A mere five months elapsed between the conference at Fréteval and Becket’s murder. After Henry had left Rocamadour and Thomas finished saying his farewells to his French hosts, the two men met in the Loire Valley to make ready for Thomas’s return to Canterbury, beginning at Tours around 12 October 1170. For the first time in almost six years, Becket crossed the frontier into Angevin territory, but clearly all was not well. When he arrived at Tours, Henry treated him with undisguised contempt. There was no kiss of peace, the king did not visit him in his lodgings in the evening and when they did get to talk, they quarrelled over the lack of progress in restoring the Canterbury properties to the Church.
Next morning, Thomas found that orders had been given for the court to move to Amboise, fifteen miles upstream. No one had bothered, or deigned, to tell him. He caught up with Henry at Montlouis, half-way between Tours and Amboise, but when it looked as if he might accompany the king to mass in the royal chapel, the order of service was hastily changed from the liturgy for the day to the liturgy for the dead (or requiem), in which the prayer for peace is omitted and no kiss exchanged.
At Chaumont-sur-Loire the atmosphere was more relaxed. Henry and Becket talked for a long time alone, again reinvigorating something of their old familiarity, agreeing that Thomas would leave Sens for the last time in mid-November. Henry would come to meet him at Rouen, where, after paying his debts and supplying him with all that was necessary for his journey, either he or Archbishop Rotrou would accompany him across the Channel.
The two men then bade each other farewell. Henry said, ‘Go in peace. I will follow you and will meet you in Rouen or in England as soon as I can.’
‘My lord,’ answered Thomas, ‘something tells me that I now take leave of you and that in this life you will see me no more.’
‘Do you think me a traitor?’ retorted the king.
‘Far be it from you, my lord,’ replied Becket. And on this they parted.
On the road back to Ste-Colombe, Becket told Herbert of Bosham that Henry had also asked him, ‘Oh, why is it that you won’t do what I want? Because for certain, if you would, I’d put everything into your hands.’ Reflecting ruefully on the meaning of these words, he told Herbert that they had reminded him of Satan’s temptation of Christ: ‘All these things will I give you, if you will fall down and worship me.’
Henry’s next move was to issue a writ to his son, from Chinon, ordering that the exiles be reinstated in all the lands and livings that they had held three months before leaving England. But what seemed to be a reconciliatory gesture had a sting in the tail. It did not include any of the lands pillaged from the Church in King Stephen’s reign, notably Saltwood Castle, now occupied by Ranulf de Broc. Thus it was a recipe for conflict, and the fact that John of Oxford and Geoffrey Ridel appended their seals to this writ as witnesses shows that Henry was taking his advice from the ‘untamed beasts’, men determined to hold on to their spoils if they could.
From England the news was worse: increasingly menacing reports arrived from Herbert of Bosham and (later) John of Salisbury, whom Becket sent on ahead. ‘All the revenues,’ John says, ‘which could have accrued up to Christmas have been seized in the king’s name.’ The bailiffs – with the de Brocs in charge – were asset-stripping the Canterbury lands, briefly reinstating the exiles’ nominees to satisfy the letter if not the spirit of Henry’s agreement and evicting them again a few days later. John was indignant that a living of his own, worth forty marks a year, had been withheld. If that were not enough, the delinquent bishops, Roger of Pont l’Évêque, Gilbert Foliot and Jocelin of Salisbury, fearing the archbishop’s reprisals, were plotting to obstruct him in every possible way. Rumour had it that they planned to advise Henry to force him to observe the ‘ancestral customs’ before he was even allowed to set foot on English shores.
Few in England believed that Henry would honour his promises. ‘I found everything,’ John laments, ‘in confusion, quite contrary to our hopes and the good reputation and fine promises of the king.’ He says that, far from feeling at home in his own country, ‘I was (as it were) in a sort of prison.’ At least he had been warmly welcomed at Canterbury, where the citizens regarded Becket as a hero. Frustratingly, John was unable to expand on this observation to explain why popular opinion had swung so decisively against Henry: he had at once to visit his dying mother at Exeter, whom he asked Thomas to remember in his prayers. Most likely the extortions and oppressions of the de Brocs were the cause. Seeking to clear as much profit in as short a time as possible from the archbishop’s estates, they were looting his manor-houses, hoarding his grain, chopping down his trees and killing his livestock, claiming that they acted in Henry’s name and with his full consent.
