Opening…

I. ARCHBISHOP THOMAS

1162–1164.

Somewhat more than a year after the primate’s death, Thomas the chancellor returned to England. He came, as we have seen, at the king’s bidding, ostensibly for the purpose of securing the recognition of little Henry as heir to the crown. But this was not the sole nor even the chief object of his mission. On the eve of his departure--so the story was told by his friends in later days--Thomas had gone to take leave of the king at Falaise. Henry drew him aside: “You do not yet know to what you are going. I will have you to be archbishop of Canterbury.” The chancellor took, or tried to take, the words for a jest. “A saintly figure indeed,” he exclaimed with a smiling glance at his own gay attire, “you are choosing to sit in that holy seat and to head that venerable convent! No, no,” he added with sudden earnestness, “I warn you that if such a thing should be, our friendship would soon turn to bitter hate. I know your plans concerning the Church; you will assert claims which I as archbishop must needs oppose; and the breach once made, jealous hands would take care that it should never be healed again.” The words were prophetic; they sum up the whole history of the pontificate of Thomas Becket. Henry, however, in his turn passed them over as a mere jest, and at once proclaimed his intention to the chancellor’s fellow-envoys, one of whom was the justiciar, Richard de Lucy. “Richard,” said the king, “if I lay dead in my shroud, would you earnestly strive to secure my first-born on my throne?” “Indeed I would, my lord, with all my might.” “Then I charge you to strive no less earnestly to place my chancellor on the metropolitan chair of Canterbury.”[1]

[1] Herb. Bosh. (Robertson, Becket, vol. iii.), pp. 180, 182. Cf. Thomas Saga (Magnusson), vol. i. pp. 63–67.

Thomas was appalled. He could not be altogether taken by surprise; he knew what had been Theobald’s wishes and hopes; he knew that from the moment of Theobald’s death all eyes had turned instinctively upon himself with the belief that the future of the Church rested wholly in his all-powerful hands; he could not but suspect the king’s own intentions,[2] although the very suspicion would keep him silent, and all the more so because those intentions ran counter to his own desires. For twelve months he had known that the primacy was within his reach; he had counted the cost, and he had no mind to pay it. He was incapable of undertaking any office without throwing his whole energies into the fulfilment of its duties; his conception of the duties of the primate of all Britain would involve the sacrifice not only of those secular pursuits which he so keenly enjoyed, but also of that personal friendship and political co-operation with the king which seemed almost an indispensable part of the life of both; and neither sacrifice was he disposed to make. He had said as much to an English friend who had been the first to hint at his coming promotion,[3] and he repeated it now with passionate earnestness to Henry himself, but all in vain. The more he resisted, the more the king insisted--the very frankness of his warnings only strengthening Henry’s confidence in him; and when the legate Cardinal Henry of Pisa urged his acceptance as a sacred duty, Thomas at last gave way.[4]

[2] Herb. Bosh. (as above), p. 180. Anon. I. (ib. vol. iv.), p. 14. Thomas Saga (as above), p. 63.

[3] Will. Fitz-Steph. (Robertson, Becket, vol. iii.), pp. 25, 26.

[4] Will. Cant. (ib. vol. i.), pp. 7, 8. Anon. I. (ib. vol. iv.), p. 18. Anon. II. (ib.), p. 86.

The council in London was no sooner ended than Richard de Lucy and three of the bishops[5] hurried to Canterbury, by the king’s orders, to obtain from the cathedral chapter the election of a primate in accordance with his will. The monks of Christ Church were never very easy to manage; in the days of the elder King Henry they had firmly and successfully resisted the intrusion of a secular clerk into the monastic chair of S. Augustine; and a strong party among them now protested that to choose for pastor of the flock of Canterbury a man who was scarcely a clerk at all, who was wholly given to hawks and hounds and the worldly ways of the court, would be no better than setting a wolf to guard a sheepfold. But their scruples were silenced by the arguments of Richard de Lucy and by their dread of the royal wrath, and in the end Thomas was elected without a dissentient voice.[6] The election was repeated in the presence of a great council[7] held at Westminster on May 23,[8] and ratified by the bishops and clergy there assembled.[9] Only one voice was raised in protest; it was that of Gilbert Foliot,[10] who, alluding doubtless to the great scutage, declared that Thomas was utterly unfit for the primacy, because he had persecuted the Church of God.[11] The protest was answered by Henry of Winchester in words suggested by Gilbert’s own phrase: “My son,” said the ex-legate, addressing Thomas, “if thou hast been hitherto as Saul the persecutor, be thou henceforth as Paul the Apostle.”[12]

[5] E. Grim (ib. vol. ii.), pp. 366. The bishops were Exeter, Chichester and Rochester; Garnier (Hippeau), pp. 16, 17, Anon. I. (Robertson, Becket, vol. iv.), pp. 14–16, and Gerv. Cant. (Stubbs), vol. i. p. 169; this last alone names Rochester, and adds another envoy--Abbot Walter of Battle, Chichester’s old adversary and the justiciar’s brother.

[6] Garnier (Hippeau), p. 17. E. Grim (Robertson, Becket, vol. ii.), pp. 366, 367. Herb. Bosh. (ib. vol. iii.), pp. 183–185. Anon. I. (ib. vol. iv.), p. 16. Thomas Saga (Magnusson, vol. i. p. 73) has quite a different version of the result.

[7] Anon. I. (Robertson, Becket, vol. iv.), p. 17. Will. Cant. (ib. vol. i.), p. 9. Garnier, as above. Gerv. Cant. (Stubbs), vol. i. p. 169. R. Diceto (Stubbs), vol. i. p. 306.

[8] The Wednesday before Pentecost. R. Diceto (as above), p. 307.

[9] Garnier, Will. Cant., Anon. I., as above. R. Diceto (as above), p. 306. Gerv. Cant. (as above), p. 170. All these writers either say or imply that the council represented, or was meant to represent, the entire clerus et populus of all England; except R. Diceto, who says: “clero totius provinciæ Cantuariorum generaliter Lundoniæ convocato” (p. 306). Cf. Thomas Saga (Magnusson), vol. i. pp. 73–77; Will. Fitz-Steph. (Robertson, Becket, vol. iii.), p. 36; and Herb. Bosh. (ib.), p. 184.

[10] Garnier, Will. Cant., Will. Fitz-Steph. and Anon. I. as above. E. Grim (Robertson, Becket, vol. ii.), p. 367. Will. Cant., E. Grim and the Anon. call him “bishop of London” by anticipation.

[11] “Destruite ad seinte Iglise.” Garnier, as above.

[12] Garnier (Hippeau), p. 18.

The election was confirmed by the great officers of state and the boy-king in his father’s name;[13] the consecration was fixed for the octave of Pentecost, and forthwith the bishops began to vie with each other for the honour of performing the ceremony. Roger of York, who till now had stood completely aloof, claimed it as a privilege due to the dignity of his see; but the primate-elect and the southern bishops declined to accept his services without a profession of canonical obedience to Canterbury, which he indignantly refused.[14] The bishop of London, on whom as dean of the province the duty according to ancient precedent should have devolved, was just dead;[15] Walter of Rochester momentarily put in a claim to supply his place,[16] but withdrew it in deference to Henry of Winchester, who had lately returned from Cluny, and whose royal blood, venerable character, and unique dignity as father of the whole English episcopate, marked him out beyond all question as the most fitting person to undertake the office.[17] By way of compensation, it was Walter who, on the Saturday in Whitsun-week, raised the newly-elected primate to the dignity of priesthood.[18]

[13] Ibid. Anon. I. (Robertson, Becket, vol. iv.), p. 17. Will. Cant. (ib. vol. i.), p. 9. E. Grim (ib. vol. ii.), p. 367. Herb. Bosh. (ib. vol. iii.), p. 185.

[14] Gerv. Cant. (Stubbs), vol. i. p. 170.

[15] He died on May 4. R. Diceto (Stubbs), vol. i. p. 306.

[16] Herb. Bosh. (as above), p. 188.

[17] Gerv. Cant., R. Diceto and Herb. Bosh. as above. MS. Lansdown. II. (Robertson, Becket, vol. iv.), p. 155. Cf. Anon. I. (ib.), p. 19. There was another claimant, a Welsh bishop, who asserted priority of consecration over all his brother-prelates; so at least says Gerv. Cant., but one does not see who he can have been.

[18] R. Diceto, as above.

Early next morning the consecration took place. Canterbury cathedral has been rebuilt from end to end since that day; it is only imagination which can picture the church of Lanfranc and Anselm and Theobald as it stood on that June morning, the scarce-risen sun gleaming faintly through its eastern windows upon the rich vestures of the fourteen bishops[19] and their attendant clergy and the dark robes of the monks who thronged the choir, while the nave was crowded with spectators, foremost among whom stood the group of ministers surrounding the little king.[20] From the vestry-door Thomas came forth, clad no longer in the brilliant attire at which he had been jesting a few weeks ago, but in the plain black cassock and white surplice of a clerk; through the lines of staring, wondering faces he passed into the choir, and there threw himself prostrate upon the altar-steps. Thence he was raised to go through a formality suggested by the prudence of his consecrator. To guard, as he hoped, against all risk of future difficulties which might arise from Thomas’s connexion with the court, Henry of Winchester led him down to the entrance of the choir, and in the name of the Church called upon the king’s representatives to deliver over the primate-elect fully and unreservedly to her holy service, freed from all secular obligations, actual or possible. A formal quit-claim was accordingly granted to Thomas by little Henry and the justiciars, in the king’s name;[21] after which the bishop of Winchester proceeded to consecrate him at once. A shout of applause rang through the church as the new primate of all Britain was led up to his patriarchal chair; but he mounted its steps with eyes downcast and full of tears.[22] To him the day was one of melancholy foreboding; yet he made its memory joyful in the Church for ever. He began his archiepiscopal career by ordaining a new festival to be kept every year on that day--the octave of Pentecost--in honour of the most Holy Trinity;[23] and in process of time the observance thus originated spread from Canterbury throughout the whole of Christendom, which thus owes to an English archbishop the institution of Trinity Sunday.

[19] See the list in Gerv. Cant. (Stubbs), vol. i. p. 170.

[20] Herb. Bosh. (Robertson, Becket, vol. iii.), p. 188.

[21] MS. Lansdown. II. (ib. vol. iv.), pp. 154, 155. Cf. Anon. I. (ib.), pp. 17, 18; Will. Cant. (ib. vol. i.), p. 9; E. Grim (ib. vol. ii.), p. 367; Herb. Bosh. (ib. vol. iii.), p. 185; Garnier (Hippeau), p. 19; and Thomas Saga (Magnusson), vol. i. p. 81. All these place this scene in London, immediately after the consecration. The three first, however, seem to be only following Garnier; and the words of Will. Fitz-Steph. (Robertson, Becket, vol. iii. p. 36), though not very explicit, seem rather to agree with the MS. Lansdown. Garnier, Grim and the Anon. I. all expressly attribute the suggestion to Henry of Winchester.

[22] Anon. I. (as above), p. 19.

[23] Gerv. Cant. as above.

“The king has wrought a miracle,” sneered the sarcastic bishop of Hereford, Gilbert Foliot; “out of a soldier and man of the world he has made an archbishop.”[24] The same royal power helped to smooth the new primate’s path a little further before him. He was not, like most of his predecessors, obliged to go in person to fetch his pallium from Rome; an embassy which he despatched immediately after his consecration obtained it for him without difficulty from Alexander III., who had just been driven by the Emperor’s hostility to seek a refuge in France, and was in no condition to venture upon any risk of thwarting King Henry’s favourite minister.[25] The next messenger whom Thomas sent over sea met with a less pleasant reception. He was charged to deliver up the great seal into the king’s hands with a request that Henry would provide himself with another chancellor, “as Thomas felt scarcely equal to the cares of one office, far less to those of two.”[26]

[24] Will. Fitz-Steph. (Robertson, Becket, vol. iii.), p. 36.

[25] Garnier (Hippeau), pp. 24, 25. Will. Cant. (Robertson, Becket, vol. i.) p. 9. Herb. Bosh. (ib. vol. iii.), p. 189. Gerv. Cant. (Stubbs), vol. i. p. 172. R. Diceto (Stubbs), vol. i. p. 307. Thomas Saga (Magnusson), vol. i. pp. 91–95.

[26] Will. Cant. (as above), p. 12. Cf. Garnier (Hippeau), p. 29, and R. Diceto as above.

Henry was both surprised and vexed. It was customary for the chancellor to resign his office on promotion to a bishopric; but this sudden step on the part of Thomas was quite unexpected, and upset a cherished scheme of the king’s. He had planned to rival the Emperor by having an archbishop for his chancellor, as the archbishops of Mainz and Cöln were respectively arch-chancellors of Germany and Italy;[27] he had certainly never intended, in raising his favourite to the primacy, to deprive himself of such a valuable assistant in secular administration; his aim had rather been to secure the services of Thomas in two departments instead of one.[28] To take away all ground of scandal, he had even procured a papal dispensation to sanction the union of the two offices in a single person.[29] Thomas, however, persisted in his resignation; and as there was no one whom Henry cared to put in his place, the chancellorship remained vacant, while the king brooded over his friend’s unexpected conduct and began to suspect that it was caused by weariness of his service.

[27] R. Diceto (as above), p. 308. The real work of the office in the Empire was, however, done by another chancellor, who at this time was a certain Reginald, of whom we shall hear again later on. “Cancellarius” plays almost as conspicuous and quite as unclerkly a part in the Italian wars of Barbarossa as in the French and Aquitanian wars of Henry.

[28] Garnier (Hippeau), p. 29. Cf. Thomas Saga (Magnusson), vol. i. pp. 69–71.

[29] Garnier, as above.

Meanwhile Thomas had entered upon the second phase of his strangely varied career. He had “put off the deacon” for awhile; he was resolved now to “put off the old man” wholly and for ever. No sooner was he consecrated than he flung himself, body and soul, into his new life with an ardour more passionate, more absorbing, more exclusive than he had displayed in pursuit of the worldly tasks and pleasures of the court. On the morrow of his consecration, when some jongleurs came to him for the largesse which he had never been known to refuse, he gently but firmly dismissed them; he was no longer, he said, the chancellor whom they had known; his whole possessions were now a sacred trust, to be spent not on actors and jesters but in the service of the Church and the poor.[30] Theobald had doubled the amount of regular alms-givings established by his predecessors; Thomas immediately doubled those of Theobald.[31] To be diligent in providing for the sick and needy, to take care that no beggar should ever be sent empty away from his door,[32] was indeed nothing new in the son of the good dame Rohesia of Caen. The lavish hospitality of the chancellor’s household, too, was naturally transferred to that of the archbishop; but it took a different tone and colour. All and more than all the old grandeur and orderliness were there; the palace still swarmed with men-at-arms, servants and retainers of all kinds, every one with his own appointed duty, whose fulfilment was still carefully watched by the master’s eyes; the bevy of high-born children had only increased, for by an ancient custom the second son of a baron could be claimed by the primate for his service--as the eldest by the king--until the age of knighthood; a claim which Thomas was not slow to enforce, and which the barons were delighted to admit. The train of clerks was of course more numerous than ever. The tables were still laden with delicate viands, served with the utmost perfection, and crowded with guests of all ranks; Thomas was still the most courteous and gracious of hosts. But the banquet wore a graver aspect than in the chancellor’s hall. The knights and other laymen occupied a table by themselves, where they talked and laughed as they listed; it was the clerks and religious who now sat nearest to Thomas. He himself was surrounded by a select group of clerks, his eruditi, his “learned men” as he called them: men versed in Scriptural and theological lore, his chosen companions in the study of Holy Writ into which he had plunged with characteristic energy; while instead of the minstrelsy which had been wont to accompany and inspire the gay talk at the chancellor’s table, there was only heard, according to ecclesiastical custom, the voice of the archbishop’s cross-bearer who sat close to his side reading from some holy book: the primate and his confidential companions meanwhile exchanging comments upon what was read, and discussing matters too deep and solemn to interest unlearned ears or to brook unlearned interruption.[33] Of the meal itself Thomas partook but sparingly;[34] its remainder was always given away;[35] and every day twenty-six poor men were brought into the hall and served with a dinner of the best, before Thomas would sit down to his own midday meal.[36]

[30] MS. Lansdown. II. (Robertson, Becket, vol. iv.), p. 156.

[31] Anon. I. (ibid.), p. 20. The Anon. II. (ibid.), p. 90, and Joh. Salisb. (ib. vol. ii.), p. 307, say that to this purpose he appropriated a tithe of all his revenues--a statement which reflects rather strangely upon the former archbishops.

[32] Joh. Salisb. and Anon. I. as above. Anon. II. (as above), pp. 89, 90.

[33] Herb. Bosh. (Robertson, Becket, vol. iii.), pp. 225–229. On the eruditi see ib. pp. 206, 207, 523–529.

[34] Ib. pp. 231–236. Will. Fitz-Steph. (ibid.), p. 37. Joh. Salisb. (ib. vol. ii.), p. 308. Anon. II. (ib. vol. iv.), p. 89.

[35] Joh. Salisb. (as above), p. 307. Anon. I. (ib. vol. iv.), pp. 20, 21.

[36] Anon. II. (ib.), p. 89.

The amount of work which he had got through by that time must have been quite as great as in the busiest days of his chancellorship. The day’s occupations ostensibly began about the hour of tierce, when the archbishop came forth from his chamber and went either to hear or to celebrate mass,[37] while a breakfast was given at his expense to a hundred persons who were called his “poor prebendaries.”[38] After mass he proceeded to his audience-chamber and there chiefly remained till the hour of nones, occupied in hearing suits and administering justice.[39] Nones were followed by dinner,[40] after which the primate shut himself up in his own apartments with his eruditi[41] and spent the rest of the day with them in business or study, interrupted only by the religious duties of the canonical hours, and sometimes by a little needful repose,[42] for his night’s rest was of the briefest. At cock-crow he rose for prime; immediately afterwards there were brought in to him secretly, under cover of the darkness, thirteen poor persons whose feet he washed and to whom he ministered at table with the utmost devotion and humility,[43] clad only in a hair-shirt which from the day of his consecration he always wore beneath the gorgeous robes in which he appeared in public.[44] He then returned to his bed, but only for a very short time; long before any one else was astir he was again up and doing, in company with one specially favoured disciple--the one who tells the tale, Herbert of Bosham. In the calm silent hours of dawn, while twelve other poor persons received a secret meal and had their feet washed by the primate’s almoner in his stead, the two friends sat eagerly searching the Scriptures together, till the archbishop chose to be left alone[45] for meditation and confession, scourging and prayer,[46] in which he remained absorbed until the hour of tierce called him forth to his duties in the world.[47]

[37] Herb. Bosh. (Robertson, Becket, vol. iii.), p. 208.

[38] Ib. p. 203.

[39] Ib. p. 219.

[40] Ib. p. 225.

[41] Ib. pp. 236, 237.

[42] Ib. p. 238.

[43] Ib. p. 199. Cf. Will. Fitz-Steph. (ibid.), p. 38, and Joh. Salisb. (ib. vol. ii.), p. 307.

[44] On the hair-shirt see MS. Lansdown. II. (ib. vol. iv.), p. 154; Anon. I. (ibid.), p. 20; Will. Cant. (ib. vol. i.), p. 10; Herb. Bosh. (ib. vol. iii.), pp. 196, 199; Garnier (Hippeau), p. 23. On Thomas’s troubles about his dress and how he settled them see Garnier, pp. 19, 20, 23; Anon. I. (as above), p. 21; E. Grim (ib. vol. ii.), p. 368; Herb. Bosh. (ib. vol. iii.), p. 196. On his whole manner of life after consecration cf. Thomas Saga (Magnusson), vol. i. pp. 95–111.

[45] Herb. Bosh. (as above), pp. 202–205.

[46] Anon. II. (Robertson, Becket, vol. iv.), p. 88.

[47] Herb. Bosh. (ib. vol. iii.), p. 205.

He was feverishly anxious to lose no opportunity of making up for his long neglect of the Scriptural and theological studies befitting his sacred calling. He openly confessed his grievous inferiority in this respect to many of his own clerks, and put himself under their teaching with child-like simplicity and earnestness. The one whom he specially chose for monitor and guide, Herbert of Bosham, was a man in whom, despite his immeasurable inferiority, one can yet see something of a temper sufficiently akin to that of Thomas himself to account for their mutual attraction, and perhaps for some of their joint errors. As they rode from London to Canterbury on the morrow of the primate’s election he had drawn Herbert aside and laid upon him a special charge to watch with careful eyes over his conduct as archbishop, and tell him without stint or scruple whatever he saw amiss in it or heard criticized by others.[48] Herbert, though he worshipped his primate with a perfect hero-worship, never hesitated to fulfil this injunction to the letter as far as his lights would permit; but unluckily his zeal was even less tempered by discretion than that of Thomas himself. He was a far less safe guide in the practical affairs of life than in the intricate paths of abstract and mystical interpretation of Holy Writ in which he and Thomas delighted to roam together. Often, when no other quiet time could be found, the archbishop would turn his horse aside as they travelled along the road, beckon to his friend, draw out a book from its hiding-place in one of his wide sleeves, and plunge into an eager discussion of its contents as they ambled slowly on.[49] When at Canterbury, his greatest pleasure was to betake himself to the cloister and sit reading like a lowly monk in one of its quiet nooks.[50]

[48] Ib. p. 186.

[49] Ib. p. 206.

[50] Will. Fitz-Steph. (ib.), pp. 38, 39.

But the eruditi of Thomas, like the disciples of Theobald, were the confidants and the sharers of far more than his literary and doctrinal studies. It was in those evening hours which he spent in their midst, secluded from all outside interruption, that the plans of Church reform and Church revival, sketched long ago by other hands in the Curia Theobaldi, assumed a shape which might perhaps have startled Theobald himself. As the weeks wore quickly away from Trinity to Ember-tide, the new primate set himself to grapple at once with the ecclesiastical abuses of the time in the persons of his first candidates for ordination. On his theory the remedy for these abuses lay in the hands of the bishops, and especially of the metropolitans, who fostered simony, worldliness and immorality among the clergy by the facility with which they admitted unqualified persons into high orders, thus filling the ranks of the priesthood with unworthy, ignorant and needy clerks, who either traded upon their sacred profession as a means to secular advancement, or disgraced it by the idle wanderings and unbecoming shifts to which the lack of fit employment drove them to resort for a living. He was determined that no favour or persuasion should ever induce him to ordain any man whom he did not know to be of saintly life and ample learning, and provided with a benefice sufficient to furnish him with occupation and maintenance; and he proclaimed and acted upon his determination with the zeal of one who, as he openly avowed, felt that he was himself the most glaring example of the evils resulting from a less stringent system of discipline.[51]

[51] Herb. Bosh. (Robertson, Becket, vol. iii.), pp. 238–247.

His next undertaking was one which almost every new-made prelate in any degree alive to the rights and duties of his office found it needful to begin as soon as possible: the recovery of the alienated property of his see. Gilbert Foliot, the model English bishop of the day, had no sooner been consecrated than he wrote to beg the Pope’s support in this important and troublesome matter.[52] It may well be that even fourteen years later the metropolitan see had not yet received full restitution for the spoliations of the anarchy. Thomas however set to work in the most sweeping fashion, boldly laying claim to every estate which he could find to have been granted away by his predecessors on grounds which did not satisfy his exalted ideas of ecclesiastical right, or on terms which he held detrimental to the interest and dignity of his church, and enforcing his claims without respect of persons; summarily turning out those who held the archiepiscopal manors in ferm,[53] disputing with the earl of Clare for jurisdiction over the castle and district of Tunbridge, and reclaiming, on the strength of a charter of the Conqueror, the custody of Rochester castle from the Crown itself. Such a course naturally stirred up for him a crowd of enemies, and increased the jealousy, suspicion and resentment which his new position and altered mode of life had already excited among the companions and rivals of his earlier days. The archbishop however was still, like the chancellor, protected against them by the shield of the royal favour; they could only work against him by working upon the mind of Henry. One by one they carried over sea their complaints of the wrongs which they had suffered, or with which they were threatened, at the primate’s hands;[54] they reported all his daily doings and interpreted them in the worst sense:--his strictness of life was superstition, his zeal for justice was cruelty, his care for his church avarice, his pontifical splendour pride, his vigour rashness and self-conceit:[55]--if the king did not look to it speedily, he would find his laws and constitutions set at naught, his regal dignity trodden under foot, and himself and his heirs reduced to mere cyphers dependent on the will and pleasure of the archbishop of Canterbury.[56]

[52] Gilb. Foliot, Ep. lxxxvii. (Giles, vol. i., p. 113).

