The next step in Thomas’s advance made him the second in command to the king himself. The long struggle for the throne that had sputtered on through most of the years since the death of King Henry I finally came to an end in 1153-54 through, first, King Stephen’s designation of his rival Matilda’s eldest son, Henry, as his heir and then, conveniently, Stephen’s death in the next year. Thus, in 1154, King Henry II ascended the throne at the age of 21. By this time, Henry had been functioning as duke of Normandy (his mother’s ancestral land) for five years or so. He had inherited his father’s county of Anjou in 1151. In 1152, he had become duke of Aquitaine, a province that constituted approximately a quarter of the area of the kingdom of France, by virtue of his marriage to Eleanor duchess of Aquitaine, the divorced wife of King Louis VII of France (see the chapter on her). Because control of Normandy brought with it hegemony over Brittany, by the time he became king of England Henry was the ruler of most of western France, an area substantially larger than that belonging directly to the man from whom he held all these territories, the king of France. From his late teens on, Henry had taken over leadership of the effort to oust Stephen from England and restore the direct line tracing from his grandfather, Henry I, through his mother to himself. He had led several inconclusive military campaigns in England, but he had relatively little experience of the kingdom. The civil war and Stephen’s ineffectual government of the kingdom had weakened governmental institutions put in place by Henry I and his predecessors and had created what felt to contemporaries like chaos (though England was actually, by comparison with most areas of the Continent, relatively peaceful and well governed even during Stephen’s reign). Henry came to the throne determined, as he often said, to restore conditions in England to their state “on the day when my grandfather was alive and dead.” To do so, however, he needed help from men familiar with English institutions and practices. A few of his grandfather’s officials were still alive, and several of them reentered royal service under Henry, but they were not enough. To help out, Theobald made the king a gift: only three months after promoting him to the archdeaconry, he gave Thomas to Henry to be his chancellor.
The Chancery
The chancery of England had developed out of the writing office of the late Anglo-Saxon kings, which produced many of the documents issued by those monarchs. Under William the Conqueror (r. 1066-87) and his sons, William II (r. 1087-1100) and Henry I (r. 1100-35), as more and more acts of government came to be written, the chancery and its head, the chancellor, became increasingly important in the government of England. Most especially, the Norman kings of England and their chancellors developed the writ—a terse written directive from the king usually addressed to a subordinate official and instructing him to perform some action—into a major means of communicating orders from the center to the localities. Modern judicial writs such as habeas corpus, certiorari, and mandamus are the descendants of these instruments; but from the twelfth century through the end of the Middle Ages writs served much wider functions than just moving judicial cases through the courts. Like most other aspects of government, chancery had deteriorated during Stephen’s reign, but even at the end of the reign it was producing writs as well as the more formal documents of government. Thomas therefore took over a going concern, though one that needed modernization and the restoration of its efficiency.
The Chancellor
While the chancery was, by 1154, an indispensable element of English government, the chancellor was not necessarily the most important official in England next to the king. Under Henry I, an official called the chief justiciar had developed as the king’s second-in-command. That position had vanished under Stephen, but it was revived by Henry II, and for much of his reign the chief justiciar functioned as what one modern scholar has called the king’s alter ego. The twelfth century was, however, an age when the person was more important than the office; and while Thomas was chancellor few would have doubted that he was the single most important adviser and companion of the king. Not only did he restore the chancery to efficient functioning, but he took on responsibilities that did not necessarily have anything to do with writing the king’s documents. He often accompanied the king on his journeys around the country and to the Continent. He hunted with him. He went on diplomatic missions for him. Thomas’s embassy to King Louis VII of France in 1158 was famous in its day for the magnificence of the ambassador’s equipage and the imperiousness of his approach to his mission. Indeed, though he was in clerical orders, he even accompanied the king on several military campaigns—and allegedly even fought in them.
World History
