After the failure of the conference at Montmartre, the pace of events markedly quickened. Without further delay, Becket reaffirmed all of his Clairvaux sentences, adding five more names to the list, including John of Oxford, Ralph of Llandaff and Geoffrey Ridel, whose influence he judged to be especially malign. He also gave the king an ultimatum, saying that unless he restored peace to the Church by the Feast of the Purification of the Blessed Virgin (2 February 1170), then a general interdict would be laid on England and Henry himself – ‘as we have spared him until now at the risk of our salvation’ – excommunicated.
In reply, Henry appealed to the pope – not without some success, since by deceitfully pretending to be willing to submit the entire dispute to Alexander’s decree, he secured a temporary postponement of the interdict. Meanwhile, all his efforts were put into making immediate preparations to return with his whole court to England to engineer Prince Henry’s coronation. Craftily throwing up a smokescreen that would fool his critics for months, he professed his ardour to accompany King Louis and the archbishop of Tyre on a crusade, suggesting Easter 1171 as the date when he would embark for the Middle East. ‘To lend greater colour to his crusading zeal,’ says John of Salisbury, who saw through this charade from the outset, he made it known that he had ‘set aside all complaints [and] all anger and animosity against the archbishop of Canterbury and his followers’.
Henry knew that to crush Becket decisively after Frederick Barbarossa and his German allies had so conspicuously failed him, he needed to persuade Louis to withdraw his protection from the exiles, which meant implementing the terms of the dynastic settlement agreed in principle at Montmirail. During the mission of Vivian and Gratian, the Angevin king had unsuccessfully sought Alexander’s consent to have his son crowned by a hand other than Becket’s in order to fulfil his bargain with the French. Now, in his eagerness to satisfy Louis before an interdict came into force, he meant to ignore the pope and have the coronation performed by Roger of Pont l’Évêque, the archbishop of York, relying on one or other of the papal licences he had obtained to crown his son during the vacancy at Canterbury in 1161.
Although Henry did not doubt that a majority of the English bishops would refuse to usurp the primate’s right to crown the heir to the throne, he also knew that Gilbert Foliot and Jocelin of Salisbury, both excommunicated at Clairvaux, would rally to his side if they could secure their absolution from Becket’s sentences quickly enough. Foliot, in particular, saw his role in the coronation as the way to recover his special influence with the king. With his hated rival beginning to occupy the high moral ground in Pope Alexander’s eyes, Foliot was feeling vulnerable, since his claim to metropolitan jurisdiction for the diocese of London had fallen on deaf ears.
While Henry made ready to cross the Channel, chartering ships and summoning the barons to attend him in a great council to be held at Windsor at Easter, Foliot, therefore, wound his way over the Alpine passes to petition Alexander to absolve him. He had tried to prepare the ground by sending his clerk, Master David, on ahead to plead his cause. Foliot was lucky: he met Master David by chance in Milan, finding him already on his way home from Benevento after successfully obtaining a decree addressed to the legates, Rotrou of Rouen and Bernard of Nevers, which granted his request. He was indeed absolved. So too was Jocelin of Salisbury after Reginald, his son, the rising diplomat, pleaded for him personally at the feet of the pope.
Timing was critical: both requests were made just as Alexander was preoccupied with accepting an invitation from the leaders of the Lombard League opposed to the schismatic Frederick to move back to the Roman Campania, closer to Rome itself. It seems that the pope and cardinals were too busy packing their luggage to consider the wider consequences of absolving the English excommunicates. Realizing within days that a serious blunder had been made, Alexander tried to countermand his mandates, but was too late.
