Eleanor Of Aquitaine (20 page)

Henry and Eleanor were holding their Easter court in Angers when this alarming edict went forth from Rome. Very expeditiously, on the Sunday following, three of Becket's closest friends arrived at Angers with demands for the restoration of the properties of Canterbury and the repatriation of the exiles. Henry received them superciliously and sent them back to Pontigny with dry evasive answers and the veiled threat that, if he were pressed by papal legates in his affairs with his primate, he would seek his safety with the schisinatic German emperor. He had already been dangling this sword above the papal conclaves by threatening to affiance his eldest daughter Matilda to the nephew of the emperor.

When his envoys returned to Pontigny empty handed, Becket addressed three successive letters to the king, which were marked by a sharp crescendo.
¹⁷
They passed swiftly from pastoral admonition to condign threats. First, he reminded Henry that, as his spiritual father, he was above all mindful of his spiritual weal, and that, after Henry had submitted himself to correction, he would find Thomas' grace to him unbounded; next, he reminded the king that sovereigns receive their glaive from the church and warned him lest his arrogance lead him to error and perdition; and finally, having had no answer to these admonitions, he served notice that, if the king did not shortly change his evil courses, something a good deal more dire than warnings would swiftly follow. He concluded this correspondence by giving Henry the term until Pentecost for penance and reflection.

Nothing was more ineffectual with Henry than unction. The warning letters did not produce the expected collapse in Angers. Henry remarked to his entourage that in his previous experience with Becket he had often known the archbishop to mistake his own will for that of Providence. The king did, however, take measures to defend himself. Although he had decreed in the Constitutions of Clarendon that appeals to Rome should be unlawful, he himself sent off an embassy to Alexander demanding restraint of the intolerable Thomas; and in the meantime, as a practical rejoinder to Becket, he dispatched to the abbé of the Cistercians, then in chapter, a threat to confiscate all the Cistercian properties in England unless the order ceased at once to harbor Becket and his fellow exiles in their house of Pontigny.

Henry's bold gestures could not, however, conceal the fact that anathema, possibly interdict, was again in the air. The Plantagenets would, as a practical matter, dread the effects of fulmination, but more as a political inconvenience than as an actual instrument of damnation. They were less sensitive in this regard than the Capets. The Angevins throughout their generations had now and then been exposed to the censures of the church; and Eleanor, both as heiress of Poitou and as Queen of France, had more than once weathered anathema.

However, anathema and interdict imposed considerable affliction on feudal magnates and alienated the pious common folk from their overlords. Simple souls abhorred as the plague the awful withholding of the sacraments, the darkening of altars, the silencing of the parish bells, the sudden extinction of those communal rites that marked with solemnity and grandeur the narrow round of their existence. The people could not, like powerful nobles, avoid the effect of anathema and interdict. Kings could, of course, as a last resort, protect themselves by threats of schism. They could support antipopes, who could also fulminate, bind and unbind, loose and unloose. But the people had no such resource.

Though the Plantagenets could not be intimidated by any personal dread of interdict, they had at this time a very special reason for not courting a breach with Rome that might make them unpopular throughout their provinces. This reason was the fact that Henry, the heir of England, though now in his twelfth year, had not yet been ceremoniously crowned, consecrated, and recognized by the assembled barons and prelates of Britain as the successor of the conquerors. The custom of anointing the heirs of kings in the lifetime of their sires had been established in Europe. Louis Capet had been consecrated by the Pope himself in the royal cathedral of Reims before the death of Louis the Fat. The birth of the heir of the Capets, diminishing as it did the status of Henry's son in the French court, gave added urgency to the Plantagenet's desire to see the youth firmly established in his English heritage. He had always taken every precaution to secure the recognition of his heir in England; but that actual anointing of the prince had not taken place, and the only person authorized by custom and tradition to consecrate the heir of England was the Archbishop of Canterbury. With his legatine commission from the Pope, Becket was now in a position to prevent any other bishop's serving under an arbitrary mandate from Henry to officiate in his place. It was thus important for the Plantagenets to avoid proceeding to extremity with Rome until the prince should have been established with the indispensable sanctions of the church.

