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Terms of Henry's accession--His character--His early reforms--His relations with France--War of Toulouse--Summary of nine years' work.

We have observed, in sketching the close of the last reign, the existence of certain terms by which Henry and Stephen, after or in preparation for the peace of November 1153, agreed that the country should be governed. Those terms are not preserved in any formal document, but they occur in two or three of the historians of the time, in a somewhat poetical garb, disguised in language adapted partly from the prophecies of Merlin, king Arthur's seer, which were in vogue at the time, and partly from the words of Holy Scripture; and yet, from the clue they furnish to the reforms actually carried out by Henry, they seem to be based upon certain real articles of agreement.

These sentences give us a clue to Henry's reforms; that is, they show us clearly the evils that first called for his attention. The kingdom, divided in two under Stephen, had been in constant war; the barons on one side had entered on the lands of the barons on the other; Stephen had confiscated the estates of Matilda's friends in the East of England, Matilda had retaliated or authorized reprisals in the West. All this must be set right. The crown had been the greatest loser, and the impoverishment of the crown involved the oppression of the people. Henry gained the crown by a national act; he must then resume not only the wasteful grants of Stephen but those of his mother also, and, in his character of king, know neither friends nor foes amongst his own people. So the Exchequer, the board which managed the royal revenue, must be placed on its old footing, and under its old managers. With the Exchequer would revive the ancient office of the sheriffs, to whom both the collection of revenue, the administration of justice in the shires, and the maintenance of the military force was entrusted. Thus local security would restore and revive trade and commerce. And when the local administration of the sheriff was revived, no doubt the feudal usurpations of the lords of castles and manors must end. The fortified houses must be pulled down; no more should the petty tyrants tax and judge their men, fight their battles like independent princes, and coin their money as so many kings. The great PEACE should be restored, of which the king was guardian and keeper. In fact, the golden age was to return. Nor was it to be delayed until Henry came to the crown; it was to be Stephen's last and expiatory task to bring about these happy results. Stephen, as we saw, wanted either the will or the power to accomplish it.

Stephen died on October 25, 1154. Henry was in France at the time, and was not able, owing to the weather, to reach England before December 8. During this time the management of affairs rested with Archbishop Theobald of Canterbury, and in some measure perhaps with his secretary, Thomas Becket, who had been so busy negotiating the succession of Henry. Although it was the theory that during the vacancy of the throne all law and police were suspended, and no one could be punished for offences committed in a general abeyance of justice, the country remained quiet during these six weeks. Perhaps the rogues were cowed by the apprehension of a strong king coming, perhaps the religious obedience inculcated by the archbishop was really maintained; perhaps the same bad weather that kept Henry in Normandy kept thieves and robbers within doors. Nor was there any political rising during the interregnum. Stephen's children were not thought of, at least on this side of the Channel, as rivals to Henry. The Bishop of Winchester had learnt moderation, that might in him well pass for wisdom; he might well feel that his position was a hazardous one, to be maintained only by caution; and he had no reason, nor excuse for seeking a reason, for evading the compact which he had had a chief hand in making. It shows, however, his importance that as soon as Henry landed, which he did near Southampton, he hastened to Winchester, and there visited his powerful kinsman, who, as we learn, was now busily employed in collecting statues and sculpture from southern Europe, and with whom he made a friendship which, although once or twice seriously endangered, was never actually broken. Amongst the other leaders who likewise had learned wisdom we must count the Empress Matilda, who, strange to say, appears to us no more as the arrogant, self-willed virago, but as a sage politician and a wise, modest, pious old lady, living at Rouen, and ruling Normandy in the name of her son with prudent counsel. Not a word is said now of her succeeding to the throne or even resigning her rights to Henry; all that was regarded as arranged by the settlement made with Stephen. Henry succeeded without a competitor. Stephen's minister, Richard de Lucy, became his minister. Theobald continued to be, as his office made him, the great constitutional adviser; and to reconcile personal convenience with constitutional precedent, he presented his secretary to the king as his future Chancellor. Thomas Becket thus entered on his high and fatal office.

