Can an archdeacon be saved?

Thomas Becket

Born 21 December 1119 or 1120  |  Died 29 December 1170, Canterbury Cathedral, England
From Southwark to sainthood: canon, chancellor, archbishop, exile, martyr and saint. Immortal, inscrutable, maybe not wise.

What miserable drones and traitors have I nourished and brought up in my household who let their lord be treated with such shameful contempt by a low born cleric?

Attributed to King Henry II

Whether or not King Henry II meant this to be Thomas Becket’s death warrant we can never know. He claimed not, and could certainly have been more direct and specific if he had wanted to leave it in no doubt. He may have meant to be taken seriously but not literally. He may have not really expected to hear much more of it - just another explosion from a man known for a volcanic temper letting off steam about a problem neither he nor anyone around him had yet been able to solve.

Four household knights heard Henry. In an era of status, pride and honour1 they may well have picked up on the slight Henry aimed at his men that his Becket problem remained unsolved. Yet their motives beyond this were unknown and not immediately obvious. Warren captures it as clearly as it is possible to get: ‘the knights, however, reacted as men of action, but of low intelligence, will to a situation they could not handle: they determined to do something.’ They travelled to Canterbury to confront the archbishop. Their leader - such that they were led - Reginald FitzUrse first summoned Thomas Becket to the king, then demanded he go into exile. Eyewitnesses, and there were plenty at this stage, record FitzUrse as being barely coherent and probably drunk. The others - William de Tracey, Hugh de Morville and Richard le Breton - were unlikely to have been any better. Becket tried to discuss their demands but was scornful towards their threats. That may not have helped to diffuse the situation, but then again it may well not have been the first time he had been threatened.

The four knights withdrew, but found Becket later in the cathedral. According to William of Newburgh, one hit Becket on the shoulder with the flat of his sword and said ‘fly, you are a dead man.’ Thomas Becket stood his ground. Stuck in their own ultimatum, the knights tried to drag Becket out of the building. He resisted and took a blow to the head in the scuffle. The knights then laid into him with swords. It was not a pretty end. On the evening of Tuesday 29 December 1170, Archbishop of Canterbury Thomas Becket was killed. Quite possibly on the orders of King Henry II. Christendom was appalled and recriminations erupted. It remains one of those episodes that transcends the detail of history. It is a folk tale, a legend - the cautionary tale of the depot with too much power and the holy man who brought out his true colours to the world.

We all know how it ends. But why did it end like this?

Thomas Becket began as a footnote. In the 1140s his predecessor as Archbishop of Canterbury, Theobald of Bec, resolved to attend a papal council in Paris. King Stephen forbad Theobald from leaving the kingdom and, while his authority was far from strong, Stephen and his queen held Kent and the ports of the South East firmly enough. Undaunted, Theobald slipped away. He crossed the Channel in 'an unseaworthy boat,’ accompanied by a small group of clerics. One of those was Thomas of London, the son of a Southwark merchant who had ploughed his profits into land and property, and who had no doubt sought a mix of advancement and establishment legitimacy from having a son in the church.2 That could well have been that.

Thomas rose in the background, becoming archdeacon in 1154; more a secular than spiritual office dealing with legal and financial requirements for a diocese. From then, for the first eight years of Henry’s reign, he was chancellor to the new king. Henry’s extensive Continental land meant that he would be out of England for long periods. This offered tremendous possibilities for whoever was left running the English administration to make their names, provided of course that they could live up to the responsibilities. Officers such as the Justiciar, Chancellor and those tasked with the Exchequer and law needed to be people Henry could both trust and rely upon. England had to stay secure, and Henry’s rights must be protected. The cash needed to keep rolling in.

Thomas offered all this and more. He was educated and able, but more than that he was clearly someone Henry enjoyed working with. Becket was at home as the diplomat, the courtier or fighting at the head of his 700 knights. Favour flowed his way - he was made tutor to Henry’s son, Henry, the future Young King - and so did the wealth that came with it. This wealth was conspicuously deployed in Henry’s causes. On an embassy to Paris and Henry’s first Toulouse campaign Thomas, still a churchman, travelled with some style with cash, valuables and generosity. Work with Henry and this was how you could turn out too.

