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  Many of the clergy began to fear that Thomas was going too far in challenging Henry. Another council was held at the Palace of Clarendon, but again Thomas replied to the king’s demand: “Saving my order!” Nobles implored, and priests with tears in their eyes begged the archbishop to be reasonable, and finally he relented. The Constitutions of Clarendon, which put clerks within civil law, were agreed, though later Thomas bitterly regretted it.

  The quarrels of State and Church, personified by Henry and Thomas, continued. In October, 1164, the king summoned the archbishop to a great council at Northampton where he accused him of misappropriation of £20,000. The bishops advised Thomas to give up his feud with the Crown and resign his office, but he went before the assembly carrying a large cross which he held before him during the proceedings as though warding off evil.

  Furious at his old friend’s behaviour, Henry retired followed by the rest of the assembly. At last the Earl of Leicester led the court back and read out Thomas’ sentence for treason. The archbishop’s reply was to deny the power of the court and walk out proudly. Some of the assembly were so irritated by him they picked up the floor rushes and flung them at him.

  That night Thomas opened his house to the common people, shared a Last Supper with them, and then fled to Flanders where he put himself under the protection of the Pope.

  Henry wrote to the English bishops: “You are not ignorant, reverend fathers, of the injurious treatment which I and my Kingdom have received from Thomas, Archbishop of Canterbury, and how basely he has fled the country. I command you, therefore, to cause all his clerks who remained with him after his flight to be prevented receiving any of the proceeds of their benefits . . .”

  Following his departure all who had supported the Constitutions of Clarenden were excommunicated. Henry’s reply was to have the English coast and ports watched so that no letters of Interdict could be brought into the kingdom. And so the quarrel continued for the next six years.

  In 1170 the king decided to have his eldest son Henry crowned to remove any future problems over the succession. Thomas objected because, as Archbishop of Canterbury, he was the one who should perform the ceremony. But the coronation went ahead with Roger, the Archbishop of York, performing the service assisted by the Bishop of London and six Diocesan bishops. Thomas let it be known the Pope would excommunicate those concerned, and Henry wrote to Gilbert, Bishop of London: “I have heard of the outrage which that traitor and enemy of mine, Thomas, had inflicted on you and other of my subjects, and I am as much displeased as if he had vomited forth his poison on my own person.”

  Thomas Becket had powerful allies in Europe, as well as the Pope, and in the same year a meeting was arranged between him and Henry in France. The final outcome of these political manoeuvres came in a letter from the king: “I remit to the Archbishop of Canterbury and to his adherents who are in exile with him . . . all my anger and offence, and I forgive the same all previous quarrels whatsoever that I may have had against him . . . and I restore him the Church of Canterbury.”

  In December, 1170, Thomas returned to Canterbury to be joyfully received by the common folk. On Christmas Day he preached in the cathedral, and announced the excommunication of the Bishops of Salisbury and London.

  Henry had hoped that, with Thomas restored, he would have some peace from his one-time companion but, when the news of the excommunications reached him at his Christmas court in Normandy, in fury he shouted the fatal words: “What a parcel of fools and dastards have I nourished in my house? Not one of them will avenge me of this one upstart clerk!”

  Taking his words literally, four knights — Reginald FitzUrse, William Trach, Hugh de Morville and Richard Brito — galloped from the court. On December 29 they reached Canterbury and entered the cathedral to find Thomas calmly waiting for them. What happened next was given in an eye-witness account by a monk, Edward Grim:—

  “ ‘Absolve,’ they cried, ‘and restore to communion those you have excommunicated, and the functions of their office to the others who have been suspended.’ He answered, ‘There has been no satisfaction made, and I will not absolve them.’

  ‘Then you shall die this instant,’ they cried, ‘and receive your desert.’ ‘I, too,’ he said, ‘am ready to die for my Lord, that in my blood the Church may obtain peace and liberty: but in the name of Almighty God I forbid you to harm any of my men, whether clerk or lay.’

