Crown & Country: A History of England Through the Monarchy (29 page)

But he reckoned without Henry. Adrian, Henry’s tame English pope, died in 1159. A disputed election followed, which resulted in a pope, Alexander III, and an anti-pope, Victor IV. In 1160, Henry recognized Alexander. His reward was Alexander’s sanction for the immediate marriage of Marguerite and Henry. The Vexin, to Louis’s impotent fury, became
de jure
part of Henry’s dominions forthwith. Its successful acquisition was crowned in 1162 when Henry met Alexander at Déols, on the banks of the River Indre. Henry greeted the pope with the extravagant abasement which the sovereign pontiff then required of mere earthly kings. But the real balance of power between the two was clear: the meeting took place on Henry’s territory, while the pope himself was the man whom Henry had – in effect – chosen.

Finally, in 1159, Henry launched a great campaign to enforce his wife’s claim to the county of Toulouse, which lay to the south of Aquitaine. Like the Welsh campaign of 1157, the expedition was carefully planned and lavishly resourced (largely at the expense of the English taxpayer). But, as with the Welsh campaign also, the results were disappointing.

Nevertheless, Henry had remade the monarchy. As William of Newburgh wrote: ‘in all parts of his realm the king won the renown of a monarch who ruled over a wider empire than all who had previously reigned in England, for it extended from the far border of Scotland to the Pyrenees’. Henry was always on the move in his empire like, it was said, a human chariot pulling everyone behind him. It exasperated his friends and foes alike. ‘At one moment the king of England is in Ireland, the next in England, the next in Normandy,’ complained Louis VII, ‘he must fly rather than travel by horse or ship.’ Thanks to his restless energy, commanding personality and indomitable will Henry II had made himself the greatest king in Christendom.

II

‘Lo! to fight and to judge: that is the task of a king.’ While Henry was fighting in France (or, as he preferred, achieving the aims of war by the means of diplomacy), he was judging in England – either in person on his occasional visits or by proxy through his representatives.

Henry was as serious and hands-on in the business of justice as he was in most other aspects of kingship. He chose his judges with care and held them to account for their stewardship. What most kept them on their toes was the fact that Henry was at least as good a lawyer as they. He was, writes the great legal historian Frederic William Maitland, ‘quite competent to criticize minutely the wording of a charter, to frame a new clause and to give his vice-chancellor a lesson in conveyancing’.

And he could impose his justice even when he wasn’t there in person, thanks to his innovations in the law, which became a sort of mirror reflecting and multiplying royal authority. The main writing office was known as the Chancery, and it issued a multiplicity of ‘writs’ – that is, standardized royal orders. The writ itself was written out on a slip of parchment and then authenticated by attaching the great seal. The seal was deliberately large and impressive and it carried the king’s image to the furthest corner of his dominions. It also makes an important point about the nature of kingship. On the front the king is seated, as a lawgiver and judge. On the reverse he is mounted and armed as the warrior-defender of his people.

In the course of Henry’s reign, writs were developed to deal with all the most common legal problems of the king’s subjects. They were mass-produced by Chancery clerks and they were available, for a fee, to every freeman. Previously, the king’s justice had depended on the king’s actual presence; now with the writ, the seal and the magic of writing, the king and his justice could be everywhere, for everybody.

For two decades England had been weak. But now the crown was worn by a man whose personality matched the pretensions of the position. Henry overawed and faced down opponents at every turn, high and low, at home and abroad. One contemporary observed: ‘He is a great, indeed the greatest of monarchs for he has no superior of whom he stands in awe, nor subject who may resist him.’

In all of this activity, whether in fighting or in judging, Henry’s principal agent and adviser in these early years was his chancellor, Thomas Becket. They had, contemporaries noted wonderingly, ‘but one heart and one mind’. It went even beyond their personal relationship, close though it was. For Becket was the only one of Henry’s ministers whose power was as extensive as the king’s own. The responsibility of the treasurer, for example, was limited to England. But Becket’s Chancery issued Henry’s orders throughout all his dominions. And the chancellor himself, like the king his master (except that some unkind tongues said that it was Becket who was the
real
master), seemed to be everywhere and to do everything.

