Crown & Country: A History of England Through the Monarchy (30 page)

This change coincided with a revolution in the scope and sophistication of canon – that is, Church – law. In 1137, Gratian, a monk of Bologna, set himself to systematize canon law on the model of the great Roman imperial jurists. The result was his
Decretum
. It was published in 1151 and it transformed both the teaching and the practice of canon law. The effects were felt even in remote England, as Theodore brought over Vacarius, a Lombard jurist, to teach Roman and canon law to the group of bright young men he had assembled in his household.

Theodore’s entourage – the ‘Canterbury men’, as they were known – became a self-sustaining intellectual community. They formed a university, civil-service training college and debating society rolled into one. They included young men like Thomas Becket who were on the thresholds of careers that would take them to the summit of Church and state. But, above all, they were lawyers. They argued ‘from prayers to meal time’ on points of law, on knotty theological problems, and on current affairs. And they did so ‘in the manner of pleaders in courts of law’.

It was in Archbishop Theodore’s household, in other words, that Becket had learned to argue a case – passionately, effectively and with an unflagging enthusiasm. That never altered. All that would happen was that he changed client. He had already changed from Archbishop Theodore to King Henry. Now, although Henry did not yet realize it, he was about to change again, from his king to his Church and – he would have claimed – to his God.

IV

And the inadvertent agent of change, of course, was Henry himself. Henry must have discussed his plans with Becket before he made him archbishop. And they offered a glittering prospect indeed. As minister for everything, Becket had been in the king’s shadow; as both viceroy to his son and heir and papal legate in England, he would have been a virtually independent potentate.

For the son of a rural knight turned failed urban property speculator, the temptation was well-nigh irresistible. Like the Devil with Christ, the king had offered him the rulership of the whole world (or at least of England). And, like Christ, Becket
was
tempted. Indeed, he admitted as much in a later letter. ‘If we had been willing’, he wrote, ‘to have been agreeable to [Henry’s] will in everything, there would have been no one, under his authority or in his kingdom, who would not have obeyed us absolutely.’ But, like Christ also, Becket eventually resisted temptation and in effect said ‘Get thee behind me, Satan’ to an astonished, hurt and increasingly angry Henry.

Why? Had Becket undergone a religious conversion? Was he a consummate actor, throwing himself with relish into a new part? An advocate, pleading on behalf of a new client? Or was he trying to prove himself to his fellow clergy, who widely suspected him of being a royal stooge?

Bearing in mind the state of the evidence, any and all of these explanations are possible. For the months following his appointment as archbishop are among the worst documented of Becket’s whole career. And contemporaries were as puzzled as posterity. Only direct divine intervention, they thought, could explain what had happened.

The change in Becket may have been complete and apparently miraculous but it was by no means instantaneous. ‘
After a time
’, William of Newburgh writes, ‘considering piously and sagaciously the responsibility of so high an honour [as the archbishopric], he on a sudden exhibited … a change in his habit and manners.’ ‘
After a time
’. There appears to be a studied ambiguity in the phrase. Did William not know when it had happened? Or was it not an event at all but a process? The latter seems the more likely. Becket, that is, did not
assume
his new role, he
grew
into it. One thing of course was clear from the beginning: he was determined to be a great archbishop just as he had been a great chancellor. He had made the latter office; he would remake the former. But how?

His first thoughts seem to have tended simply to a clerical grandeur. Theodore had had his household of clerks; Becket would have his dozens of clerks. He would be lavish in his hospitality and extravagant in his alms-giving. And he would carry out his duties meticulously: he spent time in his private devotions; he studied theology and he set himself to recover and augment the rights of his see.

But, despite the outward show, there seems at first to have been a certain reticence, even self-doubt. Perhaps it was a genuine diffidence about the propriety of his appointment. For certainly his promotion to Canterbury broke every rule in the new clericalist handbook. The proper position was that no bishop should be consecrated ‘who had not been freely elected and without previous nomination by the secular power’. But, far from Becket being ‘freely elected’, each constituency that was invited to endorse his appointment was aware of overwhelming pressure from the king.