[53] E. Grim (Robertson, Becket, vol. ii.) pp. 371, 372. Herb. Bosh. (ib. vol. iii.) pp. 250, 251. Thomas Saga (Magnusson), vol. i. pp. 117–121.

[54] Herb. Bosh. (as above), p. 252. Thomas Saga (as above), p. 121.

[55] Joh. Salisb. (Robertson, Becket, vol. ii.) pp. 309, 310. Anon. II. (ib. vol. iv.) pp. 91, 92.

[56] Joh. Salisb. (as above), p. 310. E. Grim (ibid.) p. 372. Anon. II. (ib. vol. iv.), p. 92. Cf. Arn. Lisieux, Ep. 34 (Giles, pp. 148, 149).

At the close of the year Henry determined to go and see for himself the truth of these strange rumours.[57] The negotiations concerning the papal question had detained him on the continent throughout the summer; in the end both he and Louis gave a cordial welcome to Alexander, and a general pacification was effected in a meeting of the two kings and the Pope which took place late in the autumn at Chouzy on the Loire. Compelled by contrary winds to keep Christmas at Cherbourg instead of in England as he had hoped,[58] the king landed at Southampton on S. Paul’s day.[59] Thomas, still accompanied by the little Henry, was waiting to receive him; the two friends met with demonstrations of the warmest affection, and travelled to London together in the old intimate association.[60] One subject of disagreement indeed there was; Thomas had actually been holding for six months the archdeaconry of Canterbury together with the archbishopric, and this Henry, after several vain remonstrances, now compelled him to resign.[61] They parted however in undisturbed harmony, the archbishop again taking his little pupil with him.[62]

[57] Anon. II. as above.

[58] Rob. Torigni, a. 1162.

[59] Herb. Bosh. (Robertson, Becket, vol. iii.), p. 252. The date is given by R. Diceto (Stubbs), vol. i. p. 308.

[60] Herb. Bosh. (as above), pp. 252, 253. Anon. II. (ib. vol. iv.), p. 92. R. Diceto (as above) tells a different tale; but Herbert is surely a better authority on these personal matters. Cf. also Thomas Saga (Magnusson), vol. i. pp. 121–123.

[61] R. Diceto, as above.

[62] Herb. Bosh. (as above), p. 253.

The first joint work of king and primate was the translation of Gilbert Foliot from Hereford to London. Some of those who saw its consequences in after-days declared that Henry had devised the scheme for the special purpose of securing Gilbert’s aid against the primate;[63] but it is abundantly clear that no such thought had yet entered his mind, and that the suggestion of Gilbert’s promotion really came from Thomas himself.[64] Like every one else, he looked upon Gilbert as the greatest living light of the English Church; he expected to find in him his own most zealous and efficient fellow-worker in the task which lay before him as metropolitan, as well as his best helper in influencing the king for good. Gilbert was in fact the man who in the natural fitness of things had seemed marked out for the primacy; failing that, it was almost a matter of necessity that he should be placed in the see which stood next in dignity, and where both king and primate could benefit by his assistance ever at hand, instead of having to seek out their most useful adviser in the troubled depths of the Welsh marches. The chapter of London, to whom during the pecuniary troubles and long illness of their late bishop Gilbert had been an invaluable friend and protector, were only too glad to elect him; and his world-wide reputation combined with the pleadings of Henry to obtain the Pope’s consent to his translation,[65] which was completed by his enthronement in S. Paul’s cathedral on April 28, 1163.[66]

[63] Will. Fitz-Steph. (as above), p. 46.

[64] This is the statement of Anon. II. (ib. vol. iv. p. 98) and Gerv. Cant. (Stubbs, vol. i. p. 173), fully borne out by the letters of Thomas.

[65] Epp. xvi.–xix. (Robertson, Becket, vol. v. pp. 24–30). Herb. Bosh. (ib. vol. iii.), pp. 255, 256. Cf. Anon. II. (ib. vol. iv.), p. 98.

[66] R. Diceto (Stubbs), vol. i. p. 309.

The king spent the early summer in subduing South-Wales; the primate, in attending a council held by Pope Alexander at Tours.[67] From the day of his departure to that of his return Thomas’s journey was one long triumphal progress; Pope and cardinals welcomed him with such honours as had never been given to any former archbishop of Canterbury, hardly even to S. Anselm himself;[68] and the request which he made to the Pope for Anselm’s canonization[69] may indicate the effect which they produced on his mind--confirming his resolve to stand boldly upon his right of opposition to the secular power whenever it clashed with ecclesiastical theories of liberty and justice. The first opportunity for putting his resolve in practice arose upon a question of purely temporal administration at a council held by Henry at Woodstock on July 31, after his return from Wales. The Welsh princes came to swear fealty to Henry and his heir; Malcolm of Scotland came to confirm his alliance with the English Crown by doing homage in like manner to the little king.[70] Before the council broke up, however, Henry met the sharpest constitutional defeat which had befallen any English sovereign since the Norman conquest, and that at the hands of his own familiar friend.

[67] According to Gerv. Cant. (Stubbs), vol. i. p. 173, and Will. Newb., l. ii. c. 14 (Howlett, vol. i. p. 135), it opened on Trinity Sunday, May 19; according to R. Diceto (as above), p. 310, on May 21. The Thomas Saga (Magnusson), vol. i. pp. 123–127, makes out that Thomas’s chief object in going there was to obtain confirmation of certain privileges of his see. Cf. also the account of this council in Draco Norm., l. iii. cc. 13–15, vv. 949–1224 (Howlett, Will. Newb., vol. ii. pp. 742–751).

[68] Herb. Bosh. (Robertson, Becket, vol. iii.), pp. 253–255. Thomas Saga (as above), pp. 129, 131.

[69] Ep. xxiii. (Robertson, Becket, vol. v. p. 35).

[70] R. Diceto (Stubbs), vol. i. p. 311.

The king had devised a new financial project for increasing his own revenue at the expense of the sheriffs. According to current practice, a sum of two shillings annually from every hide of land in the shire was paid to those officers for their services to the community in its administration and defence. This payment, although described as customary rather than legal,[71] and called the “sheriff’s aid,”[72] seems really to have been nothing else than the Danegeld, which still occasionally made its appearance in the treasury rolls, but in such small amount that it is evident the sheriffs, if they collected it in full, paid only a fixed composition to the Crown and kept the greater part as a remuneration for their own labours. Henry now, it seems, proposed to transfer the whole of these sums from the sheriff’s income to his own, and have it enrolled in full among the royal dues. Whether he intended to make compensation to the sheriffs from some other source, or whether he already saw the need of curbing their influence and checking their avarice, we know not; but the archbishop of Canterbury started up to resist the proposed change as an injustice both to the receivers and to the payers of the aid. He seems to have looked upon it as an attempt to re-establish the Danegeld with all the odiousness attaching to its shameful origin and its unfair incidence, and to have held it his constitutional duty as representative and champion of the whole people to lift up his voice against it in their behalf. “My lord king,” he said, “saving your good pleasure, we will not give you this money as revenue, for it is not yours. To your officers, who receive it as a matter of grace rather than of right, we will give it willingly so long as they do their duty; but on no other terms will we be made to pay it at all.”--“By God’s Eyes!” swore the astonished and angry king, “what right have you to contradict me? I am doing no wrong to any man of yours. I say the moneys shall be enrolled among my royal revenues.”--“Then by those same Eyes,” swore Thomas in return, “not a penny shall you have from my lands, or from any lands of the Church!”[73]

[71] Garnier (Hippeau), p. 30. Will. Cant. (Robertson, Becket, vol. i.), p. 12. E. Grim (ib. vol. ii.), p. 373. Anon. I. (ib. vol. iv.), p. 23.

[72] “L’Aïde al Vescunte.” Garnier, as above.

[73] Garnier (Hippeau), p. 30. Cf. Will. Cant. (Robertson, Becket, vol. i.), p. 12. E. Grim (ib. vol. ii.), p. 374. Anon. I. (ib. vol. iv.), pp. 23, 24.

How the debate ended we are not told; but one thing we know: from that time forth the hated name of “Danegeld” appeared in the Pipe Rolls no more. It seems therefore that, for the first time in English history since the Norman conquest, the right of the nation’s representatives to oppose the financial demands of the Crown was asserted in the council of Woodstock, and asserted with such success that the king was obliged not merely to abandon his project, but to obliterate the last trace of the tradition on which it was founded. And it is well to remember, too, that the first stand made by Thomas of Canterbury against the royal will was made in behalf not of himself or his order but of his whole flock;--in the cause not of ecclesiastical privilege but of constitutional right. The king’s policy may have been really sounder and wiser than the primate’s; but the ground taken by Thomas at Woodstock entitles him none the less to a place in the line of patriot-archbishops of which Dunstan stands at the head.[74]

[74] On the different account of this affair given in the Thomas Saga, and the view which has been founded on it, see note A at end of chapter.

The next few weeks were occupied with litigation over the alienated lands of the metropolitan see. A crowd of claims put in by Thomas and left to await the king’s return now came up for settlement, the most important case being that of Earl Roger of Clare, whom Thomas had summoned to perform his homage for Tunbridge at Westminster on July 22. Roger answered that he held the entire fief by knight-service, to be rendered in the shape of money-payment,[75] of the king and not of the primate.[76] As Roger was connected with the noblest families in England,[77] king and barons were strongly on his side.[78] To settle the question, Henry ordered a general inquisition to be made throughout England to ascertain where the service of each land-holder was lawfully due. The investigation was of course made by the royal justiciars; and when they came to the archiepiscopal estates, one at least of the most important fiefs in dispute was adjudged by them to the Crown alone.[79]

[75] “Publicis pensionibus persolvendis.” R. Diceto (Stubbs), vol. i. p. 311.

[76] Ibid.

[77] And had moreover “the fairest sister in the whole kingdom,” adds Will. Fitz-Steph. (Robertson, Becket, vol. iii.), p. 43.

[78] Ibid.

[79] R. Diceto (Stubbs), vol. i. p. 311.

Meanwhile a dispute on a question of church patronage arose between the primate and a tenant-in-chief of the Crown, named William of Eynesford. Thomas excommunicated his opponent without observing the custom which required him to give notice to the king before inflicting spiritual penalties on one of his tenants-in-chief.[80] Henry indignantly bade him withdraw the sentence; Thomas refused, saying “it was not for the king to dictate who should be bound or who loosed.”[81] The answer was indisputable in itself; but it pointed directly to the fatal subject on which the inevitable quarrel must turn: the relations and limits between the two powers of the keys and the sword.

[80] Ib. pp. 311, 312. Will. Fitz-Steph. as above. The object of this rule--one of the avitæ consuetudines--was, as R. Diceto explains, to guard the king against the risk of unwittingly associating with excommunicates.

[81] Will. Fitz-Steph. as above.

Almost from his accession Henry seems to have been in some degree contemplating and preparing for those great schemes of legal reform which were to be the lasting glory of his reign. His earliest efforts in this direction were merely tentative; the young king was at once too inexperienced and too hard pressed with urgent business of all kinds, at home and abroad, to have either capacity or opportunity for great experiments in legislation. Throughout the past nine years, however, the projects which floated before his mind’s eye had been gradually taking shape; and now that he was at last freed for a while from the entanglements of politics and war, the time had come when he might begin to devote himself to that branch of his kingly duties for which he probably had the strongest inclination, as he certainly had the highest natural genius. He had by this time gained enough insight into the nature and causes of existing abuses to venture upon dealing with them systematically and in detail, and he had determined to begin with a question which was allowed on all hands to be one of the utmost gravity: the repression of crime in the clergy.

The origin of this difficulty was in the separation--needful perhaps, but none the less disastrous in some of its consequences--made by William the Conqueror between the temporal and ecclesiastical courts of justice. In William’s intention the two sets of tribunals were to work side by side without mutual interference save when the secular power was called in to enforce the decisions of the spiritual judge. But in practice the scheme was soon found to involve a crowd of difficulties. The two jurisdictions were constantly coming into contact, and it was a perpetual question where to draw the line between them. The struggle for the investitures, the religious revival which followed it, the vast and rapid developement of the canon law, with the increase of knowledge brought to bear upon its interpretation through the revived study of the civil law of Rome, gave the clergy a new sense of corporate importance and strength, and a new position as a distinct order in the state; the breakdown of all secular administration under Stephen tended still further to exalt the influence of the canonical system which alone retained some vestige of legal authority, and to throw into the Church-courts a mass of business with which they had hitherto had only an indirect concern, but which they alone now seemed capable of treating. Their proceedings were conducted on the principles of the canon law, which admitted of none but spiritual penalties; they refused to allow any lay interference with the persons over whom they claimed sole jurisdiction; and as these comprised the whole clerical body in the widest possible sense, extending to all who had received the lowest orders of the Church or who had taken monastic vows, the result was to place a considerable part of the population altogether outside the ordinary law of the land, and beyond the reach of adequate punishment for the most heinous crimes. Such crimes were only too common, and were necessarily fostered by this system of clerical immunities; for a man capable of staining his holy orders with theft or murder was not likely to be restrained by the fear of losing them, which a clerical criminal knew to be the worst punishment in store for him; and moreover, it was but too easy for the doers of such deeds to shelter themselves under the protection of a privilege to which often they had no real title. The king’s justiciars declared that in the nine years since Henry’s accession more than a hundred murders, besides innumerable robberies and lesser offences, had gone unpunished because they were committed by clerks, or men who represented themselves to be such.[82] The scandal was acknowledged on all hands; the spiritual party in the Church grieved over it quite as loudly and deeply as the lay reformers; but they hoped to remedy it in their own way, by a searching reformation and a stringent enforcement of spiritual discipline within the ranks of the clergy themselves. The subject had first come under Henry’s direct notice in the summer of 1158, when he received at York a complaint from a citizen of Scarborough that a certain dean had extorted money from him by unjust means. The case was tried, in the king’s presence, before the archbishop of the province, two bishops, and John of Canterbury the treasurer of York. The dean failed in his defence; and as it was proved that he had extorted the money by a libel, an offence against which Henry had made a special decree, some of the barons present were sent to see that the law had its course. John of Canterbury, however, rose and gave it as the decision of the spiritual judges that the money should be restored to the citizen and the criminal delivered over to the mercy of his metropolitan; and despite the justiciar’s remonstrances, they refused to allow the king any rights in the matter. Henry indignantly ordered an appeal to the archbishop of Canterbury; but he was called over sea before it could be heard,[83] and had never returned to England until now, when another archbishop sat in Theobald’s place.

[82] Will. Newb., l. ii. c. 16 (Howlett, vol. i. p. 140).

[83] Will. Fitz-Steph. (Robertson, Becket), vol. iii. pp. 43–45.

That it was Thomas of London who sat there was far from being an indication that Henry had forgotten the incident. It was precisely because Henry in these last four years had thought over the question of the clerical immunities and determined how to deal with it that he had sought to place on S. Augustine’s chair a man after his own heart. He aimed at reducing the position of the clergy, like all other doubtful matters, to the standard of his grandfather’s time. He held that he had a right to whatever his ancestors had enjoyed; he saw therein nothing derogatory to either the Church or the primate, whom he rather intended to exalt by making him his own inseparable colleague in temporal administration and the supreme authority within the realm in purely spiritual matters--thus avoiding the appeals to Rome which had led to so much mischief, and securing for himself a representative to whom he could safely intrust the whole work of government in England as guardian of the little king,[84] while he himself would be free to devote his whole energies to the management of his continental affairs. He seems in fact to have hoped tacitly to repeal the severance of the temporal and ecclesiastical jurisdictions, and bring back the golden age of William and Lanfranc, if not that of Eadgar and Dunstan; and for this he, not unnaturally, counted unreservedly upon Thomas. By slow degrees he discovered his miscalculation. Thomas had given him one direct warning which had been unheeded; he had warned him again indirectly by resigning the chancellorship; now, when the king unfolded his plans, he did not at once contradict him; he merely answered all his arguments and persuasions with one set phrase:--“I will render unto Cæsar the things that are Cæsar’s, and unto God the things that are God’s.”[85]

[84] Anon. II. (ib. vol. iv.), pp. 92–94.

[85] Ib. pp. 94, 95.

In July occurred a typical case which brought matters to a crisis. A clerk named Philip de Broi had been tried in the bishop of Lincoln’s court for murder, had cleared himself by a legal compurgation, and had been acquitted. The king, not satisfied, commanded or permitted the charge to be revived, and the accused to be summoned to take his trial at Dunstable before Simon Fitz-Peter, then acting as justice-in-eyre in Bedfordshire, where Philip dwelt. Philip indignantly refused to plead again in answer to a charge of which he had been acquitted, and overwhelmed the judge with abuse, of which Simon on his return to London made formal complaint to the king. Henry was furious, swore his wonted oath “by God’s Eyes” that an insult to his minister was an insult to himself, and ordered the culprit to be brought to justice for the contempt of court and the homicide both at once. The primate insisted that the trial should take place in his own court at Canterbury, and to this Henry was compelled unwillingly to consent. The charge of homicide was quickly disposed of; Philip had been acquitted in a Church court, and his present judges had no wish to reverse its decision. On the charge of insulting a royal officer they sentenced him to undergo a public scourging at the hands of the offended person, and to forfeit the whole of his income for the next two years, to be distributed in alms according to the king’s pleasure. Henry declared the punishment insufficient, and bitterly reproached the bishops with having perverted justice out of favour to their order.[86] They denied it; but a story which came up from the diocese of Salisbury[87] and another from that of Worcester[88] tended still further to shew the helplessness of the royal justice against the ecclesiastical courts under the protection of the primate; and the latter’s blundering attempts to satisfy the king only increased his irritation. Not only did Thomas venture beyond the limits of punishment prescribed by the canon law by causing a clerk who had been convicted of theft to be branded as well as degraded,[89] but he actually took upon himself to condemn another to banishment.[90] He hoped by these severe sentences to appease the king’s wrath;[91] Henry, on the contrary, resented them as an interference with his rights; what he wanted was not severe punishment in isolated cases, but the power to inflict it in the regular course of his own royal justice. At last he laid the whole question before a great council which met at Westminster on October 1.[92]

[86] Garnier (Hippeau), pp. 30–32. Will. Cant. (Robertson, Becket, vol. i.), pp. 12, 13. E. Grim (ib. vol. ii.), pp. 374–376. Will. Fitz-Steph. (ib. vol. iii.), p. 45. Herb. Bosh. (ib.), pp. 265, 266. Anon. I. (ib. vol. iv.), pp. 24, 25. R. Diceto (Stubbs), vol. i. p. 313. There is another version in Thomas Saga (Magnusson), vol. i. p. 145.

[87] Herb. Bosh. (as above), pp. 264, 265. Thomas Saga (as above), p. 143.

[88] Will. Fitz-Steph. as above.

[89] Will. Fitz-Steph. (Robertson, Becket, vol. iii.), pp. 45, 46.

[90] Herb. Bosh. (ibid.), p. 267.

[91] Will. Fitz-Steph. (ibid.), p. 46.

[92] Herb. Bosh. (ibid.), p. 266. Anon. II. (ib. vol. iv.), p. 95. Summa Causæ (ibid.), p. 201; this last gives the date.

The king’s first proposition, that the bishops should confirm the old customs observed in his grandfather’s days,[93] opened a discussion which lasted far into the night. Henry himself proceeded to explain his meaning more fully; he required, first, that the bishops should be more strict in the pursuit of criminal clerks;[94] secondly, that all such clerks, when convicted and degraded, should be handed over to the secular arm for temporal punishment like laymen, according to the practice usual under Henry I.;[95] and finally, that the bishops should renounce their claim to inflict any temporal punishment whatever, such as exile or imprisonment in a monastery, which he declared to be an infringement of his regal rights over the territory of his whole realm and the persons of all his subjects.[96] The primate, after vainly begging for an adjournment till the morrow, retired to consult with his suffragans.[97] When he returned, it was to set forth his view of the “two swords”--the two jurisdictions, spiritual and temporal--in terms which put an end to all hope of agreement with the king. He declared the ministers of the Heavenly King exempt from all subjection to the judgement of an earthly sovereign; the utmost that he would concede was that a clerk once degraded should thenceforth be treated as a layman and punished as such if he offended again.[98] Henry, apparently too much astonished to argue further, simply repeated his first question--“Would the bishops obey the royal customs?” “Aye, saving our order,” was the answer given by the primate in the name and with the consent of all.[99] When appealed to singly they all made the same answer.[100] Henry bade them withdraw the qualifying phrase, and accept the customs unconditionally; they, through the mouth of their primate, refused;[101] the king raged and swore, but all in vain. At last he strode suddenly out of the hall without taking leave of the assembly;[102] and when morning broke they found that he had quitted London.[103] Before the day was over, Thomas received a summons to surrender some honours which he had held as chancellor and still retained;[104] and soon afterwards the little Henry was taken out of his care.[105]

[93] Garnier (Hippeau), p. 32. Anon. I. (Robertson, Becket, vol. iv.), pp. 25, 26. E. Grim (ib. vol. ii.), p. 376.

[94] Anon. II. (ib. vol. iv.), p. 96.

[95] Ibid. Cf. Summa Causæ (ib.), p. 202, Herb. Bosh. (ib. vol. iii.), p. 266, and Thomas Saga (Magnusson), vol. i. pp. 148, 149.

[96] Herb. Bosh. (as above), p. 267.

[97] Summa Causæ (ib. vol. iv.), p. 202. Their discussion is given in Thomas Saga (as above), p. 151.

[98] Herb. Bosh. (Robertson, Becket, vol. iii.), pp. 268–272. Cf. Anon. I. (ib. vol. iv.), p. 22. The speech in Thomas Saga (Magnusson), vol. i. pp. 151–153, is much more moderate in tone, but grants no more in substance.

[99] Garnier (Hippeau), p. 32. Will. Cant. (Robertson, Becket, vol. i.), p. 13. E. Grim (ib. vol. ii.), p. 376. Herb. Bosh. (ib. vol. iii.), p. 273. Anon. II. (ib. vol. iv.), p. 97. Cf. Ep. ccxxv. (ib. vol. v. p. 527).

[100] For Hilary of Chichester’s attempt at evasion see Herb. Bosh. (as above), pp. 273, 274, and Thomas Saga (Magnusson), vol. i. p. 155.

[101] Garnier, E. Grim, Herb. Bosh., Anon. II., as above. For this scene the Saga (as above), pp. 153–155, substitutes a wrangle between king and primate, which however comes to the same result.

[102] Herb. Bosh. (as above), p. 274.

[103] Ib. p. 275. Summa Causæ (ib. vol. iv.), p. 205. Thomas Saga (as above), p. 157.

[104] Herb. Bosh. (as above), p. 275.

[105] He was with his father at the council of Clarendon in January 1164. Summa Causæ (ib. vol. iv.), p. 208.