Having flouted Becket's legatine mission in Angers, Henry shut himself up from the world in his fortress castle of Chinon to gain a respite of time. Sick kings were not subject to excommunication, and the chronicle says that Henry was sick in his stronghold above the Vienne. While the king wrestled with his malady, Becket was not idle. He came forth from his Lenten retreat and fortified himself at the shrine of Saint Drausius, the crusader's champion.
¹⁹
The spring season for pilgrimage was on, and the people of Champagne and Burgundy, the burghers and scholars of Paris, were on the road. It had gone abroad that Thomas, armed with papal authority, had threatened the King of the English, and that, exiled now from his poor monk's portion in Pontigny by the malice of that king, he was on his way to the great shrine of Saint Mary Magdalene in Vézelay for the day of Pentecost. The time assigned for Henry's penance had expired. As in the spring of Saint Bernard's condemnation of Abélard at Sens, the people now thronged to a great shrine of Burgundy anticipating another thunderous episode in that everlasting magnificent drama between the powers of light and the powers of darkness.

The vast Cluniac church of Vézelay was that which Abbé Bernard (now named for sainthood) had found too small for his call to the second crusade. It was the center of convocation from whose portals news took wing over the thoroughfares of pilgrimage to the farthest corners of Gaul. On a Sunday of May, before a concourse of "divers nations" and certain distinguished prelates of France, the exiled archbishop,
miser et miserabilis
, but mighty with authority, preached the sermon of Pentecost.

The ritual of excommunication was by custom performed in the narthex, beyond the holy bounds of sanctuary. After the offices, the throngs moved from the nave into the open with a solemn procession of the clergy. There in the entry of the church, the candles were lighted, one for each impenitent; then as the formula was recited, these were extinguished one by one and trampled underfoot; the book was closed; the doors to the sanctuary were barred to those cut off from the church's grace; and bells announced to the whole believing world the expulsion of the excommunicates; their names were affixed to the portals to warn all men, as they loved their own salvation, to shun them. So it was at Vézelay.

After the sermon, Thomas recited the wrongs of the church, reviewed his citation of all the malefactors in service of the king to acknowledgment of their crimes and to repentance, described their stubborn disobedience. When he spoke of his old friend the king, his voice broke and his words were dissolved in tears. But the burden of duty and conscience lay upon him. Denouncing each in turn, and specifying again the sin of each, he did with book, bell, and candle excommunicate Henry's clerks, Richard of Lichester and John of Oxford for their damnable traffic with schisinatics in Germany; Henry's legists, Richard of Lucy and John of Balliol, for setting up the subversive Constitutions of Clarendon; Henry's officers, Ranulf de Broc, Hugh of Saint Clare and Thomas Fitz-Stephen, for their unlawful seizure and holding of the properties of Canterbury. No bolt of anathema touched the king directly, but the finger of the archbishop pointed straight at his forehead with a dreadful warning. The Primate of England, armed by the Pope with legatine power, outlawed all the noxious acts of the king's agents and rendered them null and void. Like a ripple widening in a pool, the tidings spread in every direction from Vézelay.

"Rumor does in truth fly on wings to kings and princes," says Hoveden. It was presently said that Henry received the news in Chinon with tears of rage. But when he at last emerged from seclusion he had recovered both health and composure. "As with the voice of a crier" he announced to an astonished world that he had not only the Archbishop of Canterbury but the Pope and the Roman cardinals "in his purse."
²¹
He related to his familiars how much this business of his had cost in the
curia
. He displayed documents certifying that Alexander, waiving the legateship of Thomas, had given a dispensation to the Archbishop of York to crown the heir of England. He declared that the Pope considered relieving him of his insufferable archbishop by translating Becket to some distant see, perhaps to Sicily. It was rumored that he had offered his infant daughter Joanna to the Prince of Sicily to prosper this arrangement.
²²
He gave it out that the censures pronounced by Becket at Vézelay were suspended pending the arrival of papal envoys. Alexander, he proclaimed, was sending two cardinal legates to Gaul to put an end to the intolerable
démarches
of the archbishop against the dignity of the king. These cardinals were William of Pavia and Otto of Ostia, and they were already getting over the Alps. The person who brought these heartening tidings to Chinon was no other than John of Oxford, whom Becket had recently excommunicated at Vézelay, now absolved by agency of the Pope himself.

No one was more dumfounded by this surprising turn of affairs than the Archbishop of Canterbury. William of Pavia was one of his dearest enemies and was now rumored to be Henry's candidate for his see. Otto of Ostia was one to blow neither hot nor cold upon his grievances. Becket's friend, John of Salisbury, familiar with the
curia
, dreaded them both merely as Romans and cardinals. Becket at once surmised that Rome had "smelled of English sterling." He had a vision in which he was offered a cup of poisoned wine from the edges of which two spiders crawled.

