Simon Schama journeys through 5,000 years of life in the British Isles.
Henry II built one of the greatest empires the medieval world had seen - only to see his wife, Eleanor of Aquitaine, and his scheming sons tear it all to pieces. He also created the jury system and the first legal statute books, but is best remembered as the man who ordered the murder of the Archbishop of Canterbury, Thomas Becket, his best friend turned bitterest enemy.
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Henry II built one of the greatest empires the medieval world had seen - only to see his wife, Eleanor of Aquitaine, and his scheming sons tear it all to pieces. He also created the jury system and the first legal statute books, but is best remembered as the man who ordered the murder of the Archbishop of Canterbury, Thomas Becket, his best friend turned bitterest enemy.
Watch Complete Series:
https://dailymotion.com/playlist/x8t1po
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TVTranscript
00:00England, 1154, nearly a century after the Battle of Hastings.
00:16The country has been torn apart by a savage civil war.
00:25William the Conqueror was long dead.
00:28For 30 years, his grandchildren had been locked
00:31in a life-or-death struggle for the crown of England.
00:39The realm was in ruins.
00:53And then there appeared a young king,
00:56brave and charismatic, who stopped the anarchy.
01:00His name was Henry,
01:02and he would become the greatest of all our medieval kings.
01:09He should be as well known to us as Henry VIII or Elizabeth I,
01:13but if he is remembered at all today,
01:16it is as the king who ordered the murder in the cathedral,
01:19or as the father of the much more famous, impossibly bad King John
01:24and the impossibly glamorous Richard the Lionheart.
01:32Henry II has no great monument to his reign.
01:36No horseback statue of him stands outside Westminster.
01:40Yet he made an indelible mark on our country,
01:43the father of the common law, the godfather of the English state.
01:49But Henry was cursed, brought down by the church, his children
01:53and most of all by his queen,
01:55the older, beautiful, all-powerful Eleanor of Aquitaine.
02:00This is the story of Henry II and his family.
02:04In all the pages of British history,
02:06there has never been anything quite like it.
02:49Henry II, his wife, Eleanor, and their children, Richard and John,
02:54were the most astonishing of all the family firms
02:57to have run the enterprise of Britain.
03:00They did so with a furious energy
03:02that either entranced or appalled their subjects.
03:06And like many family firms,
03:08they had a capacity for both creation and self-fulfilment.
03:12What their intelligence built, their passions destroyed.
03:19They were called the Angebins,
03:21named after the French-speaking province of Anjou.
03:24At the height of their power,
03:26they were the masters of everything that counted in Christendom.
03:30Their England was the linchpin of an empire
03:33that stretched from the Scottish borders to the Pyrenees.
03:37Not since the Romans, and never again,
03:40has England been quite so European.
03:45The dynasty had its roots in the civil war
03:48that was being fought between two cousins,
03:51Stephen and Matilda,
03:53the grandchildren of William the Conqueror.
03:56It was Stephen who seized the crown,
03:58but that wasn't the end of the story.
04:01In the late 19th century,
04:04it was Stephen who seized the crown,
04:06but that wasn't the end of it.
04:08For if Matilda couldn't beat him with an army,
04:11she could beat him with a wedding,
04:13a wedding that would found a dynasty
04:15and reduce Stephen's ambitions to dust.
04:26In 1128, Matilda married Geoffrey of Anjou,
04:30nicknamed Plantagenet,
04:32because he wore a sprig of yellow broom,
04:34or Plantagenesta, in his hat.
04:37His family emblem was three lions.
04:42Along with his money, power and territory,
04:45Geoffrey gave Matilda something even more important,
04:48a son, Henry.
04:50SINGING
05:00As the boy Henry grew up,
05:02it became apparent that from his mother
05:05he'd inherited steely single-mindedness,
05:08lots of physical courage and a phenomenally foul temper.
05:13From his father, he'd got instinctive charm
05:16and knife-sharp political and military intelligence.
05:20But the quality that anyone who ever met Henry
05:23most vividly remembered about him,
05:26the overflowing tank of energy
05:28that made him the most hyperactive king in British history,
05:32this was all his own.
05:38This was the age of chivalry,
05:40when the myth of Arthur and Camelot was at its most popular.
05:45Right from the start, Henry was being groomed
05:48by his ambitious parents to take England away from Stephen,
05:52to become a new King Arthur.
05:55And to do this, of course, he would need a Guinevere.
05:59As it happened, the perfect candidate had just become available,
06:03Eleanor of Aquitaine.
06:06But the match was a gamble.
06:08He was 19, she was pushing 30.
06:11He was relatively inexperienced.
06:14Eleanor had seen as much of the ways of the world
06:17as it could possibly offer.
06:22And yet, something rather surprising happened
06:25between the teenage Arthur and the mercurial Guinevere,
06:29something that was a bit of a surprise.
06:33Henry found himself at the altar in 1152,
06:36beside an older woman,
06:38described as a graceful, dark-eyed beauty.
06:42Disconcertingly articulate, strong-minded and jocular,
06:46hardly the veiled damsel in distress,
06:49Eleanor was the one he had been looking for.
06:52But she was not the one he had been looking for.
