The Conquering Family (14 page)

The hearing lasted for seven days. The results of the deliberations then began to show in the form of demands which were conveyed to the monastery and served on its grim, silent guest. First he was told he must pay for his contempt a fine of three hundred pounds. This was a colossal assessment, but the primate raised no objections. The next day a demand was made for the payment of sums he had expended in France during his term as chancellor. On the third day the heaviest blow of all fell, a demand that he make an accounting for all money received at the chancellery from vacant clerical posts while he was chancellor and to pay to the Crown the full amount. No man in the world, no king even, was rich enough to meet such an exaction. It was clear that an impasse had been reached and that the proceedings could lead to only one conclusion.

The King could not keep still while all this was going on. He strode up and down the Council Room, roaring at his officers when they advised caution or leniency, slapping at his heavy thigh with a riding whip. When one of the go-betweens returned, he would ask eager questions. What had the fellow said? How did he look? Did he bear on his countenance the signs of worry? “There can no longer be both of us in England!” he declared, again and again. “I as King, he as archbishop!” It was clear he was pressing his demands to force a resignation from Thomas à Becket. If these exactions were met by some miracle, he would think of others.

The primate continued to sit in his small cell. He was under as much strain as the King, but it showed only in the hollowness of his eyes. The bishops came to him, one at a time, suggesting this course, advocating that form of compromise. They were veering back to him spiritually but still lacked the courage to stand behind him. He had curt negatives for everything. To the arguments of Foliot, for whom he had contempt, he said scornfully, “Cease.… It is well known how
you
, being consulted, would reply!”

On the last day of the trial he went to St. Stephen’s to celebrate mass, using the psalm
Princes sat and spake against me
. Then, arrayed in his full vestments and carrying the heavy archiepiscopal cross in his own hands, he rode to the castle, only two of his forty attendants daring to accompany him. A great crowd of the common people gathered and followed him to the gates of the castle, shouting to him to be of good cheer
and praying loudly. The noise reached the chamber where the Council sat, and Henry cried out to those about him to draw up a charge of treason against this man who was denying royal authority. The bishops, regaining a measure of their courage, refused to participate and were ordered truculently to withdraw. They changed sides of the hall, taking the chamber where the lesser nobility had stayed all these days, dicing, telling stories, cursing the obstinacy of this scurvy priest who thus kept them kicking their heels in pestilential idleness. The lesser nobles took possession of the Great Hall itself. Some stretched themselves out on the trestle tables and went to sleep.

Thomas à Becket dismounted in the courtyard and, holding the cross high in front of him, walked over the rough clay surface. There was a mist, and the tops of the towers could not be seen. A servant, more courageous than the bishops inside, dropped on a knee and begged the primate’s blessing.

Inside the screens, the archbishop stopped and looked about him. Then, with an ironic sense of the fitness of it, he crossed to the chamber where his bishops were sitting. He stood in the door and looked at each one in turn with a brooding air. The Bishop of Hereford got to his feet and offered to carry the cross which the head of the Church still held out stiffly in front of him like a standard-bearer in the van of an army. The accused man shook his head. Foliot cried out at him angrily, “If you come thus armed into court, the King will draw a still sharper sword!”

Thomas motioned him to be silent and was met with another acrimonious outburst. “Fool!” cried the Bishop of London. “Fool thou hast ever been, and from thy folly, I now see, thou wilt never depart!”

The archbishop walked to the head of the chamber and seated himself, so that he seemed to be presiding at a meeting of the prelates of England. A few of the company became uncomfortable and left. The rest pressed him to give in, earnestly and vehemently. To all of them he had one reply only, “I hear you!”

Hours passed. Supper was served in the Great Hall and the sound of rattling dishes reached them and the chamber was filled with the odor of warm food. Darkness had fallen and servants brought in tall candle-holders and placed them in the corners. The Bishop of Worcester, a bastard brother of the King, begged with increased heat that the primate give in and so put an end to all this. The answer was the same, “I hear you!”