  “Then they made a rush at him and laid sacrilegious hands upon him, pulling and dragging him roughly and violently, endeavouring to get him outside the walls of the church and there to slay him, or bind him and carry him off prisoner, as they afterwards confessed was their intention. But as he could not easily be moved from the pillar, one of them seized hold of him and clung on to him more closely. The Bishop shook him off vigorously, calling him a pandar and saying, ‘Touch me not, Reginald; you owe me fealty and obedience; you’re acting like a madman, you and your accomplices.’

  “All aflame with terrible fury at this rebuff, the knight brandished his sword against the consecrated head. ‘Neither faith,’ he cried, ‘nor obedience do I owe you against my fealty to my lord the king.’ Scarce had he uttered these words than the wicked knight fearing lest he should be rescued by the people and escape alive, suddenly leaped upon him and wounded the sacrificial lamb of God in the head, cutting off the top of the crown. . . and by the same strike he almost cut off the arm of him who tells the story.”

  Benedict of Peterborough related what happened next:—

  “While the body lay still on the pavement some of them (the townsfolk of Canterbury) smeared their eyes with blood, others brought bottles and carried off secretly as much of it as they could. Others cut shreds of clothing and dipped them into the blood. At a later time no one was thought happy who had not carried off something from the precious treasure of the martyr’s body. And indeed with everything in such a state of confusion and tumult, each man could do as he pleased. Some of the blood left over was carefully and cleanly collected and poured into a clean vessel and treasured up in the church. The bishop’s pallium and outer vesture, stained with blood, were the discreet piety given to the poor to pay (sic) for his soul, and happy would it have been for them, if if they had not with inconsiderate haste sold them for a paltry sum of money.”

  The martyrdom of Thomas Becket sent a shock wave through the Christian world. Henry . . . grieved more terribly, more than it was possible to say: for three days he would eat nothing nor speak to anyone, and for five weeks his doors were closed and he led a solitary life.”

  Pope Alexander threatened excommunication unless he would yield unconditionally to the demands of the Church. Henry’s response was to take an army of 4,000 to Waterford on October 18, 1171, to conquer Ireland. He left an order that no man should follow unless he was summoned, and thus he ensured that no letters of excommunication would reach him.

  Isolated from the rest of the world, Henry subjugated most of the country which until then had been independent of the Church of Rome. When the Irish clergy made formal submission to him at Cashel, Henry was in a position to offer the Pope the loyalty of the Irish. He then went to Normandy, where he did penance before papal legates and was absolved. In the death of Thomas the Church had gained not only a saint but a hold over the King of England, and Ireland was brought into its fold.

  Contents

  CHAPTER THREE - The Murder of Prince Arthur

  “Is it my fault that I was Geoffrey’s son ?”

  WITHIN THE GRIM walls of the Castle of Chinon Henry II lay huddled on his sickbed and brooded bitterly on his star-crossed destiny. Spasms shook his body as his fever increased in virulence; the suppurating abscess in his groin was a throbbing obligato to the mental suffering which transcended that of his body. The first Plantagenet King of England, his empire stretched from Hadrian’s Wall almost to the Mediterranean, but now it was crumbling on account of a damnable alliance between his lion-hearted son Richard and Philip II of France. Not for the first time it
must have seemed to the king that his beloved children had inherited the Satanic blood of the Angevins, that he had sired a devil’s brood.

  Eager to rule his vast dominions before they inherited them by his death, three out of his four sons had openly waged war on him — enthusiastically encouraged by their mother Queen Eleanor.

  His eldest son Henry had acquired a taste for power as temporary ruler of England while his father was in Ireland after the murder of Becket. When the king returned, he demanded a kingdom for himself on one side of the Channel or the other. When this was refused the plotting began, and King Henry learned of his danger at Toulouse when a Count Raymond, kneeling before him in the usual act of homage, whispered: “Beware of your sons and your wife.” The warning came just as young Henry left for Paris and — in company with his brothers Richard and Geoffrey, the King of France, the King of Scotland and various barons on both sides of the Channel declared war on his father. Only his youngest son John, who had no territorial prospects and was therefore nicknamed “Lackland”, remained uninvolved.