The king’s wrath presently cooled so far that he invited the primate to a conference at Northampton. They met on horseback in a field near the town; high words passed between them; the king again demanded, and the archbishop again refused, unconditional acceptance of the customs; and in this determination they parted.[106] A private negotiation with some of the other prelates--suggested, it was said, by the diplomatist-bishop of Lisieux--was more successful; Roger of York and Robert of Lincoln met the king at Gloucester and agreed to accept his customs with no other qualification than a promise on his part to exact nothing contrary to the rights of their order. Hilary of Chichester not only did the same but undertook to persuade the primate himself. In this of course he failed.[107] Some time before Christmas, however, there came to the archbishop three commissioners who professed to be sent by the Pope to bid him withdraw his opposition; Henry having, according to their story, assured the Pope that he had no designs against the clergy or the Church, and required nothing beyond a verbal assent for the saving of his regal dignity.[108] On the faith of their word Thomas met the king at Oxford,[109] and there promised to accept the customs and obey the king “loyally and in good faith.” Henry then demanded that as the archbishop had withstood him publicly, so his submission should be repeated publicly too, in an assembly of barons and clergy to be convened for that purpose.[110] This was more than Thomas had been led to expect; but he made no objection, and the Christmas season passed over in peace. Henry kept the feast at Berkhampstead,[111] one of the castles lately taken from the archbishop; Thomas at Canterbury, where he had just been consecrating the great English scholar Robert of Melun--one of the three Papal commissioners--to succeed Gilbert Foliot as bishop of Hereford.[112]

[106] Anon. I. (Robertson, Becket, vol. iv.), pp. 27–29.

[107] Garnier (Hippeau), pp. 33, 34. Will. Cant. (Robertson, Becket, vol. i.), pp. 14, 15. E. Grim (ib. vol. ii.), pp. 377, 378. Anon. I. (ib. vol. iv.), pp. 30–31. Cf. Herb. Bosh. (ib. vol. iii.), p. 276, and Thomas Saga (Magnusson), vol. i. p. 159.

[108] Garnier (Hippeau), pp. 34, 35. Will. Cant. (as above), p. 15. E. Grim (ib. vol. ii.), p. 378. Anon. I. (ib. vol. iv.), p. 31. Thomas Saga (as above), p. 161. All, except the Anon., seem to doubt the genuineness of the mission.

[109] Herb. Bosh. (as above), p. 277. The Anon. I. (ib. vol. iv.), p. 32, and Garnier (Hippeau), p. 35, say Woodstock.

[110] Garnier, Will. Cant., Herb. Bosh. and Thomas Saga, as above. E. Grim (Robertson, Becket, vol. ii.), p. 379. Anon. I. (ib. vol. iv.), pp. 33, 34.

[111] Eyton, Itin. Hen. II., p. 66, from Pipe Roll a. 1164.

[112] On December 22. Gerv. Cant. (Stubbs), vol. i. p. 176.

On S. Hilary’s day the proposed council met at the royal hunting-seat of Clarendon near Salisbury.[113] Henry called upon the archbishop to fulfil the promise he had given at Oxford and publicly declare his assent to the customs. Thomas drew back. As he saw the mighty array of barons round the king--as he looked over the ranks of his own fellow-bishops--it flashed at last even upon his unsuspicious mind that all this anxiety to draw him into such a public repetition of a scene which he had thought to be final must cover something more than the supposed papal envoys had led him to expect, and that those “customs” which he had been assured were but a harmless word might yet become a terrible reality if he yielded another step. His hesitation threw the king into one of those paroxysms of Angevin fury which scared the English and Norman courtiers almost out of their senses. Thomas alone remained undaunted; the bishops stood “like a flock of sheep ready for slaughter,” and the king’s own ministers implored the primate to save them from the shame of having to lay violent hands upon him at their sovereign’s command. For two days he stood firm; on the third two knights of the Temple brought him a solemn assurance, on the honour of their order and the salvation of their souls, that his fears were groundless and that a verbal submission to the king’s will would end the quarrel and restore peace to the Church. He believed them; and though he still shrank from the formality, thus emptied of meaning, as little better than a lie, yet for the Church’s sake he gave way. He publicly promised to obey the king’s laws and customs loyally and in good faith, and made all the other bishops do likewise.[114]

[113] On the date see note B at end of chapter.

[114] Garnier (Hippeau), pp. 20–22, 36. Will. Cant. (Robertson, Becket, vol. i.), pp. 16, 17. E. Grim (ib. vol. ii.), pp. 380–382. Herb. Bosh. (ib. vol. iii.), pp. 278, 279. Anon. I. (ib. vol. iv.), pp. 33–36. Anon. II. (ibid.), p. 99. Cf. Thomas Saga (Magnusson), vol. i. pp. 163–167, and Gerv. Cant. (Stubbs), vol. i. pp. 177, 178.

The words were no sooner out of their mouths than Thomas learned how just his suspicions had been. A question was instantly raised--what were these customs? It was too late to discuss them that night; next morning the king bade the oldest and wisest of the barons go and make a recognition of the customs observed by his grandfather and bring up a written report of them for ratification by the council.[115] Nine days later[116] the report was presented. It comprised sixteen articles, known ever since as the Constitutions of Clarendon.[117] Some of them merely re-affirmed, in a more stringent and technical manner, the rules of William the Conqueror forbidding bishops and beneficed clerks to quit the realm or excommunicate the king’s tenants-in-chief without his leave, and the terms on which the temporal position of the bishops had been settled by the compromise between Henry I. and Anselm at the close of the struggle for the investitures. Another aimed at checking the abuse of appeals to Rome, by providing that no appeal should be carried further than the archbishop’s court without the assent of the king. The remainder dealt with the settlement of disputes concerning presentations and advowsons, which were transferred from the ecclesiastical courts to that of the king; the treatment of excommunicate persons; the limits of the right of sanctuary as regarding the goods of persons who had incurred forfeiture to the Crown; the ordination of villeins; the jurisdiction over clerks accused of crime; the protection of laymen cited before the Church courts against episcopal and archidiaconal injustice; and the method of procedure in suits concerning the tenure of Church lands.

[115] Garnier (Hippeau), p. 37. Will. Cant. (Robertson, Becket, vol. i.), p. 18. E. Grim (ib. vol. ii.), p. 382. Herb. Bosh. (ib. vol. iii.), p. 279. Anon. I. (ib. vol. iv.), p. 37. Anon. II. (ibid.), p. 102. Gerv. Cant. (Stubbs), vol. i. p. 178.

[116] On the chronology see note B at end of chapter.

[117] Will. Cant. (as above), pp. 18–23; Gerv. Cant, (as above), pp. 178–180; Stubbs, Select Charters, pp. 137–140.

The two articles last mentioned are especially remarkable. The former provided that if a layman was accused before a bishop on insufficient testimony, the sheriff should at the bishop’s request summon a jury of twelve lawful men of the neighbourhood to swear to the truth or falsehood of the charge.[118] The other clause decreed that when an estate was claimed by a clerk in frank-almoign and by a layman as a secular fief the question should be settled by the chief justiciar in like manner on the recognition of twelve jurors.[119] The way in which these provisions are introduced implies that the principle contained in them was already well known in the country; it indicates that some steps had already been taken towards a general remodelling of legal procedure, intended to embrace all branches of judicial administration and bring them all into orderly and harmonious working. In this view the Constitutions of Clarendon were only part of a great scheme in whose complete developement they might have held an appropriate and useful place.[120] But the churchmen of the day, to whom they were thus suddenly presented as an isolated fragment, could hardly be expected to see in them anything but an engine of state tyranny for grinding down the Church. Almost every one of them assumed, in some way or other, the complete subordination of ecclesiastical to temporal authority; the right of lay jurisdiction over clerks was asserted in the most uncompromising terms; while the last clause of all, which forbade the ordination of villeins without the consent of their lords, stirred a nobler feeling than jealousy for mere class-privileges. Its real intention was probably not to hinder the enfranchisement of serfs, but simply to protect the landowners against the loss of services which, being attached to the soil, they had no means of replacing, and very possibly also to prevent the number of criminal clerks being further increased by the admission of villeins anxious to escape from the justice of their lords. But men who for ages had been trained to regard the Church as a divinely-appointed city of refuge for all the poor and needy, the oppressed and the enslaved, could only see the other side of the measure and feel their inmost hearts rise up in the cry of a contemporary poet--“Hath not God called us all, bond and free, to His service?”[121]

[118] Const. Clarend. c. 6 (Stubbs, Select Charters, pp. 138, 139).

[119] Const. Clarend. c. 9 (Stubbs, Select Charters, p. 139).

[120] It should be noticed that this was clearly understood, and full justice was done to Henry’s intentions, not only by the most impartial and philosophic historian of the time--William of Newburgh (l. ii. c. 16; Howlett, vol. i. p. 140)--but even by Thomas’s most ardent follower, Herbert of Bosham (Robertson, Becket, vol. iii. pp. 272, 273, 278, 280).

[121] “Et Deus à sun servise nus a tuz apelez! Mielz valt filz à vilain qui est preuz et senez, Que ne fet gentilz hum failliz et debutez!”

Garnier (Hippeau), p. 89. This, variously expressed, was the grand argument of the clerical-democratic party, and the true source of their strength. And they were not altogether wrong in attributing the action of their opponents, in part at least, to aristocratic contempt and exclusiveness--if we may trust Gervase of Canterbury’s report of a complaint said to have been uttered at a later time by the king: “Hi quoque omnes” [i.e. the religious orders] “tales sibi fratres associant, pelliparios scilicet et sutores, quorum nec unus deberet instante necessitate in episcopum vel abbatem salvâ conscientiâ nostrâ promoveri.” Gerv. Cant. (Stubbs), vol. i. p. 540.

The discussion occupied six days;[122] as each clause was read out to the assembly, Thomas rose and set forth his reasons for opposing it.[123] When at last the end was reached, Henry called upon him and all the bishops to affix their seals to the constitutions. “Never,” burst out the primate--“never, while there is a breath left in my body!”[124] The king was obliged to content himself with the former verbal assent, gained on false pretences as it had been; a copy of the obnoxious document was handed to the primate, who took it, as he said, for a witness against its contrivers, and indignantly quitted the assembly.[125] In an agony of remorse for the credulity which had led him into such a trap he withdrew to Winchester and suspended himself from all priestly functions till he had received absolution from the Pope.[126]

[122] See note B at end of chapter.

[123] Herb. Bosh. (Robertson, Becket, vol. iii.), pp. 280–285. The answers to the Constitutions in Garnier (Hippeau), pp. 84–89, seem to be partly Thomas’s and partly his own.

[124] “L’arcevesques respunt: Fei que dei Deu le bel, Co n’ert, tant cum la vie me bate en cest vessel!”

Garnier (Hippeau), p. 37. Cf. E. Grim (Robertson, Becket, vol. ii.), p. 383, and Anon. I. (ib. vol. iv.), p. 37.

[125] Garnier, as above. Will. Cant. (Robertson, Becket, vol. i.), p. 23. E. Grim (ib. vol. ii.), p. 383. Anon. I. (ib. vol. iv.), p. 37. Cf. Joh. Salisb. (ib. vol. ii.), p. 311; Herb. Bosh. (ib. vol. iii.), p. 288; Anon. II. (ib. vol. iv.), p. 103, and Thomas Saga (Magnusson), vol. i. pp. 167–169. Will. Fitz-Steph. (Robertson, Becket, vol. iii.), pp. 48, 49, says that Thomas did set his seal to the constitutions; but his statement is at variance with those of all other authorities; and he himself afterwards recites two speeches made at Northampton, one by Thomas and one by Hilary of Chichester, both distinctly affirming that none of the bishops sealed. Ib. pp. 66, 67.

[126] Garnier (Hippeau), p. 38. Will. Cant. (as above), p. 24. Joh. Salisb. (ib. vol. ii.), p. 312. E. Grim (ibid.), p. 383. Will. Fitz-Steph. (ib. vol. iii.), p. 49. Herb. Bosh. (ibid.), pp. 289–292. Anon. I. (ib. vol. iv.), p. 37.

It was to the Pope that both parties looked for a settlement of their dispute; but Alexander, ill acquainted both with the merits of the case and with the characters of the disputants, and beset on all sides with political difficulties, could only strive in vain to hold the balance evenly between them. Meanwhile the political quarrel of king and primate was embittered by an incident in which Henry’s personal feelings were stirred. His brother William--the favourite young brother whom he had once planned to establish as sovereign in Ireland--had set his heart upon a marriage with the widowed countess of Warren; the archbishop had forbidden the match on the ground of affinity, and his prohibition had put an end to the scheme.[127] Baffled and indignant, William returned to Normandy and poured the story of his grievance into the sympathizing ears first of his mother and then, as it seems, of the brotherhood at Bec.[128] On January 29, 1164--one day before the dissolution of the council of Clarendon--he died at Rouen;[129] and a writer who was himself at that time a monk at Bec not only implies his own belief that the young man actually died of disappointment, but declares that Henry shared that belief, and thenceforth looked upon the primate by whom the disappointment had been caused as little less than the murderer of his brother.[130] The king’s exasperation was at any rate plain to all eyes; and as the summer drew on Thomas found himself gradually deserted. His best friend, John of Salisbury, had already been taken from his side, and was soon driven into exile by the jealousy of the king;[131] another friend, John of Canterbury, had been removed out of the country early in 1163 by the ingenious device of making him bishop of Poitiers.[132] The old dispute concerning the relations between Canterbury and York had broken out afresh with intensified bitterness between Roger of Pont-l’Evêque and the former comrade of whom he had long been jealous, and who had now once again been promoted over his head; the king, hoping to turn it to account for his own purposes, was intriguing at the Papal court in Roger’s behalf, and one of his confidential agents there was Thomas’s own archdeacon, Geoffrey Ridel.[133] The bishops as yet were passive; in the York controversy Gilbert Foliot strongly supported his own metropolitan;[134] but between him and Thomas there was already a question, amicable indeed at present but ominous nevertheless, as to whether or not the profession of obedience made to Theobald by the bishop of Hereford should be repeated by the same man as bishop of London to Theobald’s successor.[135]

[127] Will. Fitz-Steph. (Robertson, Becket, vol. iv.) p. 142. Isabel de Warren was the widow of Stephen’s son William, who of course was cousin in the third degree to William of Anjou.

[128] “Hic” [i.e. Thomas] “regis fratrem pertæsum semper habebat, Ne consul foret hic, obvius ille fuit: Cum nata comitis comitem Warenna tulisset, Nobilis hic præsul ne nocuisset ei. Irâ permotus, nunquam rediturus, ab Anglis Advenit is, matri nunciat ista piæ. Hinc Beccum veniens fratrum se tradit amori.”

Draco Norm., l. ii. c. 8, vv. 441–447 (Howlett, Will. Newb., vol. ii. p. 676).

[129] Rob. Torigni, a. 1164. Draco Norm., l. ii. c. 8, vv. 448–450 (as above). The date is from the first-named writer.

[130] Draco Norm., l. ii. c. 8, vv. 453–456 (as above). Considering the abundance--one might almost say superabundance--of unquestionably authentic information which we already possess as to the origin and grounds of Henry’s quarrel with Thomas, I cannot attach so much importance as Mr. Howlett apparently does (ib. pref. pp. lxi–lxiii) to this new contribution from Stephen of Rouen. Stephen’s work is quasi-romantic in character and utterly unhistoric in style; and his view of the whole Becket controversy is simply ludicrous, for he ignores the clerical immunities and the Constitutions of Clarendon altogether, and attributes the quarrel wholly to two other causes--this affair about William, and Thomas’s supposed peculations while chancellor (ib. l. iii. c. 12, vv. 909–914, p. 741). That the domestic tragedy of which he gives such a highly-coloured account had some bearing upon the great political drama appears from the words of Richard le Breton to Thomas at his murder seven years later, “Hoc habeas pro amore domini mei Willelmi fratris regis” (Will. Fitz-Steph., Robertson, Becket, vol. iii. p. 142). But in these words there is no mention either of William’s death or of Henry’s feelings about it. Some allusion to either or both may have been in the speaker’s mind; but what he actually said implies nothing more than that he had been in William’s service, and had therefore resented the thwarting of his lord’s interests, and through them, it may be, of his own. Will. Fitz-Steph., after explaining what William’s grievance was, simply adds, “Unde Willelmus ... inconsolabiliter doluit; et omnes sui archiepiscopo inimici facti sunt.” Ibid.

[131] From a comparison of Will. Fitz-Steph. (Robertson, Becket, vol. iii.), p. 46, with Ep. lv. (ib. vol. v. pp. 95–103), it appears that John was separated from Thomas before the council of Clarendon. After some months of wandering he found shelter at Reims, in the great abbey of S. Remigius of which his old friend Peter of Celle was now abbot, and there he chiefly dwelt during the next seven years.

[132] Will. Fitz-Steph., as above, says John was promoted for the purpose of getting him out of the way. He was consecrated by the Pope at the council of Tours; R. Diceto (Stubbs), vol. i. p. 311. It must be remembered that Henry had already had experience of John’s zeal for clerical immunities.

[133] Epp. xiii., xxvii., xxxvi., xli.–xliii., l., li., liii., liv. (Robertson, Becket, vol. v. pp. 21, 22, 44–46, 59, 60, 67–69, 85, 87, 88, 91, 94); Will. Cant. (ib. vol. i.), p. 24; E. Grim (ib. vol. ii.), p. 384; Anon. I. (ib. vol. iv.), pp. 38, 39; Garnier (Hippeau), pp. 39, 40; Thomas Saga (Magnusson), vol. i. pp. 179–181; Gerv. Cant. (Stubbs), vol. i. p. 181.

[134] Ep. xxviii. (Robertson, Becket, vol. v. pp. 46, 47).

[135] Epp. xxxv., lxvii. (ib. pp. 56, 57, 130, 131).

Thomas himself fully expected to meet the fate of Anselm; throughout the winter his friends had been endeavouring to secure him a refuge in France;[136] and early in the summer of 1164, having been refused an interview with the king,[137] he made two attempts to escape secretly from Romney. The first time he was repelled by a contrary wind; the second time the sailors put back ostensibly for the same reason, but really because they had recognized their passenger and dreaded the royal wrath;[138] and a servant who went on the following night to shut the gates of the deserted palace at Canterbury found the primate, worn out with fatigue and disappointment, sitting alone in the darkness like a beggar upon his own door-step.[139] Despairing of escape, he made another effort to see the king at Woodstock. Henry dreaded nothing so much as the archbishop’s flight, for he felt that it would probably be followed by a Papal interdict on his dominions,[140] and would certainly give an immense advantage against him to Louis of France, who was at that very moment threatening war in Auvergne.[141] He therefore received Thomas courteously, though with somewhat less than the usual honours,[142] and made no allusion to the past except by a playful question “whether the archbishop did not think the realm was wide enough to contain them both?” Thomas saw, however, that the old cordiality was gone; his enemies saw it too, and, as his biographer says, “they came about him like bees.”[143] Foremost among them was John the king’s marshal, who had a suit in the archbishop’s court concerning the manor of Pageham.[144] It was provided by one of Henry’s new rules of legal procedure that if a suitor saw no chance of obtaining justice in the court of his own lord he might, by taking an oath to that effect and bringing two witnesses to do the same, transfer the suit to a higher court.[145] John by this method removed his case from the court of the archbishop to that of the king; and thither Thomas was cited to answer his claim on the feast of the Exaltation of the Cross. When that day came the primate was too ill to move; he sent essoiners to excuse his absence in legal form, and also a written protest against the removal of the suit, on the ground that it had been obtained by perjury--John having taken the oath not upon the Gospel, but upon an old song-book which he had surreptitiously brought into court for the purpose.[146] Henry angrily refused to believe either Thomas or his essoiners,[147] and immediately issued orders for a great council to be held at Northampton.[148] It was customary to call the archbishops and the greater barons by a special writ addressed to each individually, while the lesser tenants-in-chief received a general summons through the sheriffs of the different counties. Roger of York was specially called in due form;[149] the metropolitan of all Britain, who ought to have been invited first and most honourably of all, merely received through the sheriff of Kent a peremptory citation to be ready on the first day of the council with his defence against the claim of John the marshal.[150]

[136] Epp. xxxv., xxxvi., lv. (ib. pp. 57, 58, 97).

[137] Will. Fitz-Steph. (ib.), vol. iii. p. 49.

[138] Cf. Will. Fitz-Steph. as above; Herb. Bosh. (ibid.), p. 293; Anon. II. (ib. vol. iv.), p. 104; and Alan Tewkesb. (ib. vol. ii.), p. 325, with E. Grim (ibid.), pp. 389, 390; Will. Cant. (ib. vol. i.), p. 29; Anon. I. (ib. vol. iv.), p. 40; and Garnier (Hippeau), p. 49.

[139] Alan Tewkesb. as above.

[140] Will. Cant. (ib. vol. i.), p. 29. E. Grim (ib. vol. ii.), p. 390. Anon. I. (ib. vol. iv.), p. 40. Garnier (Hippeau), p. 50.

[141] Ep. lx. (Robertson, Becket, vol. v., p. 115).

[142] Ep. ccxxv. (ib. p. 530). Herb. Bosh. (ib. vol. iii.), p. 294.

[143] Herb. Bosh. (Robertson, Becket, vol. iii.), pp. 294, 295.

[144] Will. Fitz-Steph. (ibid.), p. 50.

[145] Garnier (Hippeau), p. 51. Will. Cant. (Robertson, Becket, vol. i.), p. 31. Anon. I. (ib. vol. iv.), p. 41. On this proceeding see Glanville, De Legg. et Conss. Angl., l. xii. c. 7.

[146] Garnier (Hippeau), pp. 51–53. Will. Cant. (as above), p. 30. E. Grim (ib. vol. ii.), p. 390. Will. Fitz-Steph. (ib. vol. iii.), p. 50. Anon. I. (ib. vol. iv.), p. 41. Ep. ccxxv. (ib. vol. v.), pp. 530, 531.

[147] Will. Fitz-Steph. as above.

[148] Ib. p. 49. Herb. Bosh. (ibid.), p. 296. Anon. I. (ib. vol. iv.), p. 30. Ep. ccxxv. (ib. vol. v.), p. 531. Garnier (Hippeau), p. 50.

[149] R. Diceto (Stubbs), vol. i. pp. 313, 314.

[150] Will. Fitz-Steph. (Robertson, Becket, vol. iii.), p. 51.

The council--an almost complete gathering of the tenants-in-chief, lay and spiritual, throughout the realm[151]--was summoned for Tuesday October 6.[152] The king however lingered hawking by the river-side till late at night,[153] and it was not till next morning after Mass that the archbishop could obtain an audience. He began by asking leave to go and consult the Pope on his dispute with Roger of York and divers other questions touching the interests of both Church and state; Henry angrily bade him be silent and retire to prepare his defence for his contempt of the royal summons in the matter of John the marshal.[154] The trial took place next day. John himself did not appear, being detained in the king’s service at the Michaelmas session of the Exchequer in London;[155] the charge of failure of justice was apparently withdrawn, but for the alleged contempt Thomas was sentenced to a fine of five hundred pounds.[156] Indignant as he was at the flagrant illegality of the trial, in which his own suffragans had been compelled to sit in judgement on their primate, Thomas was yet persuaded to submit, in the hope of avoiding further wrangling over what seemed now to have become a mere question of money.[157] But there were other questions to follow. Henry now demanded from the archbishop a sum of three hundred pounds, representing the revenue due from the honours of Eye and Berkhampstead for the time during which he had held them since his resignation of the chancellorship.[158] Thomas remarked that he had spent far more than that sum on the repair of the royal palaces, and protested against the unfairness of making such a demand without warning. Still, however, he disdained to resist for a matter of filthy lucre, and found sureties for the required amount.[159] Next morning Henry made a further demand for the repayment of a loan made to Thomas in his chancellor days.[160] In those days the two friends had virtually had but one purse as well as “one mind and one heart,” and Thomas was deeply wounded by this evident proof that their friendship was at an end. Once more he submitted; but this time it was no easy matter to find sureties;[161] and then, late on the Friday evening, there was reached the last and most overwhelming count in the long indictment thus gradually unrolled before the eyes of the astonished primate. He was called upon to render a complete statement of all the revenues of vacant sees, baronies and honours of which he had had the custody as chancellor--in short, of the whole accounts of the chancery during his tenure of office.[162]

[151] Herb. Bosh. (ibid.) p. 296. E. Grim (ib. vol. ii.), p. 390. Anon. I. (ib. vol. iv.), p. 41. R. Diceto (Stubbs), vol. i. p. 313. Only two bishops were absent: Nigel of Ely, disabled by paralysis, and William of Norwich, who made an excuse to avoid sharing in what he knew was to come. Gerv. Cant. (Stubbs), vol. i. p. 185. From Alan Tewkesb. however (Robertson, Becket, vol. ii. p. 331), it seems that Norwich came after all--only, like Rochester (Will. Fitz-Steph., ib. vol. iii. p. 52), somewhat late.