Herbert of Bosham, writing to similar effect, warned Becket to delay his homecoming. The de Brocs, he said, had become dangerously violent. He dared not mention the details in a letter, but believed that before long their crimes would grow to include piracy. On hearing that Becket might soon be returning, they were patrolling the coast and had already captured one of the archbishop’s transport vessels on the high seas, looting his wine casks, massacring some of his crew and throwing the rest into dungeons.
Such dispiriting first-hand intelligence did not deflect Thomas from his purpose. As late as the end of October, he was still striving steadfastly to make his reconciliation with the king work. To his great credit, his self-control in these extremely difficult weeks is remarkable. If he made mistakes, they were to continue to insist that every single yard of lost Canterbury land had to be restored to him and naively to imagine that if he could only drive a wedge between the king and the ‘untamed beasts’ – talking to Henry as he had once done during the height of their intimacy and rebuilding their old mutual rapport – he would succeed and everything would come right in the end.
It was in exactly this spirit that he now wrote to Pope Alexander urging moderation. Despite seeking revenge on the three bishops for their role in Prince Henry’s coronation, he realized that timing would be critical. He needed, he told Alexander, the maximum flexibility. Most of all, and despite the coolness of his reception at Tours and Amboise, he wanted Henry to be given the benefit of the doubt. ‘We fear,’ he cautioned, ‘that a sharp word may inflame the tender ears of that very powerful man and impede the recently-begun peace.’
He also appealed to Henry in a similar vein, not courting martyrdom, but facing facts – voicing his credible fear that he might be thrown into prison or physically assaulted when he reached England at the hands of ruffians like the de Brocs. After first praising the king’s efforts to grant the exiles peace and security, he complained of the snail-like progress in restoring their lands, blaming Ranulf de Broc, lately overheard boasting that Becket ‘shall not long rejoice in your peace’ and threatening to murder him ‘before he can eat a whole loaf in England’. ‘Fate,’ Thomas declared, ‘is drawing me, unhappy wretch that I am, to that afflicted Church; by your licence and grace I shall return to her, perhaps to die to prevent her destruction, unless your piety deigns swiftly to offer us some other comfort.’
In his letter to the pope, Becket puts his finger on the root of the problem. Henry’s desire was that his archbishop should obey him in all things. ‘Oh, why is it,’ he had said, ‘that you won’t do what I want?’ As Thomas explained the situation to Alexander, ‘he promises that if we wait and show him our earlier devotion, he will compensate us in such manner that no just cause of complaint will remain.’ What he wanted was for Becket to admit defeat, submit to his will and promise to obey the ‘ancestral customs’ – the inference screams from the page. Only then, and not until then, would he be truly reconciled to his former chancellor and throw his weight behind the peace settlement. This was the harsh reality, and no better instance of Becket’s capacity for self-restraint, when it was really needed, can be found than when he now refrained from repeating his claim that Henry was a tyrant, instead biting his lip and praising him for his acts of ‘humanity and kindness to us’. Not always did his heart get the better of his head.
Then, in November, his hand was incalculably strengthened by the arrival of a bundle of letters from the papal curia. Pope Alexander – whose correspondence had to cross the Alps and who was still under the misapprehension that the younger King Henry had sworn an oath ‘to preserve the evil customs’ at his coronation – had sent decrees ordering the immediate excommunication and suspension of the delinquent bishops. All Thomas had to do was to deliver them. Such lesser fry as Geoffrey Ridel and his ilk, the pope left to Thomas to punish. Further decrees – some addressed to Becket, others to William of Sens and Archbishop Rotrou – re-established the archbishop of Canterbury as resident papal legate for England (as in 1166, the terms covered all of England, with the exception of jurisdiction over Roger of Pont l’Évêque and the diocese of York) and ordered fresh interdicts to be imposed on Henry’s continental lands if the Fréteval agreement did not stick. Perhaps the most dangerous decree was one, issued from Segni on 13 October, confirming Thomas’s authority to excommunicate anyone he chose apart from Henry, Eleanor and their children.