In 1156, for example, Becket was an itinerant judge in three counties; in 1158, Becket, as we have seen, had gone to the Paris summit with Louis VII ahead of Henry, to prepare the ground and smooth the way. Later in the year, he was again justice itinerant in England. In 1159, he was the key figure, after Henry himself, in the Toulouse campaign: he organized the heavy taxation needed to finance it (which fell especially heavily on the Church); he commanded a troop of hand-picked knights and was the foremost in every fight. As the supreme mark of trust, he was given responsibility for the upbringing of the king’s son and heir Henry, and in 1162 returned from Normandy to England with him, charged with the task of getting the magnates to agree to his nomination as heir.

He succeeded in this as in everything else.

When, therefore, Thomas’s former patron, Archbishop Theobald, died in 1161, Becket was the obvious candidate to replace him. Theobald had ‘hoped and prayed’ that he would be his successor. More to the point, Henry had determined on it as well.

Becket was aghast and begged to be excused: he could not both fulfil his duties to the Church as archbishop and retain Henry’s affection, he explained. Henry was insistent. Only the Empress Matilda, who had had personal experience of an earlier transformation, when the imperial chancellor had been made archbishop, counselled against the promotion. But her fears were ignored and Becket’s were overcome. ‘I acquiesced’, he explained later, ‘more for love [of Henry] than for the love of God.’

The elevation of the royal favourite was triumphant. He was elected unanimously on 23 May; the royal assent was signified by Becket’s ward, the young Prince Henry; he was ordained priest on 2 June and the following day was consecrated archbishop by Bishop Henry of Winchester in a spectacular ceremony.

Who would be proved right: Henry or his mother Matilda? It did not take Henry long to find out.

III

Henry had high hopes for his friend in his new office, though not, perhaps, quite as high as Becket had for himself. As archbishop and chancellor – for Henry took it for granted that Becket would continue in his old position as well – Becket would be supreme in both Church and state. His place in each would add lustre to the other and both would lend a reflected glory to Henry himself. For only the greatest of kings could confidently employ such an omnipotent and omnicompetent minister. Indeed, among contemporary rulers only one other had a chancellor-archbishop, the Emperor Frederick Barbarossa.

How better to reinforce Henry’s own claims to quasi-imperial status?

But, above all, Becket’s appointment was intended to play a central part in Henry’s grand political strategy. This centred on his seven-year-old son and heir, Henry. Becket, as the king’s best friend and alter ego, had already been heavily involved in the upbringing of his son. Now, as chancellor-archbishop, he would – Henry intended – finish what he had begun: he would crown the young Henry as king in his father’s lifetime and head up a subordinate administration that would rule England in his name.

Finally, and almost as an afterthought against these high matters of dynastic policy, Archbishop Becket would be able to take the English Church in hand on Henry II’s behalf as well. For Henry II’s was not the only monarchy in England. There was another power in the land: the Church. The Church was a state within a state: it had its own language, Latin; its own system of law, known as ‘canon’ law; its own property, which extended to upwards of a fifth of the land in England; its own symbols of power in the churches, cathedrals and monasteries, which are still among our most impressive structures. Above all, it had its own personnel and its own organization, which paralleled the machinery of royal government.

Indeed, England would not have been England without the English Church and the king could not have ruled England without its cooperation either. The landed wealth of the bishops and abbots made their appointments important sources of royal patronage. The king also looked to the leading clergy as councillors, advisers and administrators. Nor was the king the only one: indeed, the services of the clergy were needed by all levels of secular society. For the Church had more or less a monopoly on learning and the teaching of Latin, which, following the post-Conquest abandonment of Anglo-Saxon as a written language, had become the language of both government and public and private administration.

So all jobs that we would still call ‘clerical’ were filled by clergymen. They were the lawyers, accountants, dons, secretaries, doctors and mere pen-pushers. And they were everywhere: one in six of the population were in some form or other of holy orders. This raised awkward questions of demarcation. What happened when a cleric committed a crime against the king’s peace? Who should try a case between a clergyman and a layman? Who had jurisdiction over Church property? Where, in short, did the king’s justice stop and the Church’s begin?