The demolition of the castles, which one contemporary writer reckons at three hundred and seventy-five, another a little later at eleven hundred and fifteen, was a still greater boon; for these, had they been suffered to stand, would not only have fitted England to be a constant scene of civil war, but have continued to afford to their owners a shadow of claim for the exercise of those feudal jurisdictions which on the Continent made every baron a petty despot. Castles were unfortunately not entirely destroyed at this time; the older strongholds, which had been built under Henry, were untouched, and gave trouble enough in the one civil war that marks the reign; but the legal misuse of them was abolished, and they ceased to be centres of feudal lawlessness.

Another measure which must have been taken at the coronation, when all the recognised earls did their homage and paid their ceremonial services, seems to have been the degrading or cashiering of the supposititious earls created by Stephen and Matilda. Some of these may have obtained recognition by getting new grants; but those who lost endowment and dignity at once, like William of Ypres, the leader of the Flemish mercenaries, could make no terms. They sank to the rank from which they had been so incautiously raised.

In 1158 he wore his crown, as we have seen, at Easter, at Worcester; in the summer he went into Cumberland, no doubt to set the machinery of government at work there in due order after the change of rulers; and at Carlisle on Midsummer-day he conferred knighthood on William of Warenne. In August he went to France, whence he did not return until January, 1163. This brings us to the point of time at which the struggle with Becket begins, to which, with its attendant circumstances, we may devote another chapter.

We may, therefore, now take up the thread of the foreign transactions at the beginning of the reign and bring it down to the same point. The geographical extent of Henry's dominions furnishes the leading clue to this part of his history. They embraced, speaking roughly and roundly, Normandy, Maine, Touraine, Anjou, Guienne, Poictou, and Gascony. But this statement has to be accepted with some very important limitations. In the first place, each of these states, and each bundle of them, had come to him in a different way--some from his father, some from his mother, some by his wife--and each bundle had been got together by those from whom he received it in similar ways. The result of that was that in each state or bundle of states there was a distant relation between the lord and his vassals--a constitution, we might call it, by which various rights and privileges and a varying legal system or customs subsisted. What was law in Normandy was not customary in Anjou; and the barons of Poictou had, or claimed, customs which must, if they could have enforced them, have produced utter anarchy. Here was a constant and abundant source of administrative difficulties, the adjustment of which was one of the causes of Henry's long absence from England. But a second incidental result was, that, as many of these estates came into the common inheritance on very deficient title, conquest in one case, chicanery in another, there were a number of claimants in each, claimants who by prescriptive right might have lost all chance of recovering their lands, but whose very existence gave trouble. In Anjou, for instance, Henry had to contend against his own brother Geoffrey, to whom their father had left certain cities, and who might have a claim to the whole county. In Normandy the heirs of Stephen claimed the county of Mortain; in Maine, Saintonge, and other Southern provinces, there were the remnants of older dynasties, always ready to give trouble.

But further than this, the feudal law, as it was then recognized in France, gave the king, in his manifold capacities as king, duke, and count, certain rights and certain obligations that are puzzling now, and must have been actually bewildering then. Henry, as Duke of Normandy, inherited the relation, entered into by his ancestor Duke Richard the Fearless, of vassal to the Duke of the Franks; but the Duke of the Franks had now become King of France. It was a serious question how the duties of vassalage were to be defined. As Duke of Normandy also he had a right to the feudal superiority of Brittany. Yet it was no easy thing to say how Brittany could be made to act in case of a quarrel between king and duke. The tie which bound him as Count of Anjou was different from that which bound him as Duke of Normandy to the same King of France. As Count of Poictiers he was feudally bound to the Duke of Aquitaine, but he was himself duke of Aquitaine, unless he chose to regard his wife as duchess and himself as count, in which case he would be liable to do feudal service to his wife only, and she would be responsible for the service to the King of France; a very curious relation for a lady who had been married to both. We do not, however, find, that this contrivance was employed by Henry himself, although it was used by John. And this same point of difficulty arose everywhere. The feudal rights of Aquitaine--the right, that is, to demand homage and service--extended far beyond the limits of the sovereign authority of the dukes, and it was always an object to turn a claim of overlordship into an actual exercise of sovereign authority. The tie between the great county of Toulouse and the duchy of Aquitaine was complicated both by legal difficulty and by questions of descent. The rights over Auvergne, claimed by both the king and the duke, were so complex as to be the matter of continual arbitration, and at last were left to settle themselves.

