Milo acknowledged the jest with a polite, perfunctory smile. “If I might have a word alone with you, my lord archbishop . . . ?”
Becket acquiesced and, as the clerks watched intently, the two men walked together for a time along the shore, heads down, their mantles catching the wind and swirling out behind them. When they moved apart, Becket smiled and clapped Milo on the shoulder, then beckoned to his companions. “We are going back to our lodgings, where the Dean of Boulogne has graciously agreed to dine with us.”
The offer of hospitality was made with deliberate wryness, acknowledging the reduced circumstances of an archbishop in exile, and Becket’s clerks smiled dutifully. But they kept casting uneasy glances toward the dean, and when the opportunity presented itself, two of them dropped back to walk beside him.
Milo knew them both: Gunter was one of the archbishop’s most devoted clerks and, Master William had long plied his medical skills in the highest circles of the English Church, first as physician to Theobald, Archbishop of Canterbury, and then to his successor, Thomas Becket. It was easy for the dean to guess what they wanted to ask and he saw no reason not to tell them.
“I was sent at the behest of the Count of Boulogne,” he said quietly. “He wanted to warn the archbishop that his enemies are awaiting him at Dover, with evil intent in mind.”
They showed no surprise, for this was only one of several warnings that Becket had received in recent weeks. Neither man bothered to ask Milo what the archbishop had replied, for they already knew that. He’d been saying to anyone who’d listen that nothing would stop him from returning to England, that if he died en route to Canterbury, they must promise to see to his burial in Christ Church Cathedral.
“We must convince Lord Thomas to put in at any port but Dover, then,” Gunter declared and veered off to suggest that to one of the most persuasive of Becket’s clerks, Alexander Llewelyn, his Welsh cross-bearer.
Master William remained at Milo’s side. His shoulders hunched against the wind, hands jammed into the side slits of his cloak, he was scuffing his feet in the sand, trampling shells underfoot as if they were the enemy. “You do not look,” Milo observed, “like a man eagerly anticipating a return to his homeland, Will.”
“I fear what awaits us,” the physician said with despairing honesty. “If Lord Thomas’s enemies are already plotting against him, what will they do once they hear of the excommunications?”
“What excommunications?” Milo asked sharply, and Master William looked about furtively, then deliberately slowed his pace so that they lagged behind the others.
“I might as well tell you, for all will know soon enough. The English king has acted with his usual guile, and upon learning of his bad faith, Lord Thomas fell into a great rage and . . . and did something I fear we may all regret.”
The Dean of Boulogne came to an abrupt halt. “God in Heaven, do not tell me he has excommunicated the king!”
Master William shook his head dolefully. “No . . . but this morning he sent a trusted servant to Dover with papal letters of censure for the Archbishop of York and the Bishops of London and Salisbury.”
“Why would he do that? Has he lost his mind?”
“You must not be so quick to judge him,” Master William said defensively. “You do not yet know what the king did to provoke him. Despite his talk about peaceful cooperation, the king decided to fill the six vacant bishoprics ere Lord Thomas could be restored to power in England. York, London, and Salisbury had gathered at Dover, making ready to escort electors overseas to vote for the king’s nominees. But Lord Thomas learned of their duplicity ere they could sail for Normandy and acted to thwart them.”
Milo swore a most unclerical oath, stalked to the water’s edge and back again, mentally heaping curses in equal measure upon the heads of England’s king and archbishop. They were a matched pair, he thought angrily, prideful and obstinate and racing headlong into disaster. The worst of it, though, was the damage that had been done to the Holy Church by their infernal feuding. And, just as so many had long feared, there was no end in sight.Henry, King of England, to his son, Henry the king, greetings. Know that Thomas, Archbishop of Canterbury, has made peace with me according to my will. I therefore command that he and all his men shall have peace. You are to see to it that the archbishop and all his men who left England for his sake shall have all their possessions as they had them three months before the archbishop departed from England. And you will cause to come before you the more important knights of the Honor of Saltwood, and by their oath, you will cause recognition to be made of what is held there in fee from the archbishopric of Canterbury . . . Witnessed by Rotrou, Archbishop of Rouen, at Chinon.