Incensed and distraught over the absolutions, which he viewed as tantamount to yet another revocation of his disciplinary powers, Becket sent a blistering rebuke to the papal curia, tetchily accusing Alexander of rehabilitating men who were nothing more than unrepentant criminals. ‘Those loyal to you,’ he scolded the pope in Latin prose made more pungent still with John of Salisbury’s help, ‘had advised you from the outset that the English king could more easily be defeated by a certain degree of severity, but never mollified by any mildness, services or favours.’ Exonerating Foliot, he continued, was a scandal, since he was a devil incarnate, an unbound Satan, ‘the author of all these wickednesses’ who had first tempted his episcopal colleagues into appealing against the Vézelay sentences and now rejoiced in his ability to defeat justice and render innocence captive. ‘I do not know,’ Thomas railed, his emotions surging within him like an erupting volcano, ‘by what compact the Lord’s party is always slain in the curia, so that Barabbas may escape and Christ be killed.’
Becket then vented his scorn on a faithful friend, Cardinal Albert de Morra, his old law teacher from Bologna, who – since he worked in the papal chancery – suddenly came into his line of fire. ‘The exiles,’ Thomas mocked sarcastically, ‘are condemned before you for no other reason … except that they are Christ’s poor and weak, and refuse to withdraw from God’s justice. On the other side, the sacrilegious and the murderers, the robbers and the impenitent, are absolved.’ And in an impassioned avowal, he professed himself willing to suffer martyrdom for the Church’s sake: ‘God knows and he must judge, but we are prepared to die for her … By God’s favour, I shall never withdraw from fidelity to the Church, neither in life nor in death.’
How serious he was is difficult to assess. He had scarcely spoken this way since confronting Henry on horseback outside the walls of Northampton in October 1163 after their first chilling clash at the Council of Westminster. Then, he was reacting to Henry’s swipe against his lowly ancestry – ‘Are you not the son of one of my villeins?’ – when, assuming his words were accurately reported, he spoke in the heat of the moment. Now, however, bitterly frustrated and disorientated after almost six long years of kaleidoscopic but futile diplomacy, he came to wonder whether only through martyrdom might his cause be judged on its merits, with the politics stripped away. As St Cyprian, a handsome volume of whose collected letters he had acquired at Pontigny, had many times written, it was a Christian’s duty boldly to resist the heathen magistrate in the cause of faith. If that led him into martyrdom, he must accept the obligation, showing confidence, fortitude and constancy. He should not fear to be killed.
Henry returned to English shores at Portsmouth on 3 March 1170, after a perilous crossing in which some of his ships were wrecked and his personal physician and up to 400 others drowned. Determined not to lose a minute once his barons had met in council, he gave the orders for his son’s coronation, which was celebrated in his presence and that of his whole court and the citizens of London at Westminster Abbey on Sunday 14 June. First Prince Henry, now turned fifteen, was knighted by his father, then crowned and anointed by Roger of Pont l’Évêque, assisted by Gilbert Foliot and Jocelin of Salisbury. Henry of Winchester, William of Norwich and Bartholomew of Exeter were among those choosing to boycott the event.
So eager would Henry be to crown his son before papal or archiepiscopal prohibitions arrived, he closed the ports, forbade anyone he suspected of colluding with the exiles, such as Roger of Worcester, from crossing the Channel, and put Eleanor and Richard de Humez in charge of an aggressive purge of dissidents, a move suggesting that his wife was as keen as he was to suppress any opposition to their son’s coronation. Amid all the commotion, his daughter-in-law, Princess Margaret, was entirely forgotten. Although she and her female attendants were furnished with expensive coronation robes paid for by the London citizens, they would not be worn. Left kicking her heels at Caen instead of riding in procession to the abbey with her husband, she angrily complained to her father, who raged furiously at the insult.
As it happened, Thomas beat the embargo, choosing as his trusted courier the nun Mary of Blois, former abbess of Romsey and King Stephen’s daughter, whom in 1160, while chancellor, he had unsuccessfully tried to save from the scandalous marriage Henry had arranged for her to Matthew of Flanders. After several years (and two daughters) the marriage had been dissolved, allowing Mary to return to her convent. A royal princess could safely slip through the blockade and, using the code-name ‘Idonea’ (‘the most suitable one’), Mary served copies of decrees from Pope Alexander forbidding a coronation – unless Becket presided – on both Roger of Pont l’Évêque and Gilbert Foliot. The documents were safely delivered but their recipients chose to ignore them. John of Salisbury’s response was to advise Becket to make an immediate appeal to the pope.