The fact was that Alexander was again "in shipwreck," this time in the very trough of the wave. The Holy Roman Emperor's army, abetted, as some suspected, by English subsidy, was at the gates of Rome. In this crisis of his affairs, the Pope wrote to Becket obscurely. "If," he said, "matters do not come off for the moment to your satisfaction, wait for a more favorable time." But patience was not Thomas' most conspicuous virtue. He dipped his pen in gall and composed letters to Alexander and expostulations to the legates, some of which his tactful friend edited and re-edited before they could be dispatched to the Holy See. John observes that in some instances Becket's original language was "not fit to be addressed to the Pope's postilion."

The legates, arrived in Gaul after unexpected delays, found it more difficult than they had imagined to bring the wounded Becket before a tribunal procured in Rome by his adversary. He demurred; he made legal difficulties; he begged the question, declaring he would come to the parley only after the restoration of his see. At last, late in the fall of 1168 (Saint Martin's) he was induced to meet the cardinals at Gisors. Though the legates engaged him cautiously and forbore to press him, they could not bring him to negotiate, nor could they contrive any formula to which he would assent. William and Otto were obliged to retire empty handed to Henry in Argentan. Henry, who had been willing to spend liberally to gain his ends, suffered an attack of Angevin fury at the failure of his mission. The legates were dismissed so promptly, says Diceto, that they did not wait for their own equipage to be assembled, but rode hurriedly away on such horses as they could find, their ears burning with Henry's parting shout, "I hope I may never lay eyes on a cardinal again."

The wrath af a woman is much to dread

Tristram and Ysolt

IN THE SPRING OF 1168 HENRY, by threat of joining the German schismatics,
¹
to one of the most powerful of whom he had already married his daughter Matilda, had procured two valuable concessions from Alexander one, a renewal of the papal authority to the Archbishop of York to crown the young king; the other, a letter forbidding Becket to proceed forthwith with the
excommunication
of the
king
or nobles
in
England
. These boons were offset, however, by a new delegation summoning Becket and the king again to arbitrament of their grievances, and setting Ascension Day as the term of papal leniency.

Neither Henry nor Becket displayed any eagerness for further parleyings, and it was not until early in 1169 that the legation found any contrivance for bringing them together. In January the papal commission took advantage of an occasion arranged by Louis Capet to bring Henry with his sons to the frontiers of the Ile de France to do homage, in presence of a cloud of noble and ecclesiastical witnesses, for Angevin provinces held of the French king as overlord. The time appeared to the Capets ripe and propitious for an inviolable definition of boundaries and a limitation of the presumptions of the Angevin who, for twenty years, had been thrusting out his fortresses in ever-widening encroachment upon Louis and his vassals.

The total circumstances in which the assembly was convened gave it much more than usual significance to an anxious feudal world. There was not only the customary periodic renewal of homage by vassals to their overlords, and especially by the King of England to the King of France; but these relations were complicated by the Becket affair which had penetrated the whole area of ecclesiastical relationships. And just at this crisis in the affairs of the Angevin, when straws might tip the balance of his fortunes, the Countess of Poitou had interjected a new and most disturbing issue.

The chroniclers are, as usual in matters touching the privy concerns of kings, discreet. But the news had already spread that a breach had occurred between the King of the English and the Countess of Poitou; and that the Queen of England, taking with her her own dedicated heir, the young Prince Richard, had set sail from Britain with seven ships carrying her retinue and her belongings;
²
and that, after sharing Henry's Christmas court in Argentan, she had retired to her own ducal city of Poitiers. There she had set up her own court and assumed the administration of her own provinces. She was under a certain protective surveillance, to be sure; but her status as vassal of the King of the Franks for her own domains gave to her initiative, to say nothing of its piquancy, an ominous tinge.

Henry and Louis met, with considerable display on both sides, at Montmirail, a castled town on the borders of Maine and the Chartrain, on the day of Epiphany, January 6, 1169.
³
It was not precisely with the air of a simple homager that Henry arrived at the conclave. He was accompanied by an imposing retinue, in which his three sons appeared, each resplendent with his own
mesnie
, the rival barons of the rival counties to which the young princes had been assigned. Henry's words to Louis were carefully composed and full of grace.

"My lord King," he said, "on this day of Epiphany, on which the three kings brought their gifts to the King of Kings, I commend my three sons and my lands to your keeping."