06:55She was the one he had been looking for.
06:58She was the one he had been looking for.
07:01The very same veiled damsel in the tower.
07:04One likes to think that for her part,
07:06Eleanor saw not just the usual feudal, spur-clanking bonehead,
07:10but beyond a stocky frame and barrelled chest,
07:13someone who was an intriguing peculiarity.
07:17The rare prince who looked right,
07:19with a falcon on one hand and a book in the other.
07:24But it was Eleanor's homeland, Aquitaine,
07:27that was the greatest prize,
07:29a vast stretch of land between Anjou and the Pyrenees,
07:32a place where wine-steeped Latin culture
07:35had been polished anew by Provençal sensuality.
07:40Its capital here in Poitiers,
07:42the home of troubadours and courtly love.
07:54No wonder, then, that Eleanor grew up, as her contemporaries put it,
07:58aveillant, welcoming, vivacious,
08:01her handsome head perhaps turned
08:03by all those lovelorn lyrics of knights enslaved by beauties
08:07and bent on besieging their virtue.
08:13So this is what Eleanor brought to the match.
08:16Grandeur, territory, wealth, a lot of wealth,
08:20and the glamour of Aquitaine.
08:23No wonder Henry thought that with this marriage
08:25he got, well, pretty much everything.
08:28Everything, that is, except the crown of England.
08:35In 1153, Henry Plantagenet crossed the Channel.
08:39His father, Geoffrey, had already taken Normandy from Stephen,
08:43so now it was up to Henry to take England.
08:47Faced with an exhausted nation and defecting baron, Stephen caved in.
08:52A deal was struck.
08:54Stephen would be allowed to die on the throne,
08:57on condition he named Henry as his heir.
09:02Within a year, Stephen was dead,
09:04and Eleanor and Henry were crowned together at Westminster Abbey,
09:08King and Queen of England.
09:10When they emerged from the vivats and the incense,
09:13they were the French-speaking sovereigns of an enormous realm
09:17which stretched from the Pyrenees through the vineyards of Gascony,
09:21along the codfish-run coastal waters of Brittany,
09:24then over the Channel to England,
09:26along the length and breadth of the country to the Welsh borders
09:30and the windy moors of Cumbria and Northumbria.
09:35And it was a perfect time to come into this country
09:38and it was a perfect time to come into this colossal inheritance,
09:42for the mid-12th century really was the springtime of the Middle Ages.
09:46Literacy and learning were spreading
09:48from the cathedral schools in Paris and Canterbury.
09:51Monasteries were being founded at a record pace,
09:54and although they were supposed to be purged of worldliness,
09:58before long they were the engines of economic power,
10:01producers of wool, masters of the mills and rivers.
10:05So if this was indeed springtime,
10:08Henry and Eleanor had just gotten themselves the fattest and the ripest fruit.
10:16Still, it's unlikely they ever thought of it as a true empire
10:20in the Roman sense of a single realm.
10:22Its many regions were all treated separately according to their customs.
10:26And while Westminster was increasingly at the heart of administration,
10:31Rouen in Normandy, Chinon in Anjou and Poitiers in Aquitaine
10:35were just as important.
10:39It was rather the greatest and grandest family estate in all Christendom,
10:44and that surely was enough to be going on with.
10:51After all, it was one thing to stand around counting off one's possessions,
10:56it's quite another thing to know what one was supposed to do about being king,
11:00especially king of a country so promising but so peculiar as England,
11:04with all its Anglo-Saxon names and institutions
11:07like shire courts, writs and sheriffs.
11:11After all, what did Henry Plantagenet know of Huntingdonshire?
11:15Or, for that matter, what did Huntingdonshire know of Henry Plantagenet?
11:22Henry, of course, spoke virtually no English at all.
11:25What he would have grasped, though, if only from his coronation oaths,
11:28was that kings of England were supposed to be both judge and warlord.
11:34In fact, the coronation oath, preserved intact from Ebba the Confessor,
11:39who was increasingly being held up as some sort of ideal monarch,
11:43pretty much spelled out the job description of the king of England.
11:47One was protect the church.
11:49Two was preserve intact the lands of your ancestors.
11:53Three, do justice.
11:55And four, and most sweeping of all, suppress evil laws and customs.
12:06Fulfilling one and two went without saying.
12:09But what was surprising about Henry
12:11was that he took vows three and four just as seriously.
12:15Before Henry, justice was, do what I want, I'm the king.
12:20By the end of Henry's reign,
12:22getting the king's justice didn't depend on the king being there in person.
12:26Henry had established permanent, professional courts
12:30sitting at Westminster or touring the counties,
12:33acting reliably in his name.
12:37Now, law became, listen to what my judges have to say.
12:44And by 1180, those judges could consult England's first legal textbook,
12:49full of precedents on which to base their decisions.
12:52The law now had its own kind of majesty.
13:02It was vow number one, though, the protection of the church,
13:07which quite unpredictably would cause Henry II the greatest grief.
13:12It was to provoke a kind of spiritual civil war.
13:16In its way, every bit as unsettling as the feudal civil war,
13:20and which, in its most dreadful hour,
13:23would end with bloodshed in the cathedral.