With his son and heir crowned and deputed to govern England with the assistance of Richard de Lucy, who was now appointed justiciar (or chief judicial official), following Robert de Beaumont’s death two years before, the elder Henry returned to Normandy to find Alexander’s special legates, Rotrou of Rouen and Bernard of Nevers, waiting for him. Reinforced by Archbishop William of Sens, a trusted confidant of King Louis and one of Becket’s supporters, whom the pope had appointed to be ‘papal legate for France’, they were armed with fresh and peremptory papal instructions to impose a peace on similar terms to those agreed by Becket at Montmartre – whether Henry liked it or not. By this time the papal curia had resettled itself in the Campania, perambulating between such hill-top towns as Veroli, Ferentino, Segni and Anagni, where earlier popes had traditionally kept their summer residences. Believing himself to be more secure than at any point since his election, Alexander had given his legates the power to place interdicts on all Henry’s lands; any bishop not observing them would be suspended or excommunicated. In a brisk concluding paragraph, the pope even threatened that if Henry failed to put the peace terms into effect within forty days, he would personally excommunicate him.
Armed to the teeth with their papal mandates and abandoning their ‘ant-like’ crawl in dealing with the king (as Becket’s old secretary, Master Ernulf, put it), the legates flung themselves into action, proclaiming a general interdict on Henry’s continental lands, beginning with Aquitaine, while Thomas composed fiery letters addressed to Gilbert Foliot, Roger of Pont l’Évêque and others, laying another on England.
Becket’s letters of interdict may never have been sent, but that was only because they were not needed. He had been right all along: the mere prospect of interdicts with teeth was enough to bring Henry to the negotiating table. So after consultations with King Louis and separate preliminary discussions between the legates and Henry at Falaise in late June, and between the legates and Becket at Sens on 16 July, it was agreed that a final peace conference lasting three days would be held on the frontier, beginning on Monday 20 July. Fréteval was the place chosen, an impregnable castle with a circular central keep, the outer bailey protected by earthworks and a deep ditch, the inner bailey by an exterior polygonal wall flanked by five towers itself enclosing a circular interior wall flanked by two, set on a narrow spur of high ground guarding the road from Châteaudun to Vendôme in Touraine and dominating the valley of the Loir (a tributary of the Loire). The arrangement was that Thomas would come there to receive Henry’s peace on the third and final day, the festival of St Mary Magdalene.
Typically, Henry would outmanoeuvre the papal legates even before the conference itself opened. He would prevail in his renewed insistence that he would never offer the kiss of peace to Becket despite the pope’s instructions to the contrary, since he had sworn never to give it and did not wish to be known as a perjurer. This was all about saving face, but realizing how momentous would be the consequences for the Church and his own followers if another attempt at reconciliation failed, Thomas agreed to dilute the preconditions he had himself proposed – that Henry should give a written statement of the peace, recorded in triplicate, which offered specific assurances concerning the release of the exiles from his enmity, the restoration of their property and the kiss of peace – and would instead concede that he should agree to a settlement without the kiss. Becket made this generous offer when Henry, who at this point was more desperate for a settlement than he had ever been before, agreed to swear on oath that by refusing the kiss he was not laying a trap for Thomas, naming William of Sens as his surety.
Three vivid, eyewitness narratives of the Fréteval conference survive, the most reliable and informative by Becket himself in the form of a memorandum to the pope; the others by Herbert of Bosham and William fitz Stephen, the latter now writing as much from the royalist viewpoint as the archbishop’s, given that he had made his peace with the king and travelled in the royal entourage.