Finally the earls of Cornwall and Leicester entered the chamber. The first named was a good friend of Becket and would remain so to the end, but when he opened his mouth to speak the archbishop cut him off impatiently.

“You come to speak of a sentence,” he said. He rose from his chair, still
holding the massive cross in front of him. “Do thou first listen to me. The child may not judge his father. The King may not judge me. I will be judged only by the Pope under God and, in your presence, I make my appeal to him.” His voice rose to a higher pitch. “I forbid you, my lord, under threat of anathema, to pronounce your sentence.”

He left the chamber and crossed the Great Hall. Supper was over and the servants were moving the dismantled trestle tables back to their positions along the wall. The place was filled with well-fed men looking for something to amuse them. They were all a little drunk from their potations, and the spectacle of the erect figure crossing the space with set face roused them to action. They began to jeer, to shout insults at him, calling him “Traitor!”

The floor was covered with rushes, on top of which lay the broken evidences of the meal, bones and the heads of fish and pieces of bread. The company began to pick up handfuls from the floor and to pelt the archbishop with this refuse.

Outside the castle walls great crowds were waiting for him. They had waited all day, being deeply concerned as to what might happen to him. “See what a glorious train escorts me!” said the archbishop. “These are the poor to whom Christ so often turned!” The people followed him to the monastery, where he had the doors thrown open and food served to them.

A small party of men, English from their faces and the special intonations in their use of the Norman tongue, entered an inn at Gravelines, a port on the Norman coast. Night was falling and so the moat around the town was deep with tidal water, locking everyone in as securely as by bar and chain within its tall stone ramparts. It was a bad time for trouble of any kind, escape being out of the question, and it was clear from the manner of some of the party that they were acutely aware of this. One of them was a very tall man with deeply lined face and a commanding eye. The landlord looked at him closely, noticing that the long and sensitive hands did not busy themselves with the good food on the table. Dropping on one knee beside the tall stranger, he begged his blessing.

One of the other men demanded in an angry whisper that the landlord get to his feet at once. Did he want to attract the attention of the other guests? The man rose slowly.

“You are the good Bishop of England, my lord,” he said in a low tone. “We all know about you, my lord, and are happy you are here.”

He had guessed correctly. Thomas à Becket had ridden out of Northampton in a pelting rain after leaving the castle and had made for the coast. With no attempt at disguise except that he assumed the name of Dearman, he had crossed the Channel and was now on his way to lay his case before the Pope. All over England letters had been received by the officers of the Crown, by the wardens of ports, by the captains of ships.
This notice read:
Thomas, heretofore archbishop, a traitor to the King of England and a fugitive of evil intent, is to be seized and held
.

The letters had been issued too late.

For more than seven years the Archbishop of Canterbury remained in exile. At one time the King of France would shower him with favors and promise war in his behalf, at others he would close his doors to the uncompromising primate. Pope Alexander blew hot and cold. When Becket placed the Constitutions of Clarendon in his hands, he claimed never to have seen them and flew into a rage over the rigorous clauses. Having once commanded Becket to accept them, he now censured him for having made his first verbal submission. Henry was in Normandy, where he received the cardinals the Pope sent to him in efforts to arrive at a solution of the difficulties. The King was lavishing gold in all directions in bids for support. One meeting was arranged between King and archbishop at Montmirail which came to nothing. Through it all the primate kept suspended over the head of Henry the threat of excommunication and the laying of England under an interdict.

At first Thomas lived in the Cistercian monastery at Pontigny and about him, as always, legends began to grow. It was said that in dining with the Pope he had turned water into wine twice, not intending to do so (performing miracles before the Pope would smack of insolence) but not being able to control the divine power in his hands. Two of the stories told of him became widespread.