Henry’s ultimate accolade would follow shortly. Theobald had died and the king determined in 1162 that Thomas Becket was to be his replacement. The clergy, from the bishops to the cathedral canons who saw it as their right to propose candidates, were aghast. Surely this was the king bringing the church more closely under his thumb by appointing his close, and decidedly secular, friend? After all, they would first have to make Thomas a priest. If Henry was picking fights with the church, at that moment it looked to be with everyone except his new archbishop.

He glorified in his independence… revelled in his novel importance… he would out-bishop the sneering bishops and become the perfect Archbishop of Canterbury.

Frank Barlow, Feudal Kingdom of England 1972

Thomas Becket may well have been Henry’s ideal chancellor, and had doubtless put much effort in to making sure that was the case. As archbishop, and particularly after the initial reception of his appointment, it was clear that there were others Becket needed to impress. So he would.

Henry was in his Continental lands. The first sign of trouble that he is likely to have seen was when the chancellor’s seals were returned to him by Becket, seemingly with no prior warning. By all accounts Henry was stunned. How had this gone wrong? But this was just the start. By keeping the case out of the king’s courts, Becket moved to protect Philip de Brois, a canon of Bedford accused of killing a knight who had stopped him from raping his daughter. The archbishop also demanded the homage of the Earl of Hereford for the castle at Tonbridge, which was claimed by Canterbury. This also should have been resolved through the king’s courts, but Becket made no effort to bring the case. He excommunicated William of Eynesford, a tenant-in-chief of the king, over an advowson dispute 3 without due process. Whatever the merits of these cases4, this was gesture politics writ large.

Becket’s behaviour in the early months of his archiepiscopate seems at first gratuitously offensive to the king… It almost seems that he was deliberately picking a quarrel.

W L Warren; Henry II (DATE)

Henry returned to England in 1163 to a wealth of complaints. These were not only about Becket in particular, but also the actions of the church more generally. Ecclesiastical justice was being used to shield criminous clerks - members of religious orders accused of secular crimes. When the clergy had grown to 15%-20% of the kingdom’s population this caused problems, especially when most of those in the clergy were in minor orders below the rank of priest and hard to tell from the layman in the street. Henry was only too happy to review and reassert the boundaries between church and state which had existed for centuries. He was not alone. Frederick Barbarossa is found looking at his rights in the context of canon law in the Holy Roman Empire at the same time. Henry had already reissued the decrees from William I’s Council of Lillebonne in Normandy. The time had clearly come where this needed to be sorted out.

The king raised the issue at the Council of Westminster in 1163, determining the clerks seized or convicted in church courts of ‘great crimes’ be defrocked and handed over to the royal courts. Becket objected to this on the grounds that a man could not be tried twice for the same offence. Although canon law was silent on the technicalities, it was a fair point and laudable principle. But it missed the bigger question of which court should try the accused in the first place, to which Henry’s answer at Westminster had been something of a practical fudge. There had been no immunity for as great a churchman as Odo of Bayeux from William I’s justice, so even accepting a hardening of the ecclesiastical line in the meantime, Henry had some good precedent to rely on.

Matters then seems to have languished around statements of high principle, as so often happens when compromise becomes impossible. Henry asked if the bishops acknowledged the ’Customs of the Kingdom.’ Becket did so, but added to his reply ‘saving our order’ - in other words provided these did not conflict with canon law. Since the exercise at Westminster had been to clarify the boundaries of both, this may have been seen as unhelpful by those on both sides. Even the pope thought so. Alexander III persuaded Becket to make a full acceptance of the Customs at Woodstock in December 1163, and another effort would be made down the road at Clarendon in January 1164. In the meantime, Henry ended Becket tutorship of the Young King and withdrew his revenues from the chancellorship, which Becket had continued to draw even after handing back the seals of office.5

This next council seemed to be getting somewhere. The resulting Constitutions of Clarendon set royal control over communications between the English church and Rome; it defined the limits of what royal and church courts each covered and retained the king’s court as the final court of appeal; it set limits on ecclesiastical censure, for example requiring royal permission for tenants-in-chief to be excommunicated; and in return ecclesiastical justice was strengthened where it applied. All of these strands can be traced back through the laws and customs of Henry I, William the Conqueror and Edward the Confessor. Only clause three had any real novelty {QUOTE}. Even then, if it sounded radical it was hardly explosive on its own. Alexander III, left to his own pragmatic devices, was unlikely to have objected.

Becket objected.