[152] Will. Fitz-Steph. (as above), p. 50. Herb. Bosh. (ib. p. 296), says “hebdomadæ feria quinta, sexta ante B. Calixti ... diem”--a self-contradiction, for in 1164 October 9, the sixth day before the feast of S. Calixtus, was not Thursday but Friday. He makes, however, a similar confusion as to the last day of the council (ib. pp. 301, 304, 326); and as this was undoubtedly Tuesday October 13--not Wednesday 14, as he seems to make it in p. 304--it is plain that his mistake lies in placing the feast of S. Calixtus a day too early, and that the day to which he really means to assign the opening of the assembly is Thursday October 8. This really agrees with Will. Fitz-Steph., for, as will be seen, the council did not formally meet till a day after that for which it was summoned, and did not get to business till a day later still. William gives the date for which it had been summoned; Herbert, that of its practical beginning. R. Diceto (Stubbs, vol. i. p. 313) has substituted the closing day for that of opening; the author of Thomas Saga (Magnusson, vol. i. p. 241), has done the same, with a further confusion as to the days of the week; while Gerv. Cant. (Stubbs, vol. i. p. 182) has a date which agrees with nothing, and which must be altogether wrong.

[153] Will. Fitz-Steph. as above.

[154] Garnier (Hippeau), p. 52. E. Grim (Robertson, Becket, vol. ii.), p. 391. Cf. Anon. I. (ib. vol. iv.), p. 42, and Will. Fitz-Steph. (ib. vol. iii.), p. 51.

[155] Will. Fitz-Steph. (Robertson, Becket, vol. iii.), p. 51.

[156] Ibid. Herb. Bosh. (ibid.), p. 297. Will. Cant. (ib. vol. i.), p. 30. E. Grim (ib. vol. ii.), p. 391. Anon. I. (ib. vol. iv.), p. 42. Garnier (Hippeau), p. 52. Thomas Saga (Magnusson), vol. i. p. 18. Gerv. Cant. (Stubbs), vol. i. p. 183. R. Diceto (Stubbs), vol. i. p. 313. The actual sentence was forfeiture of all his moveable goods ad misericordiam--commuted according to custom; cf. Herb. Bosh. and Gerv. Cant., as above, with Will. Fitz-Steph. (as above), p. 62. Garnier makes the sum three hundred pounds; Will. Cant., fifty; E. Grim, the Anon. I. and R. Diceto, five hundred.

[157] Garnier (Hippeau), p. 52. E. Grim (as above), p. 391. Anon. I. (ib. vol. iv.), p. 43.

[158] This must be the meaning of Will. Fitz-Steph. (ib. vol. iii.), p. 53, compared with R. Diceto (Stubbs), vol. i. pp. 313, 314.

[159] Will. Fitz-Steph. as above.

[160] The demand is stated by Will. Fitz-Steph. (ibid.) as “de quingentis marcis ex causâ commodati in exercitu Tolosæ, et aliis quingentis marcis ex causâ fidejussionis regis pro eo erga quendam Judæum ibidem.” This would make the total amount £666: 3: 8. Herb. Bosh. (ibid.), p. 298, and the Thomas Saga (Magnusson), vol. i. p. 189, make it five hundred pounds.

[161] Herb. Bosh. (Robertson, Becket, vol. iii.), pp. 298, 299.

[162] Garnier (Hippeau), p. 53. Will. Cant. (Robertson, Becket, vol. i.), p. 31. Joh. Salisb. (ib. vol. ii.), p. 312. E. Grim (ibid.), p. 392. Will. Fitz-Steph. (ib. vol. iii.), p. 54. Herb. Bosh. (ibid.), p. 299. Anon. I. (ib. vol. iv.), p. 43. Anon. II. (ibid.), p. 104. R. Diceto (Stubbs), vol. i. p. 314. The total sum due was assessed in the end at thirty thousand pounds, according to Garnier (p. 65), Will. Cant. (p. 38), E. Grim (p. 396) and Anon. I. (p. 49). Herb. Bosh., however (as above), makes it thirty thousand marks (i.e. twenty thousand pounds). The Thomas Saga (Magnusson), vol. i. p. 191, says thirty thousand marks “of burnt silver,” i.e. blanch; while Gilbert Foliot, when reciting the story to the Pope’s legates in 1167, is reported as stating it at forty-four thousand marks (£2933: 6: 8); Ep. cccxxxix. (Robertson, Becket, vol. vi. p. 271). Herb. Bosh. (as above) places this demand on the Saturday morning, and the whole history of the three days, Friday-Sunday, October 9–11, is somewhat confused by the discordant notes of time given by the various biographers. I have followed Will. Fitz-Steph., who is the most self-consistent and apparently the most trustworthy.

At this crushing demand the archbishop’s courage gave way, and he threw himself at the king’s feet in despair. All the bishops did likewise, but in vain; Henry swore “by God’s Eyes” that he would have the accounts in full. He granted, however, a respite till the morrow,[163] and Thomas spent the next morning in consultation with his suffragans.[164] Gilbert of London advised unconditional surrender;[165] Henry of Winchester, who had already withstood the king to his face the night before,[166] strongly opposed this view,[167] and suggested that the matter should be compromised by an offer of two thousand marks. This the king rejected.[168] After long deliberation[169] it was decided--again at the suggestion of Bishop Henry--that Thomas should refuse to entertain the king’s demands on the ground of the release from all secular obligations granted to him at his consecration. This answer was carried by the bishops in a body to the king. He refused to accept it, declaring that the release had been given without his authority; and all that the bishops could wring from him was a further adjournment till the Monday morning.[170] In the middle of Sunday night the highly-strung nervous organization of Thomas broke down under the long cruel strain; the morning found him lying in helpless agony, and with great difficulty he obtained from the king another day’s delay.[171] Before it expired a warning reached him from the court that if he appeared there he must expect nothing short of imprisonment or death.[172] A like rumour spread through the council, and at dawn the bishops in a body implored their primate to give up the hopeless struggle and throw himself on the mercy of the king. He refused to betray his Church by accepting a sentence which he believed to be illegal as well as unjust, forbade the bishops to take any further part in his trial, gave them notice of an appeal to Rome if they should do so, and charged them on their canonical obedience to excommunicate at once whatever laymen should dare to sit in judgement upon him.[173] Against this last command the bishop of London instantly appealed.[174] All then returned to the court, except Henry of Winchester and Jocelyn of Salisbury, who lingered for a last word of pleading or of sympathy.[175] When they too were gone, Thomas went to the chapel of the monastery in which he was lodging--a small Benedictine house dedicated to S. Andrew, just outside the walls of Northampton--and with the utmost solemnity celebrated the mass of S. Stephen with its significant introit: “Princes have sat and spoken against me.” The mass ended, he mounted his horse, and escorted no longer by a brilliant train of clerks and knights, but by a crowd of poor folk full of sympathy and admiration, he rode straight to the castle where the council awaited him.[176]

[163] Garnier (Hippeau), pp. 53, 54.

[164] Herb. Bosh. (Robertson, Becket, vol. iii.), p. 300.

[165] Alan Tewkesb. (ib. vol. ii.), pp. 326, 327.

[166] Garnier (Hippeau), p. 54.

[167] Alan Tewkesb. (as above), p. 327.

[168] Will. Fitz-Steph. (ib. vol. iii.), p. 54.

[169] The speeches of the bishops--interesting for studies of character--are given at length by Alan Tewkesb. (as above), pp. 327, 328. Cf. the account in Thomas Saga (Magnusson), vol. i. pp. 193–199.

[170] Will. Cant. (Robertson, Becket, vol. i.), p. 31. E. Grim (ib. vol. ii.), p. 392. Herb. Bosh. (ib. vol. iii.), p. 300. Anon. I. (ib. vol. iv.), p. 43. Anon. II. (ibid.), pp. 104, 105. Alan Tewkesb. (ib. vol. ii.), pp. 328, 329, has a slightly different version; in this, and also in Thomas Saga (Magnusson), vol. i. pp. 199–201, Gilbert Foliot wins the respite by a daring misrepresentation of Thomas’s answer to the king. I have followed Herbert’s reckoning of the days here, as it fits in with that of Will. Fitz-Steph., who seems the best guide in this matter.

[171] Garnier (Hippeau), pp. 55, 56. Will. Cant. (as above), p. 32. Alan Tewkesb. (ib. vol. ii.) pp. 329, 330. E. Grim (ibid.), pp. 392, 393. Will. Fitz-Steph. (ib. vol. iii.), p. 56. Herb. Bosh. (ibid.), pp. 300, 301. Anon. I. (ib. vol. iv.), p. 44. Thomas Saga (as above), p. 203. Here again I follow Will. Fitz-Steph. and Herbert as to the day.

[172] Garnier (Hippeau), p. 56. Will. Cant. as above. E. Grim (ib. vol. ii.), p. 393. Anon. I. (ib. vol. iv.), p. 44. Thomas Saga as above.

[173] Will. Fitz-Steph. (as above), p. 62. Herb. Bosh. (ibid.), pp. 301–303. Thomas Saga (as above), pp. 205–207.

[174] Herb. Bosh. (as above), p. 303. Thomas Saga (as above), p. 207. Some of the other biographers place this scene later in the day, but we can hardly do otherwise than follow the two eye-witnesses, William and Herbert.

[175] Herb. Bosh. (Robertson, Becket, vol. iii.), p. 303. Jocelyn’s after-conduct shewed that his sympathy with the primate was not very deep.

[176] Will. Cant. (Robertson, Becket, vol. i.), pp. 32, 34. Alan Tewkesb. (ib. vol. ii.), p. 330. E. Grim (ibid.), p. 393. Will. Fitz-Steph. (ib. vol. iii.), pp. 56, 57. Herb. Bosh. (ibid.), p. 304. Anon. I. (ib. vol. iv.), p. 45. Garnier (Hippeau), pp. 56–60. Thomas Saga (Magnusson), vol. i. pp. 207–209.

At the gate he took his cross from the attendant who usually bore it, and went forward alone to the hall where the bishops and barons were assembled.[177] They fell back in amazement at the apparition of the tall solitary figure, robed in full pontificals, and carrying the crucifix like an uplifted banner prepared at once for defence and for defiance; friends and opponents were almost equally shocked, and it was not till he had passed through their midst and seated himself in a corner of the hall that the bishops recovered sufficiently to gather round him and intreat that he would give up his unbecoming burthen. Thomas refused; “he would not lay down his standard, he would not part with his shield.” “A fool you ever were, a fool I see you are still and will be to the end,” burst out Gilbert Foliot at last, as after a long argument he turned impatiently away.[178] The others followed him, and the primate was left with only two companions, William Fitz-Stephen and his own especial friend, Herbert of Bosham.[179] The king had retired to an inner chamber and was there deliberating with his most intimate counsellors[180] when the story of the primate’s entrance reached his ears. He took it as an unpardonable insult, and caused Thomas to be proclaimed a traitor. Warnings and threats ran confusedly through the hall. The archbishop bent over the disciple sitting at his feet:--“For thee I fear--yet fear not thou; even now mayest thou share my crown.” The ardent encouragement with which Herbert answered him[181] provoked one of the king’s marshals to interfere and forbid that any one should speak to the “traitor.” William Fitz-Stephen, who had been vainly striving to put in a gentle word, caught his primate’s eyes and pointed to the crucifix, intrusting to its silent eloquence the lesson of patience and prayer which his lips were forbidden to utter. When he and Thomas, after long separation, met again in the land of exile, that speechless admonition seems to have been the first thing which recurred to the minds of both.[182]

[177] Garnier (Hippeau), p. 60. Will. Fitz-Steph. (Robertson, Becket, vol. iii.), p. 57. Herb. Bosh. (ibid.), p. 304. Alan Tewkesb. (ib. vol. ii.), p. 330. Thomas Saga (as above), p. 209.

[178] Garnier (Hippeau), pp. 60, 61. Will. Cant. (as above), p. 34. Alan Tewkesb. (ib. vol. ii.), p. 330. E. Grim (ibid.), p. 394. Will. Fitz-Steph. (ib. vol. iii.), p. 57. Herb. Bosh. (ibid.), pp. 305, 306. Anon. I. (ib. vol. iv.), pp. 46, 47. Thomas Saga (as above), pp. 211–213.

[179] Will. Cant. (Robertson, Becket, vol. i.), p. 34. Herb. Bosh. (ib. vol. iii.), p. 307. They only mention Herbert; William’s presence appears in the sequel.

[180] Garnier (Hippeau), p. 61. Will. Cant. (as above), p. 35. E. Grim (ib. vol. ii.), p. 394. Herb. Bosh. (ib. vol. iii.), p. 305. Anon. I. (ib. vol. iv.), p. 47.

[181] Herb. Bosh. (ib. vol. iii.), pp. 306–308.

[182] Will. Fitz-Steph. (ibid.), p. 59.

In the chamber overhead, meanwhile, Henry had summoned the bishops to a conference.[183] On receiving from them an account of their morning’s interview with Thomas, he sent down to the latter his ultimatum, requiring him to withdraw his appeal to Rome and his commands to the bishops as contrary to the customs which he had sworn to observe, and to submit to the judgement of the king’s court on the chancery accounts. Seated, with eyes fixed on the cross, Thomas quietly but firmly refused. His refusal was reported to the king, who grew fiery-red with rage, caught eagerly at the barons’ proposal that the archbishop should be judged for contempt of his sovereign’s jurisdiction in appealing from it to another tribunal, and called upon the bishops to join in his condemnation.[184] York, London and Chichester proposed that they should cite him before the Pope instead, on the grounds of perjury at Clarendon and unjust demands on their obedience.[185] To this Henry consented; the appeal was uttered by Hilary of Chichester in the name of all, and in most insulting terms;[186] and the bishops sat down opposite their primate to await the sentence of the lay barons.[187]

[183] Ib. p. 57. Will. Cant. (ib. vol. i.), p. 35. Alan Tewkesb. (ib. vol. ii.), p. 331. Garnier (Hippeau), p. 62.

[184] Garnier (Hippeau), pp. 65, 66. Will. Cant. (Robertson, Becket, vol. i.), pp. 36–38. Will. Fitz-Steph. (ib. vol. iii.), pp. 62–65. Cf. Thomas Saga (Magnusson), vol. i. pp. 213–217.

[185] Will. Cant. (as above), p. 37. In the versions of E. Grim (ib. vol. ii.), p. 396, Herb. Bosh. (ib. vol. iii.), p. 308, and the Thomas Saga (as above), p. 217, they bluntly bargain to be let off from actually sitting in judgement on their primate in consideration of a promise to stand by the king against him for ever after.

[186] Will. Fitz-Steph. (Robertson, Becket, vol. iii.), pp. 65, 66. Alan Tewkesb. (ib. vol. ii.), pp. 331, 332. According to Alan, Thomas answered but one word--“I hear”; according to William, he condescended to make a long speech. Cf. Anon. I. (ib. vol. iv.), p. 49.

[187] Alan Tewkesb. (ib. vol. ii.), p. 332.

What that sentence was no one outside the royal council-chamber ever really knew. It was one thing to determine it there and another to deliver it to its victim, sitting alone and unmoved with the sign of victory in his hand. With the utmost reluctance and hesitation the old justiciar, Earl Robert of Leicester, came to perform his odious task. At the word “judgement” Thomas started up, with uplifted crucifix and flashing eyes, forbade the speaker to proceed, and solemnly appealed to the protection of the court of Rome. The justiciar and his companions retired in silence.[188] “I too will go, for the hour is past,” said Thomas.[189] Cross in hand he strode past the speechless group of bishops into the outer hall; the courtiers followed him with a torrent of insults, which were taken up by the squires and serving-men outside; as he stumbled against a pile of faggots set ready for the fire, Ralf de Broc rushed upon him with a shout of “Traitor! traitor!”[190] The king’s half-brother, Count Hameline, echoed the cry;[191] but he shrank back at the primate’s retort--“Were I a knight instead of a priest, this hand should prove thee a liar!”[192] Amid a storm of abuse Thomas made his way into the court-yard and sprang upon his horse, taking up his faithful Herbert behind him.[193] The outer gate was locked, but a squire of the archbishop managed to find the keys.[194] Whether there was any real intention of stopping his egress it seems impossible to determine; the king and his counsellors were apparently too much puzzled to do anything but let matters take their course; Henry indeed sent down a herald to quell the disturbance and forbid all violence to the primate;[195] but the precaution came too late. Once outside the gates, Thomas had no need of such protection. From the mob of hooting enemies within he passed into the midst of a crowd of poor folk who pressed upon him with every demonstration of rapturous affection; in every street as he rode along the people came out to throw themselves at his feet and beg his blessing.

[188] Garnier (Hippeau), p. 67. Will. Cant. (as above), pp. 38, 39. Alan Tewkesb. (ib. vol. ii.), pp. 332, 333. E. Grim (ibid.), pp. 397, 398. Will. Fitz-Steph. (ib. vol. iii.), pp. 67, 68. Herb. Bosh. (ibid.), pp. 309, 310. Anon. I. (ib. vol. iv.), pp. 50, 51. Cf. Thomas Saga (Magnusson), vol. i. p. 221, where the altercation is longer, but comes to the same end.

[189] Anon. I. (as above), p. 51.

[190] Garnier (Hippeau), p. 68. Will. Cant. (Robertson, Becket, vol. i.), p. 39. E. Grim (ib. vol. ii.), p. 398. Anon. I. (ib. vol. iv.), pp. 51, 52. Cf. Will. Fitz-Steph. (ib. vol. iii.), p. 68.

[191] Garnier and Will. Cant. as above. Anon. I. (as above), p. 52.

[192] Anon. I. as above. Cf. Herb. Bosh. (ib. vol. iii.), p. 310. There is a different version in Will. Cant. (ib. vol. i.), pp. 39, 40.

[193] Will. Fitz-Steph. as above. Of his own escape William says nothing; but we know from a passage later in the same page that he soon rejoined his primate.

[194] Garnier (Hippeau), p. 69. Cf. Will. Cant. (as above), p. 40; Alan Tewkesb. (ib. vol. ii.), p. 333; Anon. I. (ib. vol. iv.), p. 52; and Thomas Saga (Magnusson), vol. i. p. 222.

[195] Garnier (Hippeau), p. 70. Will. Fitz-Steph. (as above), p. 69. E. Grim (ib. vol. ii.), p. 399.

It was with these poor folk that he supped that night, for his own household, all save a chosen few, now hastened to take leave of him.[196] Through the bishops of Rochester, Hereford and Worcester he requested of the king a safe-conduct for his journey to Canterbury; the king declined to answer till the morrow.[197] The primate’s suspicions were aroused. He caused his bed to be laid in the church, as if intending to spend the night in prayer.[198] At cock-crow the monks came and sang their matins in an under-tone for fear of disturbing their weary guest;[199] but his chamberlain was watching over an empty couch. At dead of night Thomas had made his escape with two canons of Sempringham and a faithful squire of his own, named Roger of Brai. A violent storm of rain helped to cover their flight,[200] and it was not till the middle of the next day that king and council discovered that the primate was gone.

[196] Alan Tewkesb. (as above), p. 333. E. Grim (ibid.), p. 399. Herb. Bosh. (ib. vol. iii.), p. 310. Anon. I. (ib. vol. iv.), p. 52. Will. Cant. (ib. vol. i.), p. 40. Garnier, as above.

[197] Alan Tewkesb. (Robertson, Becket, vol. ii.), p. 334. Will. Fitz-Steph. (ib. vol. iii.), p. 69. Herb. Bosh. (ibid.), p. 312.

[198] Alan Tewkesb. and Will. Fitz-Steph. as above. Will. Cant. (ib. vol. i.), p. 40. Anon. I. (ib. vol. iv.), p. 53. Garnier (Hippeau), p. 70. Thomas Saga (Magnusson), vol. i. p. 229.

[199] Garnier, as above.

[200] Garnier (Hippeau), p. 71. E. Grim (Robertson, Becket, vol. ii.), p. 399. Anon. I. (ib. vol. iv.), pp. 53, 54. Cf. Will. Cant. (ib. vol. i.), p. 40, Will. Fitz-Steph. (ib. vol. iii.), p. 69, and Herb. Bosh. (ibid.) p. 312.

“God’s blessing go with him!” murmured with a sigh of relief the aged Bishop Henry of Winchester. “We have not done with him yet!” cried the king. He at once issued orders that all the ports should be watched to prevent Thomas from leaving the country,[201] and that the temporalities of the metropolitan see should be left untouched pending an appeal to the Pope[202] which he despatched the archbishop of York and the bishops of London, Worcester, Exeter and Chichester to prosecute without delay.[203] They sailed from Dover on All Souls day;[204] that very night Thomas, after three weeks of adventurous wanderings, guarded with the most devoted vigilance by the brethren of Sempringham, embarked in a little boat from Sandwich; next day he landed in Flanders;[205] and after another fortnight’s hiding he made his way safe to Soissons, where the king of France, disregarding an embassy sent by Henry to prevent him, welcomed him with open arms. He hurried on to Sens, where the Pope was now dwelling; the appellant bishops had preceded him, but Alexander was deaf to their arguments.[206] Thomas laid at the Pope’s feet his copy of the Constitutions of Clarendon; they were read, discussed and solemnly condemned in full consistory.[207] The exiled primate withdrew to a shelter which his friend Bishop John of Poitiers had secured for him in the Cistercian abbey of Pontigny in Burgundy.[208] On Christmas-eve, at Marlborough, Henry’s envoys reported to him the failure of their mission. On S. Stephen’s day Henry confiscated the whole possessions of the metropolitan see, of the primate himself and of all his clerks, and ordered all his kindred and dependents, clerical or lay, to be banished from the realm.[209]

[201] Anon. I. (as above), p. 55.

[202] Will. Fitz-Steph. (ib. vol. iii.), p. 70. Herb. Bosh. (ibid.), p. 322.

[203] Garnier (Hippeau), p. 79. Alan Tewkesb. (as above), p. 336. E. Grim (ibid.), p. 402. Will. Fitz-Steph. (ib. vol. iii.), p. 70. Herb. Bosh. (ibid.), p. 323. Anon. I. (ib. vol. iv.), pp. 60, 61. Thomas Saga (Magnusson), vol. i. p. 261.

[204] Will. Fitz-Steph. as above.

[205] Garnier (Hippeau), pp. 71–74. E. Grim (as above), pp. 399, 400. Alan Tewkesb. (ibid.), p. 335. Will. Fitz-Steph. (ib. vol. iii.), p. 70. Herb. Bosh. (ibid.), pp. 323–325. Anon. I. (ib. vol. iv.), pp. 54, 55. Thomas Saga (Magnusson), vol. i. p. 245. Here again there is a confusion about the date.

