London - Edward Rutherfurd [150]
Coronation day. A strange business that had been. Perhaps if it had not been so strange, he might not have gone out drinking with his friends afterwards. He might never have gone along.
They were all so drunk. How else could they have gone to the wrong house? Dear God. It wasn’t the baker at all. It was an armourer. A fellow with a coat of mail, strong as a blacksmith. What a fight he had put up. They were only going to steal the fellow’s shirt. Just a trophy.
Then the apprentice. That wide-eyed boy with a knife. And then . . . He could not bear to think of it. His hands were clenched. Try to relax.
Nobody had seen him. They had all run. The hue and cry had been raised. They’d scattered. Nobody could have seen him.
The coronation that had taken place in Westminster Abbey the previous day, 14 June 1170, had been remarkable for two reasons. The first was that the young man being crowned was not, in fact, the king.
After the Conqueror’s sons Rufus and Henry I, and a period of feudal anarchy while the heirs in the female line fought for supremacy, the English Crown had settled upon an extraordinary man. Henry II had inherited England and Normandy through his mother, the Conqueror’s granddaughter. By a spectacular marriage he controlled the vast lands of Aquitaine in south-west France, including the rich wine region of Bordeaux. From his French father, he had also inherited the fertile region of Anjou, which lay between his Norman and his wife’s domains. The King of England was thus master of a feudal empire that stretched up Europe’s Atlantic coast from Spain to Scotland and threatened even the jealous king of France.
From his father he had inherited two other things. The first was a curious family name. A certain ancestor, it was said, had worn in his cap not a feather but a flower, a sprig of broom. Plante à genêt, they called it in French. In English, Plantagenet.
He had also inherited the Plantagenet family temperament. Brilliant and restless, the sharp-eyed Henry was seldom in one place for more than a few days as he laboured to secure and expand his empire. He was a wonderful administrator. Already he was transforming English justice, his trained judges offering his subjects royal courts instead of the unreliable ones of the feudal barons. His administration was strict. That very year half the sheriffs of England were trembling as the clerks of the Exchequer suddenly arrived to inspect their affairs. No wonder young Silversleeves’s father had admonished him: “If you would only work and serve the king well, the whole world would be at your feet.”
But there was another side to the Plantagenets. Even by the standards of those dangerous times they were ruthless and devious. Some said they were descended from the Devil. “From the Devil they came,” the great Bernard of Clairvaux had grimly remarked, “and to the Devil they will return.” Their fits of temper were legendary.
King Henry II also had four turbulent sons. It was to secure the succession to the English throne, therefore, and to prevent anarchy, that he had summoned his family and magnates to Westminster Abbey to witness the coronation of his eldest son whilst he himself was still alive. “Perhaps,” the onlookers hoped piously, “this will bring some order to this devil’s brood.”
The other strange feature of the ceremony was that Thomas Becket, Archbishop of Canterbury, the priest who should have officiated, was not even present. He had fled the country.
Becket. Cursed name. Cursed family. Strike them down and they rise up again like serpents.
A dark night. That was what reminded him of Becket. Another dark night long ago. And another crime. A terrible one.
Had his own family done it? Were they born criminals?
No. He could not accept that. If the Beckets drove men to dark deeds, it was they, the cursed Beckets, who were to blame. It must be so.
The enmity between the Beckets and the Silversleeves had not simply continued from the preceding century, it had grown worse.
When Gilbert Becket, a prosperous mercer, and his family had arrived in London, the