This was the breakthrough for which Thomas had waited so long. This, not Henry’s blandishments, was his fatal temptation, and with such an arsenal at his disposal, the risk was that his old impulsiveness would reassert itself. His theatrical instinct certainly did. When he rode out from Ste-Colombe on his way to rendezvous with Henry at Rouen, he wore silk clothes and was accompanied by a detachment of 100 horsemen lent by sympathetic French noblemen. But when he arrived at Rouen on the appointed day, Henry was nowhere to be found. Instead, John of Oxford, excommunicated at Vézelay and never in Becket’s eyes absolved, was there to meet him and hand over a curt note explaining that the king had gone to deal with a skirmish between his vassals and King Louis in the Auvergne.
‘How times change!’ exclaimed Thomas with a withering glance at John. ‘Once it would have been the archbishop of Canterbury’s job to provide you with a safe-conduct to England, and one considerably safer than you are offering him.’ To Archbishop Rotrou, who had kept the rendezvous out of politeness and in a purely personal capacity, he then rattled off an avalanche of questions. Why is the king not here in person? What has happened about the agreement we had? Will he not keep his word? What about the money I was promised? Have you received orders to accompany me to England?
‘Not at all,’ Rotrou replied only to the last, but since Thomas had brought his creditors with him and an embarrassing scene was fast developing as they were insisting on payment, he offered £300 from his own money to settle the debts.
On 24 November 1170, after a few days’ rest at Rouen, a distinctly crestfallen Becket rode with John of Oxford – now without a cavalry escort – towards the port of Wissant. There, while strolling along the beach, studying the weather and the tide, Milo, dean of Boulogne, came to warn him that the English coasts were being closely watched. In a shabby intrigue with the three delinquent bishops, Ranulf de Broc and his men were scouring the horizon for his ship, intending to search his baggage and seize any papal decrees, threatening to cut off his head if he as much as dared to land. To make matters worse, the three bishops meant to collude with Henry in filling five vacant bishoprics without reference to the primate – a flagrant violation of his rights – and were awaiting the arrival of a vessel to carry them over to Normandy.
Stung by such treachery, Becket decided to fire some of his weapons, sending a boy named Osbern to serve the papal decrees on the delinquent bishops. Bravely tracking them down to a church at Dover, the boy thrust their excommunications into their hands before running away and escaping into the busy marketplace.
Thomas set sail for England on 1 December, still with John of Oxford as his chaperone, dropping anchor at Sandwich after a fast, smooth, easy crossing, only to find de Broc and a gang of armed thugs scurrying towards the quayside. Boarding his ship, they rummaged through his luggage, made violent threats until John of Oxford restrained them, and ordered him to rescind his sentences on the three bishops. He replied that the excommunications were not his, but the pope’s: the conditions of his appointment as a papal legate did not allow him to absolve Roger of Pont l’Évêque, but he would absolve Gilbert Foliot and Jocelin of Salisbury if they humbly sued for pardon and swore to submit themselves to Alexander’s final judgement.
He then took the road for Canterbury, where all along the twelve-mile route he was received as a liberator and with a far greater acclaim than had ever awaited Henry. Clad in his silk robes again, he may also have been able to ride in style, since shortly after landing, he reunited himself with three magnificent warhorses he had arranged to be transported from France as a gift for his former charge, the younger Henry.
