The diplomatic negotiations of the years from 1165 through late 1170 were conducted primarily by means of letters, a remarkable number of which survive or can be reconstructed from the details given in surviving replies. Thomas and his supporters kept up a barrage of correspondence intended to prevent Louis, Alexander, or any other Continental authority from abandoning or decreasing their support for him. He wrote repeatedly to the bishops who remained in England—conspicuously, none of them followed him into exile—to urge them to remain steadfast in his support and not to let Henry run roughshod over the church in his absence. He also tried as best he could to keep in touch with supporters in England and prevent them from giving in to despair or to Henry. Henry’s chancery poured out equally voluminous amounts of material intended to encourage Louis, Alexander, and others to accept his case against Thomas and abandon him. After Thomas excommunicated several of his opponents in 1166 and 1169 and they appealed to the pope against his sentences, dealings with the papal court about the validity of these sentences added substantially to the volume of correspondence. The ins and outs of all this correspondence and the diplomacy it represents are too complicated for us to follow here.
Gilbert Foliot's Indictment of Thomas
The most famous contemporary denunciation of Thomas occurs in a long letter to him from Gilbert Foliot written in 1166. It describes the origins of the quarrel from the point of view of a bishop who sided with the king throughout. Its principal point is that the matters at issue were relatively unimportant: "[T]here is no dispute between us regarding faith, nor regarding the sacraments, nor morals.... The entire dispute with the king... is about certain customs which he claims were observed, and enjoyed by his predecessors, and he wishes and expects to enjoy. . . . As very many people say, and the whole history of the realm testifies, he did not himself set up these customs: this is how he found them." The quarrel needed never have become serious and would not have if the personality and actions of the archbishop had not exacerbated the situation beyond the king's bearing. "For what cure is useful that heals one wound, and inflicts one far greater, far more dangerous?" In the most famous passage in the letter, concerning the capitulation at Clarendon, Foliot exclaims, "Who fled? Who turned tail? Who was broken in spirit? . . . Let [God] judge on what account we could not be turned by the threats of princes; let him judge who fled, who was a deserter in the battle. . .. [T]he leader of the army turned tail, the commander of the battlefield ran away, the archbishop of Canterbury departed from the common counsel and association of his brothers." Foliot also expresses his—and other bishops'—sense that Thomas had put them in an impossible position: "You bent the knee at Clarendon, took to flight at Northampton, changed your dress and hid for a time, and secretly left the king's lands, and what did you achieve? What did you gain in doing this, except to evade studiously that death which no one had deigned to threaten? ... The sword which you have thrown away hangs over us."
The major moments in the attempts to resolve the dispute were those when meetings between Henry and Thomas were arranged. All the parties professed—despite all evidence to the contrary—that the quarrel could most easily be solved if the two protagonists could just get together and talk out their differences. Repeatedly, therefore, meetings were attempted. The first was scheduled to take place at Angers on Easter 1166, but it did not come off, though Henry met with John of Salisbury, Herbert of Bosham, and another of the archbishop’s clerks. In November 1167, papal legates moved back and forth between Henry in Normandy and Thomas just beyond the border, but nothing notable came of this attempt. Again in July 1168, a proposed meeting between Henry and Thomas at La Ferte-Bernard failed to occur. At Mont-mirail in early January 1169, Henry and Thomas actually met but wound up quarreling even worse than before, to the disgust of the French king and the papal legates in attendance. A month later, Thomas was nearby while Henry and Louis tried but failed to work out a compromise. An elaborate round of negotiations throughout much of the rest of the year resulted in a near meeting at Montmartre, outside Paris: the two principals were in adjoining spaces while their emissaries worked out a compromise, but their efforts came to nothing because Thomas demanded that Henry exchange the kiss of peace with him, as a guarantee of his sincerity, and Henry refused to give it. He alleged that his only reason was that he had once sworn never to exchange the kiss with Thomas and he would not break an oath. He offered to have his eldest son kiss Thomas instead, but Thomas found this insufficient. Predictably, an attempt in early 1170 to arrange another conference failed yet again.