Earlier that day, the Archbishop of Canterbury had been welcomed joyfully into Southwark. He’d been escorted to his lodgings at the Bishop of Winchester’s manor by the canons of St Mary, followed by local priests and their parishioners. Hours later, church bells still pealed on both sides of the river, and the bankside crowds had yet to disperse, slowing William Fitz Stephen’s progress so that an early December dusk was already descending by the time he was allowed to pass through the great gate of Winchester Palace.
Fitz Stephen’s nerves were on edge, for he was not sure of his reception. He’d seen the archbishop only once in the past six years, a brief meeting at Fleury-sur-Loire. At the time, Thomas Becket had not indicated that he bore Fitz Stephen any grudge for failing to follow him into exile. But Fitz Stephen knew that others in the archbishop’s entourage were not as forgiving, and he feared that their rancor might have poisoned his lord’s good will.
He was not long in discovering that his qualms were well founded. He saw several familiar faces, but none greeted him, averting their eyes as if he were a moral leper, one infected with some dreadful malady of the soul. And no sooner had he entered the great hall when a known figure stepped into his path, barring his way.
“Master Fitz Stephen, as I live and breathe! Passing strange, your turning up here. I was reading Scriptures a few nights ago, Leviticus 26:36, if memory serves, and suddenly it was as if you were right there in the chamber with me.”
Fitz Stephen was not the biblical scholar that Herbert of Bosham was; the other man even had knowledge of Hebrew, a rarity in the most learned circles. But Fitz Stephen, subdeacon and lawyer, was well versed enough in the Scriptures to appreciate the insult. The sound of a driven leaf shall put them to flight, and they shall flee as one flees from the sword, and they shall fall when none pursues.
His first instinct was to strike back with scriptural weapons of his own; Matthew was certainly apt, with its admonition to judge not, that ye be not judged. But that would be an exercise in futility, exactly what Herbert wanted him to do. Instead, he smiled blandly. “It is always good to be remembered.”
Herbert’s dark eyes glowed like embers. “You are not welcome here!”
“That is not for you to say.”
“You abandoned our lord in his hour of jeopardy and embraced his persecutor!”
“I made my peace with our lord king, as the archbishop himself did at Fréteval!”
“A false peace, just as you are a false friend!”
“Could you say that more loudly, Master Herbert? I doubt that they could hear you across the river in London.”
At the intrusion of this new voice, both Herbert and Fitz Stephen swung toward the sound. Herbert scowled, for Becket’s Welsh cross-bearer was the only one of the archbishop’s clerks who could match him in rhetorical flourishes, boldness of speech, and pure lung power. While he acknowledged Alexander Llewelyn’s unwavering loyalty to their lord, a trait he found to be conspicuously rare amongst the Welsh, he was invariably perplexed by the other man’s drolleries and insouciance. He assumed now that this was a jest of some sort, although the humor of it escaped him, as humor always did.
“If you choose to consort with apostates, Master Llewelyn,” he said loftily, “that is your right. I, however, do not.” And he made a dignified departure,
marred only by the hostile glare he flung over his shoulder at Fitz Stephen as he strode off.
“Why is it,” Alexander wondered, “that I always feel the urge to applaud after one of Herbert’s speeches?”
Fitz Stephen grinned, for that had been a standing joke between them, that Herbert of Bosham secretly yearned, not for a bishopric as most clerks did, but for the starring role in a troupe of players. His pleasure was sharp at this proof that their friendship had survived the vicissitudes of the past six years. “You do not blame me, then, for making peace with the king?”
“You did what you had to do,” Alexander said, accepting life’s inequities and anomalies with the fatalism of the true Celt. “My family is safely out of the king’s reach in Wales, but yours was in . . . Gloucester-shire, was it not? Who could blame you for not wanting to see them banished from England? How are your sisters? And that brother of yours? They are well?”
“Yes, thank God Almighty, they are. Ralph has entered the king’s service, in fact.” Fitz Stephen hesitated, but his were the instincts of a lawyer; better to scout out the terrain first. “Sander . . . does the lord archbishop feel as you do? Or as Herbert does?”