[206] Garnier (Hippeau), pp. 74–81. Will. Cant. (Robertson, Becket, vol. i.), pp. 42–46. Alan Tewkesb. (ib. vol. ii.), pp. 335–341. E. Grim (ibid.), pp. 400–403. Will. Fitz-Steph. (ib. vol. iii.), pp. 70–74. Herb. Bosh. (ibid.), pp. 325–340. Anon. I. (ib. vol. iv.), pp. 57–61. Cf. Thomas Saga (Magnusson), vol. i. pp. 265–289.

[207] Garnier (Hippeau), pp. 82–84. Will. Cant. (as above), p. 46. Alan Tewkesb. (ib. vol. ii.), pp. 341, 342. E. Grim (ibid.), pp. 403, 404. Herb. Bosh. (ib. vol. iii.), pp. 340–342. Anon. I. (ib. vol. iv.), pp. 61–64. The formal record of these proceedings is the edition of the Constitutions included among the collected letters of S. Thomas--Ep. xlv. (ib. vol. v. pp. 71–79), in which there is appended to each article the Pope’s verdict--“Hoc toleravit” or “Hoc damnavit.” The tolerated articles are 2, 6, 11, 13, 14 and 16. Alan of Tewkesbury, who first collected the letters of S. Thomas, was for some years a canon of Benevento, and probably got this annotated copy of the Constitutions from Lombard, who had been in Thomas’s suite as one of his eruditi during this visit to Sens, and who was archbishop of Benevento at the time of Alan’s residence there.

[208] Garnier (Hippeau), p. 90. Will. Cant. (as above), p. 46. Joh. Salisb. (ib. vol. ii.), p. 313. Alan Tewkesb. (ibid.), p. 345. E. Grim (ibid.), p. 404. Will. Fitz-Steph. (ib. vol. iii.), p. 76. Herb. Bosh. (ibid.), p. 357. Anon. I. (ib. vol. iv.), p. 64. Anon. II. (ibid.), p. 109. Cf. Ep. lx. (ib. vol. v.), p. 114.

[209] Garnier (Hippeau), p. 91. Will. Cant. (as above), pp. 46, 47. Joh. Salisb. (ib. vol. ii.), pp. 313, 314. E. Grim (ibid.), p. 404. Will. Fitz-Steph. (ib. vol. iii.), p. 75. Herb. Bosh. (ibid.), p. 359. Anon. I. (ib. vol. iv.), p. 65. The dates are from Will. Fitz-Steph. The Thomas Saga (Magnusson), vol. i. pp. 347–349, puts this banishment too late in the story.

NOTE A.

THE COUNCIL OF WOODSTOCK.

The usual view of the council of Woodstock--a view founded on contemporary accounts and endorsed by Bishop Stubbs (Constit. Hist., vol. i. p. 462)--has been disputed on the authority of the Icelandic Thomas Saga. This Saga represents the subject of the quarrel as being, not a general levy of so much per hide throughout the country, but a special tax upon the Church lands--nothing else, in fact, than the “ungeld” which William Rufus had imposed on them to raise the money paid to Duke Robert for his temporary cession of Normandy, and which had been continued ever since. “We have read afore how King William levied a due on all churches in the land, in order to repay him all the costs at which his brother Robert did depart from the land. This money the king said he had disbursed for the freedom of Jewry, and therefore it behoved well the learned folk to repay it to their king. But because the king’s court hath a mouth that holdeth fast, this due continued from year to year. At first it was called Jerusalem tax, but afterwards Warfare-due, for the king to keep up an army for the common peace of the country. But at this time matters have gone so far, that this due was exacted, as a king’s tax, from every house” [“monastery,” editor’s note], “small and great, throughout England, under no other name than an ancient tax payable into the royal treasury without any reason being shown for it.” Thomas Saga (Magnusson), vol. i. p. 139. Mr. Magnusson (ib. p. 138, note 7) thinks that this account “must be taken as representing the true history of” the tax in question. In his Preface (ib. vol. ii. pp. cvii–cviii) he argues that if the tax had been one upon the tax-payers in general, “evidently the primate had no right to interfere in such a matter, except so far as church lands were concerned;” and he concludes that the version in the Saga “gives a natural clue to the archbishop’s protest, which thus becomes a protest only on behalf of the Church.” This argument hardly takes sufficient account of the English primate’s constitutional position, which furnishes a perfectly “natural clue” to his protest, supposing that protest to have been made on behalf of the whole nation and not only of the Church:--or rather, to speak more accurately, in behalf of the Church in the true sense of that word--the sense which Theobald’s disciples were always striving to give to it--as representing the whole nation viewed in a spiritual aspect, and not only the clerical order. Mr. Magnusson adds: “We have no doubt that the source of the Icelandic Saga here is Robert of Cricklade, or ... Benedict of Peterborough, who has had a better information on the subject than the other authorities, which, it would seem, all have Garnier for a primary source; but he, a foreigner, might very well be supposed to have formed an erroneous view on a subject the history of which he did not know, except by hearsay evidence” (ib. pp. cviii, cix). It might be answered that the “hearsay evidence” on which Garnier founded his view must have been evidence which he heard in England, where he is known to have carefully collected the materials for his work (Garnier, ed. Hippeau, pp. 6, 205, 206), and that his view is entitled to just as much consideration as that of the Icelander, founded upon the evidence of Robert or Benedict;--that of the three writers who follow Garnier, two, William of Canterbury and Edward Grim, were English (William of Canterbury may have been Irish by birth, but he was English by education and domicile) and might therefore have been able to check any errors caused by the different nationality of their guide:--and that even if the case resolved itself into a question between the authority of Garnier and that of Benedict or Robert (which can hardly be admitted), they would be of at least equal weight, and the balance of intrinsic probability would be on Garnier’s side. For his story points directly to the Danegeld; and we have the indisputable witness of the Pipe Rolls that the Danegeld, in some shape or other, was levied at intervals throughout the Norman reigns and until the year 1163, when it vanished for ever. On the other hand, the Red King’s “ungeld” upon the Church lands, like all his other “ungelds,” certainly died with him; and nothing can well be more unlikely than that Henry II. in the very midst of his early reforms should have reintroduced, entirely without excuse and without necessity, one of the most obnoxious and unjust of the measures which had been expressly abolished in “the time of his grandfather King Henry.”

NOTE B.

THE COUNCIL OF CLARENDON.

There is some difficulty as to both the date and the duration of this council. Gerv. Cant. (Stubbs, vol. i. p. 176) gives the date of meeting as January 13; R. Diceto (Stubbs, vol. i. p. 312) as January 25; while the official copy of the Constitutions (Summa Causæ, Robertson, Becket, vol. iv. p. 208; Stubbs, Select Charters, p. 140) gives the closing day as January 30 (“quartâ die ante Purificationem S. Mariæ”). As to the duration of the council, we learn from Herb. Bosh. (Robertson, Becket, vol. iii. p. 279) and Gerv. Cant. (as above, p. 178) that there was an adjournment of at least one night; while Gilbert Foliot (Robertson, Becket, vol. v. Ep. ccxxv. pp. 527–529) says “Clarendonæ ... continuato triduo id solum actum est ut observandarum regni consuetudinum et dignitatum a nobis fieret absoluta promissio;” and that “die vero tertio,” after a most extraordinary scene, Thomas “antiquas regni consuetudines antiquorum memoriâ in commune propositas et scripto commendatas, de cætero domino nostro regi se fideliter observaturum in verbo veritatis absolute promittens, in vi nobis injunxit obedientiæ sponsione simili nos obligare.” This looks at first glance as if meant to describe the closing scene of the council, in which case its whole duration would be limited to three days. But it seems possible to find another interpretation which would enable us to reconcile all the discordant dates, by understanding Gilbert’s words as referring to the verbal discussion at the opening of the council, before the written Constitutions were produced at all. Gilbert does indeed expressly mention “customs committed to writing”; but this may very easily be a piece of confusion either accidental or intentional. On this supposition the chronology may be arranged as follows:--The council meets on January 13 (Gerv. Cant.). That day and the two following are spent in talking over the primate; towards evening of the third--which will be January 15--he yields, and the bishops with him (Gilb. Foliot). Then they begin to discuss what they have promised; the debate warms and lengthens; Thomas, worn out with his three days’ struggle and seeing the rocks ahead, begs for a respite till the morrow (Herb. Bosh.). On that morrow--i.e. January 16--Henry issues his commission to the “elders,” and the council remains in abeyance till they are ready with their report. None of our authorities tell us how long an interval elapsed between the issue of the royal commission and its report. Herbert, indeed, seems to imply that the discussion on the constitutions began one night and the written report was brought up next day. But this is only possible on the supposition that it had been prepared secretly beforehand, of which none of the other writers shew any suspicion. If the thing was not prepared beforehand, it must have taken some time to do; and even if it was, the king and the commissioners would surely, for the sake of appearances, make a few days’ delay to give a shew of reality to their investigations. Nine days is not too much to allow for preparation of the report. On January 25, then, it is brought up, and the real business of the council begins in earnest on the day named by R. Diceto. And if Thomas fought over every one of the sixteen constitutions in the way of which Herbert gives us a specimen, six days more may very well have been spent in the discussion, which would thus end, as the Summa Causæ says, on January 30.

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II. HENRY AND ROME

1164–1172.

With the archbishop’s flight into France the struggle between him and the king entered upon a new phase. Its intrinsic importance was almost entirely lost, and it became simply an element in the wider questions of general European politics. In England Thomas’s departure left Henry sole master of the field; the Constitutions of Clarendon were put in force without delay and without difficulty; a year later they were followed up by an Assize, significantly issued from the same place, which laid the foundations of the whole later English system of procedure in criminal causes; and thenceforth the work of legal and judicial reform went on almost without a break, totally unaffected by the strife which continued to rage between king and primate for the next five years. The social condition of the country was only indirectly affected by it. The causes which had ostensibly given rise to it--the principle involved in the acceptance or rejection of the Constitutions--did not appeal strongly to the national mind, and had already become obscured and subordinated to the personal aspect which the quarrel had assumed at Northampton. As in the case of Anselm, it was on this personal aspect alone that popular feeling really fastened; and in this point of view the advantage was strongly on the archbishop’s side. Thomas, whose natural gifts had already made him a sort of popular idol, was set by the high-handed proceedings of the council in the light of a victim of regal tyranny; and the sweeping and cruel proscriptions inflicted upon all who were in the remotest way connected with him tended still further to excite popular sympathy for his wrongs and turn it away from his persecutor. But the sympathy was for the individual, not for the cause. The principle of the clerical immunities had no hold upon the minds of the people or even of the clergy at large. Even among the archbishop’s own personal friends, almost the only men who clave to it with anything like the same ardour as himself were his two old comrades of the Curia Theobaldi, Bishop John of Poitiers and John of Salisbury; and even the devotion of John of Salisbury, which is one of the brightest jewels in Becket’s crown, was really the devotion of friend to friend, of Churchman to primate, of a generous, chivalrous soul to what seemed the oppressed and down-trodden side, rather than the devotion of a partizan to party principle. Herbert of Bosham, the primate’s shadow and second self, who clave to his side through good report and evil report and looked upon him as a hero and a martyr from first to last, was nevertheless the author of the famous verdict which all the searching criticism of later times has never yet been able to amend: “Both parties had a zeal for God; which zeal was according to knowledge, His judgement alone can determine.”[210]

[210] Herb. Bosh. (Robertson, Becket, vol. iii.) p. 273. The whole passage from “O rex et o pontifex” to “judicium” (pp. 272, 273) should be compared with the admirable commentary of Will. Newb., l. ii. c. 16 (Howlett, vol. i. pp. 140–141).

Cool, dispassionate thinkers like Gilbert Foliot, on the other hand, while inclining towards the cause which Thomas had at heart, recoiled from his mode of upholding it as little less than suicidal. In Gilbert’s view it was Thomas who had betrayed those “rights of his order” which he proclaimed so loudly, by forsaking the attitude of passive resistance which the bishops had adopted at Westminster and in which they were practically unassailable, and staking everything upon the king’s good faith, without security, in the meeting at Oxford and the council at Clarendon:--it was Thomas who by his subsequent conduct--his rash attempts at flight, his rapid changes of front at Northampton in first admitting and then denying the royal jurisdiction, his final insult to the king in coming to the council cross in hand, and his undignified departure from the realm--had frustrated the efforts whereby wiser and cooler heads might have brought the king to a better mind and induced him to withdraw the Constitutions:--and it was not Thomas, but his suffragans, left to bear the brunt of a storm which they had neither deserved nor provoked, who were really in a fair way to become confessors and martyrs for a Church brought into jeopardy by its own primate.[211] Gilbert in fact saw clearly that the importance of the point at issue between king and archbishop was as nothing compared to the disastrous consequences which must result from their protracted strife. It threatened nothing less than ruin to the intellectual and religious revival which Theobald had fostered so carefully and so successfully. The best hopes of the movement were bound up with the alliance between Church and state which had been cemented at Henry’s accession; that alliance was now destroyed; instead of the Church’s most valuable fellow-worker, the king had been made her bitter foe; and the work of revival was left to be carried on--if it could be carried on at all--in the teeth of the royal opposition and without a leader, while the man who should have directed it was only a perpetual stumbling-block in the path of those who had to supply as best they could the place left deserted by his flight. It was upon Gilbert of London that this burthen chiefly fell; and it is in Gilbert’s position that we may find a key to the subsequent direction of the controversy, as far as England was concerned.

[211] Ep. ccxxv. (Robertson, Becket, vol. v.), pp. 526 et seq.

For full twenty years before Becket’s rise to the primacy Gilbert Foliot had been one of the most respected members of the reforming party in the English Church. While Thomas was a worldly young subdeacon in the household of Archbishop Theobald, while as chancellor he was outshining the king in luxurious splendour or riding in coat of mail at the head of his troops, Gilbert was setting the pattern of ecclesiastical discipline and furnishing the steadiest and most valued assistance to the primate’s schemes of reform. Trained no less than Henry of Winchester in the old Cluniac traditions of ecclesiastical authority, his credit had never been shaken by rashness and inconsistency such as had marred Henry’s labours; and it would have been neither strange nor blameworthy if he had cherished a hope of carrying on Theobald’s work as Theobald’s successor. Gilbert, however, solemnly denied that he had ever sought after or desired the primacy;[212] and his conduct does not seem to furnish any just ground for assuming the falsehood of the denial. His opposition to the election of Thomas was thoroughly consistent with his position and known views; equally so was the support and co-operation which Thomas, as soon as he was fairly launched into his new course of action, anxiously sought to obtain from him, and which he for a while steadily gave. He had begun to find such co-operation difficult even before the question of the clerical immunities arose at the council of Westminster. On that question, in itself, the primate and the bishop of London were at one; but they differed completely in their way of treating it. To the impulsive, short-sighted, downright Thomas it was the one, sole, all-absorbing question of life and death; to the calm, far-seeing, cautious Gilbert it was a provoking hindrance--raised up partly by the primate’s own bad management--to the well-being of interests far too serious and too wide-reaching to be imperilled for a mere point of administrative detail. He took up his position definitely at the council of Northampton. The customs being once accepted, he held it the true Churchman’s duty to obey them, to make the best and not the worst of them, while desiring and labouring for their abrogation, but only by pacific means. A temporary submission was the least of two evils. It was infinitely safer to bend to the storm and trust to the influences of time and conciliation for turning the mind of the king, than to run the risk of driving him into irreconcileable hostility to the Church. For hostility to the Church meant something far worse now than in the days when William Rufus and Henry I. had set up their regal authority against primate and Pope. It meant a widening of the schism which was rending western Christendom in twain; it meant the accession of the whole Angevin dominions to the party of the Emperor and the anti-Pope, and the severance of all the ties between the English Church and her continental sisters which Theobald, Eugene and Adrian had laboured so diligently to secure.

[212] Ep. ccxxv. (Robertson, Becket, vol. v.), pp. 522, 523.

The dread of this catastrophe explains also the attitude of the Pope. In the long dreary tale of negotiation and intrigue which has to be traced through the maze of the Becket correspondence, the most inconsistent and self-contradictory, the most undecided and undignified, the most unsatisfactory and disappointing part of all is that played by Alexander III. It is however only fair to remember that, in this and in all like cases, the Pope’s part was also the most difficult one. No crown in Christendom pressed so sorely on its wearer’s brow as the triple tiara:--“It may well look bright,” Adrian IV. had been wont to say to his friend John of Salisbury, “for it is a crown of fire!” Adrian indeed, though his short reign was one of marked vigour and prosperity, declared that if he had had any idea of the thorns with which S. Peter’s chair was filled, he would have begged his bread in England or remained buried in the cloisters of S. Rufus to the end of his days sooner than thrust himself into such a thicket of troubles.[213] For it was not only “the care of all the churches” that rested upon a medieval Pope, but the care of all the states as well. The court of Rome had grown into the final court of appeal for all Christendom; the Pope was expected to be the universal referee, arbitrator and peacemaker of Europe, to hold the balance between contending parties, to penetrate and disentangle the intricacies of political situations which baffled the skill of the most experienced diplomatists, to exercise a sort of equitable jurisdiction on a vast scale over the whole range of political as well as social life. Earlier and later pontiffs may have voluntarily brought this burthen upon themselves; most of the Popes of the twelfth century, at any rate, seem to have groaned under it as a weight too heavy for any human strength to bear. Unprincipled as their policy often seemed, there was not a little justice in the view of John of Salisbury, that a position so exceptional could not be brought within the scope of ordinary rules of conduct, and that only those who had themselves felt its difficulties could be really competent to judge it at all.[214] Adrian’s energetic spirit was worn out by it in four years;[215] yet his position was easy compared to that of Alexander III. Alexander was a pontiff without a throne, the head of a Church in captivity and exile; dependent on the support of the most selfish and untrustworthy of living sovereigns; with Italy and Germany arrayed against him under the rule of a schismatic Emperor, and with the fidelity of the Angevin house hanging upon a thread which the least strain, the lightest touch, might break at any moment. Moreover Alexander was no Englishman like his predecessor. He had no inborn comprehension and no experience of the ways and tempers of the north; he had no bosom-friend, no John of Salisbury, to stand as interpreter between him and the Angevin king or the English primate; he understood neither of them, and he was almost equally afraid of both. His chief anxiety was to have as little as possible to do with them and their quarrel, and the fugitive archbishop was to him anything but a welcome guest.

[213] Joh. Salisb. Polycrat., l. viii. c. 23 (Giles, vol. iv. p. 367).

[214] Joh. Salisb., Polycrat., l. viii. c. 23 (Giles, vol. iv. p. 363).

[215] Ibid. (pp. 366, 367). “Licet nihil aliud lædat, necesse est ut citissime vel solo labore deficiat [sc. Papa].... Dum superest, ipsum interroga.” This was written early in 1159, and in August Adrian died.

It was of course impossible for the Pope to withhold his sympathy and his support from a prelate who came to him as a confessor for the privileges of the Church. But it was equally impossible for him to run the risk of driving Henry and his dominions into schism by espousing Thomas’s cause as decisively as Thomas himself desired. Placed thus in what Adrian had once declared to be the ordinary position of a Roman pontiff--“between hammer and anvil”--Alexander drifted into a policy of shifts and contradictions, tergiversations and double-dealings, which irritated Henry and which Thomas simply failed to comprehend. If Gilbert Foliot and Arnulf of Lisieux could have succeeded in their efforts to induce the contending parties to accept a compromise, the Pope would have been only too glad to sanction it. But it was useless to talk of compromise where Thomas Becket was concerned. To all the remoter consequences, the ultimate bearings of the quarrel, he was totally blind. For him there was but one question in the world, the one directly before him; it could have but two sides, right and wrong, between which all adjustment was impossible, and with which considerations of present expediency or future consequences had nothing to do. All Gilbert’s arguments for surrender, his solemn warnings of the peril of schism, his pleadings that it was better for the English Church to become for a while a sickly member of the ecclesiastical body than to be cut off from it altogether,[216] Thomas looked upon, at best, as proposals for doing evil that good might come. After his humiliating experience at Clarendon he seems to have felt that he was no match for Henry’s subtlety; his flight was evidently caused chiefly by dread of being again entrapped into a betrayal of what he held to be his duty; and once, in an agony of self-reproach and self-distrust, he laid his archiepiscopal ring at the Pope’s feet and prayed to be released from the burthen of an office for which he felt himself unworthy and unfit.[217] Strong as was the temptation to pacify Henry thus easily, Alexander felt that the Church could not allow such a sacrifice of her champion; and Thomas never again swerved from his determination to be satisfied with nothing short of complete surrender on the part of the king. For this one object he laboured, pleaded, argued, censured, during the next six years without ceasing; his own suffragans, the monastic orders, Pope, cardinals, the Empress Matilda, the king of France, none of them had a moment’s peace from his passionate endeavours to press them into a service which he seemed to expect them all to regard as a matter of life and death not merely for England but for all Christendom. Doubtless it was a sad waste of energy and a sad perversion of enthusiasm; yet the enthusiasm contrasts pathetically, almost heroically, with the spirit in which it was met. There was something noble, if there was also something exasperatingly unpractical, in a man who, absorbed in his devotion to one mistaken idea, never even saw that he and his cause were becoming the pretexts and the tools of half the political intrigues of Europe, and whom the experience of a lifetime failed to teach that all the world was not as single-hearted as himself. Intellectually, a mind thus constituted must needs provoke and deserve the impatient scorn of a cool clear brain such as Gilbert Foliot’s; but its very intellectual weakness was the source of its true strength. It is this dogged adherence to one fixed idea, this simplicity of aim, which appeals to the average crowd of mankind far more strongly than the larger and more statesmanlike temper of men like Foliot, or like Henry himself. Whether or no the cause be worthy--whether or no the zeal be according to knowledge--it is the zealot, not the philosopher, who becomes the popular hero and martyr.

[216] Ep. cviii. (Robertson, Becket, vol. v.), p. 207.

[217] Will. Cant. (ib. vol. i.), p. 46; Alan Tewkesb. (ib. vol. ii.), pp. 342, 343; E. Grim (ibid.), p. 403; Will. Fitz-Steph. (ib. vol. iii.), p. 76; Thomas Saga (Magnusson), vol. i. pp. 305–313. Will. Newb., l. ii. c. 16 (Howlett, vol. i. p. 140), gives this scene as having occurred, “ut dicitur,” at the council of Tours.

From the moment of Thomas’s arrival in France, then, little though he perceived it himself, the direct question at issue between him and the king became in every point of view save his own entirely subordinate to the indirect consequences of their quarrel; the ecclesiastical interest became secondary to the political, which involved matters of grave importance to all Europe. The one person to whom the archbishop’s flight was most thoroughly welcome was Louis of France. Louis and Henry were nominally at peace; but to Louis their alliance was simply a shield behind which he could plan without danger his schemes for undermining Henry’s power on the continent, and no better tool for this purpose could possibly have fallen into his hands than the fugitive archbishop of Canterbury. Thomas had indeed just enough perception of the state of affairs between the two kings--of which he must have acquired considerable experience in his chancellor days--to choose going to live on his own resources at Pontigny rather than accept the hospitality of his sovereign’s enemy.[218] This arrangement probably delighted Louis, for it furnished him with a safe answer to Henry’s complaints and remonstrances about harbouring the “traitor”--Thomas was in sanctuary in a Cistercian abbey in Burgundy, and France was not harbouring him at all; while the welcome which Louis gave to the primate’s exiled friends and the sympathy which he displayed for their cause heightened his own reputation for devotion to the Church and served as a foil to set off more conspicuously the supposed hostility of Henry. To Louis in short the quarrel was something which might turn to his own advantage by helping to bring Henry into difficulties; and he used it accordingly with a skill peculiar to himself, making a great shew of disinterested zeal and friendly mediation, and all the while taking care that the breach should be kept open till its healing was required for his own interest.

[218] Anon. II. (Robertson, Becket, vol. iv.), p. 109.

