History of England 1-6

The character of Thomas Becket has always been the subject of controversy. His reputation as saint and martyr has, as it were, preceded him. He was a man always willing to play the part. Like a later English saint and martyr, Thomas More, he was always on stage. He took off the twenty-four changes of silk robes, and put on a shirt of sackcloth filled with lice. He lived on bread and water muddied with dirt. In that respect, opposites yoked violently together within one man, he was profoundly medieval. He was also proud, and stubborn, and excessively self-righteous.

As soon as he became archbishop, in 1162, he confronted the king. He refused to allow the sheriffs of Canterbury to send money to the royal treasury; then he challenged the king’s decision that churchmen, found guilty in the clerical courts, should be handed over to the secular authorities for punishment. ‘You do not’, he said, ‘have the power to command bishops.’ But that was precisely what the king wished to do. He was resolved to restore royal authority over the English Church in the style of the Norman kings. They had withstood papal intervention in the affairs of England, and a papal legate could only enter the country at the king’s invitation. The behaviour of Becket, as the agent of the see of Peter, incensed him. Henry did not contest the sacred authority of the Church, but he was determined that it would not encroach upon the rights and duties of the throne.

His anger, once roused, was formidable. Anger was a speciality of the Angevin dynasty, a black and ferocious force that could destroy anything in its path. One courtier recorded an incident when ‘the king, flying into his usual temper, flung his cap from his head, pulled off his belt, threw off his cloak and clothes, grabbed the silken coverlet off the couch, and sitting as it might be on some dungheap started chewing pieces of straw’. This was the man who became the mortal enemy of Thomas Becket. The king was determined to ruin him.

At the beginning of 1164 the king and his advisers drew up a statement of sixteen clauses, known as the Constitutions of Clarendon, in which royal power was asserted against the interests and demands of the pope. Becket first agreed to the proposals, thus seeming ‘to perjure myself’, but then retracted his consent; he refused to sign the document. In the autumn of this year the king called a council at Northampton, with the bishops and great lords of the realm in attendance. Becket was now charged with contempt of court and fined, but the king had prepared further measures. Becket was ordered to account for all the revenue that had passed through his hands as chancellor as well as other sums of money for which he was deemed to be responsible. Henry allowed him no room for manoeuvre. Becket then made an entrance. He rode into the courtyard of the council chamber at Northampton, wearing his robes of office and bearing a large cross in his hands.

The story has become well known, and may have been elaborated in the telling. Some of the bishops came up to him as he dismounted from his horse, and tried to take the cross from him. ‘If the king were to brandish his sword,’ one of them said, ‘as you now brandish the cross, what hope can there be of making peace between you?’ ‘I know what I am doing,’ Becket replied. ‘I bear it for the protection of the peace of God upon my person and the English Church.’ Then he walked into the chamber, where he forbade the bishops to deliver any judgment against him. The king asked the lords alone to pronounce sentence against the archbishop. Becket refused to listen. ‘Such as I am,’ he told them, ‘I am your father, while you are magnates of the household, lay powers, secular persons. I will not hear your judgment.’ He swept out of the chamber, cross in hand, with loud cries of ‘Traitor!’ following him. Soon after, he fled the country in disguise.

He made his way to Sens, where Pope Alexander III held his court in exile, and flung himself at the feet of the pontiff. In the course of a long address, in which he denounced the arrogance and impiety of the king in attempting to destroy the powers of the Church, he adverted to his own role as archbishop. ‘Though I accepted this burden unwillingly nevertheless it was human will and not divine will that induced me to do so.’ He was blaming Henry. ‘What wonder, then, it has brought me into such straits?’ Weeping, he took the ring of office from his finger. ‘I resign into your hands, Father, the archbishopric of Canterbury.’ Some of the cardinals present hoped that the pope would put the ring in his pocket; they did not want to be at odds with the king of England. But Alexander III returned the ring. ‘Receive anew at our hands,’ he told Becket, ‘the cure of the episcopal office.’