CHAPTER IV

The King and the Archbishop

GILBERT BECKET was not a Norman soldier who went on the First Crusade and married a Saracen princess, as many early historians asserted, nor was he a dull Saxon merchant who sent his son Thomas to France to acquire the education and manners of a Norman, as others have contended. The truth lies between. Gilbert Becket was a London merchant of Norman birth who married a Caen woman named Rohaise and became quite wealthy. He was rich enough, in fact, to have a fine solar apartment in his house in West Chepe, containing a bed of the very new tester type, with a most convenient canopy, on top of which blankets and sheets and pillows could be stored. He owned other property within the walls and he founded a chapel in the churchyard at St. Paul’s, originally, perhaps, a chantry.

They were devout people, the Beckets, and on each birthday of her only son, Madame Rohaise made a ceremony of weighing him and then sending to the poor the equivalent of his weight in food, clothing, and money. This quickly became a costly charity, for Thomas of the Snipe grew rapidly. He kept growing until he had reached his reputed six feet, which would make him one of the tallest men in England. The handsome youth was sent to the fashionable priory of Merton and then to Oxford. Then he returned to London, where he was occupied for a few years in business, and it was during this London phase that the Archbishop of Canterbury, good old Theobald, a friend of the family, took serious notice of him. The primate had made a practice of keeping about him a circle of promising young men for service in the Church, and Thomas à Becket became immediately the one for whom the highest hopes were entertained. Believing that his prodigy needed the advantages of a legal education, Theobald sent him to Paris and Bologna, where he gained a thorough grounding in both canon and secular law. He came back a polished man of the world, a convincing talker, a diplomat of great charm, and the possessor of a keen and active mind. The archbishop now took him into his own organization, making him Archdeacon of Canterbury and provost of Beverley. A deacon’s degree sufficed for these posts, but it was understood that later he would take holy orders. Certain other benefices were given him, and he began to enjoy a quite considerable income.

His first chance to show his full capacity came when Theobald sent him to Rome on a secret mission to Pope Eugenius. Stephen was King and trying every means to have his son Eustace declared his successor. Becket’s instructions were to convince the Pope that to do this would be to perpetuate the division in England and that, apart from the political issues involved, Matilda’s son Henry gave great promise of developing into a wise ruler while Eustace gave very little. It appears that the tall young Becket handled this delicate mission with much discretion and address and succeeded in persuading Eugenius that papal influence should be thrown quietly to the Angevin succession. Young Henry did not know at the time that such skilled advocacy was being exerted in his behalf, but he heard of it later. The success of Becket’s diplomacy had something to do, of course, with the favorable impression he made on Henry at their first meeting, and it certainly was a factor in his selection for the post of chancellor.

The chancellors in the past had been members of the Curia Regis, acting in the capacity of legal advisers. They had superintended the work of the clerical staff around the King; they presided at “the trial of the pyx,” when the accuracy of new mintings was decided by a panel of London silversmiths; they were custodians of the Great Seal. The post took on a fresh importance and significance, however, from the moment that Thomas à Becket stepped into it. The era he inaugurated amazed the men about the King, accustomed to the old ways. The chancellery had been quiet enough: two guards with bared pikes at the entrance; a long and drafty hall in which churchmen were certain to be encountered, walking sedately and talking in low tones; a few open doors into small stone apartments where clerks could be seen at work; an anteroom filled with the usual sour-faced petitioners.

Becket’s staff grew so quickly that he soon had fifty-two clerks. How they were disposed of is a mystery. There had been no enlargement of the Westminster facilities when Henry I put government on a businesslike basis, nor had there been any since. It can only be assumed that in the Becket period the small stone apartments had three or four occupants instead of the customary one and that the anteroom was taken over for clerical work, driving the sour-faced petitioners to waiting in the long hall. The chancellery, as all records agree, became a hive of industry, and the chancellor himself was the busiest man there. He saw visitors without delay, sometimes walking along the line and pausing for a few words with each, disposing of their concerns fairly as well as quickly. He wrote scores of letters each day; he was always in attendance at the Curia Regis; he always had time for long consultations with the King.

Henry was delighted with the change which had come about. This hum of activity, this furious driving of quills in the hands of competent scriveners meant that the work of all the earls and sheriffs throughout the kingdom was being supervised and corrected. No corner of the country, he knew, was now unwatched. This was government as he understood it, as he wanted it.

That a new star on the political horizon had arisen was soon recognized by everyone with the results that might be expected. People went to great pains to make the acquaintance of the new chancellor. His table was frequented by the great nobles and courtiers. More and more the young men of his staff were driven to the extreme ends of the table. Thomas à Becket never sat down to meat without a large company, and he saw to it that his guests were well fed. The fancy era in cooking had begun which was to reach its peak a century later in the fantastic embellishments of the great French royal cook, Taillevent. There were carvers at the chancellor’s side tables to baste the joints with the rare spices now coming from the East and with rose water and sauces of onion and young leeks before they were carried along the tables. One writer of the day asserts that a hundred shillings was paid on one occasion by the chancellor for a dish of eels from across the Channel, but this is one of the absurd exaggerations which are often copied and believed. One hundred shillings was a very considerable amount, enough to set a man up in the fishmongering trade with warehouse and kiddles to catch fish in the Thames.

The new power in the kingdom generally appeared at table in a super-tunic of a deep wine shade which had no suggestion of the clerical about it. He wore a long gold chain around his neck and a girdle of gold links with a sapphire in the clasp. He was abstemious about food and so had plenty of opportunity to talk. His conversation was lively and diverting, and it is said that he never had a guest who failed to fall under his spell.

Henry had become so fond of his new minister that he would often drop in for supper after an afternoon’s hunting. He would ride his horse right into the hall, bring it up sharply with jingling of accouterments and stamping of hoofs, spring from the saddle, and then vault across the table, to take the seat always reserved for him beside the chancellor. He was hungry, he would boom in his deep voice, hungry for food and good talk. He would get both in as much quantity as he desired. The young King never tired of the talk of Becket, which was sometimes witty and entertaining, sometimes contentious, always wise and discerning. The supper would last well into the evening, neither the King nor the chancellor drinking much but monopolizing the conversation between them with a cross fire of question and answer, a verbal jousting with some of the impact of tipped lances; while the other guests, often men of the highest degree and the deepest pride, listened and had nothing to say but drank a great deal.

The minds of Henry and his new minister met on common ground so far as the problems of administration were concerned. But Becket had mental resources which the young King lacked and willingly conceded: a subtlety in reasoning, an ingenuity which led to unusual improvisation in ways and means. He could think of new methods of arriving at a desired result which surprised and delighted the King.

There seemed no limit to the qualifications of the merchant’s son who was now recognized as a power behind the once all-sufficient throne. When Henry took an army into the south of France to substantiate his claim as overlord of Toulouse, a most imposing army with the King of Scotland and a prince of Wales in his train, Becket led a company of seven hundred knights, organized and equipped at his own expense. There were four thousand foot soldiers in the troop, the best-trained body of men in the whole army. The semi-clerical chancellor showed himself an amazingly fine soldier, surprising everyone without a doubt. He was supreme in the tilting grounds; he led his men through the first breach in the walls; he displayed the strategic sense of a great captain. It should be added that among the seven hundred knights in his train was a certain Reginald Fitzurse, who was as Norman in appearance and temperament as his name—dark of eye and long of nose, almost passionately resolute, and with a furious temper. There is no reason to suppose that the chancellor paid any more attention to the touchy, black-a-vised Fitzurse (of whom there will be much to tell later) than to any of the rest. It is quite probable that the young knight would have remained in his service if he had not given up the chancellery for a higher post.

When it was found that Louis of France, caught off guard by the English move on Toulouse, had thrown himself into that city with a few knights only, Henry hesitated to make an attack, because on French soil the King of France was his suzerain. Becket, more realistic about it than the usually hardheaded King, contended that Louis had entered Toulouse in an obvious effort to thwart English plans. He believed the city should be stormed as first intended. For once Henry did not follow his minister’s advice and he regretted it later, for he did not accomplish what he had set out to do in this expensive southern foray.

The chancellor’s household became even more splendid after the return to England. He had kept all his clerical posts and the stipends thereof, and the funds of empty bishoprics passed through his hands. Henry, as plain and unpretentious as the shabby shoes he wore, wanted no such pomp himself, but he did not object to the way Becket displayed his wealth and importance. Sometimes he made a jest of it. One winter night they were riding together through London and passed a beggar who whined for help. Henry looked at Thomas à Becket riding a few feet behind him and most handsomely wrapped up in a cloak with ermine lining. He grinned delightedly. The poor man was in bad stead, he declared, lacking a cloak on such a night. Should not his gossip Thomas, who had many cloaks, give the beggar the one he happened to be wearing? The chancellor made a facetious reply, something to the effect that to give such a cloak to this lousy scamp would be as unfitting as to transfer the doors of Canterbury to a London spitalhouse. Henry then reached out and tried to take the cloak from his shoulders. Becket resisted. The pair of them wrestled and tussled in their saddles, roaring with delight the while. The King won, of course, and the fine cloak was handed over to the shivering and probably frightened beggar. Later Henry saw to it that a new cloak, quite as grand and sumptuous, was sent to the chancellery. How the beggar disposed of this embarrassing largesse was never discovered.

Becket’s magnificence and his sense of showmanship reached a peak when he was sent to France to negotiate a marriage between Prince Henry and Marguerite, daughter of Louis of France by his second marriage. The princess was seven at the time and the English heir a little older. The chancellor had two hundred horsemen in his train and eight wagons drawn by double teams of gaily caparisoned horses. One of the wagons was fitted up as a traveling kitchen, one as a chapel; two contained ale to be distributed wherever they went; the rest were used for the plate and the costumes of the party. There were singing boys to lead the procession, and pack horses with monkeys in the saddles, and all manner of devices to attract attention. In town and village the same question was always asked: Who was this great man making a journey in such state? They were told it was a very great and wealthy and powerful man who, nevertheless, was servant to the King of England.

Henry was delighted. He knew that such display gave Europe an appreciation of his importance. Unwilling to indulge in such capers himself, he was happy there was someone to do it so well for him.

Becket was soon on the best of terms with Louis of France, and the negotiations for the marriage were concluded without difficulty. The princess, according to the custom of the day, was to be educated in England. When she arrived in London shortly thereafter, she and the prince were placed in the chancellery so that Thomas à Becket could act as tutor to them. The heir to the throne and the stranger from France developed an affection for him which nothing could change, not even the tragic differences which developed later. The princess in particular was so attached to him that when her young husband was crowned King of England by his father while Becket was in France after his breach with Henry, she refused to be crowned at the same time because her beloved master could not officiate. She spoke continually of how understanding he had been when she first arrived, a small and very frightened girl in a strange land, and how patiently he guided her somewhat unwilling feet in the path of knowledge. His life was a continuous mystery to her, for he never seemed to have time for sleep. When he did slumber, it was not in his imposing bed but on the hard boards of the floor beside it. Here is evidence that even in his most ostentatious stage the ascetic in him was beginning to assert itself.

In the year 1162 an event occurred which was to end the amity and the perfect teaming of Henry the King and his most useful and versatile servant. Theobald died and, without a doubt, was translated to the very special share of heaven reserved for the rare men who succeed in living saintly lives in high office. A successor now had to be found.

Henry had made up his mind in this matter long before. He had followed an aggressive policy in any clash between Church and State, and Becket had never failed to range himself on the side of kingly authority. To make his chancellor archbishop as well seemed to him a shrewd stroke, assuring himself of leadership in the Church in sympathy with his own desires and designs. He lost no time in letting the merchant’s son know what was in his mind.