  Henry’s energetic response to this wholesale treachery was amazing. He arrested Eleanor as she was fleeing in a man’s disguise to join her rebellious sons, and had her imprisoned at Winchester for the next 16 years. He recalled troops from Ireland, spent every penny he could raise on mercenaries, and set about crushing his enemies one after the other. The French king was defeated on the Normandy border, rebellion in Brittany was stamped out and Aquitaine subdued.

  Then, on July 7, 1174, Henry crossed the Channel in a fierce gale to save England. The Scots had swept down from the north, Flemish forces were ready to invade the east coast and followers of rebel barons were rioting in London. The king went straight -to Canterbury where he entered the cathedral barefoot and in pilgrim’s rags to do public penance before the tomb of Thomas Becket which had become a famous shrine.

  He spent a night long vigil before it, and was scourged by the 70 monks of the chapter. At dawn he left for London where, four days later, news reached him that King William of Scotland, pinned beneath his horse, had surrendered to one of Henry’s loyal knights when the English king was on his knees at Canterbury. On the same day the Count of Flanders had called off the invasion as adverse winds had held back his fleet so long he no longer had any money to pay his troops.

  Henry Plantagenet had triumphed. England was at peace, his frontiers were secure and the Pope was friendly. During the following years his reforms prospered and his influence abroad was so great that when kings quarrelled he was called upon to mediate. His support of the Pope against his enemies brought peace in Europe.

  But the disloyalty of his sons had been a bitter blow, for Henry loved them more than anything else. To pacify Richard he made him Duke of Aquitaine and Geoffrey became Duke of Brittany, but the Plantagenet family quarrels were to continue. Sometimes the brothers fought each other and it was said they were united only when they joined and fought against their father. Only the youngest, John, seemed to be loyal, and Henry loved him most.

  In 1183 young Henry rebelled against the king, and William of Newburgh related: “Having made an alliance with his brother Geoffrey, Count of Brittany and some magnates from Aquitaine, he provoked his father by his warlike movements . . . Shortly after, by God’s judgement, the younger Henry was stricken with fever. His malady growing more serious and his physicians despairing of his life, he was smitten with remorse and sent to his father, humbly confessing his fault and begging as a last favour from his affectionate father that he would condescend to visit his dying son. On receipt of this message his father’s bowels yearned over him but, being persuaded by his friends that it would not be safe for the King to trust himself to those wicked conspirators who were about his son’s person, although it would be a fatherly act to visit him in his sickness, their timid counsels prevailed and the King did not go. Instead he dispatched to his son a familiar ring as a token of mercy and forgiveness and a pledge of his parental affection. On receiving the ring the son kissed it and immediately expired.”

  The death of Henry made Richard the heir apparent, but the satisfaction he may have felt was soon soured when he saw that the king wished to provide for his favourite John at his expense. Matters became more complicated three years later when Prince Geoffrey was unsaddled in a tournament and battered to death beneath the hooves of the charging horses.

  At the death of Geoffrey, Philip Augustus, the new French king, as suzerain of Brittany, claimed the custody of his son Arthur — a claim which Henry as the king’s grandfather emphatically rejected. Richard, fearing he might be dispossessed in favour of his younger brother John, aligned himself with Philip and by the end of 1188 was at war with his father.

  Henry had few troops in Anjou, the home of the Angevins, to match the combined forces of his son and the King of France. By the middle of 1189 his town of Le Mans had fallen and, stricken by fever, he sought refuge in Chinon where he heard the terrible news that Tours, the city of his birth, had fallen to his hereditary enemy and his rebellious son. It meant that he had no other option but to agree to their demands, though when Richard arrived to negotiate and received the traditional kiss of peace from his ailing father, Henry was heard to mutter, “May the Lord never let me die until I am avenged on you.”

  One of the terms Richard and Philip insisted upon was that Henry would officially pardon all the rebels who had plotted against him. In order for him to do this he had to know who they were, and a list of their names was brought to his sick chamber. As the king sat up in his bed and glanced at the scroll he went white, uttered a groan and, throwing himself back on to the mattress, turned his face to the wall.

  The very first name on the list was that of his best-loved son John, the only one Henry had believed had always been true to him.

