The collapse of the peace talks at Montmirail need not have been conclusive. With King Louis on Becket’s side again, Prior Simon and the other papal arbitrators brought Henry back to the negotiating table on 7 February 1169 at St-Léger-en-Yvelines, near Rambouillet in the French Vexin. John of Salisbury, an eyewitness, said that Henry wriggled and squirmed, making ‘many diverse and inconsistent replies’, denying that he had expelled Thomas from his lands and saying he would gladly take him back ‘if he is willing to do as his predecessors had done, and to promise as much honestly and in good faith’. Code for ‘observing the ancestral customs’ whether written down or not, Henry’s words meant that, for him, nothing had changed. As Becket ruefully reflected, ‘he is seeking nothing from us apart from the observance of his customs … He indeed changed the word, but did not change his intention.’ So the exasperated arbitrators finally served on him the papal ultimatum they had so far withheld, ordering him to restore both peace and property to Thomas and the exiles without further delay or risk the consequences.
Becket had no remaining doubts: surely the time for talking was over and it was time to act. With the deadline set by the pope for the restoration of his disciplinary powers fast approaching, he made lists of those he intended to censure. He planned to replicate his actions at Vézelay, choosing as his theatre the Cistercian abbey of Clairvaux, where St Bernard, its founder, had preached so many of his famous sermons. Nestling beside a stream in a densely forested valley on the borders of Burgundy and Champagne near Bar-sur-Aube, Clairvaux was less than three days’ ride from Ste-Colombe. Thomas arrived there shortly before Palm Sunday, the beginning of Holy Week and one of the most significant days of the Church’s calendar. This was the day that commemorated Christ’s entry into Jerusalem riding a humble donkey, cheered on by jubilant crowds who had come to welcome him, only to meet his death on the cross five days later.
To win maximum publicity for what he was poised to do, Thomas could not have chosen a better stage or a more auspicious day. Pilgrims lined the route to the abbey, watching the grand procession in which a statue of Christ mounted on a donkey made its way towards the church and saints’ relics were carried aloft. Once the procession had entered the nave, Thomas mounted the pulpit, the air still thick with incense, and solemnly excommunicated Gilbert Foliot, the leading signatory to the bishops’ appeal against the Vézelay sentences, and Jocelin of Salisbury, another of Foliot’s allies who had appointed the hated John of Oxford to a deanery in defiance of a papal prohibition, much to Thomas’s disgust. Next, he excommunicated the seven principal sequestrators of the Canterbury estates, beginning with Ranulf de Broc and his nephew and giving notice that another six miscreants, including Richard de Lucy and Richard of Ilchester, would be sentenced on Ascension Day (29 May) unless they returned their misappropriated church lands before that date and made reparations.
With Pope Alexander safely beyond Frederick Barbarossa’s reach at Benevento, the English bishops were warier than before of ignoring their obligations to censure and cast out from their community those whom their primate had excommunicated. Besides Henry of Winchester, those publishing Becket’s sanctions in their dioceses were William of Norwich, Bartholomew of Exeter and (most encouragingly for the exiles) Hilary of Chichester. Together with Roger of Worcester, to whom Becket wrote a personal appeal for support, they found the latest sentences too serious to pretend not to see, splitting the episcopate down the middle. Even Roger of Pont l’Évêque wavered, preferring not to disobey Thomas in case the pope took his side. Foliot alone was unmoved, declaring that his own London diocese had ancient metropolitan status, making it superior to Canterbury, which if true would have exempted him from Becket’s jurisdiction – a fraudulent claim, relying on a single line in a long-forgotten letter of Pope Gregory the Great, written in the year 601.
