What is the relationship between Henry II and thomas becket ?
Henry’s quarrels with Thomas à Beckett have cast a long shadow over his reign. The son of a wealthy London merchant of Norman extraction, Beckett was appointed Chancellor. Beckett was at first worldly and unlike the King, dressed extravagantly. A story is related that riding through London together on a cold winters day, Henry saw a pauper shivering in his rags. He asked Thomas would it not be charitable for someone to give the man a cloak, Beckett agreed that it would, whereupon Henry laughingly grasped Thomas’ expensive fur cloak. There followed an unseemly struggle in which the King attempted to wrest the unwilling Beckett’s cloak from him. Finally succeeding and most amused at Thomas’s reaction, he threw it to the beggar. Beckett was sent on a mission to the court of France to negotiate a marriage between Henry and Eleanor’s eldest surviving son, known as Young Henry and Margaret, the daughter of the King of France by his second marriage. This he carried out with aplomb, travelling