The war of Toulouse, with its preparations and results, occupied the greater part of 1159, although the campaign itself was short. Henry had assembled his full court of vassals. William of Warenne, the son of Stephen, and Malcolm, King of Scots, followed him as his liegemen rather than as allies. Becket, as his Chancellor, came with an equipment not inferior to that of any of his earls and counts. Altogether it was a very splendid and expensive affair. The king marched to Toulouse; but at Toulouse was his enemy, his friend, his lord, his wife's first husband. Henry could not proceed to extremes against the man whom in his youthful sincerity he still recognized as his feudal lord, and whose personal humiliation would have degraded the idea of royalty, of which he was himself so proud. So he left Becket to continue the siege and returned westward. The French were attempting a diversion on the Norman frontier. Toulouse, therefore, was not taken. Towards the end of the year a truce was made with Lewis, and early in 1160 the truce was turned into an alliance. But the alliance brought with it the seeds of new and more fatal divisions.

We have noted the way in which Henry used his children as his tools or as the counters of his game. He began with them very young. His eldest child, William, to whom we have seen homage done immediately after the coronation, died very soon after, and Henry, who was born in February, 1155, and had received conditional homage when he was two months old, now became the heir apparent. The next child was a daughter, Matilda, born in 1156; in 1157 Richard was born, at either Oxford or Woodstock; Geoffrey, the next brother, came in 1158; then Eleanor, in 1162; Johanna, in 1165; and last of all John, in 1167. On Henry's attempts to provide for these children hangs nearly all the interest of his foreign wars; and the marriages of the daughters form a key to the history of the foreign policy of England and her alliances for many ages.

The game may be considered to begin with Richard, who at the age of a year was betrothed to the daughter of Raymond of Barcelona and Queen Petronilla of Aragon. This was done, it appears, to bind the count and queen either to help or to stand neutral in the war of Toulouse. The betrothal came to nothing. Henry, the elder brother, was the next victim. The peace of 1160 assigned him, at the age of five, as husband to the little lady Margaret of France, Lewis's daughter by his second wife, Constance of Castile. This marriage was not only to seal the peace but to secure to Henry a good frontier between Normandy and France. The castles of Gisors and Neafle, and the county of the Vexin, which lay between Normandy and Paris, were to be Margaret's portion, not to be surrendered until the marriage could be formally celebrated, and until then to remain in the custody of the Templars. Henry, however, did not stick at trifles. The little Margaret had been put into his hands to learn English or Norman ways. He had the marriage celebrated between the two children, and then prevailed on the Templars to surrender the castles. Lewis never forgave that, and the Vexin quarrel remained an open sore during the rest of the reign; for after the death of the younger Henry his rights were transferred to Richard by another unhappy marriage contract with another of Lewis's daughters. Practically the question was settled by the betrayal of Gisors to Philip, by Gilbert of Vacoeuil, whilst Richard was in Palestine; but the struggle continued until John finally lost not only the Vexin but Normandy itself and all else that he had to lose. For the present, however, the outbreak of war, to which Henry's sharp practice led, was only a brief one. Henry was successful, and peace was concluded in August, 1161. The year 1162 he spent in Normandy, holding councils and organizing the administration of the duchy, as he had done that of the kingdom in his first year.

