London - Edward Rutherfurd [151]
Who had started the fires? The first had begun at the Beckets’ house on the very night their son Thomas was born. The second, many years later, began elsewhere but destroyed most of their property. And then the rumours had begun. “It was the Silversleeves,” people began to whisper. “They started those fires. They ruined the Beckets.” It was outrageous. It cast a pall of suspicion over the entire Silversleeves family. However hotly Pentecost’s father had denied it, the hissing rumour spread and could not be quenched. Gradually a new and even more insidious thought crept into the mind of this gloomy family. “The Beckets started the rumour,” they decided. “They’ll torment us to the grave.” It did not make him any less resentful when young Pentecost secretly asked himself: could it be true?
And still those Beckets would not lie down. Londoners remembered young Thomas Becket very well. Thomas of London, he often used to call himself. A lazy fellow who, like young Silversleeves, had never become a magister. He became a clerk, though, and despite his father’s ruin got himself noticed. He was good at that, always making friends and dropping them, as the Silversleeves family liked to point out. Then the old Archbishop of Canterbury had taken him into his household. He charmed the king. He had a talent for that too, with his tall good looks, his elegance and his brilliant eyes. He must have served his masters well, even brilliantly, for suddenly, to all London’s astonishment, at the age of only thirty-seven he was made Chancellor of England.
Pentecost had once seen him riding down the West Cheap with his retinue. He had been magnificently dressed in a cloak lined with ermine. Jewels had flashed on his tunic. Even the men who rode with him looked like dukes. “He’s got style,” his father had conceded gloomily. And then, with irritation: “Look at him. He takes on more airs than the king.”
But the surprise of Becket’s rise to the chancellorship was nothing compared with the general stupefaction when, seven years later, he was made Archbishop of Canterbury. Thomas, the worldly servant of the king, Primate of all England? And to remain the king’s chancellor as well?
“The king wants the Church under his thumb,” young Silversleeves’s father had remarked. “With Becket there, that’s what he’ll get.” It was sensible enough, if a little shocking.
And then the strangest thing had happened. Pentecost remembered it well, that day he had returned home from school to find his father’s courtyard full of people talking excitedly.
“Becket has turned against the king.”
Of course, for a king and an archbishop to quarrel was not unusual. For the past one hundred years, a great debate had been taking place across Europe as to how Church and State should exercise their authority. Were the great feudal bishops subject to kings or not? Could a pope depose a king? There had been angry words, even excommunications. In England only a generation earlier, Rufus’s callous treatment of the Church had forced the saintly Archbishop Anselm to leave the kingdom for several years. Certainly, Henry II was just the kind of monarch to provoke one of these quarrels. But Becket? The king’s own man?
“He’s given up all ostentation,” the reports came. “He lives like the simplest monk.” Had the ambitious