13:30And this was especially ironic, since at the outset,
13:33it seemed to be the church that was the strongest pillar
13:36of Henry's administration.
13:38Its literate clerics initiated him into the mysteries of governing England.
13:43So when the Archbishop of Canterbury offered up
13:45one of his brightest protégés, Thomas Beckett,
13:48for the office of Chancellor, Henry listened, looked and gave him the job.
13:59So, who exactly was this Beckett then?
14:02Well, for a start, he was the first commoner of any kind
14:06to make a mark on British history.
14:08And the possibility that someone like Beckett, a merchant's son,
14:12with an impoverished Norman knight clanking around somewhere
14:15in the family closet, could end up as the king's best friend,
14:19said something about the possibility of the great swarming city itself.
14:26At the heart of the emerging capital was the great church of St Paul,
14:30and around it, upriver from the grim pile of the conqueror's tower,
14:35were wharves, thick with ships loaded with wool going out,
14:38wine, furs or silks coming in.
14:41In this teeming world, Beckett's father strutted,
14:45owner of one of the grandest houses in Cheapside.
14:50The truth is Beckett was a real Londoner,
14:53with a natural flair for doing what Londoners like doing most,
14:57the getting and spending of money, spectacle, costume,
15:02and despite his notoriously delicate gut,
15:05Beckett also seems to have enjoyed good food and drink.
15:09He was street smart and he was book smart.
15:12In short, from the get-go, Beckett was a big league performer.
15:16He was a player.
15:20There were, in a way, a match of opposites.
15:23Beckett was older by a decade, and as chancellor,
15:26willing to deal with the administrative detail that bored the king.
15:30Beckett was tall, self-contained, his forehead creased with frown lines.
15:36The king was square-shaped, packed with hectic passion,
15:41a real plantagenet powerhouse.
15:49Above all, Beckett was able to keep up
15:51with the relentless pace set by Henry himself.
15:55Medieval courts were itinerant affairs,
15:58travelling 20, 30 miles a day,
16:01eating in a royal forest or by the roadside.
16:04But Henry, who made a fetish of exercise out of a fear, some said,
16:08of growing fat, never seemed to slow down,
16:11barely arriving at one of his palaces before chasing off again.
16:18Clarendon Palace was the most magnificent hunting lodge in England.
16:23All that's left of it now is this raw, ivy-covered stump of stone.
16:28But in Henry's time, the place would have been full of courtiers
16:32and dogs and hawks and horses.
16:35That's the way the king liked it,
16:37a kind of scruffy power to his entertainment.
16:46In fact, Beckett saw right through Henry's game of studied informality,
16:51the way he avoided wearing the crown,
16:53his preference for ordinary riding clothes.
16:56Beckett knew that when Henry extended the hand of friendship,
16:59he was capable of following it by frosty withdrawals of affection,
17:04unpredictable explosions of carpet-biting, incendiary fury.
17:16It was this pseudo-sibling relationship
17:19that gave Beckett the confidence later on
17:22to treat the king as a virtual equal,
17:25with catastrophic results for all concerned.
17:29Time and again, he'd tell his dwindling band of followers,
17:32look, I know this looks bad, but trust me,
17:36I know the way this man operates.
17:40But even in the early days, beneath the jesting,
17:44there was, if Thomas looked for it, a kind of ominous tension.
17:48When, for example, the king and the chancellor rode through London,
17:52Henry pointed to the countless destitute,
17:55and eyeing Thomas's gorgeous scarlet and grey miniver edge cloak,
17:59let it be known how charitable it was to the king.
18:03Well, yes, said Beckett, you should attend to it right away.
18:07Oh, no, no, no, you should have the credit, insisted the king,
18:11pulling at Beckett's cape.
18:13An undignified tug-of-war then followed,
18:15with both men trying to pull the capes off each other.
18:19At last, the chancellor had no alternative
18:22but to allow the king to overcome the king.
18:25The king, however, refused.
18:28At last, the chancellor had no alternative
18:31but to allow the king to overcome him
18:34and give his cape to the poor man.
18:50Yet if Henry suspected Thomas of getting above himself,
18:54and if he did, he wasn't alone,
18:56it didn't get in the way of Beckett coming to mind
18:59for the top job in the country,
19:01the newly vacated post of Archbishop of Canterbury.
19:05In fact, Beckett's worldliness must have made him seem
19:09precisely the right kind of man for the job Henry wanted to do,
19:13which was to put the church in its place.
19:19Monarchs had long taken it for granted
19:22that they were directly anointed by God,
19:25safely above the church,
19:27but the popes of this period begged to differ.
19:30Kings, they said, reported to popes, not the other way around.
19:34This wasn't just an academic quibble.
19:37This was a fight to the death.
19:43There were two flashpoints.
19:46The first was whether law-breaking clergymen
19:49were allowed in the king's courts like everyone else.
19:54The second was whether bishops had the power
19:57to excommunicate royal officials.
20:01By making Beckett Archbishop of Canterbury,
20:04Henry believed he could depend on someone who would share his view
20:08of the subordinate relationship of church to state.
20:12The king was in for a shock.
20:19At least there seemed to be a good deal of the old Beckett
20:23about the new Beckett.