This speech did not discompose Louis, who was often admired in his day for his gift of rejoinder. Bending his dovelike eyes upon Henry and the sons of Eleanor, he replied,

"Since the King who received those gifts from the Magi appears to have inspired your words, may your sons, as they take possession of their lands by the title of our grace, do so as in the presence of our Lord."

This hint to the Angevins to weigh their homage honestly, which the witnesses assembled at Montmirail could well appreciate, Henry allowed to pass. He brought forward for presentation to his overlord the apple of his eye, his namesake, the heir of England, a handsome stripling of fourteen, with the distinguished grace of the Poitevins, fine stature, proud expressive mien, and bright clustering locks. Upon him the King of England confirmed his ancestral inheritance of Maine and Anjou, and the young count, still unkinghted and uncrowned, then placed his hands in the palm of his father in law, the King of France, and did homage for his provinces. He had already done homage as Duke of Normandy. The Abbé of Mont Saint Michel reports that Louis now, as a special mark of his favor, restored to Prince Henry the seneschalship of France, which he had previously bestowed upon his other son-in-law, the Count of Blois.

The magnates then saw the queen's favorite stand forth, Richard the tawny lion cub, his sturdy Angevin frame well grown, a youth with bold darting eyes and long arms apt for sword and strong bow. Henry confirmed to him the title to the inheritance assigned to him at birth, the magnificent provinces of the queen extending southward from the Loire, that rich portion which, added to the feudal domain of either king, made him, in spite of gestures of homage, the virtual master of the other. To this prince, the special scion of the queen, Louis now gave striking evidence of his paternal grace. As he had formerly attached the Angevin dynasty by offering the Princess Marguerite to Henry's heir, he now attached the house of Poitou by presenting one of his superfluity of daughters to Prince Richard, and with her he gave as her dowry the County of Berry, which Henry had long required to widen his frontier. Alais Capet, a child of nine,
⁶
sister of the elder prince's consort Marguerite, orphaned now from her own kin, was given over to the Plantagenets to be reared among them as the future Countess of Poitou. The feudal world, blinking at this scene, remarked that Louis, by hook and by crook, seemed likely to bring back into his domain that rich duchy which he had lost with Eleanor.

For Geoffrey, the third son, now but nine, Henry had made the conquest of Brittany, which owed nominal feudal homage to Louis, and the French king now gave consent to that
fait accompli
and assented to the marriage of the Count of Brittany to the Countess Constance, the hereditary heiress of the province, who was already, in any case, a hostage of the Plantagenets.
⁷
The marriage was definitely consanguineous, but Henry had been careful to appeal for a papal dispensation to circumvent that difficulty. It was arranged at Montmirail that Geoffrey should do homage for Brittany to his brother Henry, Duke of Normandy, by which subinfeudation Louis would still retain a nominal homage for those western lands.

The chroniclers of the Angevin dynasty, accustomed as they were to see Henry sign charters with the point of his sword, were sorely confused by this business at Montmirail. They offer various explanations as to why the King of England, who had been so energetic and successful in seizing and welding together a solid domain upon the Continent, should now, in his mighty prime, divide that structure that had cost him so much stress, among sons not yet grown to knighthood. Some said that a recent presentiment of death while in a fever had made the king foresee what fratricidal strife might ensue if he were carried off before his testament was certified. Some said the Becket affair threatened the succession of Prince Henry, wherefore the king was eager to see the rights of all his sons acknowledged before the bishops and nobles of both realms. Some held that Henry had set his house in order because he had been moved by the peril of the Angevin dynasty in Palestine, and expected to take the cross and go to the succor of King Baldwin of Jerusalem. Others subsequently conjectured that Henry had secretly been offered the Kingdom of Lombardy, even the Holy Roman Empire, and that the Count of Maurienne had opened to him the mountain passes to Italy whereby he might connect a Gallic with a Roman domain of Carolingian scope.
⁸
These chroniclers recalled that Henry had once lightly remarked that the whole world might be better off under the rule of one just and able man. All were perplexed. But if the queen, because of some breach with the king, had insisted upon withdrawing to her own continental domains and setting up her second son there in an estate almost equal to Henry's own possessions, it was high time for Henry to make some such offsetting provision for the first son of the Plantagenets as was actually made at Montmirail

*

It was with the greatest difficulty that Alexander's legates had brought Becket to the place of conclave. He had grown weary of inconclusive bargainings with the king. His awful weapon of anathema gained impressiveness when thundered over a vast intervening heaven. Henry's malice in routing him from Pontigny had reduced him to such poverty that he lacked the means of appearing with befitting dignity before kings and bishops. It was Louis who overcame his objections. The French king provided him with a modest equipage of horses for himself and a decent escort of clerks, lent his castle for Becket's entertainment, and summoned some of the prelates of Gaul, especially his brother-in-law, the newly consecrated Bishop of Sens, to conduct the Archbishop of Canterbury into the presence.