With such an onlooker as this Henry knew that he must play his game with the utmost caution. He had been provoked by the personal opposition of his old friend into standing upon his regal dignity more stiffly than he would have thought it worth while to do so long as it remained unchallenged. On his side, too, there was a principle at stake, and he could not give it up unconditionally; but he might have been induced to accept a compromise, had not the obstinacy of Thomas forced him into a corresponding attitude of unbending determination. So keen was his sense of the danger attendant upon the fugitive archbishop’s presence in France that it led him to postpone once more the work which he had been planning in England and cross over to Normandy again early in 1165.[219] Lent was passed in fruitless attempts to bring about a triple conference between the two kings and the Pope; Henry refused to allow Thomas to be present; Thomas begged the Pope not to expose himself to Henry’s wiles without him who alone could help him to see through them; and Alexander, now busy with preparations for his return to Rome, was probably not sorry to escape by declaring that for a temporal prince to dictate who should or who should not form part of the Pope’s suite was a claim which had never been heard of before and which he could not possibly admit.[220] Immediately after Easter he set out on his journey homewards.

[219] Rob. Torigni, a. 1165.

[220] Alan Tewkesb. (Robertson, Becket, vol. ii.), pp. 346, 347; evidently taken from the Pope’s own letter, extant only in the Icelandic version, in Thomas Saga (Magnusson), vol. i. p. 329.

The rival party saw their opportunity and seized it without delay. Their fortunes were now at a very low ebb; the antipope Victor had died in April; his chief supporter, Cardinal Guy of Crema, had succeeded him under the title of Paschal III.; but Italy had cast him off, and even in Germany the tide was turning against him. The Emperor, however, clung with unwavering determination to his original policy; and he at once saw in the English king’s quarrel with the Church a means of gaining for Paschal’s cause what would amply compensate for all that had been lost. Before Alexander was fairly out of the French kingdom an embassy from Germany came to Henry at Rouen, bringing proposals for an alliance to be secured by two marriages: one between the English princess Matilda, Henry’s eldest daughter, and the Emperor’s cousin Duke Henry of Saxony; the other between Henry’s second daughter and Frederic’s own little son. The chief ambassador was Reginald, archbishop-elect of Cöln, who from the time of Frederic’s accession--two years before that of Henry--had been his chancellor and confidential adviser, playing a part curiously like that of Thomas Becket, till in the very year of the English chancellor’s removal to Canterbury he was appointed to the see of Cöln. There the parallel with Thomas ended; for Reginald was the most extreme champion of the privileges not of the Church but of the Imperial Crown, and was even more closely identified with the schismatic party than Frederic himself. Henry sent him over to the queen, who had been left as regent in England, to receive from her a formal promise of her daughter’s hand to the duke of Saxony, in a great council convened at Westminster for that purpose. The old justiciar Earl Robert of Leicester refused the kiss of peace to the schismatic and caused the altars at which he had celebrated to be thrown down,[221] thereby saving Henry from the fatal blunder of committing himself publicly to the cause of the anti-pope, and England from the dangers of open schism. But he could not prevent the king from sending two clerks to a council which met at Würzburg on Whit-Sunday to abjure Pope Alexander and acknowledge Paschal; and although the fact was strenuously denied, it seems impossible to doubt that they did take the oath at the Emperor’s hands in their master’s name;[222] indeed, Reginald of Cöln boasted that Henry had promised to make all the bishops in his dominions do the same.

[221] R. Diceto (Stubbs), vol. i. p. 318. He mistakenly thinks that the king was at Westminster, and he also thinks the embassy came in 1167. Its true date, 1165, is shown by the letters referred to in next note.

[222] Epp. xcviii.–ci. (Robertson, Becket, vol. v. pp. 184–195). Will. Cant. (ib. vol. i.), pp. 52, 53. Thomas Saga (Magnusson), vol. i. p. 331.

A crisis seemed imminent, but Henry managed to avoid it. From the Emperor’s solicitations, from the Pope’s remonstrances, from all the pleadings of friends and all the intrigues of foes, he suddenly made his escape by flying back to England and plunging into a Welsh war which kept him all the summer safe out of their reach,[223] and furnished him with an excuse for postponing indefinitely the completion of his alliance with the schismatic party. Such an alliance would in fact have cost far more than it was worth. Alexander was once more safely seated upon S. Peter’s chair, and was urging Thomas to throw himself wholly on the protection of the king of France; Louis was in the highest state of triumph, rejoicing over the birth of his long-desired son; while the whole Angevin dominions, which Eleanor was governing in her husband’s absence, were full of suppressed disaffection and surrounded with threatening or intriguing foes.[224] In Lent 1166 therefore Henry hurried back to Normandy to hold a conference with Louis, and, if possible, to free his own hands for the work which lay before him.

[223] Gerv. Cant. (Stubbs, vol. i. p. 197) says Henry went into Wales in 1165, “quo facilius domini Papæ vel etiam Cantuariensis archiepiscopi ... declinaret sententiam.”

[224] “Movetur enim [rex] Francorum invidiâ, calumniisque Flandrensium, Wallensium improbitate, Scottorum insidiis, temeritate Britonum, Pictavorumque fœderibus, interioris Aquitaniæ sumptibus, Gasconum levitate, et (quod gravius est) simultate fere omnium quoscumque ditioni ejus constat esse subjectos.” Ep. clxii. (Robertson, Becket, vol. v.), pp. 313, 314.

The work was in truth a vast and complex one. At the age of thirty-three Henry was already planning out an elaborate scheme for the future of his children and the distribution of his territories, in which the election of his eldest son as joint-king in England was but the first and least difficult step. Normandy and Anjou, as well as England, had to be secured for little Henry; Aquitaine was if possible to be settled upon Richard as his mother’s heir; for Geoffrey Henry was bent upon acquiring the Breton duchy.[225] Conan IV., whom Henry had in 1158 established as duke of Britanny, had but one child, a daughter, whose hand, together with the reversion of her father’s territories, the king was anxious to secure for his son. This however required the assent not only of Conan but of Louis of France, and also of the Breton barons, who bitterly resented the Norman interference which had set Conan as ruler over them, and were inclined to resist to the uttermost an arrangement which would bring them still more directly under the Norman yoke; while Louis was but too ready to encourage them in their resistance. A campaign in the summer of 1166, however, another in August 1167, and a third in the following spring so far broke their opposition[226] that in May 1169 Geoffrey was sent into Britanny to receive their homage as heir to the dukedom; three months later his father joined him,[227] and at Christmas they held their court together at Nantes,[228] whence they made a sort of triumphal progress through the duchy, receiving homage and fealty wherever they went.[229]

[225] Will. Newb. l. ii. c. 18 (Howlett, vol. i. pp. 145, 146).

[226] On the Breton campaign of 1166 see R. Diceto (Stubbs), vol. i. p. 329, and Rob. Torigni ad ann. Henry was near Fougères on June 28 (Ep. ccix., Robertson, Becket, vol. v. p. 421); he was besieging Fougères itself on July 13–14 (Eyton, Itin. Hen. II., p. 96). On the campaigns of 1167 and 1168 see Rob. Torigni ad ann., the meagre entries in a Breton chronicle, a. 1168–1169 (Morice, Hist. Bret., preuves, vol. i. col. 104; Rer. Gall. Scriptt., vol. xii. p. 560), and Chron. S. Albin. a. 1167 (Marchegay, Eglises, p. 40), which tells of Louis’s share in the matter. See also the account of Henry’s correspondence with King Arthur in Draco Norm., l. ii. cc. 17–22, vv. 941–1282 (Howlett, Will. Newb., vol. ii. pp. 695–707). According to this writer, one of the Breton leaders--“Arturi dapifer, Rollandus, consul et idem tunc Britonum” (Mr. Howlett suggests that this may be Roland of Dinan, ib. p. 696 note)--wrote a letter to Arthur imploring his aid for Britanny, and received a reassuring answer; Henry also received a long epistle from the blameless king, to which, “subridens sociis, nil pavefactus,” (c. 21, v. 1218, p. 705) he returned a polite and diplomatic answer. Unluckily the good monk omits to say how the letters were conveyed, and gives us no light upon the postal arrangements between Britanny and Avalon--which by the way he places among “silvas ... Cornubiæ, proxima castra loco,” whatever that may mean (c. 20, vv. 1213, 1214, p. 705). It is quite possible that some of the Breton leaders did seek to rouse the spirit of their followers by publishing an imaginary correspondence with the mythic hero-king whose existence was to most of the common people in Britanny at that time almost as much an article of faith as any in the Creed; it is possible too that they were themselves so far carried away by the same illusion as to attempt to work upon Henry by similar means; and in that case it is extremely probable that Henry, with his Angevin tact and sense of humour, would meet the appeal pretty much as the Bec writer represents. But the letters given in the Draco must be the monk’s own composition. Neither Roland nor Henry can have been capable of stringing together such a quantity of pseudo-history, ancient and modern, as is therein contained.

[227] Rob. Torigni, a. 1169.

[228] R. Diceto (Stubbs), vol. i. p. 337. Gesta Hen. [“Benedict of Peterborough”] (Stubbs), vol. i. p. 3. Rog. Howden (Stubbs), vol. ii. p. 3.

[229] Gesta Hen. as above.

It had proved easier to subdue Britanny than to hold Aquitaine. The half independent princes of the south, so scornful of a king beyond the Loire, were at least equally scornful of a king from beyond the sea; in November 1166 Henry was obliged to summon them to a conference at Chinon,[230] and to relieve Eleanor of her task of government by sending her to keep Christmas in England,[231] while he himself took her place at Poitiers.[232] His foes seized their opportunity to revive the vexed question of Toulouse; a meeting with Raymond at Grandmont and an attempt to assert Henry’s ducal authority over the count of Auvergne led to a fresh rupture with Louis;[233] and in the spring of 1168 the discontented barons of Aquitaine, secure of the French king’s goodwill, broke into open revolt. In the midst of a negotiation with Louis, Henry hurried away to subdue them.[234] Scarcely had he turned northward again when Earl Patrick of Salisbury, whom he had appointed to assist Eleanor in the government of the duchy, was murdered by one of the rebel leaders;[235] and Eleanor was once more left to stand her ground alone in Poitou, while her husband was fighting the Bretons, staving off the ecclesiastical censures which threatened him, and vainly endeavouring to pacify Louis, who now openly shewed himself as the champion of all Henry’s disaffected vassals, Breton, Poitevin, Scottish and Welsh,[236] as well as of the exiled archbishop.

[230] Ep. ccliii. (Robertson, Becket, vol. vi.), p. 74.

[231] Eyton, Itin. Hen. II., pp. 104, 108.

[232] Rob. Torigni, a. 1167. Cf. Ep. cclxxvii. (Robertson, Becket, vol. vi.), p. 131.

[233] Rob. Torigni, a. 1167. Cf. Chronn. S. Albin. and S. Serg. a. 1166 (Marchegay, Eglises, pp. 40, 149).

[234] Rob. Torigni, a. 1168. Ep. ccccix. (Robertson, Becket, vol. vi.), p. 408.

[235] Gerv. Cant. (Stubbs), vol. i. p. 205. R. Diceto (Stubbs), vol. i. p. 331. Rob. Torigni, a. 1168. Rog. Howden (Stubbs), vol. i. pp. 273, 274. This last writer states that the slayer was Guy of Lusignan, and that Guy fled to Jerusalem (of which he afterwards became king) to escape the punishment of this crime. This story has been generally adopted by modern historians. But its latter half is incompatible with the appearance of “Guy of Lusignan” among the rebels in Aquitaine in 1173, five years after the death of Patrick (Gesta Hen., Stubbs, vol. i. p. 46); and the whole of it seems to rest solely on Roger’s misunderstanding of the passage in the Gesta which he was copying. In that passage Guy is introduced as “Guido de Lezinan, frater Gaufridi de Lezinan, qui Patricium comitem Salesbiriensem tempore hostilitatis ... occiderat. Erat enim prædictus Guido,” etc.; then comes an account of his adventures in Palestine (Gesta Hen., Stubbs, vol. i. p. 343). Roger of Howden chose to make qui refer to Guido; but it might just as well, or even better, refer to Gaufridus. Guy comes upon the historical scene for the first time in 1173. It seems pretty clear that Geoffrey was his elder brother, and took a leading part in southern politics and warfare long before Guy was of an age to join in them. If Patrick was slain by either of the brothers, therefore, it was by Geoffrey and not by Guy. Admitting this much, however, there is still no ground for looking upon even Geoffrey as a murderer who had committed such a crime as to be obliged to fly from justice. For “Geoffrey of Lusignan” stood by the side of Guy among the rebels of 1173 (Gesta Hen., Stubbs, vol. i. p. 46); “Geoffrey of Lusignan” and his brothers claimed La Marche against King Henry between 1178 and 1180 (Geoff. Vigeois, l. i. c. 70, Labbe, Nova Biblioth., vol. ii. p. 324); “Geoffrey of Lusignan” rose against Richard in 1188 (Gesta Hen., Stubbs, vol. ii. p. 34; Rog. Howden, Stubbs, vol. ii. p. 339; R. Diceto, Stubbs, vol. ii. pp. 54, 55); and it was not till after he had in this revolt slain a special friend of Richard, that he betook himself to Palestine, where he arrived in the summer of the same year (Itin. Reg. Ric., Stubbs, p. 26), and where, moreover, he and Richard afterwards became firm allies. Geoffrey may therefore enjoy the benefit of the plea which Bishop Stubbs (Itin. Reg. Ric., introd. p. cxxiv, note) puts forward for Guy, that “there is nothing to show that Patrick was not killed in fair fight.” But it seems pretty clear that for the heroic king of Jerusalem himself no such plea is needed at all.

[236] Rob. Torigni, a. 1168; Epp. ccccix., ccccxxxiv. (Robertson, Becket, vol. vi.), pp. 408, 455, 456.

Henry meanwhile was endeavouring to strengthen his political position by alliances in more remote quarters; the marriage of his eldest daughter with the duke of Saxony had taken place early in 1168;[237] two years before, the hand of one of her sisters had been half promised to the marquis of Montferrat for his son, in return for his good offices with the Pope;[238] and a project was now on foot for the marriage of Henry’s second daughter, Eleanor, with the king of Castille--a marriage which took place in 1169;[239] while the infant Jane, who was scarcely four years old, was betrothed to the boy-king William of Sicily.[240] For Richard his father was now endeavouring to gain the hand of Adela of France, the younger daughter of Louis and Constance, as a sort of security for the investiture of Aquitaine; while at the same time Henry was on the one hand making interest with the Emperor’s Italian foes, the rising commonwealths of Lombardy and the jurisconsults of Bologna;[241] and on the other, Frederic was endeavouring to regain his alliance by an embassy headed by his own cousin, Henry’s new-made son-in-law, the duke of Saxony.[242]

[237] Gerv. Cant. (Stubbs), vol. i. p. 205. From the Pipe Roll of the year, with Mr. Eyton’s comment (Itin. Hen. II., p. 109), it seems that Matilda and her mother crossed the sea together in September 1167, and that Matilda went on to Germany, where she was married early next year, while Eleanor returned to England before Christmas. Rob. Torigni, a. 1167.

[238] Ep. cclii. (Robertson, Becket, vol. vi.), p. 68.

[239] R. Diceto (Stubbs), vol. i. p. 334. The original scheme seems to have been for marrying both Eleanor and Jane to Spanish sovereigns, among whom, however, Castille is not named. In a letter written in the summer of 1168 John of Salisbury speaks of “regum, Navariensis aut Aragonensis scilicet, quibus filias suas dare disponit [rex].” Ep. ccccxxxiv. (Robertson, Becket, vol. vi.) p. 457.

[240] Ep. dxxxviii. (ib. vol. vii.) p. 26. Jane was born at Angers in October 1165; Rob. Torigni, ad ann.

[241] Epp. dxxxviii., dxxxix. (Robertson, Becket, vol. vii.), pp. 26, 30, 31.

[242] Rob. Torigni, a. 1168. Gerv. Cant. (Stubbs), vol. i. p. 205. Draco Norm., l. iii. cc. 4, 5, vv. 191–360 (Howlett, Will. Newb., vol. ii. pp. 718–724).

All this political, ecclesiastical and diplomatic coil Henry had to unravel almost single-handed. Of the group of counsellors who had stood around him in his early years, Arnulf of Lisieux on one side of the sea and Richard de Lucy on the other were almost the sole survivors. He had lost the services of his constable Henry of Essex under very painful circumstances a few months before that council at Woodstock which saw the beginning of his quarrel with Thomas. The constable was accused by Robert de Montfort of having committed high treason six years before by purposely letting fall the standard and falsely proclaiming the king’s death at the battle of Consilt. Henry of Essex declared that he had dropped the standard in the paralysis of despair, really believing the king to be dead; and it is evident from the high commands which he held in the war of Toulouse and elsewhere that the king continued to treat him with undiminished confidence, and to regard him as one of his most valuable ministers and friends. The charge once made, however, could only be met by ordeal of battle. The encounter took place at Reading; Henry of Essex went down before his accuser’s lance; and all that his sovereign could do for him was to save his life by letting the monks of the neighbouring abbey carry his body off the field as if for burial, and when he proved to be still alive, suffering him to remain as a brother of the house, while his property was confiscated to the Crown and his services were lost to the state.[243] The king’s mother died in the autumn of 1167;[244] his old friend and adviser Earl Robert of Leicester passed away in 1168.[245] A desperate attempt was even made to part him from his wife, in order to get rid of his rights over Aquitaine;[246] while the man who had once been his most successful diplomatic agent and his unfailing helper against the wiles of all his enemies was now the most formidable tool in their hands.

[243] Rob. Torigni, a. 1163. Will. Newb., l. ii. c. 5 (Howlett, vol. i. p. 108). Joc. Brakelond (Rokewode, Camden Soc.), pp. 50–52. For date see Palgrave, Eng. Commonwealth, vol. ii. pp. xxii, xxiii.

[244] Rob. Torigni, a. 1167. Draco Norm., l. iii. c. 1, vv. 1–12 (Howlett, Will. Newb., vol. ii. p. 711). Chron. S. Serg., a. 1167 (Marchegay, Eglises, p. 150).

[245] Rob. Torigni, a. 1168. Ann. Waverl. a. 1168 (Luard, Ann. Monast., vol. ii. p. 239). Chron. Mailros, a. 1168.

[246] See the Gradus cognationis inter regem et reginam (Robertson, Becket, vol. vi. p. 266). “Hanc computationem præsentaverunt Pictavenses cardinalibus quando S. Thomas exsulabat, sed non sunt auditi.” The “computation” as there stated is wrong; but the right one really does leave Henry and Eleanor within the forbidden degrees. (See above, vol. i. p. 393, note 2{1161}, and p. 445, note 11{1418}). They were cousins in the fifth degree, their common ancestress being Herleva of Falaise.

It was for his children’s sake that Henry at last bent his pride to do what he had vowed never to do again. At Montmirail, on the feast of Epiphany 1169, he renewed his homage to Louis, made full submission to him, and promised compensation to the Breton and Poitevin barons for their losses in the recent wars.[247] Next day young Henry did homage to the French king for the counties of Anjou and Maine,[248] and, as it seems, of Britanny, which his brother Geoffrey was to hold under him.[249] Richard did the like for Aquitaine, of which Louis granted him the investiture,[250] together with a promise of Adela’s hand.[251] Three weeks later young Henry, in his new capacity of count of Anjou, officiated in Paris as seneschal to the king of France;[252] he afterwards repeated his homage to Louis’s son and heir, and received that of his own brother Geoffrey for the duchy of Britanny.[253]

[247] Ep. cccclxi. (Robertson, Becket, vol. vi.), pp. 506, 507.

[248] Ib. p. 507. Rob. Torigni a. 1169. Gerv. Cant. (Stubbs), vol. i. p. 208.

[249] Rob. Torigni, a. 1169, and Gerv. Cant. (as above) say that young Henry did homage to Louis for Britanny; Normandy was not mentioned, the homage done for it by young Henry in 1160 being counted sufficient (ibid.). The elder king himself kept Touraine on the old terms of homage to Theobald of Blois (Ep. cccclxi. as above).

[250] Ep. cccclxi., Rob. Torigni and Gerv. Cant. as above.

[251] Gerv. Cant. as above.

[252] Rob. Torigni, a. 1169.

[253] Ibid.

One thing alone was now lacking to the completion of Henry’s scheme: the crowning of his heir. There can be no doubt that when he sent Thomas and the child to England together--the one to be chosen king and the other to be made primate--he intended the coronation to take place as soon as he himself could rejoin them. Its performance, delayed by his own continued absence on the continent, had however been made impossible by his quarrel with Thomas. That the archbishop of Canterbury alone could lawfully crown a king of England was a constitutional as well as an ecclesiastical tradition so deeply rooted in the minds of Englishmen that nothing short of absolute necessity had induced Henry I. to set it aside in his own case; and still less could Henry II. venture to risk such an innovation in the case of his son.[254] Yet the prospect of a reconciliation with the primate seemed at this moment further off than ever.

[254] The historical arguments on this subject may be seen in Will. Fitz-Steph. (Robertson, Becket, vol. iii.), p. 110, and Ep. dclxxxiv. (ib. vol. vii.), pp. 328–330. Henry was once said to have projected getting the Pope himself to crown the child; Ep. lv. (ib. vol. v.), p. 100. Against this, of course, Canterbury could have had nothing to say.

Thomas’s first impulse on entering Pontigny had been to give himself up to a course of study, devotion and self-discipline more severe than anything which he had yet attempted. He secretly assumed the habit of the “white monks,”[255] and nearly ruined his delicate constitution by a rash endeavour to practise the rigorous abstinence enjoined by the rules of the order.[256] He grew more diligent than ever in prayer, meditation, and study of Holy Scripture.[257] But his restless, impetuous nature could not rise to the serene heights of more than worldly wisdom urged upon him by John of Salisbury, who truly insisted that such occupations alone were worthy of a true confessor.[258] In spite of John’s warnings and pleadings, he still kept all his friends--John himself included--ceaselessly at work in his behalf; and while he sought out in every church and convent in Gaul every rare and valuable book that he could hear of, to be copied for his cathedral library, he was also raking together for the same collection all the privileges, old or new, that could be disinterred from the Roman archives or extorted from the favour of the Pope.[259] Until Easter 1166 Alexander restrained him from any direct measures against the king;[260] then, unable to keep silence any longer, Thomas again took the matter into his own hands and wrote to Henry himself, earnestly imploring him to consider his ways and to grant his old friend a personal interview.[261] Henry was inexorable; Thomas wrote again, this time a torrent of mingled warnings, intreaties and remonstrances,[262] and with just as little effect. Then, towards the end of May, as the king was holding council with his barons at Chinon, a barefooted monk came to him with a third letter from the primate.[263] Once again Thomas expressed his longing for a personal meeting; once again he set forth the doctrine of the divine rights and duties of kings, and charged Henry, by the solemn memory of his coronation-vows, to restore to the English Church her privileges and her chief pastor. Only in the last sentence came a significant warning: “If not, then know of a surety that you shall feel the severity of Divine vengeance!”[264] And there was no doubt about its meaning; for the Empress Matilda had already transmitted to her son a threat sent to her by Thomas in plain words, that unless she could bring him to acknowledge his error, “shortly, yea, very shortly” the “sword of the Spirit” should be drawn against his dominions and even against himself.[265]

[255] Alan Tewkesb. (Robertson, Becket, vol. ii.), p. 345. Anon. I. (ib. vol. iv.), p. 64. Thomas Saga (Magnusson), vol. i. p. 315.

[256] Garnier (Hippeau), pp. 126, 127. E. Grim (Robertson, Becket, vol. ii.), pp. 412, 413. Herb. Bosh. (ib. vol. iii.), pp. 376–379. Thomas Saga (as above), p. 317.