The King was in Normandy, and Becket had made one of his periodic visits, probably to discuss the situation created by the death of Theobald. Henry drew the chancellor aside and told him what he desired. Becket was wearing a crimson dalmatic over his shoulders, an unusually handsome garment. He laughed and extended his arm to show the pearls embroidered in the cuff.

“You would be choosing a gay dress,” he said, bending down from his great height to speak in a low tone in the King’s ear, “to figure at the head of your sober monks of Canterbury.”

When Henry pressed the matter, saying that no other appointment would suit him, the chancellor became equally serious. He shook his head doubtfully. “If you do as you say,” he declared, “you will soon hate me, my lord King, as much as you love me now.”

Henry was not to be denied. He did not seem willing to put any belief in his minister’s objections, not even when the latter said that as archbishop he would not be able to agree with the royal policy. It was firmly in the King’s mind that it would be a perfect arrangement to have Becket at the head of the Church as well as State so that he, Henry, could devote himself more to his continental possessions, where the imperial dream was taking on firmer substance all the time. If Becket had stated categorically that he would relinquish the chancellorship if made primate, the shrewd King would have declared that retention of the secular post was an indispensable consideration and that the appointment to Canterbury could not be made otherwise. That the discussion did not reach this point is proof that Becket did not so declare himself.

In any careful sifting of the little evidence which exists, in the light shed upon the character of Becket by later events, the conclusion cannot be avoided that his objections were not deep-seated. He was fascinated by the greatness offered him, for the Archbishop of Canterbury was second in the kingdom only to the King himself. Knowing the attitude he would adopt, conscious of the inflexibility of which he was capable, he found this great role not one to be rejected. Even aware that there could be one ending only to the part he intended to play, he was prepared in his heart to accept the tragic consequences. Whether from deep convictions which he had kept suppressed or a less praiseworthy desire to strut importantly on the pages of history, he raised no positive objections to the King’s will. A clear-cut statement would have ended the matter. But he did not make it.

A year passed and Henry was still in France when the matter of the appointment came up. The King sent Richard de Lucy to inform the chapter of his desire and resolve to see the chancellor chosen as successor to Theobald. The members of the chapter were stunned. It seems that the possibility of this nomination had not occurred to any of them. Becket had been a capable administrator and he was popular, although the lordliness of his ways had aroused some criticism and jealousy. But he was not in holy orders, and on all clashes of authority and policy he had stood against the Church. The leading men of the Church knew what was in the King’s mind and they were unanimously and bitterly opposed to such a selection.

The matter was debated for some days. It was whispered around that the King’s mother, the old Empress, now living quietly in Rouen and refusing fiercely to visit the land of her birth, which had rejected her, had warned her son against Becket. The meetings were held in London, and it was apparent that even the citizens were puzzled and to some degree adverse, despite the fact that the great honor was designed for one of themselves. The offices of the chancellery were being crowded to the point of suffocation by place-seekers, priests and laymen alike, who could not wait to curry favor. Becket was going methodically about his duties, seeing the visitors, of course, and smiling pleasantly—and saying nothing whatever.

It seems quite possible that the opposition of the chapter would have hardened to the point of refusal if the chancellor had expressed any objections on his part. Becket, however, continued throughout to say nothing.

Finally, therefore, “the whole Church sighing and groaning,” the will of the King prevailed. Thomas à Becket was chosen. He accepted and was quickly ordained priest. On the third day of June he was consecrated Archbishop of Canterbury by Henry of Winchester.

He thus became the first man born on English soil to fill that great post since the Conquest.

2

The Church in England, to the overlordship of which Thomas à Becket has thus been called, was at a high peak of its power and influence. It is impossible to exaggerate or overemphasize the faith which men had in the early Middle Ages. They worshiped God and His Son and the Virgin and all the saints openly and humbly. They might be guilty of violent crimes, but in the end they came back to be forgiven and eased of their burdens of sin. At no other period could the fanaticism of the Crusades have been aroused.

It is not surprising, therefore, that the tendency to monasticism became so widespread and that the bell towers of holy buildings began to dot the landscape. It is recorded that one hundred and thirteen new monasteries were built in England during the reign of Henry II, three to a year. These, unhappily, were established by foreign orders, and they were not only under the control of Norman abbots but the first quota in every instance was of Norman monks. The Gilbertines, the only order of English origin, never became either powerful or large, twenty-six houses being the total number of branches. St. Benedict, whose rule had so sensibly avoided the extremes of austerity, was responsible for most of the monasteries in England, including that of St. Martin at Battle with its high altar above the spot where Harold fell. But that very lack of severe discipline was now beginning to show the inevitable consequences in a certain sloth in field work, in gluttony, and a slackening of fervor. When the brothers sat in the chapter house, the proceedings did not always take the form of readings from the lectern or open confession, but there could be general discussion which might turn on whether the head cook would provide a pittance, an unexpected extra at a meal, such as one of his round steamed puddings, rich with suet and filled with raisins like the beady eyes of homemade dolls. When the sound of the skilla summoned them to meals it was not to partake of mixtum, bread and wine. Giraldus Cambrensis, the Welshman who was twice nominated Archbishop of St. David’s and twice was ousted in favor of royal choices, visited Canterbury on one occasion and saw sixteen courses served. The cheerful Benedictines did not wait to talk until their feet carried them out of the cloisters and into thestype, the passage leading to the cemetery, where conversation was in order; they were disposed to chat on all occasions, unlike the grim Carthusians, on whom was imposed rigorous silence.

And the Black Benedictines were very rich. They had been so well endowed and had been made the recipients of so many rich bequests in wills that they owned great tracts of lands and they collected tithes and rents and exercised feudal power over the bodies of men and women of mark and moor. An abbot’s household read like a royal establishment with chamberlain, seneschal, marshal, pander, master of horse, valet, cook, palfrey men, and porters.

Out of the Benedictines, however, there had now arisen a much more vigorous order, the Cistercians or Gray Monks, who wore habits of that color with no more than a black scapular to remind them of their derivation. As the second abbot of the parent Cistercian house at Cîteaux in France had been an Englishman, St. Stephen Harding, it was natural that the first step in expansion should be across the Channel. They initially came over in 1127 and founded an abbey at Furness. This was to prove a wonderfully fine thing for the country. The Gray Monks, who had gone back to the sterner provisions of St. Benedict’s rule, were refusing donations. They were raising simple buildings, not allowing bells to weigh more than five hundred pounds and refusing to display gold and silver in their chapels. They established the rule that a monk must be bled four times a year to keep him in bodily docility as well as spiritual humbleness. And they were great farmers, depending on what they raised from the land for their subsistence. As it fell out, they were particularly successful in the raising of sheep and the proper preparing of wool. Many of the new monasteries established in Henry’s time were Cistercian, and it was partly due to them that the barges on the Thames were so well filled with wool of the very finest quality.

A great man indeed was this Englishman, St. Stephen Harding. He was directly responsible for the sternness of the Cistercian concept and for the great growth of the order. He it was who trained a young novice of great physical beauty and purity of mind and set his feet so firmly in the path of piety that the youth became the famed St. Bernard of Clairvaux, the passionate advocate of the Third Crusade. On one early occasion when the members of the new order had nothing to eat, Stephen and one lay member went out to beg alms. The lay brother collected more than was needed, but when Stephen found that the bread had been given by a priest who had obtained his benefice by simony, he gave the food to some nearby shepherds. “God forbid that we should eat of his sin,” he declared, “and that it should be turned into the substance of our bodies.” He was the first of that long line of truly holy men who carried the title of the abbot of abbots.

The Cistercians were injecting new life into the monasterial body, but practices had grown up in the Church itself which played no small part in the growth later of Lollardism. There was, for instance, the great absurdity of sanctuary. The Church, out of a deep compassion for the unfortunate and a desire to check violence, had in the earliest days followed the Hebrew practice of setting aside certain edifices as places where fugitives could go and receive a hearing. This had become so blown up into excess by this time that no one could be taken by the law from the bounds of a church. Every innocent man had, therefore, a chance to get himself free of persecution; but also every scamp, every thief, every assassin with blood on his hands could throw off pursuit by prostrating himself before a shrine or even by the act of ringing the galilee bell. Sometimes the sanctuary seekers would “abjure the realm,” which meant their consent to exile, but this was unlikely unless their crimes were heinous enough to involve the strictest punishment. The self-made exile would be stripped by the monks and given a cloak with a cross on the shoulder, and in this garb he would be sent by the nearest route to the coast. With a few pence only in his pocket he would be shipped abroad on the first boat and dumped ashore. Mostly, however, the hunted men preferred to wait in the kind shelter of the churchly wing.

Such popular sanctuaries as St. Martin’s-in-the-Lane and Westminster Abbey itself were as much infested with refugees as the head of a beggar with lice. It was disconcerting to find men with hangdog faces sitting in the grounds, peering out from the entrances and slinking through the gloom of the chapels; most particularly startling to find in the frith-stool, which had once constituted the whole of sanctuary, some shifty-eyed rogue whose crimes had stirred the countryside, knowing that as long as he sat there the law could not touch him. Sometimes these furtive guests would be supported by relatives and food would be sent in to them. Sometimes, if they had learning, they supported themselves by copying. Frequently they would venture out at night and rob passers-by and then rush back into the zone of safety.

Although this was like a hair shirt on the back of the Church and a condition which the priests hated and deplored, they were committed to it by the tradition of compassion. They refused resolutely to surrender as much as an inch to the state, and they followed up with outraged vigor any desecration of sanctuary. It is even recorded of Hugh of Lincoln, most saintly of bishops, that he once stopped a procession taking a young thief to the gallows and, out of pity for the terror on the youth’s face, conveyed him to safety. One may sympathize with the kindly bishop, realizing that one of the foulest of earlier cruelties was to hang men for the theft of a horse or a purse or a loaf of bread, and yet concede that this was stretching priestly privilege to a dangerous point.

Sanctuary was particularly galling to Henry, who was striving to set the administration of justice in order. He had gone to the extreme of putting the nobility on a level with common men in the matter of the “frank-pledge,” by which groups of ten were formed to act in the interests of justice and to serve as pledges for each other. A system of co-operation had been established among the various counties so that the hue and cry could carry from one end of the country to the other. No man might take a stranger into his home for more than one night without becoming responsible for him. Above everything, the King was struggling to turn trial by jury into a workable system. Sanctuary, that worn-out and fantastic survival from biblical days, was a continuous thorn in the flesh of legal process.

The chantry, and the cantarists who lived on its bounty, was also reaching the proportions of a scandal. It was growing, nevertheless, out of the great depth of men’s faith which created a desire for remission of sin by every means possible. When a rich man came to die he was haunted by his sins and left money for prayers to be said for the good of his soul. If he were rich enough, he would provide a fund to pay for masses and prayers over a period of years, even sometimes in perpetuity. If the funds sufficed, a chantry would be set up for the purpose. A chapel might be added to the exterior of a church or even erected by itself, and a priest would be selected to perform the duties. Early wills left such sums as six pounds, thirteen shillings, and fourpence a year for the living of the priest, with a house and a “proper garden” for his shelter. Lesser bequests kept cantarists at work at stated intervals, and they were then called annuallers, praying before shrines in stated churches or cathedrals. As many as thirty shrines might be found in a single edifice, with priests kneeling before them at all hours, begging mercy for dead donors. It has even been asserted that the larger churches had to keep a close schedule for the use of the various shrines and to maintain daily notice boards so that chantry arrangements might not become tangled.

A chantry post was a desirable thing to a priest who had entered the Church without a sense of dedication, and great was the competition for them. There is no way of computing the number which existed at this time, but there were literally thousands of them. It became a marked evil later on, particularly during the Black Death, when the ranks of the clergy were decimated. Not even the necessities of those dreadful days could persuade some selfish cantarists to give up their well-cushioned existences.