To Alexander, Thomas wrote asking for confirmation of the Clairvaux sentences. Little did he know that two of Henry’s youngest, supplest, most ingenious and ingratiating envoys, Reginald fitz Jocelin and Ralph of Llandaff, had already reached Benevento to give a wholly misleading account of the failure of the peace talks. With their words ringing in his ears, the pope had backtracked once more, commissioning two new curial officials, Vivian of Orvieto and Gratian of Pisa, both expert lawyers, as replacement ambassadors to begin the negotiations all over again. On 10 May, in what must have seemed like a bolt from the blue to Thomas, Alexander wrote to inform him of their imminent departure, reiterating his counsel of perfection. ‘We ask and admonish you, brother,’ he said, ‘carefully to bear in mind the difficulties and evils of the time and … to strive by every means possible to recover the grace and love of the king as far as it can be done, saving your order and your office.’ Thomas had heard all this before: it was easy to say, impossible to achieve; and since the pope also instructed him to suspend his Clairvaux sentences pending the arrival of the ambassadors, he could only have felt abandoned and humiliated. For what else could he reasonably be expected to do as long as Henry insisted that he yield to ‘ancestral customs’ that Alexander himself had pronounced ‘obnoxious’?
Plainly driven by second thoughts, Alexander sent another letter the very next day, its tone entirely different from the first, reassuring Thomas that this really would be a final throw of the diplomatic dice and that, if Henry could be shown to have resisted or obstructed the newly-commissioned ambassadors, then ‘the severity of due vengeance’ could be exacted and the king excommunicated. His heart leaping at this news, Becket eagerly looked forward to meeting the envoys. Vivian, a trusted servant of the pope, he found to be inscrutable, but Gratian, a nephew of Pope Eugenius III and a former student of civil and canon law at Bologna (not to be confused with the author of the Decretum), was well known to the exiles and an old friend of John of Salisbury: they had first met during one of John’s missions to the pope on Theobald’s behalf in King Stephen’s reign. Herbert of Bosham also knew him, rejoicing that the pope had sent ‘a man truly gracious in name and deed’ who, he said, would refuse all Henry’s bribes and blandishments.
The ambassadors had reached France by 22 July, when John made a pilgrimage to Vézelay to greet them, chatting to them in the abbey’s garden and establishing that, on balance, they favoured Thomas and that, should the new talks fail, his friend would indeed be free to strike against the king.
After meeting Becket at Ste-Colombe in the last week of July, the envoys were forced to kick their heels until Henry, who was fighting again in Aquitaine, put in an appearance. Their first series of meetings with him took place at Argentan, Domfront, Bayeux and Bur-le-Roi between 15 August and 2 September, while the royal court wended its way slowly around Normandy. Ever restless, eager now to shift his attention to Brittany again and so looking for a quick fix, Henry at first took a gentler, subtler, more emollient line than he had before, winding and weaving, doubling and twisting his words like a silk-maker to dazzle and beguile Vivian and Gratian into finding in his favour. A graphic narrative of the negotiations was sent to Becket by a sympathetic courtier, an eyewitness who wrote anonymously, wisely keeping his identity a closely-guarded secret for fear his letter would be intercepted by Henry’s spies.
Barely, it seems, had the serious bargaining begun when it was rudely interrupted by a carefully staged act of deliberate provocation in which the fourteen-year-old Prince Henry barged in with a band of his hunting friends, all blowing horns to announce the killing of a stag. Next day, the discussion resumed around 7 a.m., when the king, flanked by a contingent of his Norman bishops, demanded as a precondition that those sentenced at Clairvaux should be absolved without taking the usual oath to accept the archbishop’s judgement on their crimes. The argument raged until sunset, when Henry stormed out, bitterly complaining that the pope never listened to him. ‘By God’s eyes,’ he exclaimed menacingly, ‘I mean to do something about it!’
He was shocked to discover that Gratian was steelier than he had judged. ‘Do not threaten us, my lord,’ the envoy quietly advised him. ‘We come from a court that is accustomed to command emperors and kings.’ Henry was forced to apologize, but when the talking resumed, this time outdoors in a park, he threatened the envoys again and, when they rejected his demands, ran back to his horse and in everyone’s hearing swore of Becket, ‘For the rest of my life, I will never listen to anyone concerning that man’s peace and restoration – neither the Lord Pope, nor anyone else.’