[257] Will. Fitz-Steph. (Robertson, Becket, vol. iii.), p. 77. Herb. Bosh. (ibid.), p. 379.

[258] Ep. lxxxv. (ib. vol. v.), pp. 163, 164.

[259] Will. Fitz-Steph. as above.

[260] Ep. xcv. (Robertson, Becket, vol. v.), pp. 179, 180.

[261] Ep. clii. (ib. pp. 266–268).

[262] Ep. cliii. (ib. pp. 269–278), translated by Garnier (Hippeau), pp. 100–106.

[263] Garnier (Hippeau), p. 106. E. Grim (Robertson, Becket, vol. ii.), p. 419. Cf. Herb. Bosh. (ib. vol. iii.), pp. 383–385. Eyton (Itin. Hen. II., p. 93) dates this council June 1, but this cannot be reconciled with Thomas’s subsequent proceedings.

[264] Ep. cliv. (Robertson, Becket, vol. v. pp. 278–282), translated by Garnier (Hippeau), pp. 109–111.

[265] Ep. clxxxiv. (Robertson, Becket, vol. v. p. 361).

Harassed by disaster and revolt, provoked by the primate’s former letters, Henry, upon reading this one and hearing the messenger’s comment upon it--for Thomas had charged him to say a good deal more than he wrote[266]--might well feel that he was standing on the brink of a volcano. He turned desperately upon the bishops around him, half imploring, half commanding them to help him out of his strait, abusing them for a pack of traitors who would not trouble themselves to rid him of this one unmanageable foe, and exclaiming with a burst of tears that the archbishop was destroying him soul and body together; for he naturally expected nothing less than an interdict on his dominions and an anathema against himself, and both sanctioned by the Pope. When Henry was thus at his wits’ end, the only one among his continental advisers who was likely to have any counsel to offer him was Arnulf of Lisieux. Once more Arnulf proved equal to the occasion; he suggested that the primate’s intended censures should be forestalled by an appeal to the Pope. The remedy was a desperate one, for, as John of Salisbury triumphantly remarked when he heard of it, the king was flying in the face of his own Constitutions and confirming that very right of appeal which he was so anxious to abolish, by thus having recourse to it for his own protection. But there was no other loophole of escape; so the appeal was made, a messenger was despatched to give notice of it in England, close the ports and cut off all communication with Thomas and with the Pope; while the bishops of Lisieux and Séez set out for Pontigny to bid the primate stay his hand till the octave of Easter next, which was fixed for the term of Henry’s appeal.[267]

[266] Herb. Bosh. (ib. vol. iii.), p. 385.

[267] Ep. cxciv. (Robertson, Becket, vol. v.), pp. 381, 382. Herb. Bosh. (ib. vol. iii.), p. 393, confuses this appeal with a later one.

They were too late. No sooner had the barefooted messenger returned with his tidings of the king’s irreconcileable wrath than Thomas hurried to Soissons on a pilgrimage to its three famous shrines:--those of the Blessed Virgin, who had been the object of his special reverence ever since he learned the Ave Maria at his mother’s knee; of S. Gregory the Great, the patron of the whole English Church and more particularly of Canterbury and its archbishops; and of S. Drausius, who was believed to have the power of rendering invincible any champion who spent a night in prayer before his relics. Before each of these shrines Thomas, like a warrior preparing for mortal combat, passed a night in solemn vigil, the last night being that of the festival of S. Drausius, and also of Ascension-day.[268] On the morrow he left Soissons;[269] on Whitsun-eve[270] he reached Vézelay, a little town distant only a day’s journey from Pontigny, and made famous by its great abbey, which boasted of possessing the body of S. Mary Magdalene. Thomas found the place crowded with pilgrims assembled to keep the Whitsun feast on this venerated spot. He was invited by the abbot to celebrate High Mass and preach on the festival day;[271] his sermon ended, he solemnly anathematized the royal customs and all their upholders, and excommunicated by name seven persons whom he denounced as special enemies to the Church; the two first being Henry’s confidential envoys John of Oxford and Richard of Ilchester, who had been the medium of his communications with the Emperor; while a third, Jocelyn de Bailleul, was one of his chief advisers, and a fourth was no less a personage than the justiciar, Richard de Lucy.[272] Thomas had set out from Soissons in the full determination to excommunicate Henry himself at the same time; but on his way he learned that the king was dangerously ill; he therefore contented himself with a solemn warning publicly addressed to him by name, calling him to repentance for the last time, and in default, threatening him with immediate excommunication.[273]

[268] It was also the anniversary of his own ordination to the priesthood--June 2.

[269] Ep. cxciv. (Robertson, vol. v.), p. 382.

[270] Herb. Bosh. (ib. vol. iii.), p. 391, says “proximâ ante festum die,” and he makes the festival that of S. Mary Magdalene, the patron of the place. Tempting, however, as his version is--for it would explain at once Thomas’s otherwise rather unaccountable choice of Vézelay for the scene of his proceedings, and the great concourse of people who evidently were assembled there--it is quite irreconcileable with the minute chronological details of John of Salisbury’s letter (Ep. cxciv. as above), written within a few weeks of the events, while Herbert’s story was written from memory, many years after. On the other hand, R. Diceto’s date (Stubbs, vol. i. p. 318), Ascension-day, is more impossible still.

[271] Herb. Bosh. (Robertson, Becket, vol. iii.), p. 391.

[272] The details of the sentence are in Thomas’s own letters, Epp. cxcv., cxcvi., cxcviii. (Robertson, Becket, vol. v.), pp. 386–391, 392–397. Cf. Ep. cxciv. (ibid.), p. 383. The other excommunicated persons were Ralf de Broc, Hugh of S. Clare and Thomas Fitz-Bernard. Their crime was invasion of Church property. Richard of Ilchester and John of Oxford were condemned for their dealings with the schismatics; Richard de Lucy and Jocelyn de Bailleul, as being the authors of the Constitutions.

[273] Epp. cxciv., cxcvi., cxcviii. (Robertson, Becket, vol. v.), pp. 382, 383, 391, 396. Herb. Bosh. (ib. vol. iii.), pp. 391, 392.

The news of these proceedings reached Henry when, sick and anxious, he was trying to gather up strength and energy for a campaign against the Bretons. He instantly despatched another messenger to England, bidding Richard de Lucy call an assembly of the bishops and clergy and compel them to make a general appeal to the Pope against the authority and jurisdiction of their primate.[274] The meeting was held in London[275] at midsummer.[276] The appeal was made and sent to the Pope in the name of all the bishops and clergy of England; but it is tolerably clear that the main body were merely passive followers, more or less willing, of Gilbert of London and Jocelyn of Salisbury, the former of whom was almost certainly the writer of the letter which conveyed the appeal to the Pope, as well as of that which announced it to the primate.[277] The hand of Gilbert Foliot was indeed so plainly visible that Thomas’s reply was addressed with equal plainness to him personally.[278] The long and sarcastic letter with which he retorted[279] was answered in a yet more startling fashion at the opening of the next year. As Gilbert stood before the high altar of his cathedral church on the feast of its patron saint a paper was thrust into his hand; to his dismay it proved to be a papal brief granting to Archbishop Thomas a commission as legate for all England, and commanding the bishops to render him unqualified obedience and to resign within two months whatever confiscated church property had been placed in their charge by the king. In an agony of distress Gilbert, who himself had the custody of the Canterbury estates, sent this news to the king, imploring him to grant permission that the Pope’s mandate might be obeyed, at least till some method could be devised for escaping from a dilemma which now looked well-nigh hopeless.[280] Henry, absorbed in a struggle with the Bretons, had already been provoked into a vengeance as impolitic as it was mean. He threatened the Cistercian abbots assembled on Holy Cross day at the general chapter of their order that if Thomas were not immediately expelled from Pontigny, he would send all the White Monks in his dominions to share the primate’s exile.[281] When the abbot of Pontigny carried this message home, Thomas could only bid him farewell and betake himself to the sole protection left him--that of the king of France. He left Pontigny on S. Martin’s day[282] 1166, and took up his abode as the guest of Louis in the abbey of S. Columba at Sens.[283]

[274] Gerv. Cant. (Stubbs), vol. i. p. 200.

[275] Gerv. Cant. (Stubbs), vol. i. p. 200. Will. Cant. (Robertson, Becket, vol. i.), p. 56.

[276] Ep. ccix. (ib. vol. v.), p. 421.

[277] Epp. cciv., ccv. (ib. vol. v.), pp. 403–413. Cf. Ep. ccix. (ibid.), p. 241, and Will. Cant. (ib. vol. i.), pp. 56, 57. The bishop of Exeter consented to appeal, but in a fashion of his own, of which however there is no trace in the letter actually sent to the Pope. Two prelates were absent: Walter of Rochester, who pleaded illness, and Henry of Winchester, who wrote in excuse: “Vocatus a summo Pontifice, nec appello nec appellare volo.” The others thought he meant that the Pope had cited him; “ipse vero summum Pontificem, summum Judicem intelligebat, ad cujus tribunal jamjam trahebatur examinandus, tanquam qui in multis diebus processerat et vitæ metis appropinquaret.” So says Will. Cant.; but John of Salisbury says distinctly that the letter of appeal was sealed by London, Winchester and Hereford (Ep. cclii., Robertson, Becket, vol. vi. p. 65). Can William have founded his pretty story on the old confusion (which is perpetually breaking out in his favourite authority, Garnier, and in other writers who have less excuse for it) between Wincestre and Wirecestre--and was Roger of Worcester the real absentee? He certainly did not share in the obloquy which this appeal brought upon Robert of Hereford, with whom hitherto he had usually been coupled by Thomas; on the contrary, he and Bartholomew of Exeter are henceforth always coupled together as fellow-sufferers for their loyalty to the primate.

[278] Epp. ccxxiii., ccxxiv. (Robertson, Becket, vol. v. pp. 490–520).

[279] The famous “Multiplicem nobis et diffusam.” Ep. ccxxv. (ib. pp. 521–544).

[280] Ep. ccviii. (Robertson, Becket, vol. v. pp. 417, 418). The Pope’s brief is Ep. clxxii. (ib. pp. 328, 329); it is dated “Anagniæ, vii. Idus Octobris,” but its true date is Easter-day, April 24 (see editor’s note, p. 329)--the actual date of the letter whereby Alexander notified his act to the English bishops; Ep. clxxiii. (Robertson, as above, pp. 229–231). The diocese (not the province) of York was exempted from Thomas’s legatine jurisdiction--the reason being that Roger of York was legate for Scotland (Ep. cclxx., ib. vol. vi. p. 119). Thomas sent the brief over to his friends Robert of Hereford and Roger of Worcester, bidding them communicate it to their brethren, beginning with London (Ep. clxxix., ib. vol. v. pp. 344–346). Canon Robertson supposes this brief to have been delivered to Gilbert on the feast of the Commemoration of S. Paul, i.e. June 30, 1166. Gilbert himself says merely “die beati Pauli”; and his letter has no date. But it mentions “legatos qui diriguntur ad nos”; and there is no hint elsewhere of any talk about sending legates till late in the autumn, or even winter. There really seems to be no reason why we should not adopt a more obvious rendering of the date, as representing the greater and better-known festival of S. Paul’s Conversion. In that case, of course, the year must be 1167.

[281] Will. Cant. (Robertson, Becket, vol. i.), p. 50. E. Grim (ib. vol. ii.), p. 414. Will. Fitz-Steph. (ib. vol. iii.), p. 83. Herb. Bosh. (ibid.), p. 397. Anon. I. (ib. vol. iv.), p. 65. Cf. Thomas Saga (Magnusson), vol. i. p. 371.

[282] Gerv. Cant. (Stubbs), vol. i. pp. 201, 202.

[283] E. Grim (Robertson, Becket, vol. ii.), p. 415. Herb. Bosh. (ib. vol. iii.), pp. 403, 404; etc.

Henry saw his own blunder as soon as it was made, and endeavoured to neutralize its effects by despatching an embassy to the Pope, requesting that he would send a legatine commission to settle the controversy. One of his envoys was the excommunicate John of Oxford; to the horror of Thomas and the indignation of Louis, John came back in triumph, boasting not only that he had been absolved by the Pope, but that two cardinals, William and Otto--the former of whom was a determined opponent of Thomas--were coming with full powers to sit in judgement on the case between primate and king and decide it without appeal.[284] The first half of the boast was true, but not the second; the cautious Pope instructed his envoys to do nothing more than arbitrate between the contending parties, if they could.[285] They did not reach Normandy till the autumn of 1167; Thomas came to meet them on the French border on November 18; he refused to enter upon any negotiations till the property of the metropolitan see was restored;[286] the legates carried their report to the king at Argentan, and were dismissed with an exclamation of disappointment and disgust--“I wish I may never set eyes upon a cardinal again!”[287] Five of the English bishops whom Henry had summoned to advise him renewed their appeal,[288] its original term having expired six months ago; and the legates insisting that Thomas should respect the appeal,[289] another year’s delay was gained.

[284] Epp. cclxxx., cclxxxiii., cclxxxv., ccxcii. (Robertson, Becket, vol. vi.), pp. 140, 146, 147, 151–153, 170, 171.

[285] Ep. cccvii. (ibid.), p. 201. Cf. Will. Cant. (ib. vol. i.), p. 65, and Gerv. Cant. (Stubbs), vol. i. pp. 202, 203.

[286] Epp. cccxxxi., cccxxxii. (Robertson, Becket, vol. vi.), pp. 247–251, 256–258.

[287] Ep. cccxxxix. (ibid.), pp. 269, 270.

[288] Epp. cccxxxix., cccxli.–cccxlv. (ibid.), pp. 270–272, 276, 277, 283–288.

[289] Ep. cccxliii. (ibid.), pp. 284, 285.

At last, when the two kings made their treaty at Montmirail at Epiphany 1169, Thomas, who had come to the spot under the protection of Louis, suddenly entered the royal presence and fell at Henry’s feet, offering to place himself unreservedly in his hands. All parties thought the struggle was over, till the archbishop added once again the words which had so exasperated Henry at Oxford and at Clarendon: “Saving God’s honour and my order.” The king burst into a fury, and the meeting broke up in confusion.[290] Three months later, on Palm Sunday, from the high altar of Clairvaux, Thomas excommunicated ten of his opponents, first among whom was Gilbert Foliot.[291] Gilbert, who knew that the sentence had been hanging over him for more than a year, had appealed against it before it was uttered;[292] the king, too, was forewarned, and at every seaport guards were set to catch and punish with the utmost rigour any messenger from the primate. It was not till Ascension-day that a young layman named Berengar made his way up to the altar of Gilbert’s cathedral church in the middle of High Mass and thrust into the hand of the celebrant the archbishop’s letter proclaiming the excommunication of the bishop.[293] On that very day Thomas issued another string of excommunications.[294] Gilbert, driven to extremity, renewed his appeal two days later; and he added to it a formal refusal to acknowledge the jurisdiction of a metropolitan to whom he had made no profession, and a declaration--so at least it was reported in Gaul--of his intention to claim the metropolitical dignity for his own see, as an ancient right of which it had been unjustly defrauded by Canterbury.[295] A storm of indignant protest and vehement denunciation arose from the archbishop’s party; and the terrified Pope checked further proceedings by despatching another pair of envoys, who as usual failed to agree either with the king, with the archbishop, or even with each other, and after wasting the summer in misunderstandings and recriminations left the case just where they had found it.[296] By this time king and primate were both weary of their quarrel, and still more weary of mediation. In November they had another personal interview at Montmartre, and the archbishop’s unconditional restoration was all but decided.[297] Thomas, however, rashly attempted to hasten the completion of the settlement by a threat of interdict;[298] and the threat stung Henry into an act of far greater rashness. He had met Louis, as well as Thomas, at Montmartre, and had gained his immediate object of restraining the French king yet a little longer from direct hostilities; the settlement of Britanny was completed at Christmas, that of Aquitaine was so far secure that its conclusion might safely be left to Eleanor’s care; in March 1170 Henry went to England[299] with the fixed determination of seeing his eldest son crowned there before he left it again.

[290] Herb. Bosh. (ib. vol. iii.), pp. 418–427. Epp. ccccli., cccclxi. (ib. vol. vi.), pp. 488, 489, 507–509. Cf. Will. Cant. (ib. vol. i.), pp. 73, 74, and Thomas Saga (Magnusson), vol. i. pp. 427–433.

[291] Ep. cccclxxxviii. (Robertson, Becket, vol. vi. pp. 558, 559). See also Will. Fitz-Steph. (ib. vol. iii.), p. 87, and for date, R. Diceto (Stubbs), vol. i. p. 333.

[292] Ep. dxiii. (Robertson, Becket, vol. vi.), p. 614.

[293] Compare the account given by “Magister Willelmus” in Ep. dviii. (ibid.), pp. 603, 604, with that of Will. Fitz-Steph. (ib. vol. iii.), pp. 89, 90. They are clearly from the same hand.

[294] Epp. dii., dvii. (ib. vol. vi.), pp. 594, 601–603. For date cf. Ep. cccclxxxviii. (ib. pp. 558, 559).

[295] Ep. dviii. (ibid.), pp. 604–606--a very circumstantial account, yet one can scarcely understand how a man so wise and so learned as Gilbert can really have made such an utterly unhistorical claim. He must have known that it had no shadow of foundation, the nearest approach to such a thing being S. Gregory’s abortive scheme for fixing the two archbishoprics at London and York. Gilbert’s opponents, on the other hand, declared that he derived his claim from the archpriests of Jupiter who had their seat in the Roman Londinium, and denounced him as their would-be representative and successor. Epp. dxxxv., dxlvi. (ib. vol. vii.), pp. 10, 41.

[296] On this legation of Gratian and Vivian see R. Diceto (Stubbs), vol. i. p. 335; Gerv. Cant. (Stubbs), vol. i. pp. 212, 213; Herb. Bosh. (Robertson, Becket, vol. iii.), pp. 441–445; Will. Cant. (ib. vol. i.), pp. 72, 73; Epp. ccccxci., ccccxcii. (ib. vol. vi.), pp. 563, 564, 567; dlx., dlxi., dlxiii.–dlxviii., dlxxxi., dlxxxiv., dci., dcii. (ib. vol. vii.), pp. 70–76, 78–92, 115, 116, 124, 125, 151–154, etc.

[297] Will. Fitz-Steph. (Robertson, Becket, vol. iii.), pp. 97, 98; Herb. Bosh. (ibid.), pp. 445–451; Epp. dciv.–dcvii. (ib. vol. vii. pp. 158–168). Thomas Saga (Magnusson), vol. i. p. 447. R. Diceto as above, pp. 335–337. Gerv. Cant. as above, p. 213.

[298] Epp. dlxxiii.–dlxxvii. (Robertson, Becket, vol. vii. pp. 97–109), etc.

[299] Gesta Hen. (Stubbs), vol. i. p. 3. Rog. Howden (Stubbs), vol. ii. p. 3. Gerv. Cant. as above, p. 216.

Three years before, he had wrung from the Pope--then blockaded in Rome by the Imperial troops, and in the last extremity of peril--a brief authorizing young Henry’s coronation by the archbishop of York, in default of the absent primate of all England.[300] In face of a mass of earlier and later rescripts from Alexander’s predecessors and Alexander himself, all strenuously confirming the exclusive privileges of Canterbury, Henry had never yet ventured to make use of this document; like Adrian’s bull for the conquest of Ireland, it had been kept in reserve for a future day; and that day had now come. In vain did Thomas proclaim his threatened interdict;[301] in vain did the Pope ratify it;[302] in vain did both alike issue prohibitions to all the English bishops against the act which they knew to be in contemplation.[303] The vigilance of the justiciars, quickened by a fresh set of stringent injunctions sent over by the king in the previous autumn,[304] made the delivery of letters from either primate or Pope so difficult that Thomas at last could intrust it to no one but a nun, Idonea, whom he solemnly charged with the duty of presenting to Roger of York the papal brief in which the coronation was forbidden.[305] The ceremony was fixed for Sunday, June 14. A week before that date young Henry, who with his girl-bride Margaret of France had been left at Caen under the care of his mother and Richard of Hommet the constable of Normandy, was summoned to join his father in England.[306] On S. Barnabas’s day the bishops and barons assembled at Westminster in obedience to the royal summons;[307] on Saturday, the 13th, the Pope’s letter was at last forced upon the archbishop of York;[308] but none the less did he on the following morning crown and anoint young Henry in Westminster abbey; while Gilbert of London, who had managed to extort conditional absolution in the Pope’s name from Archbishop Rotrou of Rouen,[309] once more stood openly by his side in the foremost rank of the English bishops.[310]

[300] Ep. cccx. (Robertson, Becket, vol. vi. pp. 206, 207). See the editor’s note as to the date.

[301] Epp. dclxxviii.–dclxxxiii. (ib. vol. vii. pp. 320–325).

[302] Epp. dcxxviii.–dcxxx. (Robertson, Becket, vol. vii. pp. 210–214).

[303] Epp. dcxxxii., dcxxxiii., dcxlviii.–dcli. (ib. pp. 216, 217, 256–264). Herb. Bosh. (ib. vol. iii.), p. 462, puts this interdict too late.

[304] The “ten ordinances”; Ep. dxcix. (ib. vol. vii. pp. 147–149); Will. Cant. (ib. vol. i.), pp. 53–55; Gerv. Cant. (Stubbs), vol. i. pp. 214–216; Rog. Howden (Stubbs), vol. i. pp. 231–236; on the date see Bishop Stubbs’s note at last reference.

[305] Ep. dclxxii. (Robertson, Becket, vol. vii. pp. 307–309). See the editor’s note.

[306] Ep. dclxxiii. (ibid.), pp. 309, 312.

[307] Gesta Hen. (Stubbs), vol. i. p. 5.

[308] Will. Fitz-Steph. (Robertson, Becket, vol. iii.), p. 103.

[309] Ibid. Epp. dclviii.–dclx. (ib. vol. vii. pp. 275–277).

[310] Will. Fitz-Steph. (as above), p. 103; Gesta Hen. (Stubbs), vol. i. p. 5; Gerv. Cant. (Stubbs) vol. i. p. 219. R. Diceto (Stubbs), vol. i. p. 338, Chron. Mailros, a. 1170, Rog. Howden (Stubbs), vol. i. p. 4, Chron. S. Serg. a. 1169 (Marchegay, Eglises, p. 150), all give different dates, and all wrong.

The elder king only waited to see the tenants-in-chief, with the king of Scots at their head, swear fealty to his new-made colleague ere he hurried back to Normandy to meet the fast-gathering storm.[311] Louis, incensed that his daughter’s husband should have been crowned without her, was already threatening war;[312] Thomas, seeing in the king’s action nothing but the climax of Canterbury’s wrongs, was overwhelming the Pope with complaints, reproaches, and intreaties for summary vengeance upon all who had taken part in the coronation; and the majority of the cardinals strongly supported his demands.[313] Henry saw that he must make peace at any price. Two days before the feast of S. Mary Magdalene he held a conference with Louis near Fréteval, on the borders of the Vendômois and the county of Chartres;[314] they were reconciled, and as they parted Henry said jestingly to the French king: “That rascal of yours, too, shall have his peace to-morrow; and a right good peace shall it be.”[315] At dawn on S. Mary Magalene’s day[316] he met Thomas in the “Traitor’s Meadow,”[317] close to Fréteval; they rode apart together, and remained in conference so long that the patience of their followers was all but exhausted, when at last Thomas was seen to dismount and throw himself at the king’s feet. Henry sprang from his horse, raised the archbishop from the ground, held his stirrup while he remounted, and rode back to tell his followers that peace was made, on terms which practically amounted to a complete mutual amnesty and a return to the state of affairs which had existed before the quarrel.[318]

[311] Gesta Hen. (Stubbs), vol. i. p. 6. Gerv. Cant. (Stubbs), vol. i. p. 220. Will. Cant. (Robertson, Becket, vol. i.), p. 83. Henry landed at Barfleur about Midsummer; Gesta Hen. as above.