An intellectual awakening was under way in Europe, but this early renaissance does not seem to have touched England to any extent. Such learning as existed was in the Church, and it must be said that the standard of scholarship was not high in English cloisters. There were only one hundred and fifty books in the library at Canterbury. A small theological school existed at Oxford and would grow into the great university, but English youths who desired learning were sent to France or Italy.

The indomitable pride in the power of the Church which Thomas à Becket was to display in his struggle with the King was a reflection of church policy, although he alone had the audacity to proclaim it in unqualified terms. As the bishops had been military leaders in the early days of the Norman occupation, under obligation to maintain certain armed forces, it was not surprising that a militant note was still reflected. Churchmen were as arrogant as the barons and did not hesitate to fight for what they conceived to be their rights. There was the episode in 1176 when Cardinal Hugezin arrived as papal legate. A bitter dispute arose between the two English archbishops, Richard of Canterbury and Roger of York, as to which should sit on the right hand of the man from Rome. The Yorkist pretensions so enraged the officials in Richard’s train that they knocked Roger down and jumped on his prostrate body. This, needless to state, created a great scandal, with appeals to the King and then to the Pope, and it ended in Canterbury’s paying a heavy fine.

The disregard for the Saxon people which had actuated all Normans, priest and nobleman alike, was still not entirely eradicated from church leadership. High churchmen had too small regard for the lowliest of their charges and were prone to insist on everything allowed them under canon law. They still exercised a curious privilege known as deodand, which gave to the Church the instrument of a man’s death, even if it happened to be a horse on which the continued existence of the bereaved family depended.

One cure for conditions such as these was soon to make itself felt on the Continent; but Thomas à Becket, most militant of English primates, was not to see the first glimmerings of a great reform in the Church for whose unstinted prerogatives he was to die. St. Dominic would be born in 1170 at Calaroga in Castile, and from him would come the inspiration of the Dominicans, the order of Preaching Friars. St. Francis would be born twelve years later at Assisi and would give to the world his conception of religious asceticism in the order of Black Franciscans, dedicated to the help of the poor and the sick, and to service in poverty.

But the First Franciscans were not to arrive in England until years after Becket’s death, when they would begin their magnificent ministrations in London, existing on charity and living in an unheated house in the most squalid part of London called Stinking Lane. The feminine branch of the order, known as the Poor Clares, would come still later to lend their gentle hands to nursing the poor and doing much to adjust the balance.

3

Something that was to puzzle all England and to set tongues wagging in every part of Europe was happening at Canterbury. The first intimation that the court had of it was when the new archbishop stalked into the White-Hall where Prince Henry had installed himself. The prince was now twelve years of age and as much devoted to his old tutor as ever. There also were the chief justiciar and several members of the Curia Regis. Their jaws must have dropped open in surprise at what they saw.

The once magnificent Becket, the lover of fine fabrics and silken shirts and costly jewels, was dressed in the coarsest of priestly garb. His compelling eyes looked out from under a heavy cowl, one hand clasped his breviary, his feet were in thonged sandals. The forty-four-year-old primate seemed to have aged. His face was pale, presumably from fasting.

He placed in the hands of the prince, as deputy for the King, his father, the Great Seal of England, saying briefly that his new duties made it impossible for him to continue in the office of chancellor. He asked that, with the surrender of the Seal, he be absolved at once of his former responsibilities. Having said this, he fell silent and waited, burying both of his long sensitive hands in the sleeves of his brown habit and keeping his gaze straight ahead.

All men knew that Henry’s nomination of Becket had been for the purpose of combining the offices of archbishop and chancellor. The chief justiciar frowned in perplexity. What did this hasty relinquishment of the state office mean? What curious quirk had induced this unpredictable man to garb himself thus?

A question was asked. Did his lordship of Canterbury know the King’s mind in the matter?

His lordship of Canterbury did not know the King’s mind. But he knew his own. There was finality in the clipped tones he employed, the sparse sentence in which he reaffirmed his decision. He was no longer chancellor of England.

There was nothing for the openly worried group to do but accept the Seal, give him the written quittance he demanded, and then hurry off a report to the King of this amazing development.

The old Thomas à Becket no longer existed. In his place there was a zealot, a man who fasted so often that his cheekbones had sharpened and his long nose had come to dominate his face like the beak of an eagle. He prayed continuously and with the utmost humility, tears streaming down his face as his supplicating voice went on and on. He had removed himself from the archiepiscopal regality of stained glass and rich brocaded hangings to a cold room with thirl cloth at the window and no furniture save a bare pallet. He applied the knotted cord to his own back with less sparing hand than any flagellant of guilty conscience. When he went abroad he rode a poor cob or even a Cornish pony which allowed his feet to come close to the ground. He was giving to charity twice as much as the previous incumbent, who had been a compassionate man (and remembering poor Dame Brakespeare, it is hoped!); he had established the daily habit of inviting thirteen beggars into the cathedral and washing the feet of each of them himself, then feeding them well and sending them on their way with a penny. He had given up all recreations. The best chess player in England, he no longer touched the handsome pieces which had been carved for him out of walrus tusks. He donned the imposing vestments of his office only when occasion demanded.

His table was open to visitors, and the service was still on gold and silver as the dignity of the primacy demanded. The sybaritic instinct, which had once governed his way of living, continued to manifest itself in the food he served his guests. The roast capons were well peppered and seasoned with cummin; the fish was cooked in wine and water and covered with sauces made of sage, parsley, dittany, wild thyme, and garlic. But the gaunt man at the head of the table never partook of such dishes. Mixtum was now his daily food. His conversation was no longer witty; it turned on matters of the soul. He talked with a power and sincerity which convinced all who heard him.

He fell into the habit of visiting the cloisters and conversing with the Canterbury monks. Invariably he reached the thought which filled his mind, the power and the glory of the Church. His face would take on a rapt look as he spoke of it as the manifestation of God’s rule on earth which could not be second to the sway of a king or subject to his laws. Later the monks were not surprised at the turn events took. They had read his purpose in his words and had seen in his eyes the willingness to die for what he believed. He still had the power to draw men to him and he was well loved at Canterbury.

Soon the militant archbishop bared his purpose to the world. He made a list of properties which had once belonged to the episcopal see but had been diverted to lay ownership, mostly at the time of the Conquest. The return of these lands was demanded. All the indignation that men can feel over a loss of property was in the protests of the owners, but Thomas à Becket tried the cases in his own courts and gave judgment for the return of the lands. He excommunicated Sir William Eynesford of Kent when the latter ejected a priest sent by the archbishop to a benefice controlled by the knight. The excommunication of a man was like the launching of a thunderbolt from heaven, and it seemed to everyone that the punishment in this case was much too severe for the offense; if indeed, cried the barons, it could be judged an offense at all. The news of this episode reached Henry’s court at Rouen and caused a sensation there.

Henry, amazed, shocked, enraged, came back to England to discover the reason for the sudden madness of his one-time friend. Becket met him at the boat and was coldly received. Henry refused to look at him after a glance, and the words they exchanged were few. The King was aware that he need not demand an explanation of the strange conduct of the archbishop. The reason had been apparent at once in the proudly stiff carriage and the stern eye of the former chancellor. It was to be war between them.

The King struck first. He raised the point of plural appointments and insisted that the archbishop give up everything else, including the archdeaconry of Canterbury, which was a rich plum. He was on sound ground here, and Thomas had the good sense to accept his deprivations. Then the King appointed a Norman monk named Clerambault as abbot of St. Augustine’s Monastery near Canterbury. He made the selection without a doubt because he knew it would be obnoxious to the archbishop. Clerambault was an odious scoundrel who began a campaign of annoyance by refusing to perform the act of canonical obedience by placing his hands in those of the archbishop, excusing himself on the ground that St. Augustine’s had been independent of Canterbury before the Conquest. The case was laid before Pope Alexander, who found in favor of Clerambault. Becket, bitterly enraged, had to accept the papal rebuff. This same Clerambault will be heard of later in connection with the tragic ending of the struggle between Church and State. In 1173 also some visitors from the Vatican were at St. Augustine’s and reported the abbot to be corrupt and tyrannical and the father, moreover, of twelve illegitimate children in the surrounding countryside.

Henry had not initiated the quarrel with his archbishop, but he seemed determined to fight it to a finish. He found an opportunity immediately to his hand. The Church had a vulnerable point, its refusal to allow anyone in holy or clerkly orders to be tried in state courts. The Church had its own courts, and there its servants appeared when they offended. The canonical courts were notoriously lenient. Murderers escaped with fines, thieves could count on light sentences. Only if the Church unfrocked one of its children for a misdemeanor could the King’s law step in; and never under any circumstances now did the Church allow that to happen. There was a young man named Philip de Brois, of Norman descent and of reasonably high rank, who held a canonry. He killed a man whose daughter he had debauched. It was a glaring case, and the sheriff of the county moved to take Master Philip de Brois into custody for trial. Becket whisked the man out of the clutches of the common law and lodged him in safe clerical custody. The sheriff went to the King and demanded that something be done. Henry summoned the archbishop, who declared bluntly that the culprit had made settlement with the relatives of the murdered man, who were now satisfied, and that the case would be heard in the church courts in due course. Henry, striving to be moderate, proposed that the murderer be tried by a jury composed in equal parts of churchmen and lay members. Thomas gave a reluctant consent. He need not have felt concern. The jury, swayed by the superior learning of the clerical half, brought in a verdict that the revenue from his benefices should be denied the prisoner for two years and that he should stand naked before the sheriff to be flogged at the latter’s discretion!

The verdict sent Henry into one of his rare rages. He foamed at the mouth, he rolled on the floor, he shouted and tore his hair. When he recovered his composure, he said to those around him in an ominously quiet tone, “Henceforth all is over between this man and me.”

The conduct of Becket had been creating mixed feelings throughout the country. The nobility were against him because they saw that the flouting of royal power, even in favor of divine authority, went against feudal and hereditary privilege also. The bishops at first held aloof. Roger of Pont l’Evêque, who was now Archbishop of York, had been one of Theobald’s promising young men at the same time as Becket and had never lost his feeling of jealousy over the rapid rise of his rival. Gilbert Foliot, Bishop of London, had been the choice of the chapter for the primacy before the King enforced his will, and he still smarted under the disappointment. These two dissenters, however, could not stand out against the rest of the bishops who had been caught up in the excitement and were resolved to stand by Becket’s side. There was never any doubt about the rank and file of the clergy. Humble priests gave rapturous ear to their chief’s talk of the power of the Church which elevated them above the servants of kings. The common people were for Becket. There will always be sympathy for anyone who stands out against authority, and in this case the mind of the populace had been dazzled and fascinated by the tales told of this strange man. Whenever he appeared in public, people ran at Becket’s stirrups and fought to touch the skirt of his rusty habit.

Henry now realized that he could temporize no longer. The issue must be resolved. He summoned the bishops to a council at Westminster. They met him there on the first day of October, Becket cool and unperturbed, the others openly apprehensive. The King stalked in and, without any beating around verbal bushes, demanded brusquely that in future, for the safety of the realm, the common law should be upheld, and that when clerks and priests broke the law they should pay the full penalty, even when it sent them into the hands of the executioner.

The archbishop took a firm stand also. With a bluntness equal to the King’s, he stated that the courts as well as the customs of the Church were above criticism and interference. He went on to picture the consequences if the barriers were let down which hedged the clergy in like the priestly tribe of the Levites. His final word was that churchmen in England would obey the King in all things “saving our order.”