And yet, when the ambassadors, unnerved by the prospect that their mission would fail even before it had properly begun, offered to meet him half-way by absolving those excommunicates who appeared before them in person and did penance, his response was like the calm after a thunderstorm. He agreed to reconcile himself to Becket and the exiles and restore them to their lands, but no sooner had this offer been accepted than he raised the stakes again, demanding in return that either one of the envoys, or one of their clerks, should take ship to England to absolve the others whom the archbishop had sentenced. When Gratian refused, Henry stalked out again, shouting as he went, ‘Do what you like: I don’t rate you and your excommunications and doubt if they are worth an egg.’
Scandalized, the Norman bishops cautioned him, saying that the envoys had in their pockets copies of a decree from Alexander commanding everyone to obey them on pain of excommunication. ‘I know, I know,’ he replied, ‘they will interdict my land. But cannot I, who can capture a well-fortified castle every day, capture a single clerk?’ But as dusk fell, he relented, summoning Vivian and Gratian to return and repeating his offer to settle the dispute on the terms he had previously indicated, as if nothing untoward had happened.
Confident of success, the envoys next day absolved those of the Clairvaux excommunicates who appeared before them in their belief that the game of cat and mouse would shortly be over, only to discover they were the mice and Henry the cat. For when the parchment prepared by the royal clerks recording the peace terms was submitted to them that evening, Vivian and Gratian saw to their dismay that Henry had deceived them, inserting a novel and belligerent proviso into the document worded ‘saving the dignity of my realm’ (salva dignitate regni mei), clearly indicating that he still expected Becket to comply with the ‘ancestral customs’ if ever he returned to England and putting the clock back to where it had originally started.
Gratian rejected this subterfuge, which he had no hesitation in denouncing as a trick. Henry was furious – so confident had he been of success, he had already written to Abbot Gilbert of Cîteaux, giving his version of the peace terms complete with the aggressive proviso. Unwilling to bend in the slightest degree, he sent Reginald fitz Jocelin and Ralph of Llandaff on yet another mission to the papal curia with orders to seek approval for his own flawed version of the text.
Armed with his anonymous informant’s report of the proceedings, Thomas wrote to Alexander and to his own envoys at the papal curia, urging them to ‘take the greatest care in our business, and exercise caution and unending vigilance against our enemies’. He warned them especially against Reginald, a rising star who had served his apprenticeship in Becket’s own household before defecting to Henry’s, whom he said was the bastard son of Jocelin of Salisbury – the bishop’s story was that he was a student, not a priest at the time of his son’s conception – ‘who is everywhere dishonouring and blackening our name as far as he can, calling us a traitor’.
Feeling it to be superfluous to wait for Alexander’s replies as it was obvious to him that Henry remained obdurate, Thomas first reinstated his Clairvaux sentences in spite of the pope’s instructions to suspend them and then threatened to lay a general interdict on England. All church services would have to be suspended except for infant baptism and unction to the dying, which could continue but only in private. Monks alone would be allowed to carry on saying mass, and then in low voices, with the laity excluded and without any ringing of bells or other accustomed rites.
Henry’s draconian riposte was to devise a set of pre-emptive ordinances, reported by Alan of Tewkesbury and a small army of feverishly excited chroniclers, including Roger of Howden and Gervase of Canterbury, which showed he was ready to go as far as a schism, breaking completely with the pope in order to defeat Becket. On 29 September he published this document, which was intended to sever all links between England and the archbishop and pope. Anyone caught with a letter from the pope or archbishop declaring an interdict was to be judged a traitor and all those willing to obey an interdict were to be summarily deported with their entire families. All appeals to the pope or archbishop were proscribed, and the sending or receipt of letters or decrees to or from either strictly forbidden. No priest or monk was to leave the country without a special passport. All clerks, including students, domiciled abroad with church livings in England were to be recalled home. The goods of all those known to be the archbishop’s supporters were to be seized. Lastly, every male over the age of fifteen in the entire country was to swear an oath to obey these prohibitions, especially those relating to an interdict.
