Read Crown & Country: A History of England Through the Monarchy Online
Authors: David Starkey
Henry began by repeating his complaints over ‘criminous clerks’. Then, when the bishops failed to offer concessions, he went on the attack. Would they submit to the ‘ancient customs’ of the realm, he demanded. These ancient customs were studiously vague. But Henry, with his lawyer’s mind, reduced them to two principal components. The first was the Conqueror’s determination to insulate the English Church from the most aggressive papal claims. The second was his own insistence that criminous clerks should be subjected to his own, criminal justice.
The bishops, led by Becket, stalled by saying that they could only accept the ancient customs ‘saving their order’. This sounds like conditional acceptance. In fact, since the ancient customs, as Henry understood them, were contrary to the new canon law, it was a flat refusal.
The result was stalemate and both sides appealed to Pope Alexander III: Henry to have the ‘ancient customs’ confirmed; Becket to have them annulled. But the pope counselled compromise. At the beginning of December, Becket, assured that Henry only required his assent by word of mouth, agreed. Scenting victory, Henry immediately raised the stakes. He summoned a council at Clarendon in January 1164 and browbeat Becket into repeating his oral assurance in front of the entire assembly. Then, characteristically, he ordered the ancient customs to be set down in writing. The following day, the obviously pre-prepared text of the Constitutions of Clarendon was produced.
The Constitutions are one of the great texts of English history. They express an overarching vision of a Church subordinate to the crown in all, save matters of belief, and they work out its implications in minute, lawerly detail. As in Clause 3, which lays down the procedure for dealing with criminous clerks. After conviction in the Church courts, they should first be unfrocked and then handed over to the secular courts for punishment as ordinary criminals.
The Constitutions were the antithesis of everything that Becket believed in. For Becket espoused the contrary vision – based on an extreme clericalist reading of the biblical text ‘touch not mine anointed’ – which saw the Church as not only independent of the state but manifestly superior to it.
But, under Henry’s intense pressure, Becket swore to the Constitutions. As did the rest of the bishops. Henry, it seemed, had won – as he usually did.
Becket, for his part, believed that he had sinned by swearing to the Constitutions. Soon he repudiated the submission on the grounds it had been extorted under duress. Henry now tightened the screw by accusing the archbishop of embezzlement during his time as chancellor. In fear for his life Becket fled abroad.
V
From his haven in France, Becket continued to defy Henry by making ever more grandiose claims for the independence and authority of the Church. He was also pursuing diplomatic negotiations as enthusiastically as he had when in power – only this time it was with Henry’s enemies.
And there was an added danger. In order to shore up the succession to the crown, Henry wanted his son Henry crowned king of England immediately, during his own lifetime. But with the archbishop on the run and the clergy hostile this was no easy task. The right to anoint a king belonged to the archbishop of Canterbury. To get his way Henry made the archbishop of York perform the coronation. But was it legitimate? There was also the larger question of Becket’s own position. Becket on the loose and abroad was more dangerous, Henry felt, than Becket at home. He was undoing Henry’s foreign alliances. He was also a magnet for dissent in England, which was now coming from within Henry’s own family. So a compromise was patched up and Becket returned to England.
And what a return! At Christmas 1170 word reached Henry that Becket, who had learned nothing and forgotten nothing, was up to his old tricks. The archbishop, his enemies insinuated to the king, was careering round the country armed with knights and he was excommunicating bishops who were loyal to Henry. Something snapped and there resulted one of those famous Plantagenet rages. ‘Will no one rid me of this turbulent priest?’ the king exclaimed, or words to that effect. Henry had said such things before and nothing much had happened. But this time four royal knights took the king at his word and they rode furiously to Canterbury to bring Becket to account – whatever that might mean.
On 29 December the four knights – Reginald fitzUrse, William de Traci, Hugh of Morville and Richard Brito – arrived at Canterbury Cathedral. The other clergy begged Becket to flee while there was time. But he refused, deciding to make a final stand. It was fitzUrse who struck the first blow, taking off the side of Becket’s head. Still denouncing his assailants, the archbishop fell to the pavement of his cathedral and the others piled in. Moments later Becket lay dead.