These questions were further complicated by the fact that the Church was not only a state within a state. It was also, since it embraced all western Europe, above and beyond the state as well – just as the power of the pope was beyond and arguably above that of the king. And the more vigorously reform was pressed and the sharper the line that was drawn between the spiritual and the temporal, the more scope there was for a clash between the claims of pope and king.

In the Old Testament, kings were the chosen and anointed of God; in the New, Jesus enjoined his followers to ‘render unto Caesar the things that are Caesar’s, and to God the things that are God’s’. This seemed clear enough. But, above and beyond the general rule, the papal monarchy had a special claim to divine sanction. For had not Christ himself given St Peter, who was believed to have been the first pope, ‘the keys of the kingdom of heaven’?

In the Middle Ages almost no one doubted that this text gave the pope a universal spiritual authority. And it extended to kings and emperors as much as to the merest peasant. In particular, it meant that if a king sinned, the pope could chastise him like any other errant Christian. In extreme cases he could excommunicate him: that is, exclude him, more or less permanently, from the Christian community. He could also, as a further sanction, lay his territories under ‘interdict’, which had the effect of depriving, not only the miscreant king, but all his subjects of the minis-trations of Holy Church.

The result in Continental Europe and the German Empire in particular was a clash on an epic scale. It culminated in 1077, when the Holy Roman Emperor Henry IV was compelled to make his way through the snows of an Alpine winter to Canossa, there to prostrate himself as a penitent at the feet of the indomitable Hildebrand, who reigned as Pope Gregory VII.

Neither Normandy nor England experienced anything like that. For William I, despite his ostentatious piety, was unwilling to yield an inch to the papacy. He used it when it was necessary or convenient to do so, most importantly to sanction his claim to England. But all this was achieved by about 1072. Thereafter William’s concern was to insulate his dominions from Roman interference. He flatly refused the pope’s demand for homage; no pope was to be recognized nor any papal letters received without his permission; no legislation was to be proposed in a council of the English Church without his agreement; and no baron excommunicated without his consent. And he imposed a ban on bishops going to Rome, even when they had been specifically summoned by the pope. The effect was to neutralize each and every weapon in the papal armoury.

But not even the Conqueror could insulate England entirely, and under his successors there were eddies and echoes of the great European conflict. During the civil war, in particular, the Church, like most other forces in society, moved to assert itself against a weakened crown. The attack was led by Bishop Henry of Winchester. At first sight he seems an unlikely champion. Opulent, magnificent, as at home in armour as in pontificals and with an adventurous artistic taste that extended to importing ancient Classical statues from Rome to decorate his palace at Winchester, Bishop Henry was nevertheless zealous in the defence of clerical rights and privileges.

The result was that the power of the Church reached its zenith in the years of the Anarchy. Stephen had been put on the throne by churchmen and had his title confirmed by the pope. In return he was prepared to grant whatever the Church asked – in effect complete autonomy against royal authority. Stephen was also quick to reconsider. His failure to observe the excessive clerical privileges provided Bishop Henry with his main justification for deserting his brother’s cause. And it was at the council of Winchester, which followed Stephen’s defeat, that Bishop Henry’s claims for clerical supremacy became most extravagant, with his assertion that the Church not merely crowned the king but actually chose him.

Not even Becket himself could have claimed more.

After Bishop Henry’s fall from grace at Rome, the leadership of the English Church passed to Theodore, archbishop of Canterbury. He was a man of very different character from Bishop Henry: the latter was lordly, the former austere and devout. But that did not stop Theodore from being a better politician and a much superior diplomat.

The result was that Theodore presided over the closest and most fruitful period of Anglo-Roman relations since the heroic, missionary days of Anglo-Saxon Christianity. Englishmen of promise went to Rome, chiefly to work in the administration of the papal curia. This encouraged the notion that contacts between England and Rome were not exceptional or alien but part of the natural course of things. Likewise, bishops and monasteries, nervous of faltering royal authority in England and the concomitant breakdown of public order, started to seek papal protection and confirmation of their possessions. Even more importantly, they (and lesser folk too) also started to appeal to the Roman court – not exceptionally but as a matter of routine.