The first was that he wore hair drawers as well as shirts and was particular to keep them in neat repair. One night he was sewing patiently and with small success in his cell. Sensing a presence in the room, he looked up and found a lady of gentle face bending over him. She took the needle and thread into her own hands, completed the task, smiled at him with compassion, and vanished. He had recognized her at the first glance as Mary, Mother of Christ.

The other story was that on an occasion when he supped at the table of the King of France, the Queen noticed that the cuffs of his tunic were tight around his wrists and that something seemed to be moving under them. She asked him about it and he became evasive, not wanting to acknowledge that the movement was made by maggots. She insisted that he open his sleeves, and when he did the maggots were transformed into pearls which rolled onto the surface of the table and glistened in the light of the candles. The Queen would have liked one as a gift from this strange holy man, but something held her back from asking. And when the pearls
had been replaced in the sleeves and the cuffs had been tied as securely as before, they turned back to maggots again.

It will be noticed at once that discrepancies exist between these stories. If the exile were as particular as the first anecdote indicates, he would not allow himself to fall into the condition involved in the second; but both seem to have been accepted generally.

At one stage of this long and bitter tug of war Henry became so incensed that he told the Cistercians in England he would confiscate their lands if their order continued to harbor Thomas à Becket at Pontigny. Accordingly Becket was under the necessity of moving and he elected to live at Sens, much to the discomfiture of Alexander.

It seemed that nothing could be done to settle the differences between these two strong and violent men who had been once on such close terms. Henry would be enraged over some episode and would unbuckle his baldric, roll himself up in the coverings of his bed, screaming with anger and biting the edges of the mattress. Becket wrote letters to his enemies in England which scorched them, and he seemed ever on the point of excommunicating the King. Persons who were thus thrust outside the Church were supposed to be damned for eternity; no one was to come near them or speak to them. A curse was on their food, on the glass from which they drank, on their clothes, on their couches, on the air they expelled from their lungs. The Pope was continually restraining Becket. The King, he would say, must not be put under the ban, not at least until after the next Easter. Then it would become the Easter after that.

At the end of five years Henry reached a momentous decision in another matter. He would have his eldest son crowned King of England. For a moment the contest with Becket must be set aside to consider what this meant. On the surface it indicated this much and no more, that Henry was removing all possible doubts of the succession and so insuring the country from any of the trouble which followed the death of Henry I. Such, however, was the smallest part of what was in the King’s mind. There was no reason to anticipate opposition to his son after his own death. His position was so strong that no other claims existed. He had four healthy sons, and it was not within the range of possibility that all would die. In addition, Henry had the engrained Norman sense of possession and he would not give up willingly the brightest gem in his diadem, the kingship of England. No, his decision had a much more far-reaching implication. He wished to show that his dominions had outgrown the appellation of kingdom, that with such broad frontiers he must set up rulers under himself, his own sons: Henry in England, Normandy, and Anjou, Richard in Aquitaine, Geoffrey in Brittany, John in Ireland (alas, poor Ireland!), with himself the overlord of all; in other words, the empire of the west, with himself seated on a throne as important as that of Charlemagne. The crowning of the eldest son may be
accepted as the final indication, after so many others, of the nature of the dream in Henry’s mind.

At the time that he announced the imminence of his son’s coronation, someone in his presence spoke of the King of Germany. Henry flew into a temper and cried, “Why do you diminish his dignity by calling him King instead of Emperor of the Germans?”

The decision to elevate the prince to royal rank raised a serious difficulty, for only the Archbishop of Canterbury possessed the right to crown a king of England. Henry had no intention of giving in to Becket in order to have him in England for the ceremony, and he wrote to Alexander asking papal dispensation by which the Archbishop of York might preside. The Pope obliged with the necessary authorization but, on receiving a vehement protest from Becket, changed his mind and wrote direct to Roger of York, withdrawing his consent. It was said that the second letter was not received. At any rate, the ceremony was performed and young Henry began to assume some of the responsibilities of kingship. This rather complicated affair was to prove the fuse which finally set everything ablaze.