When he heard the news Henry plunged into an agony of grief, hiding himself away for three whole days so that his friends feared for his life. Was it personal grief for the death of his one-time friend? Or horror at what had been done in his name? In either case the king’s response fully matched the enormity of the deed. For Christendom was stunned by the murder of an archbishop in his own cathedral on the orders of his own king. And letters rained down upon the pope, even from Henry’s own family, demanding that he proceed, with all the awful powers of the Church, against this sacrilegious king who was worse than a Nero or a Judas.
Meanwhile, Becket’s ghost, growing more powerful year by year, served as the perfect cover for resistance or rebellion against the murderer king.
Richard I, John, Henry III
CANTERBURY CATHEDRAL LOOMS LARGE
in the Kent countryside and also in English history. After the murder of Thomas Becket it took on almost mythic status. Since then, for Henry, everything had gone wrong. All the power he had built up threatened to unravel.
Only a grand gesture of self-abasement would exorcize the ghost that haunted the Angevin empire. In July 1174 Henry purged his soul with a fast, then walked barefoot wearing only a rough woollen shirt to Thomas’s shrine in Canterbury Cathedral. There he prostrated himself before his erstwhile enemy. Next he, Henry, king of England, submitted to a public scourging by all the clergy present: bishops, abbots and each of the monks of Canterbury took it in turns to flog him. Finally he lay all night and all day on the cold stones in front of the shrine. It was an extraordinarily untypical gesture by that proud and passionate man.
The sight of a king humbled, especially so mighty a king, was shocking. But for the next century it would not be an uncommon sight as a line of English monarchs were forced, repeatedly, into humiliating concessions.
I
The penance that he performed at Canterbury, Henry calculated, was worth it if it contrived to separate Becket, the saint as he now was, from the coalition of enemies now arrayed against him. And so it proved almost immediately.
The king awoke the following morning to hear that an invasion of England had been thwarted. As if by miracle William I, king of Scots, was captured and a great armada poised to invade England from Flanders dispersed. Henry had indeed stooped to conquer. It brought to an end a crisis unleashed by the conflict with Becket, the lowest point in Henry’s hitherto triumphant reign. For the rebels arrayed against him were his own family – Eleanor, his wife, and his three eldest sons, Henry (the Young King), Richard and Geoffrey.
For Henry had made a decision about the future of his kingdoms. He wanted to provide for the stability of his empire. He also wanted to try to keep the peace among his teenage sons, who had clearly inherited his own ferocious temper, by dividing up his empire among them. But in practice the division of his lands proved to be a disastrous miscalculation. The problem was that his eldest son in particular had been given glittering titles but no real power. Young Henry had been crowned king of England and in 1169 he had paid Louis VII of France (his father-in-law) homage – the ritual act of submission that English kings made for their holdings in France – for Anjou. But all this was his in name only. The young man had to watch as the mighty empire was further divided among his siblings. Richard was given Aquitaine and Geoffrey Brittany. This slight was compounded when Henry II gave the youngest son, John, three key fiefs in Anjou,
his
territory.
Seeing the divisions in the English royal family, Louis VII dripped poison into the ear of young Henry. Had he not been crowned king? Was he not sole ruler of Anjou? But what, in effect, was he lord of ? Nothing. He was a gilded prisoner. And so too were his brothers, Richard and Geoffrey, whose power was equally illusory and dependent on their father. It was a matter of power and, above all, honour. The young Henry slipped away to join the French king and claim his just rewards. He had the full encouragement of his mother, Queen Eleanor, who had been plotting against her husband since the murder of Becket. Henry II had tried to divide and rule his family; instead he had united them against him. Richard and Geoffrey joined their mother and brother in revolt.
In the face of inter-familial strife, Henry’s empire weathered the test and the king deployed his honed and doughty intelligence against his family. Eleanor was captured and imprisoned. After his grand act of abasement at Canterbury, Henry set off for Normandy full of confidence and backed by an army. The sons tasted military defeat at the hands of their all-conquering father and came to heel.