Alexander gestured toward a window recess. “Let’s talk over there.” Once they were seated, he took his time in answering. Fitz Stephen was a patient man, though, content to wait.
“I remember something that the Bishop of Worcester said to me last year. He said that any friend of the archbishop’s was an enemy of the king’s, with one exception . . . himself. And he was right. The king is fond enough of Lord Roger to overlook his dual loyalties. I think that also holds true for you and Lord Thomas. We both know that he and the king share the same creed: ‘He that is not with me is against me.’ But I can truthfully tell you that I have not heard Lord Thomas speak against you, not once in all those years of our exile. He does not doubt your fidelity, Will,” the Welshman said seriously, and then laughed. “Much to Master Herbert’s dismay!”
“God grant it so,” Fitz Stephen said softly. “I rejoiced to hear of the archbishop’s accord with the king, Sander, for I’d given up hope that it would ever come to pass. Herbert called it a ‘false peace.’ Is there truth in that?”
Alexander’s amusement vanished as if it had never been. “I fear so,” he said at last. “We’ve been back in England less than a fortnight, and little has gone as it ought. There is continuing strife with the de Brocs. They still hold Saltwood Castle and they’ve shown no willingness to surrender their grip on the diocese as the king ordered. They even went so far as to collect the Christmas rents in advance from the archbishop’s tenants! And they have been harassing our lord in ways both petty and great. The king sent wine as a gift to the archbishop and they seized the ship and cargo, throwing the crew into gaol at Pevensey. They have stolen Lord Thomas’s hunting dogs, poached his game, felled his trees. And I am sorry to say that the young king has so far done nothing to rein in their malice. That is why we are at Southwark, Will. Lord Thomas means to go to the young king’s court at Winchester and assure him that there is no truth in the rumors the de Brocs are spreading, that he intends to overturn Hal’s coronation.”
“The de Brocs are evil men,” Fitz Stephen said grimly, “verily spawn of Satan. Did you know that Robert de Broc is an apostate Cistercian monk? It is only to be expected that they are stirring up as much trouble as they can. I thought the king was supposed to return to England with Lord Thomas. Why did that not come to pass?”
Alexander grimaced. “When we got to Rouen, the king was not there. He sent a message from Loches in Touraine, claiming that he’d had to hasten to Auvergne to fend off an attack by the French king and telling Lord Thomas to go on to England with the escort he’d provided. You care to guess who the escort was, Will?” When Fitz Stephen shook his head in puzzlement, he said, after a dramatic pause: “The Dean of Salisbury, John of Oxford.”
Fitz Stephen’s response was all that Alexander hoped for. He gaped at the Welshman in disbelief. “But Lord Thomas loathes John of Oxford! He even excommunicated him once! Whatever possessed the king to make such a choice? Was it meant as a deliberate insult?”
“That was Lord Thomas’s suspicion, too,” Alexander admitted. “He was quite indignant at having such a man foisted upon him. And that was not all. The king had promised our lord that he’d give him five hundred marks when they met at Rouen and take care of the debts he’d incurred in exile. But there was no money and our creditors had trailed after us all the way to Rouen. The Archbishop of Rouen was so embarrassed that he offered Lord Thomas three hundred pounds out of his own funds.”
“Hellfire and damnation,” Fitz Stephen muttered. There was much that he admired about his king, but he deplored Henry’s bad faith. He was not so naïve as to believe that all promises were hallowed. Men of intelligence and goodwill understood which ones could safely be broken and which ones must be honored. Alas, the king did not.
“It does not sound like an auspicious beginning,” he said, and Alexander gave a short laugh.
“You do not know the half of it, my friend. Whilst we were waiting to take ship at Wissant, the Count of Boulogne warned Lord Thomas that the de Brocs and the Sheriff of Kent were planning to arrest him upon his arrival at Dover. As a precaution, we landed instead at Sandwich, but word soon got out and the de Brocs, the sheriff, and one of the king’s justiciars, Reginald de Warenne, came galloping up from Dover with a force of armed men.”