20:25The array of fancy foods
20:27and company of young cosmopolitan scholars remained.
20:31But all was not how it appeared.
20:34Beckett ate none of the feast, and beneath his grand garments
20:38he may well have begun to wear the hair shirt
20:41that was found later on his murdered body.
20:45When the king began to realise
20:47that a mysterious transformation had taken place in Beckett,
20:51when, for instance, the archbishop stood up in public
20:54and opposed in the most militant language
20:57the king's demand for a new tax on the church,
21:00Henry Plantagenet went altogether ballistic.
21:04Nothing made him more enraged than a friendship,
21:07as he saw it, betrayed.
21:15It all came to a head here at Clarendon, early in 1164,
21:19when Henry summoned a special council of the princes of the church
21:23and the most important nobles of the realm.
21:26There he asked...
21:28Well, actually, he demanded that they assent unconditionally
21:32to what he chose to call the customs of the realm.
21:40Beckett was no idiot.
21:43He knew exactly what this meant.
21:45Royal control over the clergy.
21:48He'd seen it coming for months
21:50and had been urging his bishops to resist it at all costs.
21:54After endless prevarication, in the end,
21:57Beckett refused the king's demands, ordering total resistance,
22:02a position from which he'd never budge.
22:06The king now moved the way he liked best, through the law.
22:11In October 1164, Beckett was brought to trial at Northampton,
22:16accused, and this was the killer,
22:18of improper use of funds when he'd been chancellor.
22:21So all those half-joking comments about fancy clothes
22:25that Henry had thrown Beckett's way now stopped being funny.
22:29They'd become a deadly criminal accusation.
22:33When Thomas decided to dress up for the trial
22:37in his full archbishop's rig
22:39and carry a huge silver cross, Jesus-like,
22:42his greatest rival, the Bishop of London, tried to seize it from him,
22:46but Beckett's grip was like iron.
22:49A fool he was, a fool he'll always be,
22:52was the bishop's comment on this performance.
22:56The trial broke up, with Beckett storming out.
23:00Perjurer! Traitor! yelled Henry's barons.
23:03Whoremongers! Bastards! replied the archbishop.
23:07Convicted on the charges, Beckett knew he was in dire peril
23:11and fled on the nearby road to London.
23:14The trial was over.
23:16Beckett was sentenced to three years in prison.
23:20Convicted on the charges, Beckett knew he was in dire peril
23:24and fled on the nearest horse.
23:26He must have thought he was running for his life.
23:40Beckett and a small group of die-hard followers
23:43landed on the Flemish coast.
23:46They were broke, demoralised, prostrate with exhaustion
23:50and flooded with the grim realisation of what they'd done.
23:55They'd made themselves outlaws for Christ.
24:01This is where Beckett's little family of God ended up,
24:05the Cistercian abbey of Pontigny, about 100 miles south-east of Paris.
24:10Built in sparkling white limestone,
24:13it seemed a stunning advertisement for purity,
24:16a perfect match for Thomas's temperament.
24:31But this was no monkish retreat.
24:34It pretty soon became apparent that what Beckett had established here
24:38was a real government in exile.
24:41He had his own pan-European intelligence network.
24:44He had his own letter smugglers with the know-how
24:47to get through the blockade that Henry had imposed on communication.
24:51And he had his own versatile propaganda department.
24:55But most of all, Beckett had his own unwavering sense of self-righteousness.
25:02Pretty soon, though, Henry began to use his own formidable power
25:07to turn the screws on Beckett's supporters.
25:10There were arraignments and arrests,
25:13terrifyingly sudden summary evictions,
25:16the seizure of land and property.
25:19Anyone, anyone who so much as thought about saying a good word for Henry
25:24would be executed.
25:27Messengers caught carrying his mail were thrown into prison.
25:31Innocent relatives, incriminated by family association,
25:35were turned into exiles themselves.
25:46It took Beckett some time to understand
25:49that the only way to get out of exile
25:53was to leave the country.
25:59It took two painful years of back-and-forth diplomacy
26:03and increasingly impatient signals from the Pope
26:06to arrange even talks about talks.
26:11After a series of abortive reconciliations in 1170,
26:15it looked as though peace might finally break out.
26:19A few days later,
26:21Henry and Thomas were met by woods near the village of Vretteval.
26:26A beautiful place, remarked one observer.
26:29Only later did he find out that the locals called it Traitor's Meadow.
26:39Henry and Thomas rode out to each other
26:42and the King took off his hat in salutation.
26:46The King was in no mood for talking,
26:48the Archbishop's posterior mortified
26:51by the chafing of his secret goat hair underwear.
26:56For once, the King was in no mood to quarrel
26:59and agreed not only to restore Thomas to all his powers and authority,
27:03but also to treat those who were Beckett's enemies as his own.
27:11When it was all over and Beckett had got everything he wanted,
27:15and a tearful wave of emotions swept through him,
27:18Beckett dismounted and flung himself in front of the King's horse.
27:23The King got off his own mount
27:25and walked over to his old friend who'd become his bitterest enemy
27:30and bodily lifted him up, put one foot in a stirrup
27:34and hoisted Beckett back into the saddle.