It was a pattern which was to repeat itself for over a decade.
Young Henry still thirsted for power, but was fobbed off by his father with an allowance and the chance to shine as a chivalric superstar. Richard, who had impressed his father during the rebellion, learned the real arts of warfare as duke of Aquitaine. There he gained a reputation as a fearsome, sometimes cruel, soldier. More than any of his brothers, he was his father’s son: resourceful, ruthless and a highly capable ruler. Geoffrey was kept under close supervision, but was eventually given control of Brittany. And John was made lord of Ireland, the emptiest title of all. He was nicknamed ‘John Lackland’ by his father.
And it was Henry’s effort to provide land for the boy which once again threatened to bring his empire crashing down. For to give to John meant taking land from one of his brothers.
Now it was the sons who fought among themselves in an intense sibling rivalry for land, honour and empire. Romantically known as the ‘Angevin Curse’, it was the price to pay for so large an empire and too many heirs. In 1183 Henry the Young King once more rose against his father and his brothers but in the midst of renewed civil war he died of dysentery aged just twenty-eight.
Henry changed tack: rather than name an heir (which had caused the problems in the first place), he would keep tight lipped. It proved to be another blunder.
For the death of young Henry did not make things simpler. Far from it. It only made the surviving three brothers more desperate for land, more hostile to each other and more suspicious of their father. Richard was the eldest of the surviving sons, but on what terms would he succeed? If he inherited England, Normandy and Anjou, and added these to Aquitaine, Geoffrey and John would not stand for it. Henry offered Richard England and Normandy if he gave Aquitaine to John, but Richard refused. In response John joined the fray, unsuccessfully invading Richard’s Aquitaine.
Then there were two. Geoffrey died in 1186, leaving Richard and John to compete for the spoils. And it was Richard, the bloodied warrior of thirty-two, who began to challenge and then overtake the great Henry II. By 1189 they were in open conflict and after one heavy defeat Henry fled from his son.
The old king had to surrender on Richard’s terms. It was his last act. Mortally sick and already a broken man at the age of only fifty-six, Henry was carried back in a litter to his castle of Chinon, in his native Anjou, to die. One of the conditions imposed on him by Richard and the king of France was that he should pardon the conspirators against him. When the list was read out it included the name of his beloved youngest son, John. It was the final blow.
‘Why should I reverence Christ,’ the dying king cried out when he was asked to make his final confession, ‘and why should I honour him who has taken all my honour from me?’ Confess nevertheless he did, and immediately afterwards, on 6 July 1189, Henry died.
Henry’s body was brought for burial to the nearby abbey of Fontevrault, the traditional burial place of the counts of Anjou. Like a wounded animal he had gone home to die. Yet he had been one of England’s most successful kings – able in his prime to enforce his authority on barons, bishops and even other princes. He had turned his vision of kingship into a reality and embodied in it institutions that would far outlast his dynasty. He had made the monarchy great. Would his heirs be equal to that greatness?
II
Greatness was the one thing Richard I desired. As soon as Henry II lay dead he set about claiming his inheritance. And what a patrimony it was! It was not just the extent of the empire but the way it had been administered for the best part of four decades. Richard hastened to England to be crowned. The country was peaceful, well governed and prosperous. Richard received a treasury of some 100,000 marks. Then he held a sale – of local offices and the privileges that came with them. He returned estates that had been confiscated by his father. The money poured in. But it could never be enough for Richard’s needs. He would have put London up for sale, he is supposed to have said, if he could find a buyer rich enough.
For Richard was fired with a holy mission. In 1187 catastrophe had hit Christendom when Saladin captured Jerusalem. Richard responded by taking the cross, or pledging himself to join the crusade to recover the Holy Lands. He was the first prince in northern Europe to do so. The money he raised in England in his fire sale funded a mighty fleet and army which he led east. England was left in the hands of a capable government under the justiciar, or chief minister, William de Longchamp.