Henry, red of face and puffing with anger, called on each bishop in turn for his answer. All but one gave the same response, even Roger of York and Foliot of London. They would obey the King saving our order. This made it clear that they had reached a concerted stand in advance. The indignation of the King mounted to such a height that the bishops left the room in a panic and set out for their respective bishoprics as fast as palfrey and mule could carry them. Characteristically enough, the King reserved the most explosive of his verbal blasts for the one weak member who had lost his courage at the last moment and had not dared parrot the response saving our order.

It is not easy to defend Becket’s refusal to clean house by seeing that priests guilty of crimes were properly punished. One point in his favor, however, has been rather generally overlooked. The function of the church courts did not stop with control of their own internal affairs. They shared with the secular branch the judicial control of the whole nation. They handled exclusively all questions of inheritance, wills, and marriage, and this constituted, apart from criminal matters, the most important arm of jurisprudence. In addition they decided all points which had to do with oaths, promises, verbal disputes. The church courts, in fact, took in more money in fees and penalties than the total revenues of the Crown. Inasmuch as learning was confined so exclusively to the clerkly orders, there was no dissatisfaction over this division, not even in the mind of the King. Becket argued that the machinery of church courts could not be disrupted as occasion demanded to pluck offenders out of the hands of the duly authorized church officers.

What was needed clearly was a thorough overhauling of the problems of divided authority. Henry saw this and proceeded at once to find a solution. Early in the following year, 1164, a conference was held at Clarendon to get these matters straightened out, attended by the peers of the realm as well as the bishops. The result was the Constitutions of Clarendon, containing sixteen articles. The most important changes made were as follows: that during the vacancy of any archbishopric, abbey, or priory of royal foundation, the revenues were to revert to the Crown; that the King’s justices were to decide which court a criminal case was to be sent to and that, when it went to the clerical half, an officer of the Crown was to attend, and further, that a clerk or priest judged guilty of a felony was no longer to enjoy the immunity of the clerkly orders; that no tenant or officer of the King was to be excommunicated without application first to the King; that high churchmen were forbidden to leave the country without royal assent; that appeals on all points should end with the King and not be sent to Rome.

These terms spelt complete defeat for Thomas à Becket. Although he had received secret instructions from Pope Alexander, who disliked him and did not want to give him support, that he must be compliant and obey the laws of the land, the primate could not stomach this sweeping aside of everything for which he had fought. Now, however, he stood alone. The bishops had repented of their boldness at Westminster. No other course being open to him, he allowed himself to be forced into a verbal promise of acceptance. Knowing the conflicting interpretations which can later be given to a verbal statement, Henry placed the document in front of the primate and demanded that he sign it there and then. This was too much.

“Never!” cried Thomas à Becket, throwing aside the pen which had been forced into his hand. “I will never do this as long as breath is in my body!”

A last effort was made to commit him to the Constitutions. A copy of the document was torn in half, one to be kept in the royal archives, one for the archbishop himself. “I take this,” he declared, “but without giving my consent or my approval.” He thereupon withdrew from the conference and shut himself up in Winchester. As punishment for his weakness in making a verbal submission, he suspended himself from his office until absolution of his sin might be received from the Pope. But Alexander, who was making his headquarters at Sens in France, was not willing to support his own servant in such an open breach with the Crown. He sent legatine powers to Henry instead! To Becket he wrote in a reproving vein, absolving him from sin and advising that he resume his duties at once.

Henry had won a complete victory. The Constitutions were put into effect at once, and the immunity of priestly lawbreakers was at an end. Assuming the new regulations to be retroactive, the officers of the Crown ferreted old offenders out of their clerical prisons and hiding places and brought them to trial before state courts. Those who had been guilty of crimes of violence were mutilated or hanged.

Thomas à Becket, betrayed by his own spiritual superior as he believed, had not given in. He would not do so until the Pope issued the customary bull confirming the Constitutions. And this was a step Alexander seemed singularly reluctant to take.

The bull was not forthcoming. Henry sent messenger after messenger to Sens to urge that it be issued. The Pope paid no attention.

Eight months passed, and in September Thomas à Becket was summoned to stand trial at Northampton Castle for contempt in having failed to appear in a case which had been withdrawn from his own court to that of the King. When he arrived at the castle he found there were no lodgings for himself and his train. They stayed that night in any unoccupied corners they could find, this being no hardship for the primate, who always slept on the floor. The next morning, emerging from mass, he encountered Henry, but there were no greetings between them. The King paused, frowned ominously, and walked on. It was then intimated to the primate that he must find quarters elsewhere, and he moved with his train to the monastery of St. Andrew on the edge of the town.

The records of the trial provide some interesting lights on legal procedure of the day. The castle of Northampton was one of the few in the kingdom large enough to accommodate the whole court or to house a meeting of Parliament. There were spacious chambers on each side of the Great Hall. In the room on the right the King assembled the members of the Curia Regis, a few important members of the baronage, and the bishops. This body proceeded to try the case without summoning the primate to appear before them. In the meantime the less important barons, the knights, and the officers from the counties were waiting in a chamber across the hall, to be summoned if the need arose. The defendant, as carefully avoided by everyone as though he had on his body the brown blotches of leprosy, stayed at the monastery, seldom stirring out from his small dark cell.

The hearing lasted for seven days. The results of the deliberations then began to show in the form of demands which were conveyed to the monastery and served on its grim, silent guest. First he was told he must pay for his contempt a fine of three hundred pounds. This was a colossal assessment, but the primate raised no objections. The next day a demand was made for the payment of sums he had expended in France during his term as chancellor. On the third day the heaviest blow of all fell, a demand that he make an accounting for all money received at the chancellery from vacant clerical posts while he was chancellor and to pay to the Crown the full amount. No man in the world, no king even, was rich enough to meet such an exaction. It was clear that an impasse had been reached and that the proceedings could lead to only one conclusion.

The King could not keep still while all this was going on. He strode up and down the Council Room, roaring at his officers when they advised caution or leniency, slapping at his heavy thigh with a riding whip. When one of the go-betweens returned, he would ask eager questions. What had the fellow said? How did he look? Did he bear on his countenance the signs of worry? “There can no longer be both of us in England!” he declared, again and again. “I as King, he as archbishop!” It was clear he was pressing his demands to force a resignation from Thomas à Becket. If these exactions were met by some miracle, he would think of others.

The primate continued to sit in his small cell. He was under as much strain as the King, but it showed only in the hollowness of his eyes. The bishops came to him, one at a time, suggesting this course, advocating that form of compromise. They were veering back to him spiritually but still lacked the courage to stand behind him. He had curt negatives for everything. To the arguments of Foliot, for whom he had contempt, he said scornfully, “Cease.… It is well known how you, being consulted, would reply!”

On the last day of the trial he went to St. Stephen’s to celebrate mass, using the psalm Princes sat and spake against me. Then, arrayed in his full vestments and carrying the heavy archiepiscopal cross in his own hands, he rode to the castle, only two of his forty attendants daring to accompany him. A great crowd of the common people gathered and followed him to the gates of the castle, shouting to him to be of good cheer and praying loudly. The noise reached the chamber where the Council sat, and Henry cried out to those about him to draw up a charge of treason against this man who was denying royal authority. The bishops, regaining a measure of their courage, refused to participate and were ordered truculently to withdraw. They changed sides of the hall, taking the chamber where the lesser nobility had stayed all these days, dicing, telling stories, cursing the obstinacy of this scurvy priest who thus kept them kicking their heels in pestilential idleness. The lesser nobles took possession of the Great Hall itself. Some stretched themselves out on the trestle tables and went to sleep.

Thomas à Becket dismounted in the courtyard and, holding the cross high in front of him, walked over the rough clay surface. There was a mist, and the tops of the towers could not be seen. A servant, more courageous than the bishops inside, dropped on a knee and begged the primate’s blessing.

Inside the screens, the archbishop stopped and looked about him. Then, with an ironic sense of the fitness of it, he crossed to the chamber where his bishops were sitting. He stood in the door and looked at each one in turn with a brooding air. The Bishop of Hereford got to his feet and offered to carry the cross which the head of the Church still held out stiffly in front of him like a standard-bearer in the van of an army. The accused man shook his head. Foliot cried out at him angrily, “If you come thus armed into court, the King will draw a still sharper sword!”

Thomas motioned him to be silent and was met with another acrimonious outburst. “Fool!” cried the Bishop of London. “Fool thou hast ever been, and from thy folly, I now see, thou wilt never depart!”

The archbishop walked to the head of the chamber and seated himself, so that he seemed to be presiding at a meeting of the prelates of England. A few of the company became uncomfortable and left. The rest pressed him to give in, earnestly and vehemently. To all of them he had one reply only, “I hear you!”

Hours passed. Supper was served in the Great Hall and the sound of rattling dishes reached them and the chamber was filled with the odor of warm food. Darkness had fallen and servants brought in tall candle-holders and placed them in the corners. The Bishop of Worcester, a bastard brother of the King, begged with increased heat that the primate give in and so put an end to all this. The answer was the same, “I hear you!”

Finally the earls of Cornwall and Leicester entered the chamber. The first named was a good friend of Becket and would remain so to the end, but when he opened his mouth to speak the archbishop cut him off impatiently.

“You come to speak of a sentence,” he said. He rose from his chair, still holding the massive cross in front of him. “Do thou first listen to me. The child may not judge his father. The King may not judge me. I will be judged only by the Pope under God and, in your presence, I make my appeal to him.” His voice rose to a higher pitch. “I forbid you, my lord, under threat of anathema, to pronounce your sentence.”

He left the chamber and crossed the Great Hall. Supper was over and the servants were moving the dismantled trestle tables back to their positions along the wall. The place was filled with well-fed men looking for something to amuse them. They were all a little drunk from their potations, and the spectacle of the erect figure crossing the space with set face roused them to action. They began to jeer, to shout insults at him, calling him “Traitor!”

The floor was covered with rushes, on top of which lay the broken evidences of the meal, bones and the heads of fish and pieces of bread. The company began to pick up handfuls from the floor and to pelt the archbishop with this refuse.

Outside the castle walls great crowds were waiting for him. They had waited all day, being deeply concerned as to what might happen to him. “See what a glorious train escorts me!” said the archbishop. “These are the poor to whom Christ so often turned!” The people followed him to the monastery, where he had the doors thrown open and food served to them.

A small party of men, English from their faces and the special intonations in their use of the Norman tongue, entered an inn at Gravelines, a port on the Norman coast. Night was falling and so the moat around the town was deep with tidal water, locking everyone in as securely as by bar and chain within its tall stone ramparts. It was a bad time for trouble of any kind, escape being out of the question, and it was clear from the manner of some of the party that they were acutely aware of this. One of them was a very tall man with deeply lined face and a commanding eye. The landlord looked at him closely, noticing that the long and sensitive hands did not busy themselves with the good food on the table. Dropping on one knee beside the tall stranger, he begged his blessing.

One of the other men demanded in an angry whisper that the landlord get to his feet at once. Did he want to attract the attention of the other guests? The man rose slowly.

“You are the good Bishop of England, my lord,” he said in a low tone. “We all know about you, my lord, and are happy you are here.”

He had guessed correctly. Thomas à Becket had ridden out of Northampton in a pelting rain after leaving the castle and had made for the coast. With no attempt at disguise except that he assumed the name of Dearman, he had crossed the Channel and was now on his way to lay his case before the Pope. All over England letters had been received by the officers of the Crown, by the wardens of ports, by the captains of ships. This notice read: Thomas, heretofore archbishop, a traitor to the King of England and a fugitive of evil intent, is to be seized and held.

The letters had been issued too late.