As he left Sandwich and set out through the villages and hamlets of Kent, bells rang, organs sounded, psalms, hymns and spiritual songs were sung, parishioners processed with their crosses before them, monks knelt in prayer. Such things partly reflected the usual protocol for a returning archbishop, but the de Brocs were now so unpopular for their extortions that Becket’s reception was something far more spectacular. In defiance of the elder Henry’s orders, vast crowds of commoners had turned out, young and old, tearing off their outer garments and throwing them into the road, clamouring for a blessing and hailing Thomas as ‘the father of the orphans and the judge of the widows’. ‘Blessed is he who comes in the name of the Lord,’ many of them cried. Herbert of Bosham, an eyewitness, felt that he scarcely exaggerated when he ventured a comparison with Christ’s entry into Jerusalem on Palm Sunday.
Arriving at Canterbury, Thomas found the city and cathedral bedecked as if for a major festival. William fitz Stephen, who returned to his old loyalty and position on hearing that Becket had landed, says that the citizens wore their best Sunday clothes, held a public banquet and greeted their primate in a solemn procession. Organ music and the chanting of the Christ Church monks filled the cathedral, the archbishop’s hall resounded with fanfares of trumpets, the citizens cheered. Much gratified by the manner of his reception but still extremely apprehensive for the future, Thomas preached a sermon to his monks in the cathedral chapter-house, taking as his text ‘Here we have no abiding city, but we seek one to come’.
Next day, Henry’s officers appeared, demanding that the archbishop rescind the sentences on the delinquent bishops which (they said) contravened the ‘ancestral customs’. He flatly refused, repeating the offer he had made on the previous day. The bishops then strode in and, after a further discussion, Gilbert and Jocelin came within a whisker of submitting until Roger of Pont l’Évêque overruled them, saying that they could do nothing without first consulting the king and boasting that he had more than enough money in his treasury at York to finance any number of appeals to the pope.
But the three bishops did not sail for the elder Henry’s court in Normandy without first stirring up more trouble. Seeking to cripple their hated rival for ever, they sent their ally Geoffrey Ridel to the junior king with the slanderous, inflammatory message that Becket was plotting to depose him, for which he should be declared ‘a public enemy to the king and the kingdom’. Following the spontaneous acclamation of the crowds in his favour, Thomas was to be smeared as an insurgent set on alienating the king from his people, even a rebel already raising a strong force of armed men for war.
The result was a national security alert. When a week later Thomas rode to London, the city of his birth, on the first stage of a visit to seek reconciliation with the junior Henry at Woodstock, he was ordered to return with his followers to Canterbury and forbidden to enter any more cities or towns. The aged Henry of Winchester, his consecrator and himself once a kingmaker, at whose palace at Southwark on the south bank of the Thames Becket lodged overnight, was powerless to assist him. Once again he had received a tumultuous welcome from a crowd over 3,000 strong, with bells ringing, organs playing, choirs chanting the canticle Te Deum Laudamus (‘We praise thee, O God’) and processions of commoners streaming as far as three miles out of the city to meet him. Challenging the messenger, whose instructions he did not believe really came from the same fifteen-year-old Henry he had tutored in his own household as chancellor and known so well, Thomas asked whether it was the young king’s intention to snub him. ‘I have given you your orders,’ the messenger spat back evasively.
Unconvinced and utterly incredulous that the younger king should have denied him an audience in this cold-hearted way, Thomas sent the abbot of St Albans to make a personal appeal on his behalf to the teenager, who had now reached Windsor on his way to Winchester, but the abbot was forced to deal with intermediaries and all he achieved was the restitution of the wine stolen earlier by the de Brocs. Seeking reliable information from a different source, Becket next sent his personal physician to Reginald, Earl of Cornwall, the elder king’s uncle, who had a fistula and had quietly sought his aid. Perhaps the earl was already worrying about his fate in the world to come and wanted to make his peace with the archbishop in this one? He was certainly anxious to avoid bloodshed, since when the physician was suddenly recognized although in disguise, Reginald told him to flee for his life and warn Thomas that he and John of Salisbury were in grave danger of assassination. On discovering this news, John promptly burst into tears. Thomas was more sanguine, touching his neck with the palm of his hand, saying, ‘Here, here [hic, hic] is where the knaves will get me.’
