"The Lion of Christ" details the final painful years of turmoil that irrevocable separate the king and his archbishop - two men bound by love yet estranged by their unwillingness to compromise in administering the affairs of church and state. The essential quarrel between these two towering personalities is over the Constitutions of Clarendon, decrees which effectively seal Henry's authority over all courts, even the ecclesiastical courts previously under Thomas' jurisdiction. Thomas' refusal to obey the Constitutions leads Henry to confiscate the lands and manor houses of Canterbury, thus depriving Thomas of all revenues and supplementing the royal treasury with Canterbury monies. Powerful European monarchs move to divide their loyalties between the warring duo, and the dispute rages for six years, dispite the efforts of countless diplomatic missions.

Henry, run entirely by his need for power and wealth, is unwilling to concede to the demands of friendship, though inwardly he needs the sustenance of a comforting woman, the trust of a loyal friend. Thomas, whose arrogance he justifies as humility toward the Almightly, eventually loses to his own unmitigated pride and unrelenting belief in the sovereignty of the church. Eleanor of Aquitaine, Henry's beautiful, voluptuous, and calculating queen - another major personality in this drama - is annoyed by her husband's amorous forays and makes certain for her own reasons that the conflict between Thomas and Henry falls short of a resolution. Even after the two leaders effect a tentative reconcilation, the proud archbishop senses the imminence of his doom, and when the villians confront him in the cathedral he is ready for death.

Here is a richly colored, provocative account of one of the major conflicts that shaped the course of English history, brought to its dramatic, vivid, and stirring conclusion.