4

For more than seven years the Archbishop of Canterbury remained in exile. At one time the King of France would shower him with favors and promise war in his behalf, at others he would close his doors to the uncompromising primate. Pope Alexander blew hot and cold. When Becket placed the Constitutions of Clarendon in his hands, he claimed never to have seen them and flew into a rage over the rigorous clauses. Having once commanded Becket to accept them, he now censured him for having made his first verbal submission. Henry was in Normandy, where he received the cardinals the Pope sent to him in efforts to arrive at a solution of the difficulties. The King was lavishing gold in all directions in bids for support. One meeting was arranged between King and archbishop at Montmirail which came to nothing. Through it all the primate kept suspended over the head of Henry the threat of excommunication and the laying of England under an interdict.

At first Thomas lived in the Cistercian monastery at Pontigny and about him, as always, legends began to grow. It was said that in dining with the Pope he had turned water into wine twice, not intending to do so (performing miracles before the Pope would smack of insolence) but not being able to control the divine power in his hands. Two of the stories told of him became widespread.

The first was that he wore hair drawers as well as shirts and was particular to keep them in neat repair. One night he was sewing patiently and with small success in his cell. Sensing a presence in the room, he looked up and found a lady of gentle face bending over him. She took the needle and thread into her own hands, completed the task, smiled at him with compassion, and vanished. He had recognized her at the first glance as Mary, Mother of Christ.

The other story was that on an occasion when he supped at the table of the King of France, the Queen noticed that the cuffs of his tunic were tight around his wrists and that something seemed to be moving under them. She asked him about it and he became evasive, not wanting to acknowledge that the movement was made by maggots. She insisted that he open his sleeves, and when he did the maggots were transformed into pearls which rolled onto the surface of the table and glistened in the light of the candles. The Queen would have liked one as a gift from this strange holy man, but something held her back from asking. And when the pearls had been replaced in the sleeves and the cuffs had been tied as securely as before, they turned back to maggots again.

It will be noticed at once that discrepancies exist between these stories. If the exile were as particular as the first anecdote indicates, he would not allow himself to fall into the condition involved in the second; but both seem to have been accepted generally.

At one stage of this long and bitter tug of war Henry became so incensed that he told the Cistercians in England he would confiscate their lands if their order continued to harbor Thomas à Becket at Pontigny. Accordingly Becket was under the necessity of moving and he elected to live at Sens, much to the discomfiture of Alexander.

It seemed that nothing could be done to settle the differences between these two strong and violent men who had been once on such close terms. Henry would be enraged over some episode and would unbuckle his baldric, roll himself up in the coverings of his bed, screaming with anger and biting the edges of the mattress. Becket wrote letters to his enemies in England which scorched them, and he seemed ever on the point of excommunicating the King. Persons who were thus thrust outside the Church were supposed to be damned for eternity; no one was to come near them or speak to them. A curse was on their food, on the glass from which they drank, on their clothes, on their couches, on the air they expelled from their lungs. The Pope was continually restraining Becket. The King, he would say, must not be put under the ban, not at least until after the next Easter. Then it would become the Easter after that.

At the end of five years Henry reached a momentous decision in another matter. He would have his eldest son crowned King of England. For a moment the contest with Becket must be set aside to consider what this meant. On the surface it indicated this much and no more, that Henry was removing all possible doubts of the succession and so insuring the country from any of the trouble which followed the death of Henry I. Such, however, was the smallest part of what was in the King’s mind. There was no reason to anticipate opposition to his son after his own death. His position was so strong that no other claims existed. He had four healthy sons, and it was not within the range of possibility that all would die. In addition, Henry had the engrained Norman sense of possession and he would not give up willingly the brightest gem in his diadem, the kingship of England. No, his decision had a much more far-reaching implication. He wished to show that his dominions had outgrown the appellation of kingdom, that with such broad frontiers he must set up rulers under himself, his own sons: Henry in England, Normandy, and Anjou, Richard in Aquitaine, Geoffrey in Brittany, John in Ireland (alas, poor Ireland!), with himself the overlord of all; in other words, the empire of the west, with himself seated on a throne as important as that of Charlemagne. The crowning of the eldest son may be accepted as the final indication, after so many others, of the nature of the dream in Henry’s mind.

At the time that he announced the imminence of his son’s coronation, someone in his presence spoke of the King of Germany. Henry flew into a temper and cried, “Why do you diminish his dignity by calling him King instead of Emperor of the Germans?”

The decision to elevate the prince to royal rank raised a serious difficulty, for only the Archbishop of Canterbury possessed the right to crown a king of England. Henry had no intention of giving in to Becket in order to have him in England for the ceremony, and he wrote to Alexander asking papal dispensation by which the Archbishop of York might preside. The Pope obliged with the necessary authorization but, on receiving a vehement protest from Becket, changed his mind and wrote direct to Roger of York, withdrawing his consent. It was said that the second letter was not received. At any rate, the ceremony was performed and young Henry began to assume some of the responsibilities of kingship. This rather complicated affair was to prove the fuse which finally set everything ablaze.

In spite of the exile’s bitterness over what had happened, a meeting was arranged between the two enemies at a place called Fréteval. Henry surprised the archbishop by agreeing that he was to return to England to crown the young King a second time and that the differences between them would be settled. After this had been arranged the two old friends rode to one side and talked together with no one in earshot. The churchman claimed later that the essence of their secret talk was this, that Henry agreed there must be punishment for the bishops who had officiated at the first coronation. Certain it is that Thomas suddenly sprang from his saddle with a return of his old agility and knelt beside the King. Henry dismounted in turn and held the clerical stirrup while Thomas à Becket climbed back into the saddle. Many saw what had occurred, and the incident caused much excited speculation. Had a full reconciliation been brought about?

When the time came for the two men to part there was a long silence between them. Then Thomas said in a low tone, “My lord, my heart tells me that I part from you as one whom you shall see no more in this world.”

The archbishop encountered difficulties in arranging his return to England. He had been promised the restitution of his archiepiscopal estates and benefices and the immediate payment of some of the money due him. Nothing reached him, and the requests he sent to the King met with no response. Finally, after borrowing three hundred pounds to defray his expenses, he set sail from France and landed in due course on the coast of Kent.

It was the resourceful man of the chancellery days and not the uncompromising archbishop who took charge of the landing. He knew that the sheriff of Kent, Sir Randulf de Broc, had been taking the crops from Canterbury lands and had burned the stables and possessed himself of all the livestock. The sheriff was now riding up and down the coast like a raging lion, declaring that the exile would not be permitted to land alive. Becket heard also that the three bishops he planned to punish for taking part in the coronation had gathered at Dover and would try to prevent him from delivering his writs. The clever mind behind the austere brow, that resourceful mind which had once functioned so well in the King’s behest, saw a way to outwit all of them.

He sent a small sailing ship ahead of him, and a boy was put ashore. It was later said that the boy was a woman in disguise. At any rate, this innocent-appearing arrival went at once to St. Peter’s Priory, where the Archbishop of York was staying. He succeeded in placing in the hands of York the notice of his suspension and had vanished before the recipient realized what had happened. The same thing happened to the bishops of London and Salisbury, who had the notices of their excommunication pressed into their hands. The affair threw all of the Kong’s party into a panic. The blustering Randulf de Broc rode about Dover but did not succeed in finding any trace of the clever messenger.

The whole coast was now ablaze. When Thomas à Becket sailed up the river to Sandwich instead of landing at Dover, he found the townspeople out in force and ready to defend him against the armed troops of De Broc. That far from subtle servant of the King arrived in time to witness the landing of the archbishop but found his hands tied by the royal safe-conduct which the primate carried. He sat his horse and glowered at the demonstration of the citizens, marking victims for future reprisals.

Becket rode at once to Canterbury. At each foot of the way, it seemed, he was passing through kneeling throngs. Processions of chanting priests met him, showing their joy at his return. It was a triumph for the man who would not bend his back to the storm, who dared the lightning.

At Canterbury a sad disillusionment awaited him. Seven years of neglect and poverty had turned his palace into a shambles. It was partly dismantled, with the windows devoid of glass, cobwebs everywhere, the beautiful brass on the doors defaced and broken. There were no supplies in the place, and the servants were cowed by long adversity.

But he did what he could to restore order and then set out for Winchester to see his old pupil and admirer who had now been crowned Henry of England. Many men had rallied to him, a few even of the nobility, and he rode through Rochester and up to London with an escort of armed attendants, as in the old days when he had been chancellor and proud of all the display he could mount. As he approached the great city a company of three thousand priests and soldiers joined him and marched ahead to London Bridge, chanting a Te Deum. All London, it seemed, had turned out to greet him. It was a truly royal welcome such as a primate had never before been accorded. Disregarding a command which reached him to return at once to Canterbury and stop stirring up dissension, Thomas à Becket rode as far as Harrow. Here he received word that the young Henry would not see him. Bus first thought was to remain where he was until his demand for an audience had been met. Finally, however, he decided he should spend Christmas, which was fast approaching, at Canterbury. His return journey was less triumphant, but nevertheless great throngs met him at every turn, and it was clear that his popularity with the common people was at its height.

In the meantime Henry had been informed of everything. He was in Bayeux at the castle of Bur, where William of Normandy had made Harold swear his oath of allegiance. The news of the excommunication of the bishops had been followed by the arrival at Bur of the three prelates. Henry saw York but was compelled to refuse audience to the others because they were under the ban. This chagrined him beyond words, being an acknowledgment of the validity of the writs, but as King he did not feel free to break the law of the Church. When the reports came of the welcome which had been extended to the exile, he fell into a long silence. Roger of York was with him at the time and is reported to have said, “As long as Thomas lives, you will have neither good days nor peaceful kingdom nor a good life.”

The words of the prelate drove him into one of his furies. He raved and fumed and then was guilty of the greatest error of a lifetime. Raising a fist above his head, he fell into a tirade, concluding with, “What cowards have I about me that no one will deliver me from this lowborn priest!”

The fateful sentence, spoken in a moment of uncontrollable passion, had not been uttered for a purpose. Henry did not want Becket killed. Death would be a triumph for the recalcitrant archbishop; it would make him a martyr in the eyes of the world for all time. There were other ways of dealing with him. The King must have repented the words as soon as they left his tongue. He was alert enough certainly to discover that four of his train had disappeared and to demand that they be found and halted. He sent mounted riders to all the ports of Normandy with orders that none of them was to be allowed to embark for England.

The precautions taken were of no avail. The four knights had been wary and had separated. Each had succeeded in getting away on small ships. Henry threw his arms above his head in despair when he learned this. He knew that he had lost. In a fit of temper he had thrown away everything for which he had striven so long.

The first of the four knights who thus set out to remove from the King’s path the haughty primate was the same Reginald Fitzurse who had once ridden in Becket’s train, grown heavier and darker and a little more passionate with the years and wearing on his shield three bears passant. The others were Hugh de Moreville, forester of Cumberland and owner of the castle of Knaresborough, who was reported to have had a young Saxon boiled to death on a false accusation; William de Tracey, who had a great reputation for bravery but was said to be base and ferocious; and Richard le Breton.

5

It was Christmas Day. A cold day, with frost in the ground and a leaden sky. But the cold outside seemed easier to bear than the frigid atmosphere in the untended and dilapidated palace of the archbishop. There was little to eat. A shipload of supplies from France had been seized by Randulf de Broc and the crew imprisoned. A brother of his, Robert de Broc, had stopped a train with food and had mutilated a horse and a mule belonging to the see. The members of the staff were an unhappy lot. It is hard enough at any time to face danger; it is doubly taxing to face it with empty stomachs.