Returning to Canterbury around 18 December, three days before his fiftieth birthday, Becket found the de Brocs as firmly entrenched as ever at Saltwood Castle, with the city itself under a virtual siege from their armed gangs, who guarded the gateways and stationed themselves at key positions around the old Roman walls and along all the nearby roads. Terrorizing the entire neighbourhood with their murderous threats like a bunch of mafiosi, they had now turned to robbing the townspeople who supplied the archbishop’s provisions and to poaching his deer, kidnapping his dogs, ambushing and beating his servants, and – at the instigation of the apostate Cistercian monk Robert de Broc – one of their kinsmen cut off the tail of one of his packhorses with an axe to vaunt their cruelty.
Christmas Day fell on a Friday in 1170 and Thomas waited until then, choosing not to retaliate until he knew that his cathedral would be packed. After celebrating high mass, he mounted the steps into the pulpit, preaching a sermon in which he bravely told his audience that he had returned from exile for no other reason than to lift the yoke of servitude from their necks or to suffer death among them, adding that ‘they already had one archbishop who was a martyr, St Alphege, and that it was possible that they would shortly have another’.* His text was the passage which in the Latin Vulgate Bible reads: ‘Peace on earth towards men of goodwill.’ Far from being a promise of universal concord, as is suggested by the later translation in the King James Version, Becket interpreted the text to mean that peace would be limited to men of goodwill, allowing retribution to be unleashed against those like the de Brocs and their henchmen who continued to disobey God and the Church.
After reciting the customary prayers for the pope and the king, Thomas then excommunicated by name all those continuing to occupy the Canterbury lands unlawfully or committing violent acts, with a particular condemnation of Robert de Broc. He had previously warned them of his intentions and urged them to repent, but Robert, for one, merely laughed in his face and said that if he was to be excommunicated, he would behave like an excommunicate.
After celebrating high mass again next day, Thomas dispatched Herbert of Bosham and Alexander Llewelyn on a mission to France to inform King Louis of his belief that the Fréteval agreement had failed. In floods of tears as they received their final blessing, his two most loyal and devoted servants protested in vain that the archbishop only wanted them out of the way so that they would not get killed if someone decided to assassinate him. Next, Becket sent a chaplain and another of his clerks on a seemingly routine pastoral mission. But in their leather letter-pouch they carried a short, poignant note for William of Norwich, who – for all his weakness at the Councils of Clarendon and Northampton – had stood by Thomas during his years in exile, one of the few sympathetic bishops daring to dissociate himself publicly from Henry’s misdeeds.
‘Farewell for ever’ (semper valete), said Thomas to this old man who had expressed a heartfelt wish to see him again before he died. They would be the last words he ever wrote.
On landing at Barfleur, the three delinquent bishops had sent copies of their letters of excommunication on ahead to the elder King Henry, which caused him to bang his fists together and storm upstairs to his bedchamber, white with fury. Arriving at Bayeux on or about 21 December, they found him relaxing with his courtiers after agreeing a truce in the Auvergne. Quickly obtaining an audience, they told their version of the story, making it appear that Becket, by his sentences, had challenged the validity of the junior king’s coronation, setting out on a course of sedition and revolt with the intention of deposing him, ‘careering about the kingdom at the head of a strong force of armed men’.
Although a pack of lies from start to finish, Henry was angry enough to find the tale convincing. ‘By God’s eyes,’ he swore, ‘then I’ll be next.’ He simply could not see that the issue for Becket had never been the coronation in itself, but the usurpation of his ancient right as primate to perform the ceremony, confirmed by the pope. In Henry’s mind, the archbishop was now threatening the future of his dynasty.
‘Take counsel from your barons and knights,’ Roger of Pont l’Évêque advised. ‘It is not for us to say what should be done.’ Such phoney reticence did not, however, stop another of them, probably Gilbert Foliot, from insinuating, ‘My lord, while Thomas lives, you will have neither peace nor quiet, nor see good days.’