With rumours flying thick and fast, Becket’s first reaction to these ordinances was one of panic. His chilling claims that Henry meant to blind or castrate priests caught carrying letters from the papal curia and cut off the feet of monks were melodramatic, but since such men were to be hung from the gallows instead, his fears were hardly groundless. To enforce the ordinances, Henry chose Geoffrey Ridel, a courtier whom he had appointed archdeacon of Canterbury over the archbishop’s head, the man already performing many of the former royal chancellor’s functions, who was to be assisted by Richard of Ilchester, one of the envoys attending the schismatic Council of Würzburg in 1165. As soon as they began their work, the ports were sealed and the sheriffs started taking the new oaths of allegiance from males over fifteen in their counties, but these measures triggered an almost immediate backlash. To the king’s fury, Roger of Pont l’Évêque took the lead in this outspoken resistance. He might be Becket’s sworn enemy, but Henry, he felt, was going too far. Outward conformity was not enough for the king: he was, in effect, attempting to police his subjects’ thoughts, to look inside their minds and punish what he saw there as crimes, fuelling Becket’s determination to fresh heights – as indeed it would do four centuries later for Sir Thomas More when another Henry ordered him to take a not dissimilar oath on pain of death in his determination to break with Rome and marry Anne Boleyn. And More would famously choose death rather than capitulate.
As Becket, in an anguished outpouring of pent-up grief and frustration, protested to an ally at the papal curia around this time, Henry had a project that struck at the heart of everything Christians believed in, changing the law of God ‘so that a tyrant’s injustice may take its place’ and aiming to create a regional church under royal and therefore his personal control, enclosed within the ring fence of the coast, directed by a compliant archbishop of his own choosing. Whether this had been his intention from the beginning, Thomas could not tell – nor did it matter, for it was his intention now. After some five years of near-constant humiliation in exile while the political battles between the pope and the German emperor, and between Henry and King Louis, were played out, the beleaguered archbishop felt he had to act decisively. In William fitz Stephen’s ringing phrase, he knew the time had come ‘to put the axe to the root of the tree’.
Henry had one further game of cat and mouse to play out before the resources of diplomacy were spent. Thomas, who with his Canterbury revenues sequestered was increasingly unable to afford the intelligence networks needed to keep fully abreast of developments, suddenly discovered that as soon as Gratian, the more uncompromising of Alexander’s ambassadors, had left France on his homeward journey to Italy, Henry had coaxed his more pliant colleague, Vivian, into convening another peace conference at the abbey of St-Denis, north of Paris, at Martinmas (11 November 1169). Marking a last-ditch attempt to give substance to the Angevin-Capetian dynastic accord agreed at Montmirail, a key agenda item of this round of talks would be the coronation of Prince Henry and his wife, hence the need to settle the dispute with Becket if it could be done on something as close as possible to the elder Henry’s terms.
In the event, Henry and Thomas did not meet face to face. On Sunday 16 November Louis entertained Henry sumptuously at the abbey, where the bones of kings would be preserved until they were thrown unceremoniously into trenches by the French revolutionaries in 1793, while Becket and his followers lodged with the Templars, just outside Paris. It was agreed that, on the following Tuesday, the archbishop would come to the Chapel of the Holy Martyr, built on an ancient site at the foot of the hill known as Montmartre, then the half-way point between Paris and the abbey, where intermediaries would shuttle to and fro between him and the two kings. When the day came and Becket arrived, he was quickly shepherded inside the chapel, leaving Henry and Louis, their nobles and bishops, the papal envoy Vivian and Archbishop Rotrou of Rouen, one of Henry’s Norman advisers and former ambassadors to the papal curia, to congregate outside.
Most of the talking was done by King Louis and his advisers, who took on the role of intermediaries themselves, trying to broker a compromise. Henry began well enough, speaking in French for maximum clarity and offering – if in vague and general terms – to renounce ‘all the evil customs which might enslave the Church’ and to return the exiles’ property, while Thomas, beginning to wonder whether something genuinely constructive might be achieved this time, promised to defer to the king as his king and ‘to render unto Caesar what properly belonged to Caesar’. The rest of the day was consumed in discussing terms for the restoration of the archbishop’s property. When challenged to produce a detailed inventory of the estates he claimed, Thomas wisely countered that he could not possibly know after so long an absence precisely which lands had been seized, but wished to have everything returned to him that Theobald had once possessed, making particular reference to the lands that he had already contested with John the Marshal and others. Rather than abandon his rights to these, he said – rashly, although Henry to his credit did not rise to the bait – that he would prefer to stay in exile for ever.