Before the performance of high mass Thomas à Becket preached in the chapter house, taking as his text “On earth, peace to men of good will.” So many came to hear him that they stood in the aisles and filled every inch of space from which the tall, spare figure could be seen and the passionate voice heard. But the tone of the inexorable man returned from exile had no passion in it at first. There was love and compassion only as he expounded his message. He made it clear that he knew the fate in store for him. With great emotion he referred to the death of Alfege, the primate who had been killed by the Danes, and when he said, “There will soon be another,” people laid their heads in their hands and sobbed. The backs of the monks in the choir shook with the grief which filled them.

Perhaps, as he spoke, the archbishop’s mind went back to the Christmas Day when he had first seen the King, when Henry had faced him with thumbs tucked in his belt and had smiled instant approval. Their relationship had started with mutual liking and confidence. Why had it become distorted into opposition and hate?

But if his thoughts turned back it was for a moment only. The voice of the passionate man changed. It was now raised in denunciation. For those who were not men of good will there could be no peace, there must be punishment. For the first time his listeners realized the significance of the candles burning beside the preacher. Excommunication was delivered by candle and book. A tremor of excitement and fear swept through the chapter house. What did the archbishop intend to do? Would he take the last desperate step, the final audacity, of placing the King outside the law of God? Or—and they shuddered at this possibility—would he ban by interdict all religious observances in the country and leave them to the machinations of the devil?

In a voice shaken with anger, Thomas à Becket cursed the men who had despoiled the precincts of Canterbury in his absence. He named Randulf de Broc and, raising one of the candles, he extinguished it and threw it behind him as though it were now contaminated. Next he named the other De Broc, the mutilator of animals, and a second candle was raised, blotted out, and cast aside. Finally he dealt with two church officials who were occupying incumbencies without his approval, and again candles were tossed away. “May they all be cursed,” he cried in a loud voice, “by Jesus Christ, and may their memory be lost!”

As he descended from the pulpit and walked to the high altar, he said to his cross-bearer, “One martyr, St. Alfege, you already have; another, if God will, you will have soon.”

Three days passed. On Monday, the twenty-eighth of December, the four knights arrived at Saltwood Castle, which belonged to the see of Canterbury but had been taken by Randulf de Broc. There they remained overnight, and early the next morning they rode the fifteen miles of Roman road from Lympne to Canterbury, where they stopped outside the walls at the priory of St. Augustine’s and were received by that man of bad repute, the Abbot Clerambault. From there they rode, as the twilight shadows began to fall, into the city, Randulf de Broc accompanying them, grim-faced over the action taken against him, a troop of mounted men at his back. The black looks of the party froze the people with fear. Commands were given in sharp tones: Stand back, no interference, no noise! Then Reginald Fitzurse, taking upon himself leadership, issued a definite order. All the people of Canterbury must return to their homes and stay there behind closed doors and without lights.

A meal had been served at three o’clock in the palace, not a good meal, for the household was still badly disorganized. There was no rich sauce on the fish to please the once cultivated palate of the archbishop. It did not matter. He finished his food and drank a glass or two of wine. It was a silent repast, the servants moving on tiptoe and with lowered heads. The primate as well as his servants knew of the arrival of armed men in the town. He rose from the table, his strength renewed for the ordeal ahead of him.

Dusk had now settled over the cathedral town, but only in the palace had candles been lighted. The servants were reluctant to have them, feeling there might be security in darkness. The hymn of grace over, their master repaired to his own room and seated himself on the side of the bed, where he conversed with a small group of his closest adherents, including John of Salisbury, his chaplain William Fitzstephen, and a visitor named Grim from Cambridge, a Saxon monk.

The knights reached the court before the hall, and here they dismounted and left their weapons. The outer court was crowded with the usual beggars, and the four men pushed their way through them, wearing over their chain mail long white cloaks. They were escorted to the room where the archbishop sat.

Reginald Fitzurse, in his role of leader, said, “We bring you the commands of the King.”

It was an unfortunate opening. If the King had sent commands it was unfitting that they should be delivered by messengers of such comparative unimportance. It was worse if they were assuming royal sanction for their visit. Thomas à Becket, his brow drawn into a frown, refused to look at them and, at first, to address them. It was only when Fitzurse began to recite the wrongs which the primate had heaped on the King that his one-time leader took a part in the conversation. The excommunications laid on the bishops, declared Becket, were from the Pope and had been uttered with the knowledge and consent of the King. Fitzurse was thunderstruck. “What is it you say?” demanded the knight. “Do you charge the King with treachery?”

Becket turned then and looked at his former aide. “Reginald, Reginald,” he said, “I do no such thing.”

The tone of the altercation rose to greater heat. The archbishop, unable as usual to control his high temper, became involved in sharp rebuttals to the charges they made. Fitzurse then took it upon himself to say that the King demanded the departure of the archbishop and his servants from the realm, never to return.

A silence fell on the room at that. Thomas à Becket rose to his feet. He towered over the four stocky knights in their white cloaks, making them look insignificant and as futile as schoolboys debating with their master. He spoke in even tones at first. “Never again shall I leave England.” There was no mistaking the finality of the words. “Do you think I will fly?” His voice rose suddenly in a burst of scornful laughter, then subsided again. “Not for living man, not for the King, will I fly!”

Then his voice dropped lower to a mystical note. “You cannot be more willing to kill me,” he said, “than I am to die.”

Fitzurse and his companions realized now that nothing but violence was left to them. The man who had once served under the Becket banner turned a face distorted with deep passion to the group about the primate. “We command you,” he said brusquely, “to see that this man does not escape.”

The dusk had deepened into darkness, and the knights stumbled as they left the chill of the palace and felt their way across the unlighted courtyard, now deserted, issuing a command to their men, “To arms!” The gate was closed and the armed troops poured inside, shouting, “Reaux! Reaux!” The monks threw aside their cloaks under a sycamore tree and buckled on their swords.

In the meantime two palace servants, Osbert and Algar, shut and barred the entrance to the palace hall. Then they ran frantically from door to door and window to window, bolting them against the aggressors. Thomas à Becket was left alone. He was so deeply sunk in thought that he did not hear the slamming of the shutters, otherwise he would have commanded the servants to stop. He had not moved from the rumpled bed but sat up straight, staring at the solitary candle. When seen in dim light his face always wore an aspect of singular nobility; the fire of the eyes subdued under the finely arched eyebrows, the proud and courageous nose with a generosity of bridge which suggested the soldier, the mobile lips from which the bitterness had departed. What were his thoughts as he sat there? If they were known, the enigma which was Thomas à Becket would be solved. Was he possessed of such pride that he could not recede from a position once taken and so must go on to a tragic death? Was it ambition which activated him, a determination to set himself above everyone, even the King? Was he an actor, a supremely fine one, awaiting the cue for his last great scene? Or was he possessed of such faith, such an overwhelming sense of the greatness of the God he served, that he wanted to fill the earth with voices praising Him and none else?

He was so deeply absorbed that he did not notice the cessation of the bells which had been ringing for vespers.

His people returned to the musing archbishop. They were fairly panting with fear. The knights were arming themselves. What was to be done?

Thomas à Becket, roused from his thoughts, said in an indifferent tone, “Let them arm.”

A sound of hammering and broken glass suddenly disturbed the silence of the palace. The knights, finding the doors barred against them, were breaking through the oriel window in a passage between the hall and the private apartments of the archbishop. One of the frightened servants thought of a little-used corridor which ran from the suite to the entrance of the north cloister. By going at once, they could escape into the cathedral, where vespers were now being sung and where they would be in sanctuary.

But Thomas à Becket was not concerned with safety. He preferred to wait for the armed assassins who had been sent, as he had every reason to believe, by the King. They had to take him by the arms and practically drag him to the passage. Once there, he recollected that he had intended to be present at vespers and he then did not hold back. He insisted, however, that someone return for the archiepiscopal cross, and he waited, quite oblivious to the sounds of armed invaders within the palace, until the monk Grim arrived with it. As a result he had not traversed the full distance of the north cloister when the knights issued from the palace and turned into the south passage. Even in the deepening gloom the followers of the primate could see across the garth that the invaders were driving a group of monks ahead of them and that Reginald Fitzurse was brandishing an ax over his head. This was too much. They seized their reluctant master by the arms and hurried him into the chapter house.

He was now in sanctuary, and the men with him sighed with relief, convinced that the pursuers must give up. One servant, however, tugged at the archiepiscopal sleeve and whispered that it would be wise to take refuge in the chapel of St. Blaise. This was a very small chapel above that of St. Benedict and was reached by an obscure door which would not be seen in the dark. If Thomas à Becket heard him, he paid no heed. He knew there were many safe hiding places in the blackness of the cathedral, but he had no intention of concealing himself. He crossed the chapter house and entered the lower north transept.

Pause now for a moment. The tall archbishop was walking to martyrdom for a cause which was lost centuries ago and has been abandoned long since. But this much must be said for the strange man who would die rather than yield; he had always known what the ending must be and in his last moments he was sublime.

The chanting of the monks in the Lady Chapel had stopped with an abruptness which told of panic. Word of an armed intrusion had reached them as they began the fourth psalm of vespers, and the sound died in their throats. Some did not hesitate to scatter and flee for safety, but most of them made no effort to leave, remaining motionless in their stalls behind the high arched screen, their heads lowered, their hands taut on their prayer books.

Can history present a more dramatic and terrifying moment than when Thomas à Becket walked slowly into the transept? The tall figure moved through the gloom of the great church, lighted in small areas only by the candles burning before shrines. He found his way through the pillars, the whole arched space above a void of impenetrable darkness from which faint echoes came; walking without haste, although the clang of armed feet could be heard not far behind on the stone flagging. The courageous Grim carried the cross in the lead, at the same leisurely pace of the man whose fate he expected to share.

As the primate reached the steps of the choir above which the porphyry chair of the archbishops stood (which, clearly, he hoped to attain so they would have to kill him there), his followers swung the gates to and would have locked them if their master had not rebuked them.

“The church of God,” he said sternly, “must not be made a fortress!”

His people scattered at that. Having refused this last precaution, he was lost. None wanted to share his fate save the stouthearted Grim, who still stalked ahead, maintaining the cross meticulously at the prescribed level.

Thomas à Becket had not reached the chair when the first of the knights entered heavy-footed into the choir space. The others followed and remained there for a moment, unable to see anything.

“Where is the traitor?” demanded Fitzurse in a voice which echoed from all parts of the cathedral.

No answer came. They began to fear that the man they sought had done what common sense dictated and had found refuge in the crypt or in some dark recess.

“Where is the archbishop?”

An answer came to that without any pause. “Reginald, here I am.” Thomas à Becket emerged from the shadows and walked down the steps toward them. Now they saw him clearly, and it is impossible that they could have escaped a feeling of awe and dread. His face had taken on the rapt look of martyrdom.

“Here I am,” he repeated. “No traitor, but the archbishop and priest of God. What do you want?”

Word of what was happening had passed from house to house in Canterbury. Disobeying the order to remain indoors, people poured out into the streets, saying to one another, “They will kill our kind father.” They moved in a body to the cathedral and began to rush in through the east entrance. Hugh de Moreville detached himself from his companions and ran down the broad dark aisle, waving his sword above his head and calling out in a loud voice that no one was to move a step closer. They could see little, the bewildered citizens, save the faint glow of the candles at side shrines and perhaps the lights of the Lady Chapel far ahead of them. They were aware of De Moreville, however, as he swung his sword and threatened to kill anyone who made a move forward. They were unarmed and so there was nothing they could do, although they were desperately afraid that somewhere ahead of them in the dark their patron and great friend was being done to death.