Henry kept his Christmas court at Bur-le-Roi, where either that day, or more likely on the morrow, he convened a great council of barons and prelates almost identical to that which had accused Becket of embezzlement and false accounting at Northampton Castle in 1164. Such was Henry’s justice – as first seen in revealing depth in the Battle Abbey case – he had no compunction about trying Becket for his life and liberty in his absence, and without even sending him a formal writ of summons commanding him to attend. He presided in court himself, and although the sources are meagre, vivid reports by Guernes of Pont-Sainte-Maxence and William fitz Stephen suggest that after denouncing Becket as an ‘evil man’ and a ‘dangerous enemy’ whom he had nurtured and rewarded as his chancellor only to see him betray him as archbishop, the king levelled a specific charge of treason, saying that Thomas had declared war on him in defiance of the peace terms agreed at Fréteval and with the malicious intent of depriving the younger Henry of his crown. And in a further litany of charges sent to the pope, Arnulf of Lisieux condemned him as the aggressor, who had damaged the Church by not tempering his excess of zeal to suit the times and breached his duty as a good pastor by not first allowing those about to be excommunicated enough time to repent.
No sooner had Henry finished speaking than Robert de Breteuil, son of Robert de Beaumont and the new earl of Leicester, a leading supporter of the junior Henry, led the attack on Becket, calling him a dangerous man who should be outlawed. The old Ingelram de Bohun, Jocelin of Salisbury’s uncle, echoed his words, saying, ‘The only way to deal with such a man is to hang him on a gibbet.’ A Breton lord, William Malvoisin, spoke next. ‘Once,’ he recalled, ‘as I was returning from Jerusalem, I passed through Rome, and while I was there, I asked my host about, among other things, the popes, and was told that a certain pope had been killed for his insolence and intolerable impudence’, possibly Lucius II, who had been felled with a stone in 1145 while leading an assault on the Capitol in an attempt to suppress a popular revolt. That, it seems, was the way to deal with troublesome priests.
Swiftly concluding the debate, Henry gave his decision, which was to send William de Mandeville, Earl of Essex, and Richard de Humez immediately across the Channel with instructions to capture Thomas with a force of knights, perhaps with the intention of holding him under house arrest, but more likely throwing him into prison.
Perhaps during these deliberations, perhaps a day or so earlier (the sources disagree or are ambiguous), Henry let slip the fatal words that led directly to Becket’s murder. Although recorded in variant versions, their force is the same. Edward Grim reports him as shouting, ‘What miserable drones and traitors have I nourished and promoted in my realm, who let their lord be treated with such shameful contempt by a low-born clerk!’ Guernes says that he cried out, ‘A man who has eaten my bread, who came to my court poor and I have raised him high – now he draws up his heel to kick me in the teeth! He has shamed my kin, shamed my realm: the grief goes to my heart, and no one has avenged me!’ The chronicler Gervase of Canterbury says that he bellowed, ‘How many cowardly, useless drones have I nourished that not even a single one is willing to avenge me of the wrongs I have suffered!’
The most famous and compelling rendition – ‘Who will rid me of this turbulent priest?’ – is apocryphal. Generally assumed to have originated with Lord Lyttelton in his History of the Life of King Henry the Second begun in 1767, these words were first used by Thomas Mortimer in the opening volume of his New History of England, published three years earlier. Inaccurate and misleading as a translation of the Latin sources, this variant also misses the crucial point that – true to form – Henry’s grudge was as much rooted in his view of his archbishop’s ingratitude and presumption as of his alleged treachery. As he had said many times before, he regarded Thomas as ‘low-born’, ‘the son of one of my villeins’. The social slur is integral to the offence. He also believed that it was only the cowardice of his own courtiers – their cowering reluctance to defy the Church – that was stopping him from silencing Becket.