Finally, however, a second meeting actually came off. On July 22, 1170, in a meadow near Freteval, the king and the archbishop faced each other. By this time, Thomas was more alarmed that his exile was harming the interests of the church of Canterbury than he had ever been. In the spring of that year, Henry had decided to crown his eldest son, also named Henry (afterward known as “the Young King”), during his own lifetime. The kings of France had been using this practice for nearly two centuries as a method of ensuring an undisputed succession to the throne. It had occasionally been used by Anglo-Saxon kings of England but had never become a regular part of English practice and had not been used in England since long before the Norman Conquest. Henry may have decided to adopt the practice largely in order to put pressure on Thomas, for one of the prerogatives of the archbishops of Canterbury had long been to crown the kings of England, yet Henry had the act performed by Roger of Pont l’Eveque archbishop of York, assisted by perhaps as many as 10 of Henry’s supporters among the bishops of England and Normandy, including Gilbert Foliot of London and Joscelin of Salisbury.
To see York exercise a right that properly belonged to Canterbury must have alarmed Thomas greatly. Perhaps for this reason, he was much less confrontational at Freteval than he had been in previous negotiations. Henry, too, may have felt that the time had finally come for all this exhausting drama to come to an end. The two men met, alone, for most of the day, which led, later on, to a good deal of dispute as to exactly what they had agreed upon. Nonetheless, they came to an apparent resolution: Henry would allow Thomas to return to Canterbury. The king would rectify the matter of the Young King’s coronation, probably by allowing Thomas to re-crown young Henry and to punish the bishops who had participated in the first ceremony. The king restored both the archbishop and his servants, including Herbert of Bosham and John of Salisbury, to his peace, though without the kiss of peace; and Thomas blessed the king, though he refused to issue immediate pardons to those who had supported the king throughout the quarrel. It is noteworthy that few of the underlying causes of the quarrel were addressed. The Constitutions of Clarendon were apparently not even mentioned.
Henry II and His Sons
Henry and Eleanor had four sons who survived at least into young adulthood. The eldest was also named Henry; by 1170 he was probably 16 and was married to Margaret, daughter of King Louis VII of France. As chancellor, Thomas had gone on a famous embassy to the court of the king of France to arrange this marriage. The "Young King," whose coronation in 1170 played a role in motivating the attempt to end the controversy between Henry II and Thomas and whose unsympathetic treatment of Thomas in the month after his return to Canterbury is described in several sources, led a revolt against his father in 1173 and 1174. He died in 1183, before his father, and never became king in his own right. The other three boys were too young in the 1160s to play any role in the famous controversy. As they grew up, however, how their father was going to divide his domains among his sons became one of the major causes of conflict in the reign. As events played out, two of Henry's sons succeeded in turn to an undivided inheritance. When Henry II died in 1189, he was succeeded by his second son, Richard I, famous as Richard the Lionhearted. When Richard died in 1199, he was succeeded by the youngest of the brothers, John, the king who granted Magna Carta in 1215. The fourth brother, Geoffrey, third in order of birth, had been married to the heiress of the county of Brittany, but he died in 1186. His only son, Arthur, did try to raise a claim to the succession in 1199, only to be captured by his uncle John in 1204, after which he disappeared; he was probably murdered.
Thomas then returned to Sens to wind up his affairs there and rejoined the king in September. Relations were decidedly cool: indeed, when the two attended Mass, Henry ensured that he would not have to exchange a kiss with Thomas by arranging to have the mass for the dead celebrated instead of the usual service. The two met on and off throughout much of the fall, quarreling and making up. Eventually, it was agreed that Thomas should return to England and his see in November. Henry gave Thomas a letter of safe conduct and letters addressed to his son the new king and the king’s men at Canterbury ordering them to allow the archbishop back into the country, his see, and his possessions. He may have intended to accompany Thomas back across the Channel and attend his reinstallation. If he had, things might have turned out very differently, but Henry fell ill—or feigned illness—and Thomas traveled without a royal escort. Allegedly, on parting from Henry he predicted that the two would not meet again in this life.
World History