27:37They then rode over together to the end of the field,
27:41to the royal tent, where the King announced
27:44that henceforth they were finally reconciled
27:48and that he would now be a most kind and most generous lord.
27:56After the peace was publicly announced,
27:59Henry asked Thomas to ride with the court a while,
28:02but Beckett declined.
28:04This turned out to be mistake number one.
28:07The King had wanted to catch the moment, hold it a little longer.
28:12His mood could vanish as quickly as his bad temper could reappear.
28:21Mistake number two was much worse.
28:25As the King had pardoned Beckett's closest followers,
28:28someone suggested that, likewise,
28:30Thomas might like to forgive those who had stayed loyal to the King.
28:35It's not the same, said Beckett.
28:38And it was this fanatical inability to meet halfway,
28:42to let bygones be bygones,
28:44that would prove to be Beckett's fatal error.
28:54The last meeting between the King and Beckett
28:57took place on the banks of the River Loire.
29:01And in a mood of sad friendliness, the King says to Beckett,
29:05you know, if only you could do what I tell you to do,
29:09I'd entrust you with everything.
29:12No reply, and one imagines a long pause,
29:16a sigh, a shrug of the shoulders,
29:18and the King goes on, well, go in peace,
29:21and we shall meet either in Rouen or in England.
29:25And then another pause,
29:27and Beckett comes out with something absolutely amazing.
29:32He says, my Lord, if we part on these terms,
29:36we shall not meet again in this life.
29:39And the royal temper flares up, and Henry says,
29:42why, do you take me for a traitor?
29:45Meaning, do you suppose that I will abandon you
29:48when I've given you my protection?
29:50And Beckett looks at the King and says, heaven forbid.
29:55And I think, as he allowed that parting shot,
29:59so full of pain, sincerity and wise-guy irony,
30:03Beckett must have made the sign of the cross.
30:14Thomas Beckett's ship came into the harbour at Sandwich
30:18probably on the morning of December 1st, 1170.
30:23And was greeted not only by a throng of poor people,
30:26but by three royal officials armed to the teeth.
30:34As the stones of Canterbury came into sight,
30:37he got off his horse, took off his boots,
30:40and walked barefoot the rest of the way
30:43through anthem-singing crowds of devotees.
30:48And when he arrived home, Thomas Beckett knew
30:51what he said he would do to all those who had opposed him
30:55during his six years of exile.
30:58Shouting the dreaded curse, may they be damned by Jesus Christ,
31:03he excommunicated them.
31:09But the bishops were not in hell.
31:11They were at Henry's court near Bayeux,
31:14busy pouring venomous reports in the King's ear
31:17about Beckett's impossible, virtually treasonous arrogance.
31:21And Henry, who typically seemed to have forgotten
31:24about the promises at Fréteval,
31:26raised his head from his pillow
31:28and let out a roar of plantagenet anathema.
31:39And it was not, will no-one rid me of this turbulent priest,
31:43but a much more alarming outcry.
31:47What miserable drones and traitors have I nourished
31:51and brought up in my household
31:53who let their Lord be treated with such shameful contempt
31:57by a low-born cleric?
32:06To anyone who'd witnessed Henry's terrible meltdown
32:10or had even heard about it,
32:12his words could only mean one thing,
32:15that he wanted the interminable, insufferable Beckett problem
32:19to go away.
32:21Not go away as in six feet under, perhaps,
32:25but then, if that's what it took, so be it.
32:29He was, after all, a traitor.
32:31And, well, what happens to traitors?
32:35The Four Knights, who would kill Beckett,
32:38had no doubt about what Henry had in mind
32:41and rushed to Normandy to take a ship to Kent.
32:49Dawn the next day, December 29th, 1170.
32:53Beckett's last.
32:55Reginald Fitzhurst was on his way to see him.
33:00At around three, they burst into the Archbishop's Palace
33:04where they found Thomas with his advisers.
33:07When the knights came in, he studiously ignored them.
33:11Reginald Fitzhurst broke the silence by saying
33:14he had nothing to do with Henry's death.
33:17He had nothing to do with Henry's death.
33:20He had nothing to do with Henry's death.
33:23He had nothing to do with Henry's death.
33:26Reginald Fitzhurst broke the silence by saying
33:29he had an important message from the king,
33:31which was that Beckett should go to Winchester
33:33and give an account of his conduct.
33:36Beckett said he had no intention of being treated like a criminal.
33:40Things rapidly got ugly.
33:43Fitzhurst ominously declaring
33:45that Beckett was no longer under the king's peace.
33:52Ought Beckett to have temporised,
33:55or made an escape while there was still time?
33:58My mind is made up, he told his follower, John of Salisbury.
34:02I know exactly what I have to do.
34:06Please, God, you have chosen well, replied John.
34:13And instead of bolting,
34:15Thomas proceeded to the Cathedral for Vespers.
34:18He made sure the door was open to receive the congregation.
34:21He had chosen his place.
34:23He had written in his mind his last and greatest performance.
34:37They caught up with him here, in the north transept of the Cathedral,
34:41and Beckett must have seen right away that they meant business
34:45because they had got up in the standard kit of terrorist thugs,
34:49face and head covered.