During the whole of this long absence from England the country was governed by Richard de Lucy and Earl Robert of Leicester, as the king's chief justices or justiciars; the little Henry taking his father's place on occasions of ceremony, when he happened to be in England. The historians of these years tell us little or nothing of what was going on. There were no wars or revolts; abbots and bishops died and their successors were appointed; notably the good Archbishop Theobald, to whom Henry owed so much, died in 1161, and Becket succeeded him.

From other sources we learn that Henry's legal reforms were in full operation. He had restored the machinery of the Exchequer, and with it the method of raising revenue which had been arranged in his grandfather's time. That revenue arose, firstly, from the ferm or rent of the counties; that is, the sum paid by the sheriffs as royal stewards; by way of composition for the rents of royal lands in the shire, and the ordinary proceeds of the fines and other payments made in the ancient shiremoot or county court; secondly, from the Danegeld, a tax of two shillings on the hide of land, originally levied as tribute to the Danes under Ethelred, but continued, like the Income Tax, as a convenient ordinary resource; thirdly, from the feudal revenue, arising from the profits of marriages, wardships, transfers of land, successions, and the like, and from the aids demanded by the king from the several barons or communities that owed him feudal support. To these we may add a fourth source, the proceeds of courts of justice, held by the king's officers to determine causes for which the ancient popular courts were not thought competent; such as began with suits between the king's immediate dependents, and by degrees extended to all the civil and criminal jurisdiction of the country. Judicature and finance were thus bound very closely together; the sheriffs were not only tax-gatherers but executors of the law, and every improvement in the law was made to increase the income of the Exchequer. To this we must attribute the means taken by Henry to administer justice in the counties, sending some of the chief members of his judicial staff, year after year, through the country, forcing their way into the estates and castles of the most despotic nobles, and spreading the feeling of security together with the sense of loyalty, and the conviction that ready justice was well worth the money that it seemed to cost. Besides the revival of the provincial judicature in this shape Henry, from the beginning of the reign, added form and organization to the proceedings of his supreme court of justice, which comes into prominence later on.

Next to these his most important measure was the institution or expansion of what is called Scutage. According to the ancient English law every freeman was bound to serve in arms for the defence of his country. That principle Henry only meddled with so far as to direct and improve it. But, according to the feudal custom, quite irrespective of this, every man who held land to the amount of twenty pounds' worth of annual value was obliged to perform or furnish the military service of a knight to his immediate lord. This kept the barons always at the head of bodies of trained knights, who might be regarded as ultimately a part of the king's army, but in case of a rebellion would probably fight for their immediate lord. Henry, by allowing his vassals to commute their military service for a money payment, went a long way to disarm this very untrustworthy body; and with the money so raised he hired stipendiaries, with whom he fought his Continental wars. He began to act on this principle in the first year of his reign, when he made the bishops, notwithstanding strong objections from Archbishop Theobald, pay scutage for their lands held by knight-service. But in 1159 he extended the plan very widely, and took money instead of service from the whole of his dominions, compelling his chief lords to serve in person, but hiring, with the scutages of the inferior tenants, a splendid army of mercenaries, with which he fought the war of Toulouse.

Other results incidentally followed from the special measures by which this great end was secured; the more thorough amalgamation of the still unfused nationalities of Norman and Englishman followed from a state of things in which both were equal before the law, and the distinctions or privileges of blood were no longer recognized among free men. The diminution of military power in the hands of the territorial lords left the maintenance of peace and the defence of the country to be undertaken, as it had been of old, by the community of free Englishmen, locally trained, and armed according to their substance. This created or revived a strong warlike spirit for all national objects, without inspiring the passion for military exploit or glory, which is the bane of what is called a military nation. On the national character, thus in a state of formation, the idea that law is and ought to be supreme was now firmly impressed; and although the further development of the governmental system furnished employment for Henry's later years, and was never neglected, even in the busiest and unhappiest period of his reign, it may be fairly said that the foundation was laid in the comparative peace and industry of these early years. At the age of thirty Henry had been nearly nine years a king, and had already done a work for which England can never cease to be grateful.

The English Church--Schools of Clergy--Rise of Becket--Quarrel with the King--Exile--Death.

