Henry’s hopes for a compliant archbishop were bitterly disappointed, for Thomas began, almost immediately after his appointment, to oppose the king on a wide variety of matters. At some point early in his archiepiscopate, he ceased to function as chancellor. Some sources report that he formally resigned after he received the pallium, sending the great seal of England to Henry, who was in France and who was incensed when he received it. Then Thomas turned his attention to the estates of the archbishopric, many of which had been granted out on unusually favorable leases to the king’s men and to men of local importance in Kent. Some lessees had been in place for so long that there was a danger that their families would come to consider the estates their hereditary property. Thomas revoked all these agreements and took the estates back into his direct control. He also demanded from the king custody of three castles—Rochester, Hythe, and Saltwood, the last of which was to become the base of operations of his opponents during his exile and his murderers in the days before and after the murder—and lordship over a man named William de Ros, who owed the service of seven knights. These actions not only irritated the king but turned many of the great families of Kent against the archbishop.
Thomas was not entirely successful in securing control of these estates. In 1163, the constable of England, Henry of Essex, who had fled from a battle in 1159, was tried on charges of cowardice and convicted; among the estates Henry seized as a result was the castle of Saltwood, which Henry of Essex held from the archbishop. The king appointed Ranulf de Broc its custodian, and de Broc and his brothers quickly emerged as the most determined of Thomas’s opponents in Kent. Later the same year, the royal court found that Roger de Clare held Tonbridge directly from the king, not from the archbishop, and also that William de Ros was the king’s direct vassal. King and archbishop also quarreled about Thomas’s appointment of a priest to the church of Eyns-ford. When the lay lord of the estate, William of Eynsford, who claimed to be a direct vassal of the king, objected, Thomas excommunicated him. He then refused for quite a while Henry’s order to absolve William; by the time he gave in, Henry was angrier than ever.
Thomas also opposed Henry in matters having little or nothing to do with Canterbury or his religious duties. Most notably, at a council in July 1163, Henry proposed that he collect directly an age-old levy known as the sheriff’s aid rather than continuing to allow it to be paid to the sheriffs themselves. Thomas opposed him and declared that no such payment would be made by his estates or any church lands. Henry backed down, but he was furious.
To Henry, and to those who, through the ages, have supported him, Thomas was needlessly confrontational about matters that were of little importance until he made them so. From the point of view of Thomas and his supporters, the underlying issues in these matters would have made it necessary for any man of principle in Thomas’s position to take the stands he took. In the reform atmosphere of the mid-twelfth century, it was inappropriate for a prelate to remain the servant of the king, so Thomas had to surrender the chancellorship if he was to be able to present himself as a reforming archbishop. He needed to be a good steward of his church in its material as well as its spiritual dimension and therefore could not allow its lands to remain in the hands of inappropriate men, men who either had no right to what they held or were trying to convert Canterbury’s estates to their own permanent control. Even in the matter of the sheriff’s aid, Thomas was opposing the conversion of a customary but free-will offering to the local authorities into a national tax. One of Thomas’s modern adherents notes that, on this last point, “it is likely that he was voicing the opinion of every baron in England.” If so, it was a rare instance in which Thomas’s actions were widely popular.
Why wouldn’t or couldn’t Thomas be the kind of archbishop the king hoped for? This is the central conundrum of the whole affair, for there is nothing surprising about Henry’s reaction to his archbishop’s opposition or, indeed, about Thomas’s actions once he had so angered the king that he had put his own life in danger. Thomas’s critics then and now have often cited careerism as the explanation for his changes of allegiance, noting that he changed sides not once but twice. As Theobald’s servant, he had supported the church against the state, but when he became Henry’s chancellor, he supported the king against the church. Then, once he had attained the archbishopric, he adopted the position of radical support of the church against the king. The argument goes that his chief purpose was to advance his own interests and that, to do that, he needed to ingratiate himself with his superiors. The problem with this explanation is obvious: while the first two allegiances he adopted did serve to advance his career, the third, taken to the extreme to which he took it, was self-evidently counterproductive. It is hard to imagine that a man whose principal purpose was to rise to great importance and, presumably, wealth, would so rapidly paint himself into a corner from which the only escape was exile, poverty, or death. A more sympathetic interpretation argues that Thomas had to conceal his real view of the relationship of church and state while he was Henry’s chancellor but that, once he had become archbishop, he was free to act on his real sentiments: having risen to the highest office to which he could rationally aspire—the only higher office in the church was pope, and that would have been an unrealistic ambition—he had no reason to conceal his true beliefs. Moreover, in an age when almost everyone was brought up to believe that God expected them to perform loyal service to their superiors, there would be nothing shameful in adapting one’s attitudes to fit one’s circumstances. The simplest explanation of all is that Thomas, as he claimed and as many of his biographers report, underwent a religious conversion once he was appointed archbishop.