“Jesú! What happened?”
“Well . . . we wronged the king by doubting his motives in sending John of Oxford with us. John proved to be a godsend. He stopped them in their tracks, for all the world like a broody hen protecting her chicks!” A reminiscent grin crossed his face. “He would not even allow them into the archbishop’s presence until they’d disarmed. He insisted upon accompanying us all the way to Canterbury to make sure there would be no further trouble. Lord Thomas was impressed enough to write to His Holiness the Pope and commend his good services, and I never thought I’d live long enough to hear him speak well of John of Oxford!”
Fitz Stephen was not easily roused to anger, but he felt a deep, slow-burning rage beginning to kindle, directed at the archbishop’s enemies, wolves harrying one of God’s own. Because it was in his nature to look for flowers among weeds, he sought to reassure Alexander by saying resolutely, “Once men find out that the archbishop has been restored to the king’s full favor, these provocations will cease.”
“It is rather more complicated than that.” The Welshman lowered his voice to the confidential tones of one privy to secrets of consequence, and then revealed that Thomas Becket had dispatched letters of censure for the Archbishop of York and the Bishops of London and Salisbury.
Fitz Stephen was stunned. “Are you saying that the archbishop excommunicated them on the eve of his return to England?”
Alexander’s smile was beatific. “Indeed he did, and I’d have been willing to beg my bread by the roadside for the chance to witness their Judgment Day at Dover!”
Fitz Stephen did not share his friend’s satisfaction. “I know the depths of his anger toward them, justified anger. But . . . but why would he strike out at them now of all times, just after making peace with the king?”
“He’d not intended to do so. Remember that I said this was ‘compli cated’? When Lord Thomas first heard of the illegal coronation of the king’s son, he was told that Henry had perverted the coronation oath, demanding that his son swear to observe the ancient customs of the realm as set forth in the Constitutions of Clarendon. He wrote to His Holiness the Pope of this, with understandable outrage, for that would indeed have been salting the wound.”
“I agree. But the traditional oath was sworn, with no mention made of those accursed Constitutions!”
Alexander smiled ruefully. “I know. We soon learned that the first report was in error. But in the press of events this summer, getting ready to meet the king at Fréteval, Lord Thomas forgot to advise the Pope of this
mistaken claim. In October, the papal letters reached him at Rouen, suspending the Archbishop of York and five other bishops and ordering that the Bishops of London and Salisbury relapse into the excommunication that had so recently been lifted. Lord Thomas at once wrote to the Holy Father, asking for another set of letters in which no mention was made of the customs of the realm or the perverted coronation oath, giving him the choice of suspending or excommunicating the offending bishops at his own discretion.”
Fitz Stephen was frowning. “Then how did this come about? He could not receive new letters of censure until after Christmas, at the earliest. So he must have made use of the first letters, the ones based on faulty information. Why, Sander? Why would he do that?”
“Because he learned that the three of them were going to advise and aid the king in his plan to fill the six English bishoprics that are still vacant.”
The pieces were coming together for Fitz Stephen, in a pattern as ominous as it was familiar. The king had acted with his customary arrogance, and the archbishop had reacted with fury as calamitous as it was understandable. “Clearly, word of these excommunications has not become public knowledge, for I’d heard nothing of them. Does the king know yet, Sander? You realize that he will take Lord Thomas’s actions as a declaration of war?”
“I do not know if the king has heard yet. If not, he soon will, for all that the bishops would prefer to keep this quiet in hopes of pressuring Lord Thomas to relent. That was the chief demand made upon him by the Sheriff of Kent and the others when they confronted him at Sandwich. As for the king’s rage, I do not doubt that it will be spectacular. But the archbishop has more than one arrow in his quiver. When he made peace with the king at Fréteval, the king agreed to let him discipline those bishops who’d taken part in the coronation.”
Alexander delivered this last revelation with the complacent pride of a court jongleur who’d just demonstrated an impressive sleight-of-hand trick. Fitz Stephen did not respond as expected, though. “He consented to further excommunications?” he said, sounding so skeptical that Alexander’s smile faded.