The history of the Church of England is during many ages the chief part of the history of the nation; throughout it is a very large part of the history of the people. Their ways of thinking, their system of morals, their intellectual growth, their intercourse with the world outside, cannot be understood but by an examination of the vicissitudes of their religious history; and it plays a scarcely less important part in the development of their political institutions. Christianity in England, looked at by the eye of history, means not only the knowledge of God and His salvation by Christ Jesus; it carries with it, besides, all that is implied in civilization, national growth and national unity.

When the English, under the seven or eight struggling and quarrelling dynasties whose battles form for centuries all the recorded life of the island, were seven or eight distinct nationalities,--some of them tribally connected, some of them using allied systems of law, but otherwise having scarcely anything in common beyond dialects of a common growing language,--altogether without any common organization or the desire of forming one,--the conversion in the seventh century taught them to regard themselves as one people. They were formed by St. Gregory and Archbishop Theodore into an organized Christian Church, the several dioceses of which represented the several kingdoms or provinces of their divided state.

Thus arranged in one or, later on, in two ecclesiastical provinces, the wise men of the several tribes learned to act in concert; the tribes themselves, casting aside their tribal superstitions for a common worship, found how few real obstacles there were to prevent them from acting as one people; and from the date of the conversion the tendency of the kingdoms was to unite rather than to break up. Although this process was slow--for it went on for four centuries, and was scarcely completed when the Norman Conquest forced the mass of varied national elements into cohesion--it was a uniform tendency, contrasted with, and counteracting numerous and varying tendencies towards separation. The Church built up the unity of the State, and in so doing it built up the unity of the nation.

And one result of this was to make the Church extremely powerful in the state. There was but one archbishop of Canterbury when there were seven kings; that archbishop's word was listened to with respect and obeyed in all the seven kingdoms, in any one of which the command of a strange king would have been received with contempt. The archbishop was exceedingly powerful, both in Kent, his peculiar diocese, and by his alliances with the states and churches of the Continent; and the diocesan bishops were each, in his own district, a match for their kings, because they knew that in any struggle they could depend on the friendship of all their fellows outside their special kingdom, much more than the peccant king could depend on the assistance of his fellow-kings. They could meet in one council, whilst the several kings could only collect their own Witenagemots; they were, in fact, the rulers of the Church of England, whilst the kings were only kings of Kent, Mercia and Wessex. And when the kingdoms became one under the descendants of Egbert the prelates retained the same power.

Never, perhaps, in any country were Church and State more closely united than they were in Anglo-Saxon times in England; for they were united, with careful recognition of their distinct functions, not, as in Spain and some other lands, confounding what should have been kept distinct, or making the prelates great temporal lords, or the national deliberations mere ecclesiastical councils. The prelates, the bishops and abbots, formed, as wise men, qualified by their spiritual office to be counsellors, a very large proportion of the Witenagemot, the ruling council of the kingdom; in every county the bishop sat in the courts with the sheriff, to declare the Divine law, as the sheriff did the secular law. The clergy were, for all moral offences, under the same rules as the laity, save that it was the bishop who in the common court attended to their case and saw substantial justice enforced. So matters went on until the Conquest, the changes which took place in the meantime affecting the spiritual discipline and character rather than the constitutional position of the clergy; making them, that is, more or less secular in their views and aims, but not lessening their power. Nay, every change strengthened rather than weakened their position. Dunstan was the prime minister of the last mighty king; but under Canute the prelates were even more powerful than under Edgar; and we can understand from the history of the Conquest that it was not the fault of the English-born bishops that William the Norman obtained the victory in the council as well as in the field.

