Free ASSASSINATIONS AND CONSPIRACIES (True Crime) by Rodney Castleden Page B

Pevensey Castle, the home of Richer de l’Aigle, and educated at Merton Priory, then London, Paris and Italy. Like many ambitious young men, he decided that his best chance of progress lay in the Church. He became secretary to Archbishop Theobald of Canterbury, who thought highly of his administrative abilities and eventually recommended him, in 1154, to Henry II as his chancellor.
    Thomas excelled in this new role, which was the medieval equivalent of prime minister. He worked very closely with the king and they became firm friends. Becket appeared to give his absolute support to the king’s plan to unify the laws relating to Church and state. In this Henry II misread Thomas’s wishes and it led to trouble later. In 1162, Henry decided to select Thomas as the new Archbishop of Canterbury, assuming that Thomas would continue to collaborate from ‘the other side’. Thomas warned him not to do this, but Henry insisted. Given the charge of looking after the interests of the Church in England, Thomas did just that, and consequently resisted Henry’s attempts to reduce the Church’s great power. Within a very short time, the two men were no longer friends but enemies, and Henry wanted to remove Thomas, who was now an obstacle to his reforms.
    The men who were to remove this obstacle were four ‘knights’ who were really barons: Reginald Fitzurse, Richard le Breton, William de Tracey and Hugh de Morville. Perhaps the most peculiar thing about these men is that in spite of committing the most notorious crime of the Middle Ages, very little is known about them. They appeared out of nowhere, rode to Canterbury to insult and murder the archbishop, and vanished again. Rather more is known about Reginald Fitzurse than the others.
    Reginald Fitzurse was a Norman knight of the 12th century, the eldest son of Richard Fitzurse. He was probably born in about 1130, inheriting the manor of Williton in Somerset when his father died in 1168. He has sometimes been referred to as a baron, because he held his lands from the king. He was certainly a major landowner. In addition to the land he owned in Somerset, he owned the manor of Barham in Kent and lands in Northamptonshire too.
    Hugh de Morville was probably the son of Hugh de Morville, who held the barony of Burgh-by-Sands and several other estates in the northern shires. He was described as being ‘of a viper’s brood’. He was attached to Henry II’s court from the beginning of Henry’s reign, and his name appears as a witness on a string of charters. His name occurs also as a witness to the Constitutions of Clarendon. He married Helwis de Stuteville, and thus became possessor of the castle of Knaresborough. After the murder, he was ordered to do a penance of service in the Holy Land by the pope, but he was not punished by Henry II; he had after all loyally done what the king wanted. We know that he was allowed to obtain a licence to hold a weekly market at Kirkoswald. He died shortly after this, certainly before 1203, leaving two daughters and the sword with which he held back the crowd in Canterbury Cathedral: for a long time it was preserved in Carlisle Cathedral as a holy relic in its own right.
    Richard le Breton eventually retired to the island of Jersey after the murder.
    Obscure though these men are – and were, even in their own day – they are remembered for a single act of phenomenal brutality and sacrilege, the murder in his own cathedral of Archbishop Thomas Becket, the greatest saint of the Middle Ages. They were in attendance at the court of Henry II in northern France late in 1170 when they heard the king’s ill-tempered words regarding the Archbishop of Canterbury; ‘Will no one rid me of this turbulent priest?’ Henry II was exasperated with Becket’s non-co-operation with the raft of reforms he was trying to introduce, and had already brought him to trial at Northampton Castle in 1164, a confrontation that had led to Becket’s flight and self-imposed