There must also have been other psychological factors in the developing quarrel. It is likely that Thomas, having reluctantly agreed to accept the position of archbishop, was well aware of how his appointment would look to many: that he would appear to be an unqualified, time-serving lackey of the king, the purpose of whose appointment was to make sure that the church would do the king’s bidding without protest. To demonstrate that this was not the case, he would need to show, as soon as possible and as spectacularly as he could, that he was independent of his former patron and capable of confronting him. Therefore, he would need to seize on whatever issues came to hand, even if they were not the most cogent ones for his purpose. On Henry’s side, the disappointment must have been colossal. A man whom he thought of as a close friend and trusted adviser was suddenly and inexplicably opposing him on all fronts. He felt betrayed. And Henry was not a man to suffer frustration patiently.
In the aftermath of the meeting in July 1163, Henry apparently decided to bring the confrontation to a head and lay down the rules once and for all. He had been brought up to believe—however unrealistically—that during the reign of Henry I, England had been an entirely peaceful and easily governable place. When he came to the throne, he declared his intent of restoring conditions in England to their state “on the day when my grandfather was alive and dead.” He had been relatively successful on the secular side: England was a marvel of good government by comparison with its Continental and Celtic neighbors. Now the time had come to bring the church into line. He began to demand that the leaders of the church recognize that he was entitled to all the ecclesiastical rights that he alleged his grandfather had had.
Several major developments over the last quarter century made this demand difficult for the church to accept. Internally, in England the church had largely gone its own way for much of Stephen’s reign, and its leaders were reluctant to give up the autonomy that, to many of them, was the norm under which they had grown up as churchmen. Externally, in the Western church in general, the claims of the papacy for its own powers and for the independence of the church from lay interference in its affairs, which had been developing since the mid-eleventh century, had continued apace through the years when England was involved in civil war. Moreover, in that period canon law, the law of the church, had grown by leaps and bounds. Most especially, an Italian monk named Gratian had produced the first great book of canon law; it had rapidly become an easily available, well-organized textbook for those who needed to make legal arguments about church matters. English churchmen, therefore, were both unaccustomed to regular, strong royal interference in the affairs of the English church and armed with new tools for resisting royal demands they thought inappropriate.
At a council at Westminster in October 1163, Henry secured from the bishops, led by Thomas, an agreement in principle that he was entitled to his grandfather’s rights over the church, though they added the proviso “saving our order,” which undercut the significance of their concession. Henry retaliated by removing his eldest son, also named Henry, from Thomas’s control and depriving Thomas of all the lands he had received in his capacity as chancellor. Nonetheless, had Henry been content with the bishops’ vague agreement, there might never have been a “Becket controversy.” Unfortunately for the peace of the kingdom, however, Henry decided that he wanted the bishops’ agreement to this principle recorded in writing—and with specifics. He therefore summoned the bishops to join him at Clarendon, one of his favorite hunting lodges, in late January 1164. Quite a few of the great lords of England who could be expected to support the king’s efforts to put pressure on the church were also summoned to attend. Once everyone had arrived, Henry presented the bishops with a document, known as the Constitutions of Clarendon, listing 16 particular rules he claimed had existed in his grandfather’s day. He demanded that the bishops set their seals to the document in recognition that these rules still applied.
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