Henry II was the most capable English king since William the Conqueror — a tireless administrator who reformed the entire legal system, governed more territory than any English king before him, and destroyed himself through an argument with his Archbishop. His sons undid most of what he built: Richard spent ten years on crusade and left England to pay the bills, and John governed so badly and so corruptly that his barons forced him to sign a document in a field beside the Thames that became the foundation of constitutional government in the English-speaking world. The Magna Carta. A brilliant father, two disastrous sons, and one of the most consequential legal documents in history.
Henry II inherited England in 1154 and began governing it at a pace that exhausted everyone around him. He was everywhere at once — in England reforming the courts, in France managing his vast continental territories, on the Welsh border dealing with raids, in Ireland conducting the first English intervention there. He rarely slept long. He ate while standing. His courtiers complained that following him was impossible because he was always somewhere else before they had finished catching up. By any measure, he was extraordinary. He reorganized the English legal system in ways that still shape it. He extended royal courts into local matters that had previously been handled by barons — pulling legal authority toward the crown and away from the feudal nobility who had used private justice to their own advantage for generations. The phrase common law — law common to all England, applied equally regardless of whose land you were on — describes what he built. Then he picked a fight with his Archbishop and everything went wrong.
The relationship between Henry II and Thomas Becket — close friends who became bitter enemies over the boundary between royal and church authority — ended with Becket's murder in Canterbury Cathedral and Henry's barefoot public penance.
The Archbishop Who Would Not Bend
Thomas Becket had been Henry's closest friend and advisor — his Chancellor, his constant companion, a man of genuine brilliance and charm who made the king's government run. When the Archbishopric of Canterbury fell vacant, Henry appointed Becket to it, expecting that having his friend at the head of the English Church would resolve the perpetual tension between royal and ecclesiastical authority. Becket transformed the moment he was appointed. He gave up his fine clothes and his political role and became, apparently genuinely, the Church's man. He wore a hair shirt under his vestments. He fasted severely. He became deeply difficult from Henry's point of view: every time the king tried to extend royal authority over Church matters, Becket blocked it. They quarreled openly. Becket went into exile in France for six years. They were reconciled — at least formally — and Becket returned to England in December 1170. Within weeks they were fighting again. In a rage at his court in France, Henry made a remark that four of his knights took seriously: What a set of idle cowards do I keep in my kingdom, who allow me to be mocked by this low-born priest, and not one of them will avenge me. The four knights crossed to England. On December 29, 1170, they entered Canterbury Cathedral and murdered Thomas Becket at the altar. Henry had not ordered it. But the words were his.
Penance at the Tomb
The murder of an Archbishop in his own cathedral caused exactly the kind of outrage that ended kings. The Pope threatened excommunication. Every bishop in Europe condemned it. Henry, who understood survival, eventually made a very public act of penance: he walked barefoot through the streets of Canterbury to Becket's tomb, knelt in the crypt, and submitted to being scourged by the monks — each monk struck him once, roughly eighty strokes in total from eighty monks. Becket was canonized as a saint within three years of his death. The shrine at Canterbury became the most visited pilgrimage site in England — the destination of Chaucer's pilgrims in the Canterbury Tales, written two centuries later. Henry lived for nineteen more years after the murder, governing effectively but never entirely free of the shadow it cast. His sons began rebelling against him in his last years, partly from ambition and partly from family grievances that went back to his difficult marriage to Eleanor of Aquitaine — a woman of formidable intelligence who took her sons' side. Henry died in 1189, reportedly learning on his deathbed that his favorite son John had joined the rebellion against him. His last words, according to accounts that may be accurate: Shame, shame on a conquered king.