Much further haggling ensued over the reparations to be made for the exiles’ lost revenues and arrears. Becket put his own losses at £20,000, a daunting but realistic figure, but generously offered to settle for just half that amount. Henry offered only 1,000 silver marks, around a thirtieth of what he owed, refusing to budge. Louis, with his own agenda of ensuring his daughter’s coronation and his dynasty’s potential claim to many of the present Angevin territories in years to come, eventually broke the deadlock, persuading Thomas that ‘it would be dishonourable and unworthy of him to obstruct the peace which was so necessary and desirable to the realm and the Church for the sake of money alone’.
Astonishingly, therefore, as it appeared to the weary group of bystanders, a settlement by late afternoon seemed close at hand. Since both sides had already been persuaded by Vivian and Louis to avoid any last-minute speeches or belligerent provisos that might alter the terms and so make a rapprochement impossible, all that remained was to seal the peace.
To the utter dismay and consternation of the exiles – this time not simply the moderates among them like John of Salisbury and Alexander Llewelyn, but even the most zealous like Herbert of Bosham – the negotiations foundered at the final hurdle. Not unreasonably, Becket asked Henry to seal the peace in the customary way by giving him the kiss of peace in public. But the king promptly refused, claiming that he had sworn an oath in anger never more to give him the kiss, ‘even if it happened that one day he should restore his peace and favour to him’. Herbert reports that when Thomas had once consulted Alexander about exactly this sort of situation, the pope had advised him not to attempt to exact a pledge or an oath from the king as security, but to content himself with a kiss of peace. ‘The kiss of peace,’ said Alexander (or so claimed Herbert), ‘should suffice of itself for a priest maintaining the cause of justice. Unless any other security is offered voluntarily, it should not be exacted.’ Regularly used to mark the confirmation of a legal agreement, a settlement by arbitration or a reconciliation between parties engaged in a feud, as at the conclusion of the Battle Abbey case, the origin of the kiss lay in the liturgy of the mass, where, according to the Roman rite, the clergy and congregation kiss each other after the prayer for peace has been said and the celebrant has kissed the altar.
Was Henry speaking the truth about his oath, or was he merely saving his face, raising an objection to the kiss to avoid making it appear to his barons and courtiers that he had given in to Becket despite the niggardliness of his offer to the Church on reparations? Was his refusal more about his own cherished ‘dignity’ than about an oath? If the oath was genuine, it was the only one he never broke. Equally, should Thomas have delayed his request for the kiss of peace until this late stage? Was he simply looking for another last-minute excuse to undo a settlement that left him ruinously out of pocket? Could neither of these two men bear to see the other one claiming a victory?
Do we even know for certain that Becket had discussed the matter of the kiss with the pope? Probably he had, since a similar contingency had been at the forefront of his mind when he had first appealed to Alexander at Sens shortly after his flight into exile in 1164. Alternatively he may have raised the matter when he rode south with the pope from Paris to Bourges in the following spring on the first stages of Alexander’s return journey to Rome. But the sources are ambiguous: Herbert of Bosham muddies the waters by claiming that Thomas had consulted Alexander on this question as recently as ‘a few days before’ the Montmartre conference. That makes no sense, since it could – depending on political events in Italy and conditions on the Alpine passes – take a minimum of three weeks, and sometimes up to three months, for a courier to carry a letter from Ste-Colombe to Benevento, and that is without allowing for a reply.