These things being so, we are able to understand what it was that gave the prelates the great moral weight they possessed in Stephen's reign, and to perceive how vast was the importance of maintaining the alliance between them and the crown. We learn too how the many streams of influence which they guided reacted upon the clerical body itself, and produced several distinct schools or classes of ecclesiastical character. In the first place, the kings had taken prelates to be their ministers, and had promoted their ministers to be prelates. Bishop Roger of Salisbury was not only a powerful ecclesiastic but the royal justiciar, the head of all the courts and the treasurer of all the money of the king. Under him was a set of clerks who would set the fashion for one school of the clergy, secular in mind and aim and manners; often married men, so far as their right to marry can be accounted valid, canons of cathedrals where they provided for their children and made estates for themselves; worthy men most of them, the predecessors of the clerical magistrates of this day, far greater in quarter sessions and county meetings than in convocation or missionary work. That was one very strong school--a school that required tender handling both politically and ecclesiastically, and in the view of which we can understand how important it was for Bishop Roger to secure the consent of the Pope and the archbishops to his holding secular office. For it is said that, worldly man as he was, he refused, as a matter of conscience as well as policy, to act as the king's minister, without the distinct approval of the saintly Anselm and his successors, the archbishops as well as the popes.

A second class was composed of the ecclesiastical politicians, men, that is, who were before all things Churchmen, of whom Henry of Winchester is one of the best specimens. These did not like the first, sink the clergyman in the statesman or the magistrate, and accept preferment as the mere reward of political service; they were not the Sadducees but the Pharisees of the time; they would not marry, nor sell livings, nor act against the Pope; whatever secular power they could get they would use for the benefit of the Church. To say this is not to condemn them; they saw in the service of the Church the clearest and readiest way of serving both God and man. These men were in tone and morals a higher set of men than the first. They were in close alliance with the see of Rome; they knew far more than the others about the state of Christendom generally; they were scholars, the founders of universities, the protectors of culture; they prevented the Church from becoming thoroughly secular; and, if there was a higher type, it was a type also much more liable to be assumed by counterfeits. It is a great mistake to undervalue this school. It would seem probable that both Archbishop Theobald as well as his rival, Henry of Winchester, should be referred to it; it was the party of the Legate, the party that tried to introduce the Civil law as a subject of study at Oxford; that went abroad to attend councils, that bearded royal tyranny in Church and State.

And there was a higher type--a type we will call it rather than a school, because the graces that compose it are not learned in men's schools, but under the discipline of a Divine master; the pure religious type, which we find, with some alloy, in such men as Anselm; the meek and quiet spirit that has a zeal for righteousness and a love of souls; that will bear all things for itself, but rise up to avenge the cause of the helpless. It is the noblest type; to which belong the true hero, the true martyr, the saint indeed; but it is a type which to man's eye is the most easily counterfeited by the popular hero, the self-advertising saint, the professed candidate for mock martyrdom.

Such, then, are the three types of character which perhaps mark all ages of the Church, but which come out most markedly and distinctly in the present period; and the career of Thomas Becket, the hero of this part of our national history, cannot be understood without a clear idea of them.

Henry might well think himself fortunate in securing such a minister; he threw himself with entire confidence upon him, and there can be little doubt that Becket is to a great degree answerable for the grievous change in Henry's character that followed their quarrel. To anticipate, however: when Henry made his Chancellor Archbishop of Canterbury he contemplated securing, at the head of the Church, a friend who would sympathize with his statesmanlike designs, who was sure to be able to sway the clergy, and who would repay his unbounded confidence with grateful and straightforward service. But he was sadly disappointed. Becket was not the man to exchange his splendid position as Chancellor for the life of an ordinary commonplace archbishop. If he undertook the office he would act up to the highest idea of its requirements. Never was there a more sudden transformation. One day he is, like Roger of Salisbury, hearing causes and framing his budget, counting out his money, or reviewing his knights; the next he is Lanfranc in miniature, or not so much Lanfranc as Anselm, or Henry of Winchester rather than Anselm;--the high ecclesiastic pure and simple, coveting the Papal legation, hand-and-glove with the Pope, full of ideas based on the canon law, which his friend Gratian had just codified in the Decretum; an unflinching and unreasoning supporter of all clerical claims, right or wrong, wholesome or unwholesome, consistent or inconsistent with his previous life and opinions.