If at this point you are expecting a nuanced theological discussion of canon law, you’re about to be disappointed. Becket’s position on Clarendon can be summed up as just plain no. Warren found that ‘it is difficult to see in his numerous letters any evidence that he progressed beyond a narrow clericalism, dogmatic and basically unspiritual, despite its trappings of pious sentiment.’ It was a repeat of the Council of Woodstock the previous year when Becket opposed Henry’s efforts to make the Sheriff’s Aid payable direct to the king. Becket’s reasons were unknown, but his opposition had been enough to make Henry shelve the plan. Henry never had a long rope and he’d now reached the end of it. He summoned Becket to come to Northampton in 1164 to account for his revenues as chancellor. Faced with a task that was unpalatable, impossible or both, Becket fled into exile in France.

Becket’s exile was lengthy, public and embarrassing to Henry. It posed practical problems too, as his plan for Henry the Young King to be crowned in his lifetime relied on the Archbishop of Canterbury. It also used up valuable time and papal goodwill, while giving King Louis VII of France another lever to undermine the Angevin empire. Pope Alexander III, like Henry II, remained open to compromise but was walking a tightrope. Becket was made papal legate in 1166, but this seems to have done little to ameliorate matters. In a letter that year, Becket wrote:

It is certain that kings receive their power from the church, and the church not from them but from from Christ… You have no power to give rules to bishops… and many other things of this sort which are written among your customs which you call ancient.

Archbishop Thomas Becket, letter of 1166

Gesture politics had matured into megaphone diplomacy.

After enough false starts6 the Peace of Freteval in July 1170 allowed Becket to return. All was clearly still not well, though. Becket smarted that Canterbury’s rights had been ignored when the Archbishop of York had crowned Henry the Young King. On returning to England at the start of December, Becket’s reception from those running Canterbury in his absence was at best as frosty as the winter weather; the Young King refused to receive him. Alexander wrote to Becket later on that year with - given that this came from the pope himself - an extraordinary deployment of flattery and sympathy with the softest of kid gloves to get across one instruction: that Becket should dial it down and see it through, at least for the next few months.7

Since the days are evil and much has to be endured for the circumstances of the time, we beseech your discretion, we advise, we counsel, we urge, that in your whole conduct respecting your cause and that of the Church, you display caution, prudence, and circumspection, doing nothing in haste or precipitately… but at the right time and gravely; so that in all possible ways, consistent with the liberty of the Church and the dignity of your office, you will labour to recover the favour and goodwill of his majesty the king of England. And until next Easter you should uphold said king in that you should forbear to take action against his person or territories. For then God will give us better days, and both you and we may take proceedings with safety.

Pope Alexander III, letter to Thomas Becket (late 1170)

As we know, Alexander did not succeed. Becket denounced his enemies from the pulpit on Christmas Day. Three of the bishops who had presided at the Young King’s coronation travelled to Normandy to take up the question of Becket’s conduct with the king. Henry, famously, erupted. While a messenger was sent to England to head off any violence, they arrived too late.

The fallout for Henry II was huge, at least to begin with. Louis VII of France predictably condemned Henry for it and the Archbishop of Sens pronounced an interdict on Henry’s continental lands.8 Public opinion throughout Christendom was appalled, and understandably so. The cult of St Thomas gained devotees across Europe to the Holy Land. The dispute may have made for a spectacle, but it would be a fair guess to say that nobody had written this ending for it. Pope Alexander III was tellingly more measured. He could have excommunicated Henry or placed an interdict on England, but for now he simply forbade Henry from entering a church until the pope’s legates arrived to investigate further. Those legates reported in late 1171 that Henry ‘fears God and is obedient to the Church.’ In May 1172, Henry was formally reconciled to the Church, agreeing with the legates to fund knights in the Holy Land, take the cross himself, restore Canterbury lands and abolish customs prejudicial to the church. Henry took responsibility for his anger, but not for ordering Becket’s death.

For Henry, life went on. Events in 1171 took him to Ireland, where he was forced by the weather to stay for the winter.9 He was good to his agreement, though, and did public penance in Canterbury. He allowed his bishops to renounce their oaths from Clarendon. Henry also agreed to renounce novelties prejudicial to the church although, in a letter to the bishop of Exeter, his view was ‘I reckon these to be few or none.’10

In practical terms, that was a good short summary of Henry’s long term consequences. In 1173, Alexander III confirmed several of Henry’s appointments to church vacancies, including prominent opponents of Becket. The new bishop of Ely, Geoffrey Ridel, had been called an ‘archdevil’ by Becket. Richard of Ilchester, now bishop of Winchester, had been excommunicated by him. Richard FitzJocelin, appointed to Bath, had been ‘that traitor, that offspring of fornication.'11 That year, Henry appointed a Canterbury monk, Richard of Dover, to the vacant archbishopric. He was a moderate reformed, like Theobald. They worked together well.