34:51Chainmail, of course.
34:53They were carrying naked swords and shouting,
34:56where is the traitor?
34:58And Beckett replied,
35:00here I am, no traitor to the king, but a priest of God.
35:06The archbishop seemed calm, but no-one else was.
35:10His attendants, all except two,
35:12disappeared into the shadows of the church.
35:17But the 52-year-old Beckett was, remember,
35:20a cockney, a street fighter, tough as old boots under the cow.
35:25And when he stood rooted to the spot,
35:27he became physically, as well as theologically,
35:30the immovable object.
35:32At such times, the kind of talk he'd picked up
35:35in his cheapside childhood came back to him,
35:38ripe and abusive.
35:43Whoremonger, he yelled at Fitzers.
35:46He must suddenly have felt ridiculous,
35:48clanking around in all that armour.
35:50What do you do when you can't stand feeling ridiculous any longer?
35:54Whoosh goes the adrenaline, bang goes the gun,
35:57or in this case, the sword, down through Beckett's attendants' arm,
36:00then slicing through the top of the archbishop's head.
36:03The crown hung by a thread of flesh
36:06as Beckett sank to the floor,
36:08murmuring, according to his chroniclers,
36:10for the name of Jesus and the protection of the church,
36:14I'm ready to embrace death.
36:19Then, thank God, came a coot of grass.
36:22Another mailed arm, another downward slash to the head,
36:26so hard that the sword blade broke in two on the stones.
36:33To finish the job, a third warrior stood on the archbishop's neck,
36:37stuck the end of his sword into the open cavity of his skull,
36:41scooped out the brains and spread them on the floor.
36:45Let's be off, he said.
36:47This fellow won't be getting up again.
37:15BELL RINGS
37:38It was around 4.30 in the afternoon.
37:41The door was open,
37:43and people who had come for the service gathered round the body.
37:47But it was by no means a flock who thought Beckett was a saint.
37:51He wanted to be a king, said one.
37:54Now, let him be one.
37:58But then it all changed.
38:01Beckett's chamberlain reattached the bleeding scalp to his head
38:05with a strip of material torn from his own shirt.
38:08And the monks began to prepare Beckett's body for burial.
38:14And then they discovered what no-one until that moment had known,
38:19the hair shirt with lice crawling busily in it.
38:23Thomas the Immovable had been Thomas the Self-Mortifier,
38:28Thomas the Humble.
38:35They let him lie, washed in his own blood,
38:39and over the clotting body laid the archbishopal garments.
38:43By chance, there was a marble sarcophagus
38:47ready for someone else's burial here in the crypt,
38:50and a space to lower it into.
38:53So down went Beckett, arrayed in the full rig,
38:57the dalmatic, the pallium, the cope, the chasuble, the orb and the ring.
39:03He'd always thought Kit mattered, had Thomas Beckett.
39:08SINGING
39:13And for just what, exactly, had Beckett laid down,
39:17some would say thrown away, his life?
39:20Some fantastic notion, already out of date,
39:23that the church could lay down the law to the state?
39:30All our modern instincts seem to say,
39:33Oh, come on, look at Henry and you find reality,
39:38the guardian of the common law, the engineer of government,
39:42the smasher of anarchy.
39:45And you'd be quite wrong.
39:47Beckett, headstrong, infuriating, over-the-top theatrical Beckett,
39:53made a huge difference.
39:55His view of the church lasted.
39:58The Androvid Empire did not.
40:04The actual murderers got off pretty lightly.
40:08Hiding out in Yorkshire, excommunicated, told to go on crusade.
40:13But the real judgement Henry reserved for himself,
40:17and the verdict was guilty as charged.
40:20In 1174, he made a pilgrimage to Canterbury
40:23where Beckett's blood was said to work miracles.
40:26Over the last miles, Henry walked barefoot in a hair shirt,
40:30as Beckett had done four years earlier.
40:33At the tomb, he confessed his sins and was whipped by the monks.
40:38However tough his punishment, though, the blood would never wash away.
40:43Henry, the hero of the common law, will always be remembered
40:47as the biggest of England's crowned criminals,
40:50the murderer in the cathedral.
40:54Henry II would rule for another 20 years,
40:57long enough to see his embryonic legal system
41:00grow into a thriving network of courts.
41:03Up and down the land, these new courts were to settle
41:06not just the usual disputes of blood and mayhem,
41:09but all manner of painful rows,
41:11and to make sure that no one was left out.
41:14Henry II would rule for another 20 years,
41:17long enough to see his embryonic legal system
41:20grow into a thriving network of courts.
41:22Up and down the land, these new courts were to settle
41:25not just the usual disputes of blood and mayhem,
41:28but all manner of painful rows,
41:30over inheritances, estates and properties.
41:34How ironic, then, that the only family
41:37that would not accept the king's justice was his own.
41:41Because if there was one person who was likely to think of the king,
41:45not as judge, but as transgressor, it was his wife.
41:53Henry II would rule for another 20 years,
41:56long enough to see his embryonic legal system
41:59grow into a thriving network of courts.
42:02Up and down the land, these new courts were to settle
42:05not just the usual disputes of blood and mayhem,
42:08but all manner of painful rows,
42:10over inheritances, estates and properties.