What seems likeliest is that the negotiations failed because of an underlying lack of trust between the parties. Becket felt that he could not agree to return to Canterbury without a guarantee of his security before witnesses as symbolized by the kiss; Henry’s refusal to grant it shows that by the close of 1169 the quarrel had gone too far and ran too deep to be settled in a single day and without a face-to-face encounter. Historians since Lord Lyttelton have roundly castigated Becket for the failure, but at the time both Louis and Vivian put the fault squarely on Henry’s shoulders. Herbert reports that when the French king first heard of his Angevin counterpart’s reason for withholding the kiss, he suspected foul play, declaring that ‘beneath Henry’s honeyed speeches earlier in the day lay poison’. Becket adds that when the kiss was refused, Louis said immediately that not for all his weight in gold could he advise the exiles to return home. Count Theobald V of Blois shared his view: it would be exceedingly dangerous, he said, for Thomas to return to Canterbury without the kiss.
Vivian cast the blame on Henry alone. After talking again privately to him outside the chapel and pressing him to redeem a pledge he had earlier given him to avoid last-minute obstacles, the envoy left the scene telling anyone who would listen that he could scarcely recall ever seeing or hearing anyone who broke so many promises. ‘In the sum of my experience,’ he said, ‘that king lives and speaks more falsely than any other mortal man, so that he should be hateful to God and man.’
Since dusk was falling and the two kings had agreed to lodge at Mantes, some thirty miles north-west of Paris, the conference ended with no date set for a resumption of talks. With a long night’s journey still before him, Henry cursed Thomas again and again while mounting his horse, ‘reckoning up and recapitulating the labours, vexations and distresses he had caused him’. As to Becket, he was finally poised to lay an interdict on England, perhaps even to excommunicate Henry if he did not repent, as it seems he had once planned to do at Vézelay before John of Salisbury’s entreaties and the king’s sudden illness had dissuaded him.
And this time, Pope Alexander was likely to take his side. In fact, the pope, his patience tested beyond endurance by Henry’s tricks and excuses, threw aside caution and went much further than he ever had before, instructing two specially-commissioned legates, Archbishop Rotrou of Rouen and Bishop Bernard of Nevers, that if Henry persisted in his contumacy, they were to impose a general interdict on his continental lands in concert with one laid on England by Thomas. Only if the king recanted and agreed to implement the peace he had offered at Montmartre before snatching it away, sealing it with the kiss of peace regardless of any oath he claimed to have taken, would the interdict be withheld. Nor was this the end of the matter, since even if Henry yielded he was to be required, after a suitable interval had elapsed to spare his honour, to ‘abrogate entirely all those evil customs, and especially the ordinances that he has recently added which are contrary to his salvation and the liberty of the Church’. Should he refuse, both Thomas and the legates were to inform the pope, who would himself decide on what further sanctions should be imposed. The only olive branch Alexander held out to the king was that, in return, Becket had to grovel, humbling himself in word and deed to a degree he never had before, ‘saving only the liberty of the Church and the danger to himself and his companions’.
At last, then, it seemed as if Henry’s attacks on the Church and the archbishop would be bridled. Thomas, who since his expulsion from Pontigny had begun to despair that he would ever return to Canterbury, relished the prospect, but was painfully aware that the battle was still far from won. On the contrary, as he advised Bishop Bernard, one of the newly-commissioned legates, ‘you will have to fight against beasts’. For John of Salisbury had all along been right: courtiers were sly, slippery, treacherous, lawless flatterers ‘who lull virtue to sleep’. And the ruler of the ‘beasts’ was the lion-king Henry, seeking whomsoever he could devour: a ‘monster’, a ‘tyrant’, whose lies and deceits, smooth-talking and false promises, were as vile as robbery or fraud. ‘Whatever he says and whatever appearance he assumes,’ warned Thomas, ‘both he and all who belong to him should be suspect, considered full of lies, unless their plain and open actions demonstrate their honesty.’
With the thunder of Henry’s antipapal ordinances reverberating in his ears, Becket’s struggle with the king had become for him a cosmic battle between the forces of good and evil, ‘justice’ and ‘tyranny’, akin to a crusade against an infidel: for he was beginning to wonder whether Henry, in his headlong rush to defeat and destroy his once-loved former chancellor and now despised archbishop, would next dare to defy even God.