Many stories are told of what ensued in the space later called The Martyrdom. It is said that bitter taunts were exchanged, that the knights made efforts to seize the archbishop and carry him off a prisoner. It seems of little moment to recount all the conflicting details. Save these: that the first blow, delivered by the sword of De Tracey (whose shield, appropriately, carried two bars gules, as red as blood), was taken by Grim on his raised arm. It shattered the bone, and the sole remaining adherent of the doomed man fell back against the wall. The point of the sword, however, had touched the scalp of the archbishop. He took a step closer to them with blood pouring down his lofty forehead.

“I am prepared to die for Christ,” he said, “and for His Church.”

They were his last words. De Tracey’s sword smote him again. Le Breton then struck him, and he sank to the floor. De Broc stepped viciously on the neck of the wounded man and broke his skull open so that the brains were spread on the stone.

(1) A recent photograph of all that is left today of the tiny chapel at Chinon where Henry II died. These ruins are at the extreme end of the imposing remains of Chinon Castle.

(2) A recent photograph of the medieval stronghold and its many towers which still stand in Angers. The Angevins are still proud to claim that the castle was never reduced.

Pointing with the bloody end of his weapon at the inert form, De Broc said: “The traitor is dead. We may go.”

6

A Saxon monk named Godric, living the life of an anchorite where the Wear River rises in the Cumberland Hills at the far limit almost of the kingdom, knew of the death of Thomas à Becket the instant it occurred. This is the most extreme case on record, but it was amazing how quickly the news spread. A major convulsion of nature—an earthquake, a rain of forty days and forty nights, the appearance of a terrifying comet in the sky—could not have created a wider and wilder interest.

After the killers had left the cathedral and had ridden away in a sudden terror over what they had done (riding furiously with dread at their shoulders all the way to the castle of De Moreville in Cumberland, to find that the hermit Godric had already spread the word of their crime), the monks cleared the cathedral and hastily closed and locked the doors. They knew that Robert de Broc, who did not seem to share the remorse of the others, was ransacking the palace. There was nothing they could do. They waited until the insensitive brother of the brutal Randulf had broken open all the archiepiscopal coffers and taken possession of the state papers of the Church and stripped the place of costly vestments, the utensils of gold and silver, even the book; and furniture, and had left. Then they departed from the cathedral, doing nothing about the body.

Later in the night Osbert, the chamberlain, mustered up the courage to return. With slow and reluctant steps he made his way to the north transept, holding a candle above his head, starting at every sound. The body, he found, was lying on its face, the scalp hanging by no more than a piece of skin. Cutting off a bandage from his habit, Osbert bound the head with fingers which had become reverent and tender.

Other monks now followed him into the darkness of the great church. Speaking in the lowest of whispers, they decided to turn the body over. They found that the countenance of their murdered master was strangely full of peace. The eyes were closed, the lips seemed to smile, there was no more than a single streak of blood on the bridge of the nose. They stood about him in awed silence for several moments and looked down at him. All doubts they might have had about Thomas à Becket were gone.

Then, still in the most complete silence, they brought clean linen and bound up the head properly. The body was lifted and carried to the high altar, which was called the Glorious Altar of Conrad, and laid there in state. Candles were lighted around it, and a vessel was placed where it would catch the blood which still dripped from the mutilated head. No longer, then, could their grief be restrained. They stood in a circle, these men who had served under him, and not all of whom had been loyal by any means, and wept bitterly. It was a long time before they turned silently to go back to their dormitories and left Thomas à Becket to his God.

People who have been reared in the Christian faith believe in miracles, and it caused no surprise the next morning when Brother Benedict told the other Canterbury monks of a vision which had come to him as he slept. Without knowing how or why, he had found himself in the choir and had seen the archbishop rise from where he lay and stand before the altar as though to begin mass. The monk, in bewilderment and fear, had approached closer.

“My lord,” he asked in a whisper, “are you not dead?”

“I was dead,” answered Thomas à Becket, “but I have risen.”

While the monk watched in still greater confusion of mind, an invisible choir had begun to chant, and the voice of the primate had joined in with, “Arise, why sleepest thou, O Lord? Arise, and cast us not out forever.”

None doubted that what Benedict had seen had actually happened. With reverence and yet a trace of dread, they approached the altar where the body lay. A few of the candles had guttered out during the night. They blazed up again suddenly, and some of the watchers were certain that a hand not of this earth had been responsible. Some of them also declared they had seen the arm of the archbishop raised to bless them.

The good people of Canterbury had not slept. They had lived out the night in groups in their darkened houses, wondering what the assassins might do next and what sublime things might be happening where the body of the martyred man lay. When the word came from the cathedral soon after dawn that miracles had begun already, there was almost a frenzy to visit the spot and see the sacred clay. They swarmed up the aisles and gazed with awe at the calm face on the altar. Suddenly a woman, who had been so ill that she had been carried to the cathedral, cried that she was cured. She walked out with no assistance, her family following and rejoicing.

This started such a wave of fervor that no one in that large assembly seemed human. They laughed and wept, they prayed, they went down on their knees to touch pieces of cloth or handkerchiefs to the reddened stones. Many more who had been afflicted cried that they were cured.

The anti-Becket faction realized at once the danger of allowing this emotional wave to spread throughout the country, and quick steps were taken to suppress it. Sir Randulf de Broc, the perfect model of the brutal tyrant of the law, was preparing to remove the body and dispose of it before it could be given proper burial. Hearing this, the monks hastened to bury their master before the altar of St. John the Baptist in the crypt. They built a wall around it with a small opening through which the sarcophagus could be seen. Even the bloodstained hands of Randulf de Broc did not dare disturb this tomb.

When the news reached London, the Archbishop of York, who was there, went into the pulpit at St. Paul’s to declare that the death of Thomas à Becket was an act of divine punishment. The violent man of Canterbury, he cried, had perished like Pharaoh in his wickedness and pride. Other bishops followed his example, and from pulpits all over the land rang out denunciations of the dead man as a traitor. It was even demanded that his body should not be left in consecrated ground.

All this wildness and fury had no effect. The people of England had seen the hand of God in what followed the death of the archbishop, and all the fulminations of all the bishops in the land could not make them change their minds.

Miracles followed in quick succession. People came on crutches, gazed through the opening in the wall, and threw their supports away as they walked out. The miraculous power showed itself most often in the restoration of eyesight. Many blind people stood before the tomb in the crypt and went away, declaring they could see. One of these beneficiaries was a man whose eyes had been put out by the law, and this is a story which should be told.

The man in question, whose name was Aylward, had been sentenced to this most horrible of punishments because he had broken into the house of a neighbor who owed him money and had taken away goods to compensate himself. Perhaps he was a moneylender and a hard creditor. At any rate, he stood in ill repute with the people thereabouts, for they combined to swear against him. Sentence of mutilation had been pronounced and duly carried out. This had happened in Bedford, and one night Thomas à Becket appeared at the bedside of the blinded man and told him to go the next day to Bedford Church and pray to have his eyesight restored. This Aylward did and suddenly cried out in a madness of excitement that it was as the saintly primate had promised, that he could see! To prove it, he left the church alone, without hesitation or stumbling. This, as might be expected, created more of a sensation than anything which had happened up to that time; for where his eyes had once been were dark and gaping sockets, and if ever man was blind for life, it was this unfortunate redeemer of debts.

An investigation followed at once. Aylward was taken before a group made up of priests and citizens who studied his face with the greatest care. While they did this a strange thing happened. All of a sudden they turned to look at each other, to nod their heads in conviction. Each of them was convinced that the sight of the man had been restored as he had sworn! Somewhere in the unsightly folds of scar tissue, far back in the ugly sockets, something could be seen: a light, they thought, a mere pin point of light. This light was not always there, it came and went, but for that one moment at least all of them had seen it.

Aylward went on living thereabouts and declaring he could see.

It would have been impossible for those who wrote of these things at the time, and even more so for those who described them later, to make any accurate count of the miracles which were reported. They ran literally into the thousands. The power to speak and acknowledge sins was granted to dying people who had lost the use of their faculties. People appealed to the Martyr when in peril on the sea. Miracles of all kinds were performed by his blood, which had been saved in some quantity. It was given away in single drops. A receptacle containing no more than a drop would suddenly be seen to have filled, and this fluid would possess the full potency of the original. For centuries thereafter there were in existence quantities of the Water of St. Thomas, as it was called, and the power to create miracles was still in it.

While these miraculous manifestations were going on, and the whole Continent of Europe had united in belief, it remained a crime in England to say publicly that any miracle had occurred. It was at the risk of flogging or worse that a priest prayed for the soul of Thomas à Becket or mentioned his name in service. There were equal penalties for visiting the spot where he died, but in spite of this the roads were black with pilgrims. For a year no services were allowed in Canterbury.

But no official dam, no matter how strongly built or stubbornly maintained, could hold back such a flood. Within two years the evidence was so overwhelming that the Pope issued a bull of canonization, and Thomas à Becket became St. Thomas, the most appealed to, the most talked about, the most revered saint in the calendar.

Now that the sanction of Rome had been given, all doubts about the miracles ceased, all tendency to think or speak ill of him stopped. He had become so great in the eyes of men that for a time he monopolized all attention. Belief in him was manifested in unexpected ways. William of Sicily, who had married Henry’s daughter Joanna, erected a statue to the Martyr in the church of Monreale. Louis VII of France came to England to pray at the tomb of the man he had sometimes supported, sometimes neglected and opposed. He brought a gold cup and a very large diamond as gifts for the shrine of the saint. His visit was a dull excursion and without drama, which is not strange, because Louis was a dull man.

The worship of St. Thomas continued unabated for several centuries. It became the custom for people to make a pilgrimage to Canterbury to pray at the tomb of the Martyr, often donning the gown of the palmer and carrying a staff. The three roads which led into the cathedral city were never free of men, women, and children, walking to the tomb. They came from all parts of the Continent as well, and the inns thereabouts flourished on the trade of guests who spoke no English but displayed their intentions by holding up a vial or the English penny which each pilgrim was supposed to leave. It has been estimated that as many as one hundred thousand pilgrims walked to Canterbury in a single year. In 1220, in the reign of Henry III, who was a great builder (and a bitter failure as a king in every other respect), the new cathedral was finished and a shrine of unexampled beauty was erected on the spot where the archbishop had fallen.

He became to the people a symbol of everything right, a protector always looking down from the heavenly regions and ready to stand between them and aggression.

One hundred years later a weak and dangerous king was building the wharf where the Tower of London fronted on the river in order to combat the action of the tides and to provide entrances from the water. He had no other motive, as it turned out, but the people were bitterly opposed. They suspected everything he did, and it seemed to them that what he was striving to do was to turn the Tower into a great fortress with which he could overawe and control London. They were delighted, therefore, when the silt under the foundations proved too unstable to hold and the walls came tumbling down one night. The King persisted and, with the assistance of a great architect and builder named Adam de Lamburn, began again. One year later to the very day, there was a similar crash. The barbican which had been going up above the wharf toppled over into the high tidewaters swirling about the base. This could not be coincidence, said the people of London to each other. Never before had the hand of God been seen more certainly than in this destruction of the treacherous King’s work. And then a story grew out of the incident which was repeated all over the city and then all over England, and was believed by everyone.

On the night of the second crash a priest was passing and saw a figure, dressed in the robes of an archbishop and holding up a large cross, approach the masonry. There was a lack of substantiality about the figure, an unearthly glow, which told the frightened priest he was witnessing a visitation from the world of the spirit. Losing all power of motion, he remained where he was and saw the nebulous visitor approach the walls, asking in a stern voice, “What do ye here?” The cross was raised and then brought sharply down against the masonry. Instantly the walls crumbled and began to fall. There was a loud reverberation, a swirling of waters; the strange figure vanished, and so did the walls, tumbling into the eager current of the Thames.