This presented him with an awkward dilemma. How could he pose as the champion of the Church when his election was uncanonical and he owed his appointment to his royal friend and master?

The first step towards his liberation came with his receipt of the pallium from Pope Alexander III. Normally the archbishop was required to go in person to Rome to receive the pallium – the narrow woollen stole that was the symbol of his office – directly from the hands of the pope. But Henry, solicitous as always for the welfare and convenience of his favourite and with many other things for him to do in England, arranged for Becket to receive it by proxy.

The pallium arrived in England in August 1162 and Becket received it barefoot and prostrate in Canterbury Cathedral. The extravagance of the gesture was characteristic of a man whose theatricality matched, if it did not outdo, Henry’s own. It spoke, of course, of Becket’s reverence for the papal office. But it also betokened something much more personal. For Becket treated the pallium, which, as was customary, had been blessed by the pope himself, as a calling, even as a laying on of hands. With its receipt, he felt, the stain of his appointment had started to be wiped away. Like Peter, he had been called to be a fisher of men; like the disciple, he would renounce wealth and family and friends. And he would start by renouncing his king.

Immediately after the ceremony at Canterbury, he resigned the chancellorship, proffering as his excuse that he was ‘insufficient for one office let alone two’. Henry, who had just obtained a dispensation for him to continue to hold the chancellorship, was taken utterly by surprise and could hide neither his disappointment nor his pique. If he could not have an archbishop as chancellor, he resolved, he would not have a chancellor at all. Instead, so long as Becket lived, the office was left unfilled and its duties discharged by a vice-chancellor, Geoffrey Ridel, who had already acted as deputy to Becket. But Henry decided to make Becket suffer as well and insisted that he resign the archdeaconry of Canterbury, which was the most valuable non-episcopal appointment in the English Church, in Ridel’s favour.

It was the beginning of a dangerous game of tit-for-tat.

But even more important for Becket and the English Church as a whole was the General Council of the Church which the exiled Pope Alexander III summoned to meet at Tours in the Loire valley in May 1163.

English kings had traditionally exercised a jealous control over the attendance of their bishops at General Councils. But Henry, despite his mounting disappointment with Becket, was in an expansive mood. Following his successful meeting with Alexander at Déols, he was confident of the political cooperation of the papacy and he waved through the attendance of his bishops at the council.

The council turned out to be a life-changing experience for Becket and his fellow bishops – and a political disaster for Henry. Its sessions took place ‘with much pomp’ and debated and passed a radically reforming set of canons: no cleric was to appoint a salaried deputy to perform his office; or to involve himself in usury or lending at interest; or to leave a monastery to study law or medicine.

Bearing in mind his own past, none of this should have made comfortable listening for Becket, the former lawyer and man of affairs. Even before he entered the royal service, he had been a great pluralist, with many more ecclesiastical offices than he could possibly perform himself. As a young man too he had been in the service of his kinsman, the great London merchant Osbert Huitdeniers. Osbert was a banker and, it is safe to assume, did not lend money free of charge. A different character might have drawn the lesson of humility from the contrast between his own earlier behaviour and the standards which he now joined in imposing on his fellow clergy.

But that was not Becket’s style. Instead, Becket seems to have decided that the right way to atone for his previous failings was to espouse the new rulings with unbending rigour. This exposed him, then and now, to the charge of hypocrisy. But Becket brushed that off, as he did all criticism, and carried on regardless.

And it was not only Becket. For Henry had allowed more or less the whole bench of bishops to attend the Council of Tours. It is difficult, I think, to overestimate the consequences. Hitherto, the effective ban on bishops travelling abroad had kept the English Church significantly isolated from Continental turmoil in Church–state relations which had culminated in the Emperor Henry IV’s submission to Pope Gregory VII. But now the attendance of the English bishops in a body at the Council of Tours exposed them directly to the full blast of the Continental movement for Church reform.