[312] Gesta Hen. as above.

[313] Ep. dccvii. (Robertson, Becket, vol. vii. pp. 373, 374).

[314] “In limitibus suis inter Firmitatem, oppidum scilicet in pago Carnotensi, et Fretivalle, castrum videlicet in territorio Turonensi.” Ep. dclxxxv. (ibid.), p. 339. This Firmitas must be La Ferté-Villeneuil, and Turonensi should be Vindocinensi. Herb. Bosh., who lays the scene “in confinio Carnotusiæ et Cenomanniæ, inter duo castella quorum unum nominatur Viefui” [Viévy-le-Rayé] “et alterum Freteval” (ib. vol. iii. p. 466), is no nearer to the true geography.

[315] “Et crastinâ die habebit pacem suam latro vester; et quidem bonam habebit.” Will. Fitz-Steph. (ibid.), p. 108.

[316] Ep. dclxxxv. (ib. vol. vii.), p. 340.

[317] Herb. Bosh. (ib. vol. iii.), p. 466. Thomas Saga (Magnusson), vol. i. p. 461.

[318] Epp. dclxxxiv., dclxxxv. (Robertson, Becket, vol. vii.), pp. 326–334, 340–342. Will. Fitz-Steph. (ib. vol. iii.), pp. 108–111. Herb. Bosh. (ibid.), p. 466. Garnier (Hippeau), pp. 150, 151. Thomas Saga (as above), pp. 461–465.

Henry had no sooner returned to Normandy than he fell sick almost to death; on his recovery he went on a pilgrimage to the shrine of our Lady at Rocamadour in the Quercy,[319] and it was not until October that Thomas again saw him at Tours, on his way to a conference with Count Theobald of Blois at Amboise.[320] A difficulty had arisen about the restitution of the confiscated Church property and the absolution of the persons whom Thomas had excommunicated, each party insisting that the other should make the first step in conciliation.[321] There was also a difficulty about the kiss of peace, which Thomas required as pledge of Henry’s sincerity, but which Henry seemed desirous of postponing indefinitely.[322] Nevertheless, a letter from Henry to his son, announcing the reconciliation and bidding the young king enforce the restoration of the archiepiscopal estates, was drawn up in Thomas’s presence at Amboise and sent over to England by the hands of two of his clerks,[323] who presented it at Westminster on October 5.[324] The restoration was, however, not effected until Martinmas, and then it comprised little more than empty garners and ruined houses.[325] Thomas saw the king once more, at Chaumont,[326] and Henry promised to meet him again at Rouen, thence to proceed with him to England in person.[327] Before the appointed time came, however, fresh complications had arisen with the king of France; Henry was obliged to give up all thought of going not only to England but even to Normandy, and delegated the archbishop of Rouen and the dean of Salisbury to escort Thomas in his stead.

[319] Gesta Hen. (Stubbs), vol. i. pp. 6, 7.

[320] Herb. Bosh. (Robertson, Becket, vol. iii.) pp. 468, 469. Will. Fitz-Steph. (ibid.), p. 114. Garnier (Hippeau), p. 154. Thomas Saga (Magnusson), vol. i. p. 469. The writer of the Gesta Hen. (Stubbs, vol. i. p. 8) gives the date of this meeting as Tuesday, October 12. But this must be quite ten days too late, for we shall see that a letter drawn up after the meeting was received in England on October 5.

[321] Ep. dclxxxiv. (Robertson, Becket, vol. vii.), pp. 333–337.

[322] Henry alleged that he had publicly sworn never to give Thomas the kiss of peace, and could not face the shame of breaking his oath. Garnier (Hippeau), p. 150; Herb. Bosh. (Robertson, Becket, vol. iii.), p. 450; Ep. dcxxiii. (ib. vol. vii.) pp. 198, 199; Thomas Saga, as above, p. 449. See in Herb. Bosh. (as above), p. 469, Will. Fitz-Steph. (ibid.), p. 115, and Thomas Saga (as above), p. 469, the contrivance by which he avoided it at Tours--or Amboise, in William’s version.

[323] Garnier (Hippeau), pp. 156, 157. The letter, of which Garnier gives a translation, is Ep. dcxc. (Robertson, Becket, vol. vii.) pp. 346, 347; also in Will. Cant. (ib. vol. i.), p. 85; Will. Fitz-Steph. (ib. vol. iii.), p. 112; Gerv. Cant. (Stubbs), vol. i. p. 221; R. Diceto (Stubbs), vol. i. p. 339.

[324] Ep. dccxv. (Robertson, Becket, vol. vii.), p. 389.

[325] Ep. dccxxxiii. (ibid.), p. 402.

[326] Chaumont on the Loire, seemingly. Herb. Bosh. (ib. vol. iii.), p. 470. Cf. Thomas Saga, as above, pp. 471–473.

[327] Will. Fitz-Steph. (Robertson, Becket, vol. iii.), pp. 115, 116.

The duty finally devolved solely upon the dean, who was no other than Thomas’s old opponent John of Oxford.[328] Naturally enough, the primate was deeply hurt at being thus sent back to his see under the protection of a man who, as he truly said, ought to have been thankful for the privilege of travelling in his suite.[329] Thomas, however, was in haste to be gone, although fully persuaded that he was going to his death. He seems indeed to have been weary of life; the tone of his letters and of his parting words to the friends whom he was leaving in France indicates not so much a morbid presentiment of his fate as a passionate longing for it. Yet it can hardly have been from him alone that the foreboding communicated itself to so many other minds. Warnings came to him from all quarters; one voice after another, from the king of France[330] down to the very pilot of the ship in which he took his passage, implored him not to go; Herbert of Bosham alone upheld his resolution to the end.[331]

[328] Ib. p. 116. Epp. dccxxii., dccxxiii. (ib. vol. vii.), pp. 400, 403. Garnier (Hippeau), p. 160.

[329] Will. Fitz-Steph. as above.

[330] Ib. p. 113.

[331] Herb. Bosh. (ibid.), pp. 472–476.

We may put aside at once all the wild talk of the archbishop’s biographers about plots against his life in which the king had a share. Even if Henry’s sudden willingness for his return was really suggested by words said to have been uttered by one of his counsellors--“Why keep the archbishop out of England? It would be far better to keep him in it”--there is no need to assume that those words bore even in the speaker’s mind, far less in that of the king, the horrible meaning which they were afterwards supposed to have covered;[332] for they were true in the most literal sense. The quarrel of king and primate would have mattered little had it been fought out on English ground; it was the archbishop’s exile which rendered him so dangerous. Thomas had dealt his most fatal blow at Henry by flying from him, and Henry, as he now perceived, had made his worst blunder in driving Thomas into France. Of the infinitely greater blunder involved in the archbishop’s murder--setting the criminal aspect of the deed altogether aside--it is enough to say that Henry was wholly incapable. The same may be said of Roger of York and Gilbert of London, although, like the king himself, they were urged by dread of the archbishop into making common cause with men of a very different stamp:--men who hated the primate with a far more intense personal hatred, and who were restrained by no considerations either of policy or of morality:--men such as Ralf de Broc, a ruffian adventurer who had served as the tool of Henry’s vengeance upon the archbishop’s kinsfolk, had resumed the custody of the archiepiscopal estates when it was resigned by Gilbert Foliot, had been for the last four years at once fattening upon the property of Thomas and smarting under his excommunication, and was ready to commit any crime rather than disgorge his ill-gotten gains.[333] It was known that Thomas had letters from the Pope suspending all those bishops who had taken part in the coronation of the young king, and replacing Gilbert of London, Jocelyn of Salisbury, and all whom Thomas had excommunicated under the sentences from which they had been irregularly released by some of the Papal envoys.[334] Gilbert, Jocelyn and Roger of York now hurried to Canterbury, intending to proceed to Normandy as soon as Thomas set foot in England; while Ralf de Broc, Reginald de Warren and Gervase of Cornhill the sheriff of Kent undertook to catch him at the moment of landing, ransack his baggage, search his person, and seize any Papal letters which he might bring with him. Thomas, however was warned; he sent the letters over before him, and the three prelates at Canterbury read their condemnation before their judge quitted Gaul.[335] Next day he sailed from Wissant, and on the morning of December 1 he landed at Sandwich.[336] His enemies were ready to receive him; but at the sight of John of Oxford they stopped short, and John in the king’s name forbade all interference with the primate.[337] Amid the rapturous greetings of the people who thronged to welcome their chief pastor, he rode on to Canterbury; there some of the royal officials came to him in the king’s name, demanding the absolution of the suspended and excommunicate bishops. Thomas at first answered that he could not annul a Papal sentence; but he afterwards offered to take the risk of doing so, if the culprits would abjure their errors in the form prescribed by the Church. Gilbert and Jocelyn were inclined to yield; but Roger refused, and they ended by despatching Geoffrey Ridel to enlist the sympathies of the young king in their behalf, while they themselves carried their protest to his father in Normandy.[338]

[332] Will Fitz-Steph. as above, pp. 106, 107.

[333] On Ralf de Broc see Will. Fitz-Steph. (Robertson, Becket, vol. iii.), p. 75; Herb. Bosh. (ibid.), p. 360; Anon. I. (ib. vol. iv.) p. 65; E. Grim (ib. vol. ii.), p. 404; Epp. lxxviii. (ib. vol. v. p. 152), cccxli., ccccxcviii. (ib. vol. vi. pp. 278, 582), dccxviii., dccxxiii. (ib. vol. vii. pp. 394, 402). In the last place Thomas says that Ralf “in ecclesiam Dei ... per septem annos licentius debacchatus est”; and the writer of the Thomas Saga (Magnusson), vol. i. p. 321, seems to have understood this as meaning that Ralf had had the stewardship of the Canterbury property throughout the archbishop’s exile. This, however, does not appear to have been the case. Ralf certainly had the stewardship for a short time at first; but it was, as we have seen, soon transferred to Gilbert Foliot, and only restored to Ralf when Gilbert resigned it early in 1167.

[334] Epp. dccxx., dccxxii. (Robertson, Becket, vol. vii. pp. 397–399).

[335] Ep. dccxxiii., dccxxiv. (Robertson, Becket, vol. vii.), pp. 403, 410. Cf. Will. Cant. (ib. vol. i.), pp. 87–89; Will. Fitz-Steph. (ib. vol. iii.), p. 117; Herb. Bosh. (ibid.), pp. 471, 472; Anon. I. (ib. vol. iv.), p. 68; Anon. II. (ibid.), p. 123; Garnier (Hippeau), pp. 161, 163. The version in Thomas Saga (Magnusson), vol. i. p. 483, seems founded on a confusion between the delivery of these Papal letters and that which Berengar delivered in S. Paul’s on the Ascension-day of the previous year.

[336] Will. Fitz-Steph. (as above), p. 118. Herb. Bosh. (ibid.) p. 476. Anon. I. (ib. vol. iv.), p. 68. Garnier (Hippeau), p. 164. R. Diceto (Stubbs), vol. i. p. 339. Gerv. Cant. (Stubbs), vol. i. p. 222. Thomas Saga (as above), pp. 489–491. The date is from Will. Fitz-Steph., R. Diceto and the Saga; Gervase makes it November 30, and Herbert “two or three days after the feast of S. Andrew.”

[337] Will. Fitz-Steph. and Garnier, as above. Ep. dccxxiii. (Robertson, Becket, vol. vii.), pp. 403, 404. Thomas Saga (as above), p. 491.

[338] Ep. dccxxiii., dccxxiv. (Robertson, Becket, vol. vii.), pp. 404–406, 411, 412. Will. Cant. (ib. vol. i.), pp. 102–105. Will. Fitz-Steph. (ib. vol. iii.), pp. 120, 121. Herb. Bosh. (ibid.), p. 480. Thomas Saga (Magnusson), vol. i. pp. 497–501. Garnier (Hippeau), p. 172, erroneously thinks the censures on the bishops were not issued till Christmas-day.

The young king was preparing to hold his Christmas court at Winchester.[339] Thomas proposed to join it, but was stopped in London by a peremptory command to “go back and mind his own business at Canterbury.”[340] He obeyed under protest, and on Christmas-day again excommunicated the De Brocs and their fellow-robbers.[341] The elder king was keeping the feast at his hunting-seat of Bures near Bayeux.[342] There the three bishops threw themselves at his feet; Roger of York spoke in the name of all, and presented the Papal letters;[343] the courtiers burst into a confused storm of indignation, but not one had any counsel to offer. In his impatience and disappointment Henry uttered the fatal words which he was to rue all his life: “What a parcel of fools and dastards have I nourished in my house, that none of them can be found to avenge me of this one upstart clerk!”[344]

[339] Garnier (Hippeau), p. 166. Will. Cant. (Robertson, Becket, vol. i.), p. 106. Anon. II. (ib. vol. iv.), p. 126. R. Diceto (Stubbs), vol. i. p. 342, says the young king was at Woodstock when Thomas sought for an interview; he was, however, certainly at Winchester at Christmas.

[340] “Fère vostre mestier à Cantorbire alez.” Garnier (Hippeau), p. 171. Cf. Ep. dccxxiv. (Robertson, Becket, vol. vii.), p. 412; Will. Cant. (ib. vol. i.) pp. 106–113; Will. Fitz-Steph. (ib. vol. iii.), pp. 121–123; Herb. Bosh. (ibid.), pp. 482, 483; Rog. Howden (Stubbs), vol. ii. p. 13; Thomas Saga (Magnusson), vol. i. pp. 505–507.

[341] Will. Cant. (as above), p. 120. E. Grim (ib. vol. ii.), p. 428. Will. Fitz-Steph. (ib. vol. iii.), p. 130. Herb. Bosh. (ibid.), pp. 484, 485. R. Diceto (as above), p. 342. Thomas Saga (as above), pp. 511–513.

[342] Herb. Bosh. (as above), p. 481. Garnier (Hippeau), p. 175. Gesta Hen. (Stubbs), vol. i. p. 11. Rob. Torigni, a. 1171.

[343] Garnier (Hippeau), pp. 175–177. Will. Cant. (as above), pp. 122, 123. Cf. Thomas Saga (as above), pp. 501–503.

[344] Garnier (Hippeau), p. 175. Will. Cant. (as above), p. 121. E. Grim (ib. vol. ii.), p. 429. Herb. Bosh. (ib. vol. iii.), p. 487.

The words were hardly more than he had used at Chinon four years before, but they fell now upon other ears. Four knights--Hugh de Morville, William de Tracy, Reginald Fitz-Urse and Richard le Breton[345]--took them as a warrant for the primate’s death. That night--it was Christmas-eve[346]--they vowed to slay him, no matter how or where;[347] they left the court in secret, crossed to England by different routes,[348] and met again at Saltwood, a castle which the archbishop had been vainly endeavouring to recover from the clutches of Ralf de Broc, and where Ralf himself was dwelling amid a crowd of his kinsfolk and dependents. There the final plot was laid.[349] How it was executed is a tale which has been told so often that its details may well be spared here. On the evening of December 29, after a scene in his own hall scarcely less disgraceful than the last scene in the king’s hall at Northampton, the primate of all England was butchered at the altar’s foot in his own cathedral church.[350]

[345] In Will. Cant. (as above), pp. 128, 129, is a “descriptio spiculatorum,” in which the only point of interest is the English speech of Hugh de Morville’s mother.

[346] Garnier (Hippeau), p. 177. Will. Cant. (as above), p. 123.

[347] Garnier, as above. Will. Cant. (as above), p. 124. E. Grim (ib. vol. ii.), p. 429. Will. Fitz-Steph. (Robertson, Becket, vol. iii.), p. 128. Herb. Bosh. (ibid.), p. 487. Thomas Saga (Magnusson), vol. i. p. 517.

[348] Garnier (Hippeau), p. 177. Will. Cant. (Robertson, Becket, vol. i.) p. 124, Will. Fitz-Steph. (ib. vol. iii.), p. 130. Thomas Saga as above.

[349] Will. Fitz-Steph. as above; cf. ib. p. 126. Thomas Saga, as above, pp. 517–519. Saltwood was mentioned, as a special subject for inquiry and restitution, in the king’s letter commending Thomas to his son.

[350] Will. Cant. (as above), pp. 131–135. Joh. Salisb. (ib. vol. ii.), pp. 319, 320. E. Grim (ibid.), pp. 430–438. Will. Fitz-Steph. (ib. vol. iii.), pp. 132–142. Herb. Bosh. (ibid.), pp. 488 et seq. Anon. I. (ib. vol. iv.), pp. 70–77. Anon. II. (ibid.), pp. 128–132. Garnier (Hippeau), pp. 179–195. R. Diceto (Stubbs), vol. i. pp. 343, 344. Gerv. Cant. (Stubbs), vol. i. pp. 224–227. Thomas Saga as above, pp. 523–549.

The ill news travelled fast. It fell like a thunderbolt upon the Norman court still gathered round the king at Argentan,[351] whither the assembly had adjourned after the Christmas feast at Bures. Henry stood for a moment speechless with horror, then burst into a frenzy of despair, and shut himself up in his own rooms, refusing to eat or drink or to see any one.[352] In a few days more, as he anticipated, all Christendom was ringing with execration of the murder and clamouring for vengeance upon the king who was universally regarded as its instigator. The Pope ordered an interdict upon Henry’s continental dominions, excommunicated the murderers and all who had given or should henceforth give them aid, shelter or support, and was only restrained from pronouncing a like sentence upon the king himself by a promise that he would make compurgation and submit to penance.[353] Two cardinal-legates charged with the enforcement of these decrees were at once despatched to Normandy;[354] but when they arrived there, Henry was out of their reach. The death of Duke Conan in February had thrown Britanny completely into his hands; he only stayed to secure Geoffrey’s final establishment there as duke[355] before he called a council at Argentan and announced that he was going to Ireland.[356] He quitted Normandy just as the legates reached it,[357] leaving strict orders that the ports should be closed to all clerks and papal envoys, and that no one should dare to follow him without special permission.[358] Landing at Portsmouth in the first days of August,[359] he hurried to Winchester for a last interview with the dying Bishop Henry,[360] closed the English ports as he had closed those of Normandy,[361] then plunged once more into the depths of South Wales, and on October 16 sailed from Milford Haven for Waterford.[362]

[351] R. Diceto (as above), p. 345. Gesta Hen. (Stubbs), vol. i. p. 14.

[352] Ep. dccxxxviii. (Robertson, Becket, vol. vii.), p. 438. Cf. MS. Lansdown. (ib. vol. iv.), pp. 159, 160, and Gesta Hen. as above.

[353] Epp. dccl., dccli. (Robertson, Becket, vol. vii. pp. 471–478).

[354] Gerv. Cant. (Stubbs), vol. i. p. 233. R. Diceto (Stubbs), vol. i. p. 346. Gesta Hen. (Stubbs), vol. i. p. 24.

[355] Rob. Torigni, a. 1171. Conan died February 20; Chron. Kemperleg. ad ann. (Rer. Gall. Scriptt., vol. xii. p. 563). The Chron. S. Serg. a. 1169 (Marchegay, Eglises, p. 150), places the event two years too early. Cf. Chron. Britann. a. 1170, 1171 (Rer. Gall. Scriptt., vol. xii. p. 560; Morice, Hist. Bretagne, preuves, vol. i. col. 104).

[356] Rob. Torigni, a. 1171.

[357] MS. Lansdown. (Robertson, Becket, vol. iv.), p. 169. Gerv. Cant. (as above), pp. 233, 234. The Gesta Hen. (as above), and Rog. Howden (Stubbs, vol. ii. pp. 28, 29) seem to imply that they arrived just before Henry left; but they are rather confused about these legates. They make two pairs of them come to Normandy this summer--first, Vivian and Gratian, who come with hostile intent, and from whom Henry runs away (Gesta Hen., Stubbs, vol. i. p. 24; Rog. Howden, Stubbs, vol. ii. p. 29); and secondly, Albert and Theodwine, who apparently supersede them later in the year, and whom Henry hurries to meet (Gesta Hen. as above, p. 29; Rog. Howden as above, p. 34). But the MS. Lansdown. (which is the fullest account of all), Gerv. Cant. and R. Diceto distinctly make only one pair of legates, Albert and Theodwine. The confusion in Thomas Saga (Magnusson), vol. ii. pp. 31–33, is greater still.

[358] Gesta Hen. (as above), p. 24. Cf. Rog. Howden (as above), p. 29.

[359] Gesta Hen. as above, and Gerv. Cant. (Stubbs), vol. i. p. 234, say August 3; R. Diceto (Stubbs), vol. i. p. 347, says August 6.

[360] R. Diceto as above. Bishop Henry died on August 8; ibid.

[361] Gerv. Cant., Gesta Hen. and Rog. Howden, as above.

[362] Gesta Hen. (as above), p. 25.

The elements favoured his escape; for five months a persistent contrary wind hindered all communication to Ireland from any part of his dominions.[363] The bishops and the ministers were left to fight their own battles and make their own peace with the legates in Normandy until May 1172, when the king suddenly reappeared[364] to claim the papal absolution and offer in return not only his own spiritual obedience and that of his English and continental realms, but also that of Ireland, which he had secured for Rome as her share in the spoils of a conquest won with Adrian’s bull in his hand.[365] The bargain was soon struck. On Sunday May 21 Henry met the legates at Avranches, made his purgation for the primate’s death, promised the required expiation, and abjured his obnoxious “customs,” his eldest son joining in the abjuration.[366] To pacify Louis, young Henry and Margaret were sent over sea with the archbishop of Rouen and by him crowned together at Winchester on August 27;[367] and the Norman primate returned to join a great council of the Norman clergy assembled at Avranches to witness there, two days before Michaelmas, a public repetition of their sovereign’s purgation and his final absolution by the legates.[368]

[363] R. Diceto (Stubbs), vol. i. p. 350. Gir. Cambr., Expugn. Hibern., l. i. c. 36 (Dimock, vol. v. p. 284).

[364] R. Diceto (as above), p. 351.

[365] Gesta Hen. (Stubbs), vol. i. p. 28.

[366] Ep. dcclxxi.–dcclxxiv. (Robertson, Becket, vol. vii. pp. 513–522). MS. Lansdown. (ib. vol. iv.), pp. 173, 174.

[367] Gesta Hen. (as above), p. 31; Rog. Howden (Stubbs), vol. ii. p. 34; Gerv. Cant. (Stubbs), vol. i. p. 237. R. Diceto (as above), p. 352, makes it August 21.

[368] Gesta Hen. (as above), pp. 32, 33. Rog. Howden (as above), pp. 35–37. Gerv. Cant. (as above), p. 238. These three are the only writers who mention this purgation in September, and they say nothing of the one in May. That it took place is however clear from the letter of the legates themselves (Ep. dcclxxiv. Robertson, Becket, vol. vii. p. 521), giving its date, “Vocem jucunditatis,” i.e. Rogation-Sunday. On the other hand, the MS. Lansdown. (ib. vol. iv. pp. 173, 174) mentions only one purgation, and this clearly is the earlier one, for it is placed before the re-crowning of young Henry. The explanation seems to be that this was a private ceremony between the king and the legates, with a few chosen witnesses; the legates say in their letter that Henry promised to repeat it publicly at Caen; he probably did so at Avranches instead. On the other hand, Rob. Torigni (a. 1172) says: “Locutus est cum eis primo Savigneii, postea Abrincis, tercio Cadomi, ubi causa illa finita est;” and seems to make the Michaelmas council at Avranches a mere ordinary Church synod, where moreover “obsistente regis infirmitate parum profecerunt.” To add to the confusion, Gir. Cambr. (Expugn. Hibern., l. i. c. 39; Dimock, vol. v. p. 289) says the purgation was made at Coutances.

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