Henry’s latest tantrum closely resembled an earlier one at Chinon in May 1166, when he had cried out that his barons were all traitors ‘who had neither the zeal nor the courage to rid him of a single man’. To those who did not know him well, such outbursts could easily be taken literally. Barons more familiar with his habits, like those present at Chinon, knew differently. For all their apparent incitement to murder, these were rages more like the one at Caen in 1166, when in his fulminations against Richard de Humez, Henry had torn off his hat, hurled his cloak and clothes into a distant corner of the room and pulled the silk covering off his bed before grovelling on the floor and eating straw. In such a moment of extreme fury, he could become sufficiently uncontrolled or irrational as to lose momentarily all psychological balance. He would soon pull himself round and think better of it, and yet it is easy to see how some of his lesser flunkeys might interpret his words at face value.
It was essentially just bad luck that this time there were within earshot four of Henry’s least important household knights, men thus far merely on the fringes of intimacy with the king but with ambitions to rise high and fast in his favour. Taking his latest outburst literally, they resolved to prove their valour by setting out on an enterprise of their own, seeking to ensure that their king was indeed avenged and themselves suitably rewarded. Even Henry afterwards admitted this, conceding that it was undoubtedly ‘for’ him, if not ‘by’ him that Thomas was murdered by these four knights.
Reginald fitz Urse, William de Tracy, Richard Brito and Hugh de Morville were all prominent landowners in the south-western shires of England. All had become royal servants, but at least three had had some sort of previous relationship with Becket. If fitz Stephen is to be believed, Reginald, Hugh and William had each done homage to Thomas as chancellor and sworn a mutual pact, saving only their liege loyalty to Henry. The same three too, whether personally or through their fathers, had been closely bound to King Stephen and so had been threatened after Henry’s accession – perhaps intriguingly by Becket – with the forfeiture of property that they had pillaged during the civil war. Since Richard Brito, a younger son and the least socially exalted of the four, was a satellite of either fitz Urse or de Tracy, it is clear that this group had not come together entirely by accident. But how far any of their earlier encounters with Becket had now inspired them to commit murder will never be known. Their backstories are far too murky and obscure.
The four knights slipped out of Bur-le-Roi secretly on the evening of the 26th as soon as the great council had ended. Travelling independently at high speed and sailing from different ports, they found the wind and tide in their favour and reached Saltwood Castle within two days. There they rested overnight before mustering a large force of knights and armed men with the willing assistance of the de Brocs. Riding to Canterbury, they and a small detachment of about a dozen men made their way quietly and unobtrusively through the main gateway of the archbishop’s palace into the courtyard, while others scoured the city, ordering the citizens to take up arms in the king’s name and to accompany them to the palace. But when the frightened citizens refused to cooperate, the de Brocs ordered a curfew, instructing everyone ‘to stay indoors and keep the peace, no matter what they might see or hear’. The de Brocs then stationed their crack troops in the house of a man called Gilbert opposite the gateway to the archbishop’s palace and the rest of their forces around the walls and especially at the exits of the city to ensure that no attempt could be made to launch a rescue bid – or if there was one, that no way of escape could be found from the city into the countryside and on towards the coast.
So it was that shortly before three o’clock on the afternoon of Tuesday 29 December the scene would be set for one of the most infamous events of the Middle Ages. It is not absolutely certain that all four of the knights planned to kill Becket when they first arrived, unarmed and fortified by drink, at the door of his great hall after leaving their swords in the courtyard. Edward Grim, for one, says that at first they intended simply to capture Thomas and throw him into prison. But Grim contradicts himself, agreeing with Roger of Pontigny that at least one of the knights boasted afterwards that, far from waiting until they had returned to the courtyard for their swords and bludgeoned their way into the cathedral, they would have killed Thomas with the haft of his own processional cross before leaving his great hall, if only they could have contrived to be alone with him for long enough.
Impetuous, warlike men, reckless of bloodshed and with a burning desire to prove themselves in the eyes of the king and win the highest of rewards, the four knights had ridden into Canterbury with violence on their minds. They were to leave – as de Tracy would afterwards confess and Herbert of Bosham record – spattered with blood and quaking with sheer, stark terror, afraid at every step that the earth was about to open up before them and devour their bodies alive.