It proved a brisk and bracing air. They were able to see how far English custom departed from what was now ecclesiastical best practice. And they were strengthened in their determination to do something about it. But at least as important was the effect of Tours on their
esprit de corps
. Meeting with their fellow bishops and without the watchful eye of the king or his justiciar, they developed a novel sense of confidence and collegiality. This meant that Becket, to his surprise as much as Henry’s, was able to face the king in the forthcoming storm with a united bench of bishops behind him.

Becket and his fellow bishops came back from Tours in the early summer. A few weeks later, Henry, who had recently returned to England after an absence of over four years, encountered Becket at a council held on 1 July 1163 at Woodstock. They immediately came to blows. The issue was a payment known as the sheriff ’s aid. Hitherto the payment had formed a perquisite of the sheriff; Henry was determined that it should be paid directly to the Exchequer instead. Becket set himself with equal determination to resist the change and the two exchanged high words.

Henry realized that he had been abandoned by the man whom he had made great and who had stood by his side. But he pulled back from the brink of all-out conflict. Was he trying to preserve a necessary working relationship? Or was he keeping his powder dry for the real issue?

This was not long in coming. Immediately after his return to England, Henry was bombarded with a series of disturbing reports from his justices. They, according to William of Newburgh, ‘intimated … to the king … that many crimes against public order, such as thefts, rapes and murders, were repeatedly committed by the clergy’.

The justices spoke out of frustration, and perhaps dented professional pride, since the clergy’s exemption from lay justice meant that they got off, in effect, scot free: instead of the mutilation or execution that would be visited on a layman, they faced penance or unfrocking at worst. Shock statistics were also produced to bring the matter home. ‘During his reign’, Henry was told to his face, ‘more than a hundred murders had been committed by the clergy in England alone.’

The tactic worked. Outraged by the offence both to his sense of justice and his royal dignity committed by thugs in cassocks, Henry decided that something must be done. Becket, on the other hand, was equally determined that clerical exemption from lay justice must be preserved to the last jot and tittle.

He had found the perfect last ditch to die in.

The issue of ‘criminous clerks’ was a long-standing one. Such aberrant individuals have always existed and – to the delight of popular Sunday newspapers – still do. And the reaction of the Church was and is the same: to prefer silence to exposure and the dignity and standing of Church and clergy to the welfare of the victims or abstract notions of justice. Now the issue is child abuse; in the twelfth century it was violence. It was a more violent age; the relative number of clergy was much higher and many were in secular employment and lived essentially secular lives. They had wives and children; wore ordinary dress; and, like Chancellor Becket himself, were as handy with weapons as the next man.

What to do with such men when passions or violence spilled over into criminal acts had been in dispute since the Conquest, when William the Conqueror had introduced Church courts and canon law into England: the Church wished to protect its own; the king to do justice and vindicate his sovereignty. Where should the balance fall?

Becket pursued a double policy. In a series of high-profile cases, he stoutly defended the privileges of the Church. But he also tried to show that the Church was able to impose appropriate penalties: a priest from the diocese of Salisbury, who was unable to exonerate himself from a charge of murder, was committed to strict confinement in a monastery; a canon of Bedford, who was controversially acquitted by a Church court of murdering a knight, was banished; while a clerk of London, who stole a chalice, was branded. But, though well meant, Becket’s actions only added fuel to the flames: not only were the sentences unknown at canon law; they also trespassed flagrantly on the royal monopoly on criminal justice.

A more systematic solution would have to be found. Henry chose his moment with care. In October, the body of his sainted predecessor, Edward the Confessor, was solemnly reinterred in Westminster Abbey by Becket. Henry used this ceremony in honour of a royal saint to convene an old-fashioned council of the Church, summoned and presided over by himself as a Christian king.