  “Let things take their course,” he said to the wall, “I care no longer for myself or anything in this world.”

  On July 6 one of England’s greatest monarchs died of fever and a broken heart, his last words being “Shame, shame on a conquered king!”

  Prince John had given history the first proof of his character.

  * * *

  Rightly it has become the trend for serious historical authors to re-evaluate the characters who have played significant roles in the past. “Unreliable” tradition is dismissed and the bias of contemporary chroniclers is queried, and thus some of our blackest villains are seen in a new and more sympathetic light - a striking example being Richard III. One almost senses a spirit of competition between writers to discover redeeming features in the most unlikely subjects.

  Bad King John, for centuries regarded as one of our most evil monarchs as any reader of the Robin Hood legends knows, is now frequently portrayed as a maligned victim of monkish chroniclers who invented vile anecdotes about him in retaliation for his treatment of the Church. Now he is described as “an intelligent and hard-working ruler who distinguished himself as a general, diplomatic and justiciar.” And when it comes to the question of his cruelty we are told to judge him against the background of his age and not by the civilized standards of the 20th century. (Will historians several centuries hence suggest that our spectacular tyrants such as Hitler and Stalin should be seen in the context of their day?)

  But, having stated that the traditional view of John is inaccurate and that in reality he was a “progressive ruler”, his most enthusiastic vindicators have to admit he was treacherous to his brothers and his father, that he lost most of the Plantagenets’ Continental possessions, that he disastrously antagonised the Church, his subjects and his nobles — hence the Magna Carta! — and that at the end of his reign the Dauphin of France was in England, having been invited across the Channel to replace him. And then, of course, there is the tricky question of murder . . .

  * * *

  John, the youngest son of King Henry and his remarkable queen, Eleanor of Aquitaine, was born at Oxford Palace on December 24, 1167. As he grew up he was known as “Sansterre” or “Lackland�
� because of the claims of his three elder brothers to the various Plantagenet dominions. His father did what he could for John who became his favourite, proposing to make him King of Ireland and crown him with a “diadem of peacocks’ feathers”, but, though Pope Urban gave his consent, the coronation never took place. True John went to Ireland in April, 1185, but after eight months he returned, his lordship of the country having been a complete failure.

  The chronicler Gerald of Wales, a chaplain at King Henry’s court, was in John’s entourage and later wrote: “John, being himself young and little more than a boy, followed the counsel of young men whom he took with him, who were utterly unknown in Ireland and themselves knew nothing, whereas he rebuffed the honest and discreet men whom he found there, who knew the customs and habits of the country, treating them as though they were foreigners and of little worth.”

  Not only did he rebuff them, he and his friends were so amused at the long beards of the Irish chieftains when they came to welcome him that they had an uproarious time tugging them. So outraged were the various kings of Ireland by this insulting behaviour they went so far as to agree to stop feuding amongst themselves in order to unite against the English prince.

  The following year John’s prospects brightened briefly when his brother Geoffrey was killed, but when his widow bore a posthumous son who was christened Arthur, John’s hope of becoming Duke of Brittany evaporated. And with the arrival of this child was the knowledge that he was closer to the throne of England than John. When Richard Coeur-de-Lion and Philip of France went to war with Henry II and although John went to Normandy with his father and was given a division to command, he secretly came to terms with them — a secret which Henry only learned on his deathbed.

  John may have broken his father’s heart but the superstitious believed that it was Henry’s wrath against Richard which lasted beyond his death. Gerald of Wales wrote that when Richard entered the Abbey of Fontevraud where the king’s corpse lay and “approached the bier his father’s face lay unveiled, the cloth that had covered it having been lain aside. To all of them it appeared still to retain its colour and wonted look of fierceness. The Count gazed on it with real and strong emotion and knelt down before the altar in prayer remaining there however scarcely longer than the space of a paternoster. But at the very moment he had entered the church as those present saw there and bear witness, blood began to flow from the dead king’s nostrils and ceased not so long as his son remained there insomuch that the bystanders and those attending the bier were scarcely able to wipe it and cleanse the mouth and face with the cloth.”