A third phase awaits him. In his new character he is pretty sure to quarrel with the king; he does so, and, however just his cause, he does it in a way that does not prejudice us in his favor; his object is studiously to put Henry in the wrong; his conduct in the last degree exasperating. The second form of clerical life has served its time. Now he comes out as a candidate for martyrdom. In this also he will do what he has to do with all his might. Unmindful of the early friendship of the king, from whom certainly he had never met with anything but kindness and the most familiar courtesy, he declares that he is in danger of his life; he insists on celebrating mass at the altar of the protomartyr and on appearing at court carrying his own cross, partly as a safeguard against violence which he has no reason to apprehend, partly in an awful miserable parody of the great day of Calvary. All the rest of his career is the same--a morbid craving after the honors of martyrdom, or confessorship at the least, a crafty policy for embroiling Henry with his many enemies, combined with a plausible allegation that it is all for his good and that of the Church. There is in him some greatness of character still, some sincerity, we will hope, but no self-renunciation, no self-restraint, no earnest striving for peace; little, very little, care of the flock over which he was overseer, and which was left shepherdless.

On a calm review of his life it seems that Becket was most at home in his first position; that in the second he was ill at ease and awkward, divided between two aims and failing in conduct as well as in cause. The third phase becomes him least of all; and it is only by considering the horrible sufferings of his death that we pardon him for the conduct that brought the pains of death upon him.

Briefly to recapitulate the stages of the career of this man, to whom even his enemies allow the title of greatness: Becket was Chancellor from the accession of Henry, in 1154, to his consecration as Archbishop of Canterbury, in June, 1162. The king was still in France when Theobald died. It was regarded as a somewhat unprecedented measure to make so secular a person as Thomas archbishop, but Henry's influence and his own were supreme; he had accepted the dignity with misgiving, but having accepted he did not hesitate about the measures to be taken for securing it; the consent of the bishops and monks was readily yielded, and one who was, so far as his place of birth could make him, an Englishman, sat once more on the throne of Augustine. All difficulties were smoothed for him; he had not to go to Rome for his pall; it arrived a few weeks after his consecration; and he had six months' quiet and peace in his new dignity before the king came home.

This was on the 25th of January, 1163. Henry found, as was to be expected, that considerable arrears of business had accrued during his long absence. He was meditating a new expedition to Wales in order to enforce the homage due to him and his heir-apparent from the Welsh princes. The trial of Henry of Essex, who had been accused of treason and cowardice by Robert de Montfort, for letting fall the standard at the battle of Consilt, and who was to defend himself by battle, was also imminent; and already some apprehensions were felt as to the conduct of the archbishop. He had resigned, much in opposition to Henry's wishes, his office of Chancellor on his appointment as Archbishop, and had procured from the justiciar a full acquittance for all sums which he had received for the king during his tenure of office, especially the sums arising from the revenue of vacant churches, a source of royal income which was specially administered by the Chancellor. But he had not resigned the great manors of Eye and Berkhampstead, which were usually held as part of the endowment of the Chancellor; these it is possible he intended to hold only until his successor was appointed, but no successor was appointed, and the strange spectacle was seen of the Archbishop of Canterbury holding two of the finest pieces of the secular patronage of the crown without any official claim to them.

In another point he also showed himself somewhat grasping, or at all events made enemies at a moment when his experience should have taught him to be more politic. Many of the old possessions of his see had come into the hands of laymen, who were negligent in performing their services, and probably wished to throw off the yoke of the archbishop altogether. In order to enforce his rights he acted in a way which, justifiable as it was, was nevertheless imprudent; the result was a royal inquest as to the archiepiscopal fiefs; and, as the archbishop was already becoming unpopular, the verdict of the jury robbed him of some rights that might otherwise have been successfully maintained. In all this, however, he had no coolness with the king. Henry felt the resignation of the Chancellorship as a personal wrong; for although in the empire, where the king looked for precedents, the office of Arch-chancellor was held by the three great metropolitans of Germany, Becket had followed the usage almost unbroken in England in resigning; but there was nothing like an open quarrel. The spring of the year passed without one. In March the fate of Henry of Essex was decided; he was defeated in the battle trial, and the king, greatly against his will it was said--for he believed that the fall of the standard at Consilt was accidental--was obliged by the Norman law to declare his estates forfeited. Henry of Essex retired into a monastery, and so Henry lost one of his best friends.