On the opening two days of the conference, Henry parleyed at great length with Louis in the presence of the legates and afterwards in secret, seeking to assuage the French king’s anger over his daughter’s exclusion from the coronation. Fitz Stephen drew a veil over this portion of the talks, but almost certainly Henry invited Margaret to join her husband as he began a royal progress around his new kingdom of England. Possibly he offered to crown her at Westminster or Winchester at a later date. Whatever he proposed, it was the bare minimum needed to satisfy her father, who stood down his troops from the borders of the Norman Vexin. It was also enough to encourage Henry to indulge in friendly banter when he emerged outdoors, saying to Louis, ‘Tomorrow your thief shall have his peace, and have it good.’
‘By the saints of France, what thief?’ asked Louis.
‘Why, that archbishop of Canterbury of yours,’ said Henry.
‘Would that he was ours as he is yours,’ answered Louis. ‘You will have honour before God and men if you grant him a good peace, and we will be grateful to you.’
But this, says Herbert of Bosham, was only for the medieval equivalent of the cameras. As soon as the two kings went indoors again, ‘they spoke their minds’.
On the third day, once Louis had withdrawn, Henry rode from his lodgings to meet Becket. Their reconciliation, it had been agreed, should take place in the open air, midway between the towns of Fréteval and Viévy-le-Rayé, in a clearing within a forest known today as the Bois des Brûlons. Herbert described the meeting-place as a rustic Arcadia. It was only long afterwards that he discovered that, from ancient times, it had always been known by the local inhabitants as ‘Traitors’ Meadow’.
As Thomas drew close, flanked by William of Sens, Henry spurred on his horse to greet him, removing his hat as a conciliatory gesture, then after exchanging a few pleasant words with his former chancellor in William’s hearing led him aside towards a distant part of the field out of earshot, animatedly talking (as Thomas later told the pope) ‘for a long time and with such familiarity that it seemed there had never been any discord between us’.
Delighted and greatly heartened by the warmth of his reception, Becket was overcome, perhaps even totally disarmed. For it seemed as if an evil spell had suddenly been lifted. Momentarily he even found the idea of resisting Henry’s tyranny somewhat absurd since, far from reciting a litany of his grievances as a prelude to their encounter, as he had so often done before, the king quickly volunteered to restore his peace and favour to the Church and the exiles, and to return all their sequestrated property. As Thomas later gushed excitedly to the pope, ‘he did not presume even to mutter the much-vaunted customs. He required no oath from us or from any of our supporters; he conceded to us all the possessions which he had taken away from the Church.’
It had been a brilliant start, far exceeding anyone’s expectations, and when Henry even indicated that at some unspecified time in the future, after Becket had returned to England, he might – despite all he had said before – be induced to offer his archbishop the kiss of peace ‘if indeed we wished him to be pressed so far’, it may well have seemed as if nothing more needed to be said. Unable to overhear their words but seeing clearly from their body language the two men recovering something of their old chemistry, the onlookers were amazed. Many of them (and doubtless chiefly the exiles) wept unashamedly as they praised God and St Mary Magdalene for bringing about such a miracle.
The two titans were on their very best behaviour: after so many previous failures, the fundamentals of the peace had this time been all but dictated by Pope Alexander in his instructions and thrashed out before the legates in their meetings with both parties ahead of the rendezvous. Even a full list of the sequestrated Canterbury properties had now been drawn up and submitted in advance to the legates to avoid any subsequent misunderstandings.
Only one potentially explosive matter, at least on the exiles’ side, had yet to be resolved. Prince Henry’s coronation by Roger of Pont l’Évêque in violation of the rights and privileges of the church of Canterbury was, the archbishop believed, an ‘execration’ requiring immediate penance and satisfaction. Declaring that he could not overlook something so heinous, Thomas ‘chided’ the king, calling upon him to make amends, asking in particular for his permission to punish Roger and those of his own subordinates (meaning Gilbert Foliot and Jocelin of Salisbury) who, ‘in their exceedingly blind and bold ambition’, had defied the pope’s prohibition.
