There is one story that illuminates the happier side of his character. Bishop Hugh of Lincoln had been summoned by the king to explain why he had excommunicated a royal forester. Henry was so incensed that he ordered his courtiers not to notice or greet the bishop on his arrival. Hugh of Lincoln was therefore met with silence and indifference. Nevertheless he eased himself into a position close to the king. Hugh watched his sovereign as he took up a needle and thread to stitch a leather bandage on a finger he had injured; Henry was always careless of his person. Then Hugh suddenly remarked, in French, ‘How like your cousins of Falaise you look’. At which remark the king collapsed in laughter, and started rolling on the ground. The ‘cousins of Falaise’ were related to the illegitimate William the Conqueror; they were well known as lowly leather-workers in that Norman town. The king had seen the joke about his bastard great-grandfather.
In matters of state he was always cautious and circumspect; contemporaries relate that he was a very good manager of business, and that he had an excellent memory for facts and for faces. These were now necessary qualities for any sovereign. His principal purpose was to maintain and organize his empire, and for that it was necessary to be a master of calculation. That is also why he took care never to reveal his feelings, except to those most intimate with him; he needed to remain inscrutable to achieve his ends. Yet, in matters of high policy, he often broke his word.
The year after he had reduced the magnates to submission, he sailed to Normandy where in similarly determined spirit he seized control of his dominion. He took with him his young chancellor. Thomas Becket was a close companion, a friend as well as a counsellor. One of the king’s secretaries, Peter de Blois, wrote that ‘if the king once forms an attachment to a man, he seldom gives him up’; yet that admirable fidelity was tested to breaking point with Becket. It would need a muse of fire adequately to describe their relationship.
Becket was a Londoner, of Norman blood, who was quickly singled out for royal service. He was witty and fluent, serious without being scholarly. More importantly, perhaps, he had a very firm sense of his own dignity and importance. He had come to the attention of the king through the agency of the archbishop of Canterbury, Theobald, who had already learned to appreciate the young archdeacon’s formidable skills as clerk and adviser. Becket soon found himself in the sun of the king’s favour, and as chancellor quickly became indispensable. He was one of those men, like Wolsey after him, who resolve the cares of the sovereign while never encroaching on his majesty. Henry disliked the formal and ritual panoply of kingship, preferring instead sudden judgment and quick action; so Becket became the orator and the ambassador, gladly embracing all the matters of state that the king found unpalatable.
When Becket travelled, he travelled in procession. On a diplomatic visit to Paris, in 1158, he was preceded by 250 foot soldiers and surrounded by an escort of 200 knights and squires. His private wardrobe contained twenty-four changes of silk robes. When three years later Henry mounted an expedition to take the city and region of Toulouse, close to his lands of Gascony and Aquitaine, Becket led his own force of 700 knights.
Shortly afterward, the king proposed that he become archbishop of Canterbury in succession to Theobald. The king himself was not especially pious. He wanted a compliant churchman, effectively just an extension of his own power, and he considered Becket still to be a royal servant and adviser. In this, however, he was mistaken.
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.