The priest, regaining his faculties, turned and ran. To the people who came rushing out of the houses and rubbing sleepy eyes, or from the doors of taverns in obscure closes and corners where behind bolted shutters they had been defying curfew, he told what he had seen, saying that he had recognized the spirit at once. It was St. Thomas the Martyr.

The most striking evidence of the sentiment which existed throughout the Middle Ages is to be found in the burial of the Black Prince. This great warrior, who ranks in English history with Richard Coeur de Lion, died at an early age of an incurable disease, and his last days were spent in planning for his final home on earth. He wanted to be buried beside Thomas à Becket and he designed in the most minute detail the tomb he desired built for his bones. His wishes were carried out so far as the tomb was concerned, a handsome sarcophagus with the effigy of the great warrior, and the lions of England combined with the lilies of France. But it was deemed unfitting that so great a memorial should be erected in the crypt, and so it was placed instead near the site of what undoubtedly had been the Lady Chapel, where vespers were being sung on the night of the martyrdom. It is a pity that his last wishes were thus disregarded. There were points of difference between the primate and the prince but also some qualities they shared in common. They would have slept through the centuries in amity.

7

As for the four knights whose rash act of violence thus worked ill for the King they thought to serve, many legends about them have found their way into histories. They are generally supposed to have lived like lepers, that even dogs ran from them, that they could never escape the evidences of a revulsion which all nature had conceived for them. It has been most often told of them, and most generally believed, that they were summoned to Rome to receive sentences of punishment from the Pope, which took the form of going to the Holy Land to fight for the cross. Three of them are supposed to have died in Palestine and to have been buried in the church of the Templars in Jerusalem. The fourth, William de Tracey, because he had struck the first blow, was reserved for a special form of punishment. He was not permitted to reach the Holy Land because a strong wind always blew in his face and drove him back. This legend was believed even by his descendants, about whom it was written that “the Traceys have always the wind in their faces.”

The facts, of course, are quite different. Each member of the execrated group remained in seclusion for some time and was then taken back unobtrusively into the royal service. De Moreville had been suspended for the first year from his post of justiciar-itinerant in the north counties but was then reinstated. Reginald Fitzurse certainly went to Ireland with the forces of the Norman barons. He remained there, founded a family which retained the estates he had won with the sword, and became later a branch of the MacMahons. Four years after the dark events which stamped him with the brand of Cain, William de Tracey was made a justiciar in Normandy and lived out the balance of his life there. Le Breton seems to have settled down on his estates in Somersetshire.

From this it is clear that Henry did not try to escape his share of the guilt by laying it all on the shoulders of the men who had heeded his ill-considered words. As will be shown later, he was prepared to assume guilt himself and to seek expiation in his own way. However, his willingness to take the knights back into his service affords additional light on his motives and his reactions. He must have become reconciled to what they had done after the first reverberations had died down and the danger of sacerdotal lightnings had been averted. He felt an increasing relief that the primate, immovable in life, had been thus cleared from his path. Not then could the future be glimpsed, and Henry would have no realization of what this would do to his memory; how his greatness as a king would be obscured and forgotten and he would be remembered for the shoddier aspects of his life, seen against the dark curtain of one of the worst crimes in history.

8

Henry received word of the death of his uncompromising opponent at Argenteuil in Normandy. Without uttering a sound he turned and went into a seclusion which lasted for three days, seeing no one and refusing food. What his thoughts were can well be imagined. He would be under no delusions as to what this meant to him. The opinion of the world would be against him, he would be blamed and condemned, he might expect that the Pope would excommunicate him as the instigator of the murder. He would know this: in the duel he had fought with his one-time friend he had emerged the loser, even though it had been necessary for the archbishop to die in order to score a victory.

The most superficial examination of Henry’s character would leave no doubt, however, that these considerations would not occupy his thoughts to the exclusion of everything else. It has already been said that he never completely lost an affection, and it must be remembered that his friendship with Becket had been a deep one. There is every reason to believe that, as he wrestled with his conscience and his unhappiness through those three long days, regrets for the death of that strange man were often uppermost in his mind. Perhaps he would think of the many times he had ridden into the hall of the chancellery and had vaulted across the board to the seat reserved for him. It had been a stimulating relationship and it would have been continued on the same basis if he had not insisted on putting his friend into the higher post where he had ranked next to royalty. His sharp temper had often made him wish for Becket’s death, of course, but this had been no more than a phase of his sudden rages. In his sober moments he had not wanted the struggle to end in tragedy. But it had been rash and bitter words of his which had led to the murder, and he knew that nothing he could do would remove the stain.

Deeper than all would be his regrets for the dream, now shattered beyond repair. The star of empire which had always blazed above him had fallen from the sky. He could expect no acceptance of what had been in his mind now that this had happened. Sixteen words, uttered in a sudden fury, had undone all his striving and planning.

When Henry emerged from his tower room at last, he walked out on the narrow space behind the battlements of the keep. It was getting late, and he wondered why the bells of the abbey which he could see just beyond the walls of the town had not sounded compline. This set him to thinking, and he realized then that he had not heard the bells at all that day.

In a sudden panic he raced down the stairs and into the hall, where people were idling about in readiness for supper. He stopped by one of them to ask a question in an urgent whisper. Was it true, then, that the ban had been placed?

The answer was a reluctant affirmative. The Archbishop of Sens, without waiting on Rome for confirmation, had laid all Normandy under an interdict. No bells had rung, no masses had been said. All day people had been coming to the gates, white-faced, asking questions. What would happen to them? Could they no longer be married by the Church? Would there be no chance to confess their sins? Would the dying be allowed to go from the world unshriven?

Although Henry has been called irreligious, this is far from the truth. He shared the faith of all men and, in addition, he had a thorough respect for the power of the Church. The thought in his mind now would be what he might expect if he were placed under the ban himself. Would other men shun a king? Would he be hampered in carrying on the affairs of state? Would he have to sit alone as he had compelled the two bishops to do?

But a few moments of anxious reflection would suffice for Henry. With him a desperate prospect called for action. First he indulged in a large and furiously quick meal, having three days of fasting to make up for, and then he set his mind to ways of repairing this disaster, of facing the whirlwind he had unleashed. The result was that the Archbishop of Rouen, with two other high ecclesiastical officers, was sent off to Rome, where the Pope had now established himself, with explanations of the mistake which had produced the tragedy and a statement of the amends Henry was prepared to make. This done, he realized that the archbishop was an old man and would travel in slow and solemn state. Accordingly he made up another party of younger men, abbots and archdeacons, with instructions to reach Rome as fast as they could and hold matters in abeyance there until the properly authorized trio of older men put in an appearance.

It was well that he took this double precaution. The young men, reaching the Eternal City long before His Grace of Rouen, found themselves in an atmosphere of the most bitter hostility. Alexander had been so outraged that he had gone into seclusion himself for five days, in vain regrets, no doubt, for the vacillating part he had played while Thomas à Becket was alive. Now he was ready to loose the lightning of his wrath, to excommunicate Henry and lay England under an interdict. By a desperate canvass of the whole papal court, the first envoys accomplished what they had been sent to do, however; they persuaded Alexander to suspend judgment until the bishops arrived and had been heard.

When the Pontiff realized that Henry was ready to submit to penalties and also to abate some of the more objectionable clauses of the Constitutions of Clarendon, his hand was stayed. The excommunication of a monarch as powerful as Henry would have been a serious matter, and without a doubt Alexander was relieved that he need not, after all, proceed to this dangerous extreme.

It was agreed that the English King would not hold the Church in England responsible to him in points of law but would again allow appeals to Rome. Infringement of church rights previously established would cease. Henry was to take the cross and fight in Palestine or, if this should prove impossible, he would pay the cost of maintaining two hundred of the Knights Templars in the field for a period of three years. Less important stipulations were made. His son Henry would be crowned a second time in full accord with church practice, the adherents of Becket would be pardoned and left in the posts they occupied, ample compensation would be made for the years of looting at Canterbury, and funds would be provided for the sisters of the murdered man, Mary and Agnes Becket.

It will be seen from this that Henry did not throw himself entirely on the mercy of the Pope. He made concessions, but they were not sweeping enough to have satisfied Thomas à Becket had the primate been alive to pass on them. The King was too tough of fiber for unconditional surrender. He had been guilty of a series of mistakes and of a great sin, but he did not whine for pardon as his son John was to do at a later period. Henry never forgot his responsibilities as King of England.

The penance he took on himself to pay was no convenient gesture, no halfhearted effort. After his journey to Ireland, which will be dealt with in the next chapter, he came back to England for the purpose. It was at the most critical stage of his whole reign. His sons had united in a family mutiny and had allied themselves with the perpetual enemy, Louis of France, in an attack on Normandy. Eleanor was at the side of her beloved Richard, who could do no wrong. The King of Scotland, William the Lion, was invading Northumberland. The Earl of Leicester, espousing the cause of the rebellious sons, had landed with an army of mercenaries in Norfolk. It seemed quite possible that Henry would go down against such a powerful combination.

He landed at Southampton and rode from there to Canterbury without a stop, except to change horses and for hurried meals. He dismounted at the chapel of St. Nicholas outside the city and walked to St. Dunstan’s Oratory, where he put on a hair shirt and over that the gown of a pilgrim. With bare feet, with staff in one hand and the essential penny in the other, he walked through the streets of Canterbury to the cathedral. News of his coming had preceded him and the streets were filled with people, awed into silence by the spectacle of the much-feared King walking on bare feet, which had already begun to bleed, to plead like any common penitent.

Henry played the role fully and humbly. He prostrated himself and kissed the stones where Thomas à Becket had fallen. Then he went to the crypt and lay before the tomb. Here he made confession that, although he had not willed the death of the Martyr, he was responsible for it because of the words he had spoken. He begged forgiveness for his wickedness and pride.

Baring his back, he asked that the waxed cord of flagellation be used, that each high officer of Canterbury strike him five times and each of the monks three. The hundreds of strokes he thus demanded bruised and lacerated him so badly that the last ones to wield the cord had to be driven to it by royal insistence. Following this extreme measure, the King sat in silence before the tomb for the balance of the day and all of the night which followed. As the doors of the cathedral had been thrown open at his express command, the townspeople ventured in and stood at a distance while their ruler kept his long vigil. This was indeed something to see, the mighty monarch, master of so large a part of the known world, sitting in sackcloth, doing humble penance for his sins.

Henry did not rise until dawn. He again crossed Canterbury on bare feet. At the oratory he dressed and took to horse. On reaching London he went to the Tower, and on his first night he slept soundly in the belief that he had at last purged himself of his fault.

He was awakened before dawn by a loud rapping at his chamber door. A servant entered with word that a messenger had arrived from the north and was waiting outside. Crawling from his bed with the greatest difficulty, for his back was now stiff and painful, the King hobbled to the door. The messenger, he saw, was covered with dust from many hours in the saddle.

“My lord, I am servant to Ranulf de Glanville,” said the man, “and I come with good tidings.”

The King waited. He was badly in need of good tidings. The thought undoubtedly was in his mind, Can this be a sign that I am forgiven?

“Behold, my lord, he holds your enemy, the King of Scots, in chains at Richmond!”

Henry’s mind took fire at this news. William the Lion defeated and captured! A victory indeed! He would confound all his enemies with such a start as this. Painfully he walked to a window, a narrow slit in the thick masonry. All the bells in London were starting to ring for the victory. People were pouring into the streets, shouting to each other jubilantly. The sun was just rising over the river.

In the mood of humility which gripped him still, the King was certain that this was his reward, the proof that he had been forgiven. It must have seemed to him as he watched the rays of the sun gild the waters of the estuary that this would be the finest day he had ever known.