While Henry struggled to restrain his temper, Becket ranted against this ‘outrage’ for well over an hour, citing innumerable historical precedents of the primate’s ancient rights, culminating in an appeal to the king ‘for the love of God, for his own salvation, and for the safety of his children, to repair the damage of the grave injury done to us and to make amends for the sin of such great presumption’.
In answer, Henry deftly turned the tables, producing not (as Becket had obviously expected) the licence in favour of the archbishop of York that he had obtained during the vacancy at Canterbury – for that licence, it turned out, had been expressly revoked by the pope in 1166 – but the other, secured at the same time and held in reserve, allowing him to have his heir crowned by any bishop he wished, a grant which had included no time limit. ‘We command you,’ Alexander had then written, addressing whichever bishop Henry might choose to perform the rite of coronation, ‘that whenever the king shall request it, you shall place upon the head of his aforesaid son the crown on the authority of the apostolic see; and what therein shall be done by you we decree to remain valid and firm.’
Understandably Becket challenged the validity of this second licence, but he was struggling. He therefore, somewhat rashly, chose to attack again, throwing back Henry’s own words in his face, reminding him of one of their conversations at Rouen in 1162, around the time the king had been urging him to agree to accept the nomination for the vacant archbishopric. Then Henry had confided to him in a rare moment when he had bared his soul that he disliked Roger so much, he never wanted him to crown his son. ‘Were you not accustomed to say openly at that time,’ remembered Thomas, ‘that you would prefer your son to be beheaded rather than that this aforesaid York should place his heretic hands upon his head?’
Instantly realizing that he had gone too far, not least by casting doubt on the legality of the junior king’s coronation, Thomas retreated, reassuring Henry that it had never been his intention to undermine or disparage his son. ‘We desire his success,’ he earnestly protested, ‘and the enlargement of his renown, and we shall labour in the Lord to bring it about.’
In that case, said Henry icily, ‘if you love my son, you have a two-fold duty to do what you are bound to do. For I myself gave him to you as a son and you received him from my hand … and he loves you with such great affection that he refuses to see any of your enemies in a true light. He would certainly have destroyed them already, if he had not been prevented by the respect and fear of my name.’
As Becket nodded, recollecting with satisfaction how the young prince had begun his education in his household as chancellor, Henry resumed, on the surface maintaining his affable, familiar mood, but now layering the conversation with a subtly menacing tone. Speaking of the bishops who had crowned his son, he said, ‘I know you will avenge yourself on them even more harshly than is appropriate as soon as you have time and opportunity. I do not doubt that the church of Canterbury is the noblest church in the western world, nor do I wish her to be deprived of her right … On the other hand, to those who have betrayed you and me until now, by God’s providence I shall pay them back according to the deserts of traitors.’
At the time, Thomas took the king’s speech purely at face value. Believing he had successfully extricated himself from a tricky corner, overcome with relief and gratitude and exultant in his apparent triumph over the delinquent bishops, he dismounted from his horse and humbly prostrated himself at Henry’s feet. Bidding him to remount, Henry – who had himself dismounted – took hold of his stirrup and held it for the archbishop as he raised himself into the saddle again, while the onlookers gasped in astonishment from the opposite side of the field.
But what did Henry’s last speech really mean? Was it just his own courtiers or bishops whom he meant to punish for their bad advice, or was it also those on Becket’s side whom he believed had betrayed him? Did he not already believe in his heart that Becket was the greatest traitor in his empire?