Prelates and clerks from many provinces of Gaul pressed about as Becket, accompanied by his escort, traversed the field to the place where the kings and their suites awaited him. The king and the archbishop, who had once been as close as David and Jonathan, had not for four years laid eyes upon each other, and they now lifted their gaze above a vast abyss. Both were deeply moved. It was whispered that Becket had been urged by his best friends to withhold his salvo, and that Henry, though he still stood his ground, was eager for the sake of his son's coronation to keep the peace. Overlooking all others, Becket cast himself before the king and let his tears flow. Henry sprang forward and raised him to his feet. The archbishop had been greatly changed by the austerities of his life and the stress of his sufferings. His tall figure was gaunt, his native pallor had become transparent, his brilliant eyes subdued. Bystanders were touched by the visible signs of his spiritual combat. With a humility he had learned in exile, he pleaded the cause of the church, vowed his loyalty to the king, explained with apology his flight from his see. The assistants hung upon his words, finding them agreeable to reason, sweet and good. As he drew to a close, he appealed to the king for clemency for the church in England.

"In presence of the King of France, the nuncios of the Pope, and the Princes, your sons," he said, "I commit the whole case and the issues that have arisen between us to your royal arbitrament… saving the honor of God'"

The king, who to this moment had followed the archbishop's words with evident approbation, now started forward with gestures of rage and a burst of opprobrious language.
¹¹
When his reproaches at length died down, Thomas replied quietly and without rancor, and Henry was quickly aware that his own violence had turned the sympathies of the bystanders to the archbishop. Changing his tone, but ignoring the nuncios, he turned to the King of France and said,

"My lord King, attend me, if you please. Whatever displeases him he will declare contrary to the honor of God, and thus he will ever have the last word with me. But lest I seem in any way not to honor God, I ofter this proposal. There have been before me many kings of England, some with more, some with less, authority than mine; and there have been many archbishops of Canterbury, great and holy men. Let him yield to me what the greatest and most saintly of his predecessors conceded to the least of mine, and I shall be satisfied."

Thereupon the bystanders cried out, "Hear, hear! This is fair. The King makes a just offer."

But Thomas, who heard in the king's words a reaffirmation of the Constitutions of Clarendon, remained silent. Louis spoke instead.

"My lord Archbishop, do you desire to be higher than the saints, more strict than Peter's self? Why do you hesitate? Behold, the peace you desire is offered you."

Then the bishops drew Thomas aside, all trying to be heard at once. They besought him not to let the peace fail, implored him to be silent for the time about "the honor of God."

Only at length Thomas spoke.

"Shall I," said he, "when our fathers have suffered so much in the name of Christ, forswear the reverence I owe to God in order to regain my temporal state? Heaven forbid.
(Absit, absit.)"

Hereupon the bishops, the nobles, the exiles for Becket's sake, who longed to go home after this day's business, drew off in groups condemning the obstinacy of Thomas. One of the archbishop's kinsinen, when his horse stumbled in the twilight as he rode off, rallied the steed ruefully. "Come up, come up, Dobbin," he said, "saving the honor of God, of Holy Church, and the dignity of our order."
¹³
Henry, riding away with Louis, berated Thomas in the most richly flavored language, and for once his abuse fell without hindrance upon the French king's ears.

If Becket was disinayed by the outcome of the day, Henry can hardly have given himself to sleep after the conclave of Montmirail with a sense of profitable Angevin work accomplished. The course of the business with Louis and Becket had not left in his hands the tangible gains with which he was accustomed to retire from parleys. He seemed to have stepped over some boundary of adversity. He had always avoided committing himself; yet now he had done so. He had certainly not meant to deliver to his unfledged sons more than prospective rights and titles; yet the ambitious vassals of the princes, if not the striplings themselves, and the queen, and Louis Capet, would presume upon the feudal pledges to which he had borne witness. The queen especially.