42:13Up and down the land, these new courts were to settle
42:16not just the usual disputes of blood and mayhem,
42:19but all manner of painful rows,
42:21long enough to see his embryonic legal system
42:24grow into a thriving network of courts.
42:27Up and down the land, these new courts were to settle
42:30not just the usual disputes of blood and mayhem,
42:33but all manner of painful rows,
42:35over inheritances, estates and properties.
42:38Up and down the land, these new courts were to settle
42:41not just the usual disputes of blood and mayhem,
42:44but all manner of painful rows,
42:47and then there was Geoffrey, as bright and devious
42:50as his namesake grandfather, given Brittany,
42:53but then trampled to death by a horse.
42:56This left Richard, Coeur de Lion, the Lionheart,
43:00physically brave, chivalrous and brutally ambitious,
43:04and the youngest, John, vindictive, self-serving,
43:08but undoubtedly clever.
43:10Henry saw in him perhaps the only prince
43:13who could properly inherit the government.
43:17Between them, Richard and John managed to undo,
43:20in their own spectacular ways,
43:22not only the prospects of the kingdom,
43:25but in the space of 15 years,
43:27the entire empire their father had so skilfully constructed.
43:38It was on Richard that Eleanor pinned her hopes.
43:42She was even prepared to go as far as to encourage an alliance
43:45between Richard and her husband's bitterest enemy,
43:48the King of France.
43:52So, in 1189, Richard declared war on his father.
44:02This time, Henry faced defeat,
44:04forced to watch as his barons defected to Richard.
44:08The beleaguered Henry had no choice but to negotiate
44:11and agree terms which humbled him before his own son.
44:20To onlookers, he appeared to embrace Richard in a kiss of peace,
44:24but what he really said was,
44:26God spare me long enough to take revenge on you.
44:33And when the King asked to see the names of all those who had joined Richard,
44:38to his horror, the first on the list was his beloved son, John.
44:43Faced with his ultimate treachery, Henry read no more.
44:51He died two days later in his castle at Chinon,
44:55some chroniclers say of a broken heart.
44:58The only child at his deathbed was one of his illegitimate sons.
45:02The others, he said, with Lear-like bitterness, are the real bastards.
45:09Bring the music of birds.
45:12A barge took his body downriver to Fontevrault Abbey.
45:16When Richard finally viewed the tomb,
45:19it said that blood poured from the nostrils of the corpse.
45:23I am a lion when dawn breaks and you are me.
45:31In fact, when Henry II died here at Chinon in 1189,
45:36hardly anyone mourned.
45:38It seems that most people were off breaking open bottles
45:42to celebrate the accession of his son, Richard,
45:45the darling of popular folklore and legend.
45:48From the very beginning, then,
45:50Coeur de Lyon had won the public relations battle with his father.
45:54He was already a member of the royal family.
45:57To prove it, to show that the old regime had passed,
46:01that a new glamour had arrived,
46:03Richard put on a show-stopping coronation.
46:06As if in a reverie of Camelot, he had himself dripping in gold,
46:11golden sword, golden spurs, a golden canopy over his head.
46:16To celebrate the new reign, the new king,
46:19the new king, the new king, the new king,
46:22the new king, the new king, the new king,
46:25To celebrate the new reign,
46:27the Jews of London presented Richard with a special gift,
46:30a gesture that was immediately interpreted by the populace
46:34as a sinister plot and which triggered a general massacre.
46:41Richard of Devizes, in his chronicle,
46:43was the first to use the word holocaustum
46:46to describe the mass murder of England's Jews.
46:51To his credit, King Richard made strong efforts
46:54to forbid this first wave of pogroms.
46:57The problem was that he was never around to enforce things.
47:01It was an irony, really, the king,
47:03whose statue stands outside Parliament
47:05and who is therefore supposed to personify
47:07some sort of elemental Englishness,
47:09spent less time in his country than any other monarch.
47:13The three lions on his coat of arms were Plantagenet lions.
47:17The cross of St George stood for Aquitaine, not England.
47:29Eager to do God's work, Richard vanished to the Holy Land.
47:33John immediately set himself up as a rival,
47:36creating a virtual state within a state,
47:39complete with his own court and mercenary army.
47:42In 1192, when news arrived of Richard's capture
47:45on his way back from the Crusade,
47:47John quickly declared his brother dead and himself king.
47:53Eleanor was torn to pieces by this fratricidal struggle.
47:58She had been bred to do what Angevins do best,
48:01to preside over government, to manipulate politics.
48:05But now she was paralysed by the tragic events
48:08of her own family.
48:10In desperation, she turned to the Holy Father,
48:13to whom she wrote an extraordinary letter.
48:18I, Eleanor, Queen of England, unhappy mother,
48:23pitied by no-one, have arrived at this miserable old age.
48:31Two sons lie in dust and their antics,
48:35Two sons lie in dust and their unhappy mother
48:38is tortured by their memory.
48:42King Richard is in irons.
48:45His brother John ravages the kingdom with fire and sword.
48:50I know not which side to take.
48:53If I leave England, I abandon the kingdom of my son John,
48:57torn by civil war.
