Blois, as steadfast in their
orthodoxy as in their hatred of the Angevin, the Emperor, ready to use
any quarrel for his own purposes, were all eagerly watching every turn
of the strife. In August Henry was startled by the news that Thomas
himself had fled to seek the protection of the Pope at Sens. He was,
however, recognized by sailors, and carried back to English shores.
Henry immediately dealt his counter-blow. The archbishop was summoned in
September to London to answer in a case which John, the marshal, an
officer of the Exchequer, had withdrawn from the Archbishop's to the
King's Court. Thomas pleaded illness, and protested that the marshal had
been guilty of perjury. The king retorted by calling a council for the
trial of the archbishop on a charge of contempt of the royal summons.
With the insolence of power and the bitter anger of outraged confidence,
Henry heaped humiliations on his enemy. The Primate had a right, by
ancient custom, to be summoned first among the great lords called to the
king's council; he was now merely served with an ordinary notice from
the sheriff of Kent to attend his trial. When he arrived at Northampton
there was no lodging left free for himself and his attendants. The king
had gone out hunting amid the marshes and streams, and only the next
morning met the Primate roughly after mass, and refused him the kiss of
peace.

In the council which opened in Northampton Castle on Wednesday, 7th
October, we see the Curia Regis in the developed form which it had taken
under Henry and his justiciar, De Lucy, carrying out an exact legal
system, and observing the forms of a very elaborate procedure. The king
and his inner council of the great lords, the prelates, and the officers
of the household, withdrew to an upper chamber of the castle; the whole
company of sheriffs and lesser barons waited in the great hall below
till they were specially summoned to the king's presence, crowding round
the fire that burned in the centre of the hall under the opening in the
roof through which the smoke escaped, or lounging in the straw and
rushes that covered the floor. For seven days the trial dragged on, as
lawyers and bishops and barons anxiously groped their way through
baffling legal problems which had grown out of legislation new and old.
Even the king himself, fiery, imperious, dictatorial, clung with a kind
of superstition to the forms of legal process. The archbishop asked
leave to appeal to the Pope. "