Escorting Thomas back towards the royal tents pitched at the opposite side of the field, Henry declared in the presence of all that the old affection between him and his former chancellor had been fully restored and that their enmity had ceased. He then withdrew, ordering the Norman bishops to thrash out all outstanding points of detail with the exiles. Now the trouble set in. After first listening carefully to the advice of William of Sens and his fellow-exiles on several matters, and in particular that the vexed issue of the level of compensation payable for loss of revenues and damage to the Canterbury properties should be deferred in the interests of a speedy repatriation, Becket became overconfident. In his sheer elation at the apparent scale of his success, he began to insist that on no account would he or his followers actually cross the Channel until every single yard of sequestrated ground had been restored to them. As he later told the pope somewhat regally, ‘It is not in our mind to return to him as long as he has taken away a single yard of the Church’s land.’ So subsidiary matters that ought to have been cleared up swiftly – perhaps better handled in their entirety by advisers like Herbert of Bosham or John of Salisbury – took longer than the earlier, more critical interview with the king.
By late afternoon, when it was time for vespers, Thomas – to judge by his own account of the proceedings – had grown weary and was less psychologically in control as stress and exhilaration took their toll. The result was that, when Henry reappeared, he broke his own rules on how to handle him. When he ought to have remained silent or even simply grovelled as Pope Alexander had urged, mindful that the Angevin king should always be approached ‘with the greatest restraint and the avoidance of too much talk’, he became increasingly garrulous and condescending, ‘tossing words backwards and forwards’ (as he afterwards conceded). At a moment when he should simply have trusted to Henry’s promises of goodwill without troubling himself too much about the behaviour of the king’s cronies, he began worrying whether men like John of Oxford, Geoffrey Ridel or Ranulf de Broc, now (as he said) ‘made uneasy by the pricks of their depraved consciences’, would actively subvert the reconciliation.
Worse still, he flatly refused to restore normal relations with Henry by moving back into his old lodgings at court, as the king wished, until his crossing back to England could be arranged, saying that first he must return to France to offer his thanks to King Louis and his other benefactors. Such reticence courted scepticism about his true intentions, and sure enough, the slippery Arnulf of Lisieux stepped forward as if on cue. He proposed ‘very cunningly and urgently’ that since Henry had reconciled himself to the archbishop and his companions, then Thomas should do the same for all those courtiers whom he had previously either excommunicated or denounced as evil councillors. It was the end of a long day and Becket fell into the trap, answering that the two cases were not alike. Whereas the exiles had been deprived of their incomes and wrongfully persecuted to their great loss, he said, the king’s councillors had acted of their own free will. In any case, some of these excommunications were the pope’s, not his own, and not everyone he had censured had been excommunicated. ‘Consequently,’ he insisted, ‘the logic of law and equity forbids that there should be the same judgement for persons and cases so dissimilar.’
It was surely a disastrous mistake. As it appeared to Henry’s supporters, Becket had been far from magnanimous when presented with an opportunity to forgive and forget: he seemed to be quibbling over the small print of the peace agreement like a pettifogging lawyer, acting in less good faith than Henry. In fact, the true underlying source of his extreme caution was his sheer sense of incredulity and disbelief that a peace settlement could have been this easy, coupled with his growing sense of unease in the absence of any signals from those around the king that Henry would honour his word.
The result was that Geoffrey Ridel, whom Becket had nicknamed the ‘arch-devil’, cried out, ‘If he hates me, I’ll hate him; but if he wants to love me, I’ll love him.’ An ugly scene started to develop, requiring Henry to intervene to calm things down. Drawing Thomas quietly aside, he begged him not to pay heed to such backbiting, which he should dismiss as bait. He then declared the interview over, cleverly asking Becket for his blessing to avoid any further mention of a kiss, before mounting his horse and galloping home to the castle.
Henry had scarcely put a foot wrong at Fréteval. Desperately in need of a peace settlement to avert the threat of interdicts on his lands, he had more than satisfied Alexander’s representatives, committing himself to the idea of peace without binding himself to anything very specific other than that the sequestrated Canterbury properties would be restored and yet allowing the exiles to return to Ste-Colombe under the impression that they had won a glorious victory. Soon, they supposed, they would be on their journey home and their lands and livings would be restored to them, with the prospect of at least partial compensation for their losses in the future. The clock, they believed, was to be turned back to where it had been when Becket was elected archbishop and such shibboleths as the disputed ‘ancestral customs’ declared at Clarendon and the antipapal ordinances were to be forgotten.
