Thomas had come to the chancellorship at the age of thirty-seven. He had been a student, attached to the household of Archbishop Theobald, and he must long have looked forward to promotion in the Church as the natural field of his ambition, and in this he had just taken the first step in his appointment to the rich archdeaconry of Canterbury by his patron. As chancellor, however, he seems to have faced entirely about. He threw himself into the elegant and luxurious life of the court with an abandon and delight which, we are tempted to believe, reveal his natural bent. The family of a wealthy burgher of London in the last part of the reign of Henry I may easily have been a better school of manners and taste than the court of Anjou. Certainly in refinement, and in the order and elegance of his household as it is described, the chancellor surpassed the king. Provided with an ample income both from benefices which he held in the Church and from the perquisites of his office, he indulged in a profusion of expenditure and display which the king probably did not care for and certainly did not equal, and collected about himself such a company of clerks and laymen as made his household a better place for the training of the children of the nobles than the king's. In the king's service he spent his money with as lavish a hand as for himself, in his embassy to the French court or in the war against Toulouse. He had the skill to avoid the envy of either king or courtier, and no scandal or hint of vice was breathed against him. The way to the highest which one could hope for in the service of the state seemed open before him, and he felt himself peculiarly adapted to enjoy and render useful such a career. One cannot help speculating on the interesting but hopeless problem of what the result would have been if Becket had remained in the line of secular promotion and the primacy had gone to the next most likely candidate, Gilbert Foliot, whose type of mind would have led him to sympathize more naturally with the king's views and purposes in the questions that were so soon to arise between Church and State in England.