When Henry’s lands erupted in the rebellion that became the Great War of 1173/74, Alexander III gave no support to Henry’s enemies, including the king of France. This was clear backing for ‘this Catholic and most Christian king' from the pope not two years after Becket’s murder. It is hard not to see a measure of understanding from the pope, who himself had been intricately involved with Becket and the dispute. When Henry died in 1189, the English chroniclers made much of his disputes with his sons. The Becket dispute may have been less recent, but at the same time had receded.

So, did Becket succeed? That depends what we think his aims were. If he sought to free the English church from Henry’s yoke then, partly, yes. Yet surely the same outcome could have been achieved had Thomas used his old relationship with Henry to cash in some favours - playing the great minister to a great king was the obvious alternative. If he aimed to bring England under the church, with Henry the servant of God and His representatives, then no - that was always going to fail. But Becket became England’s most recognisable saint. He was canonised in 1173, fewer than three years after his death. The pilgrims who tell their Canterbury Tales were going to his shrine, which has been a lucrative draw to Canterbury ever since. Here we are talking about him now. So if he wanted fame - immortality as the perfect archbishop12 - he may have succeeded beyond his wildest dreams.

The twelfth century is an age which lends itself to a broad brush - the strong tides of history which include the expanding influence of the church and the fights for rights and jurisdiction. It would be a surprise if England had avoided either of these in some form or other. In the middle of it all, though, we find two of the outsize personalities of this or any age. The denouement seems as inevitable as it is inexplicable.

Henry is the known quantity. He is one of the few English monarchs to bring a genuine streak of genius to his role; practical without being dogmatic. His flaws, though, walk him straight into the Becket dispute. His contemporaries no doubt saw this too. The famous temper, but also how loyal Henry could be to people. As Gerard of Wales points out:

Whom he had hated he scarcely ever loved, but whom he had once loved he scarcely ever called to mind with hatred.

Gerald of Wales, c1190

Thomas, Henry’s great friend and ally, had become the bane of his life and it is hard for us to say why. It may have been hard for Henry to understand too. And as we see at the end of Henry’s life when his son, John, defected to his brothers, Henry really struggled when friends and favourites turned their back on him. In John’s case, they say it was what killed him. All this must have made the chances of triggering Henry’s explosive temper all the greater.

Becket must have known this. He understood exactly what buttons to press. But why? Zachary Brooke sees him as ’living the part,’em> which he did as much as chancellor as when he was archbishop. It is interesting that his ideal as Archbishop of Canterbury may well have been Anselm, who spent the 1090s and 1100s in disputes and exile. Becket worked for him to be canonised in 1163. Ultimately, Anselm had come to terms with Henry I and nobody reached a point of no return. There were plenty of chances for Becket to step back from the brink himself. Henry and Alexander would both accept compromise within reason. Many of the English bishops found Becket’s positions unhelpful. Face could always be saved. Even as the endgame played out, he could have heeded Alexander's advice - indeed instructions - or on the night itself he could simply have offered a way out to the knights, who must have sensed that it was getting out of hand. It all suggests that either Becket did not see it coming, which would be reasonable as murdering an archbishop was far beyond normal, even for the twelfth century. Or did he know that one day there was only going to be one end? If that were the case, it requires belief that Becket sought renown as well as fortune. When they inspected his body, they found a hair shirt under his robes. Ideal for the image of the fasting, flagellating saint, but completely inconsistent with the idea of fame. Perhaps that was Becket all over.

‘Can an archdeacon be saved’ was a saying at the time. It was meant as satire. Both yes and no answers would be expected with a smirk - an implicit but…. For all the blazing fireworks of Thomas Becket’s life and career, he leaves us no nearer the answer.

Bibliography

• Warren, W.L. (2000) Henry II. London, Yale
• Poole, A.L. (1955) From Domesday Book to Magna Carta. Oxford, Oxford University Press
• Walter Map (late twelfth century) De Nugis Curialis
• Schama, S. (2003) A History of Britain vol 1. London, BBC Books
• Bartlett, R. (2006) Gerald of Wales: A Voice of the Middle Ages. Stroud, The History Press