert the minds of princes and devise and proclaim a poisoned counsel against God’. Such men were like Ahab or Jezebel when they had persecuted Elijah. ‘Wickedness has many devices and wiles’ and ‘works in the skin of a vixen’. Such was John’s opinion, but since the Machiavellian traducer was now Henry’s chief spiritual councillor, he did not dare, for fear of reprisals, to attack him by name, as he had done before. Only after Becket’s murder would the tables be irrevocably turned. After that, Foliot’s accusation of cowardice would look decidedly hollow.