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Will. Fitz-Steph. as above.

Will. Fitz-Steph. , pp. 45, 46.

Herb. Bosh. , p. 267.

Will. Fitz-Steph. , p. 46.

Herb. Bosh. , p. 267.

Herb. Bosh. , p. 274.

Herb. Bosh. , p. 275.

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. 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. 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. On the faith of their word Thomas met the king at Oxford, 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. 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, 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.

On December 22. Gerv. Cant. , vol. i. p. 176.

On S. Hilary's day the proposed council met at the royal hunting-seat of Clarendon near Salisbury. 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.

On the date see note B at end of chapter.

On the chronology see note B at end of chapter.

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. 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. 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. 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?"

Const. Clarend. c. 6 .

Const. Clarend. c. 9 .

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 --but even by Thomas's most ardent follower, Herbert of Bosham .

"Et Deus ? sun servise nus a tuz apelez! Mielz valt filz ? vilain qui est preuz et senez, Que ne fet gentilz hum failliz et debutez!"

Garnier , 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" "tales sibi fratres associant, pelliparios scilicet et sutores, quorum nec unus deberet instante necessitate in episcopum vel abbatem salv? conscienti? nostr? promoveri." Gerv. Cant. , vol. i. p. 540.

The discussion occupied six days; as each clause was read out to the assembly, Thomas rose and set forth his reasons for opposing it. 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!" 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. 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.

See note B at end of chapter.

Herb. Bosh. , pp. 280-285. The answers to the Constitutions in Garnier , pp. 84-89, seem to be partly Thomas's and partly his own.

"L'arcevesques respunt: Fei que dei Deu le bel, Co n'ert, tant cum la vie me bate en cest vessel!"

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. 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. On January 29, 1164--one day before the dissolution of the council of Clarendon--he died at Rouen; 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. 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; 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. The old dispute concerning the relations between Canterbury and York had broken out afresh with intensified bitterness between Roger of Pont-l'Ev?que 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. The bishops as yet were passive; in the York controversy Gilbert Foliot strongly supported his own metropolitan; 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.

Will. Fitz-Steph. 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.

"Hic" "regis fratrem pertaesum semper habebat, Ne consul foret hic, obvius ille fuit: Cum nata comitis comitem Warenna tulisset, Nobilis hic praesul ne nocuisset ei. Ir? permotus, nunquam rediturus, ab Anglis Advenit is, matri nunciat ista piae. Hinc Beccum veniens fratrum se tradit amori."

From a comparison of Will. Fitz-Steph. , p. 46, with Ep. lv. , 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.

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 , vol. i. p. 311. It must be remembered that Henry had already had experience of John's zeal for clerical immunities.

Ep. xxviii. .

Epp. xxxv., lxvii. .

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; and early in the summer of 1164, having been refused an interview with the king, 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; 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. 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, and would certainly give an immense advantage against him to Louis of France, who was at that very moment threatening war in Auvergne. He therefore received Thomas courteously, though with somewhat less than the usual honours, 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." Foremost among them was John the king's marshal, who had a suit in the archbishop's court concerning the manor of Pageham. 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. 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. Henry angrily refused to believe either Thomas or his essoiners, and immediately issued orders for a great council to be held at Northampton. 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; 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.

Epp. xxxv., xxxvi., lv. .

Will. Fitz-Steph. , vol. iii. p. 49.

Alan Tewkesb. as above.

Ep. lx. .

Ep. ccxxv. . Herb. Bosh. , p. 294.

Herb. Bosh. , pp. 294, 295.

Will. Fitz-Steph. , p. 50.

Will. Fitz-Steph. as above.

R. Diceto , vol. i. pp. 313, 314.

Will. Fitz-Steph. , p. 51.

The council--an almost complete gathering of the tenants-in-chief, lay and spiritual, throughout the realm--was summoned for Tuesday October 6. The king however lingered hawking by the river-side till late at night, 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. 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; the charge of failure of justice was apparently withdrawn, but for the alleged contempt Thomas was sentenced to a fine of five hundred pounds. 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. 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. 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. Next morning Henry made a further demand for the repayment of a loan made to Thomas in his chancellor days. 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; 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.

Will. Fitz-Steph. as above.

Will. Fitz-Steph. , p. 51.

This must be the meaning of Will. Fitz-Steph. , p. 53, compared with R. Diceto , vol. i. pp. 313, 314.

Will. Fitz-Steph. as above.

Herb. Bosh. , pp. 298, 299.

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, and Thomas spent the next morning in consultation with his suffragans. Gilbert of London advised unconditional surrender; Henry of Winchester, who had already withstood the king to his face the night before, strongly opposed this view, and suggested that the matter should be compromised by an offer of two thousand marks. This the king rejected. After long deliberation 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. 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. Before it expired a warning reached him from the court that if he appeared there he must expect nothing short of imprisonment or death. 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. Against this last command the bishop of London instantly appealed. 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. 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.

Garnier , pp. 53, 54.

Herb. Bosh. , p. 300.

Alan Tewkesb. , pp. 326, 327.

Garnier , p. 54.

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