48:59If I stay, I may never see the dearly beloved face
49:03of my son Richard again.
49:10There was nothing the Pope could do about her plight.
49:14Money, however, could do the trick.
49:17Two years and 34 tons of gold later,
49:20Richard was ransomed into freedom,
49:23but his kingdom was bankrupt.
49:27The cost of acting out heroic war games
49:30was measured in blood as well as money.
49:33Showing contempt for the defenders of a besieged castle
49:36by standing in front of them without armour,
49:39a lone archer's bolt found the join
49:42between Richard's neck and his shoulder.
49:45The wound turned gangrenous.
49:47Within ten days, the Lionheart was dead,
49:50a triumph of daredevil romance over common sense.
49:57His body was laid in a tomb at the foot of his father's in Anjou.
50:03The heart of the Lionheart was taken to the great cathedral
50:07at Rouen in Normandy,
50:09which seems fitting since this city
50:12was always more of a capital to Richard than London.
50:17His brother John, who succeeded him, was buried in England,
50:21mostly in Worcester Cathedral,
50:23because the monks of Craxton Abbey
50:25had taken care to steal away his entrails,
50:28making John in death, as he'd been in life,
50:31one is tempted to say, gutless.
50:36It was as a politician
50:38that John was most obviously a wretched failure.
50:42Under his father, the empire had been sustained
50:45by a shrewd combination of charisma and feudal loyalty.
50:49John's problem was his difficulty in believing
50:52that anyone would ever be more than a fair-weather friend.
50:56So he relied on blackmail and extortion,
50:59threats to the barons rather than promises.
51:03Assuming disloyalty, he ended up guaranteeing it.
51:10So when John needed the barons most,
51:12when Normandy was threatened by the French king,
51:15they weren't there for him.
51:17The result was a catastrophic defeat.
51:22The loss of Normandy ripped the heart out of Andrew in power.
51:31Whether or not there was a secret meeting at Bury St Edmund's,
51:35with all the major nobles in England
51:37sworn to force John to accept reform,
51:40it's certainly true that from defeat sprang rebellion.
51:45At some point, the barons drafted a document
51:49that went well beyond forcing John to stop being vindictive,
51:54proposing instead a catalogue of things
51:56the king would not be allowed to do.
52:00It was called Magna Carta.
52:08Anyone expecting John to accept reform
52:12Anyone expecting to find in it some sort of primitive constitution
52:17is going to be in for a bit of a shock when they read the details,
52:20because the liberties enumerated here
52:23boil down largely to tax relief for the armoured and landed classes.
52:31But even if the Magna Carta is filled with the moans
52:34and bellyaching of the barons,
52:36that bellyaching turned out to have profound consequences
52:40for the future of England.
52:42For by putting so much weight on the authority of a common law,
52:46the Andrumans had stirred in the nobility,
52:49a dawning realisation that this was their law too.
52:53A generation before, the barons couldn't have cared less
52:56about the rights of men held in prison for unstated causes.
53:00That was what happened to commoners.
53:03But under John, bad things had happened to them.
53:06Land stolen, widows hounded, heirs made to disappear.
53:13So now was the time to use the weapons
53:15Henry II's revolution in justice had put into their hands.
53:19And by an amazing irony,
53:21the Andrumans became the schoolmasters of their own correction.
53:27Henry II's transformation of royal justice
53:30had come back to bite his own dynasty.
53:37So if it isn't exactly the birth certificate of democracy,
53:41it is the death certificate of despotism.
53:44It spells out for the first time the fundamental principle
53:49that the law is not simply the will or the whim of the king.
53:54The law is an independent power unto itself
53:58and the king could be brought to book for violating it.
54:07None of this was apparent right away.
54:10Ten weeks after Magna Carta had been signed,
54:13it was annulled by the Pope
54:15and John went back to fighting his battles by the sword,
54:19against the rebel barons
54:21and against the first successful invasion by King of France.
54:25For a few months in 1216, much of England was ruled by the Dauphin.
54:36John died on campaign in Norfolk,
54:39facing the windswept waters of the Wash.
54:42Fighting had quickened his appetite
54:44and he ate a meal so hearty it paid him back
54:47with a fatal spasm of dysentery.
54:50As for the barons of England,
54:52they had had no appetite for civil war, much less rule from France.
54:57So when John's nine-year-old son
54:59was proclaimed Henry III at Gloucester Cathedral,
55:02they rallied to him.
55:06But what they were rallying to
55:08was not so much a person now as a contract.
55:11The understanding, guaranteed by the reissue of the Charter,
55:15that from now on, the government of England
55:18had to be accountable to the sovereignty of the law.
55:26The ramshackle conglomerate of the Androvan Empire
55:29had fallen apart almost as quickly as it had risen.
55:33But in the England to which it was reduced,
55:36something solid was left.
55:38Something that's best measured not in masonry or mileage,
55:42but in magistrates.
55:44So the best thing that can be said for the Androvans
55:47was that they'd left behind a country that didn't need them anymore.
55:52Why hunt for Excalibur
55:54when you had something much more potent, Magna Carta?
56:03CHOIR SINGS
56:33THE END