Unfortunately for them, Henry never saw it this way. In his eyes, he had been forced to make a tactical retreat under pressure from the pope – that was all. He would live to fight another day and had no intention of allowing the ‘ancestral customs’ to be sidelined or rescinded. Rather than declaring that now, he simply had to wait for Becket to wrong-foot himself, for he understood his former chancellor well enough to know that as soon as he got the opportunity, he would take his revenge on the three delinquent bishops. And he was not mistaken, since directly after the interview at Fréteval, the archbishop’s servant Gunther of Winchester set out for the papal curia to seek letters authorizing another round of excommunications. The new decrees would, furthermore, be obtained – catastrophically, if almost certainly not deliberately – under false colours, since in his ignorance of what precisely had occurred at Westminster Abbey on 14 June and forced to act solely on the reports he had received from his anonymous informants, who may not themselves have been present, it appears that Thomas had told Pope Alexander that at the ceremony the junior King Henry, instead of swearing the traditional coronation oath, with its promise to defend and protect the Holy Church of God and its liberties, had at the behest of the three delinquent bishops sworn to preserve the ‘ancestral customs’ recorded in the chirograph at Clarendon, including those condemned by the pope. Although copies of Thomas’s letters to the papal curia about the coronation have not survived, Alexander’s response makes plain that Thomas had assured him that an oath ‘to preserve the evil customs’ had been used.
The conference at Fréteval was followed by a lull. Within three weeks of leaving the castle, Henry fell seriously ill with malaria at La Motte, near Domfront. Staring death in the face, he made his will, broadly confirming the territorial dispositions he had made the previous year at Montmirail. The younger Henry was to inherit England, Normandy, Maine and Anjou and was to become the guardian of his youngest brother, John. Richard, already invested as count of Poitou and living there with his mother and her uncle, was to hold Aquitaine directly from King Louis, while Geoffrey, who had received the homage of the barons of Brittany at Rennes in 1169, was to have that duchy on the same basis, not as his eldest brother’s vassal, as their father had originally planned.
Henry’s fever was so grave, rumour had it that he had died. Recovering at the end of September, he made a pilgrimage to Rocamadour in the county of Quercy in fulfilment of a vow he had taken on his sickbed. Climbing the steep steps carved into the side of the gorge above the River Alzou, a tributary of the Dordogne, to the spectacular shrine of the Virgin Mary on its ledge half-way up the cliff face, he was repeating a visit he had made in 1159 on the way to his campaign in Toulouse, when he had prayed for success in battle. By 1 October he was back with his barons at Tours. Meanwhile, the special legates were awaiting Pope Alexander’s reactions to the peace settlement, while Henry’s courtiers, with Geoffrey Ridel in the vanguard, were busily colluding with their friends and counterparts in England, wondering how best they might obstruct the return of the sequestrated Canterbury properties to the archbishop’s nominees.
After visiting King Louis in Paris and preaching a sermon on the theme of peace at the abbey of St Victor on the left bank of the Seine, close to where he had sat at the feet of his masters as a student, Becket rejoined his fellow-exiles at Sens. He quickly discovered that their mounting suspicions as to Henry’s sincerity were well founded, since at least one of the royal writs authorizing the return of the confiscated property to its rightful owners had been qualified by the proviso ‘saving the honour of my realm’.
Similar doubts were shared at the papal curia, where on first hearing the reports of the Fréteval conference brought by the archbishop’s messengers the much-maligned but still-supportive Cardinal Albert informed the exiles, ‘I thought that more had been given to you in appearance than in reality … we know that an Ethiopian cannot easily change his skin nor a leopard change his spots.’ Would he be proved right or would Henry’s brush with death make him a newly-reformed character?
Thomas was soon going to find out.