As we should expect from our knowledge of later crises of the kind, the bone of contention was found in the financial budget of the year. Henry was, as usual, busy with his reforms; and although he was an honest reformer and had a true genius for organization, he liked best those methods of reform that helped to fill the treasury. The administration of the sheriffs was during the later part of the reign a frequent subject of legislative ordinance, and the question which now arose was connected with it. The sheriffs had been used to collect from every hide of land in their counties two shillings annually. It was probable that out of this a fixed sum was paid to the king under the name of Danegeld; certainly the Danegeld was collected at that rate; and as the sums paid into the Exchequer under that name were very small compared with the extent of land that paid the tax, it is probable that the sheriffs paid a fixed composition, and retained the surplus as wages for their services in the execution of judicial work and police. Our authorities merely tell us that the king proposed to take away this money from the sheriffs and bring it into the general account of his revenue. Thomas opposed this; declared that the tax should not go into the king's coffers, that the sheriffs should not lose, that the lands of his Church should pay the tax no more; and he seems to have prevailed, although we have no positive record to that effect.

The courtiers saw it, and they began to raise little suits against Becket on little matters by which they might harass him, and, like true courtiers, accelerate the fall of a falling man. Such in particular were John the Marshal, who raised a claim touching one of the archiepiscopal manors, and William of Eynesford, who claimed the patronage of one of the archbishop's livings, and was rashly excommunicated by Becket, contrary to the custom which forbade the excommunication of a tenant-in-chief of the king without the king's license. Three months, however, passed away; and on the 1st of October the king called a great council at Westminster.

In the process of his reforms he was startled by the absolute immunity accorded to the crimes of the clergy, or persons pretending to be clergymen, through the double jurisdiction of the lay and Church courts which was introduced by William the Conqueror. Any clerk who committed a crime could be demanded by his bishop from the officers of secular justice, and sentenced by him to ecclesiastical punishment, which, according to the law of William, was to be enforced by the secular arm. But, in fact, so much afraid were the bishops of any clerk being tried by the lay courts, and so jealous were the lay officers of being called on to enforce the ecclesiastical punishments, that the whole system broke down. Thieves and murderers who called themselves clerks were demanded by the bishops and sentenced to penances and deprivation of orders, two punishments at which they could afford to laugh. Henry proposed that, when such prisoners were taken and found guilty, they should be delivered to the bishops to be spiritually punished, and then to the secular officers, to have sufficient punishment, to be hanged, or blinded, or imprisoned as the mild laws of the period ordered. Thomas would not hear of this--one punishment was enough for one fault; if the clergyman was a thief, and proved so to be, let him be degraded--that was enough; if he broke the law again, the law might have him, for he was after degradation entitled to the privileges of a clergyman no more. Henry grew very angry at this foolish and imprudent proposal. Such, he said, had not been the law in the time of his grandfather, the great king Henry the Elder, the lion of righteousness. He would not submit, but would enforce the ancient rights and customs of the realm as his grandfather had done. But what, it was asked, were those customs? The reign of Stephen had witnessed a total abeyance of secular law, and had listened to very extraordinary assertions of ecclesiastical right and liberty. Let the ancient customs be first ascertained, and then it would be time to say whether or no the clergy and laity could act together. Becket allowed the bishops to promise to observe these customs 'saving their order.' Henry declared that that meant nothing. The assembly was broken up in wrath. The king ordered the manors of Eye and Berkhampstead to be surrendered, and the archbishop in two or three later interviews sought in vain for a reconciliation.

Whether in this Henry acted from passionate indignation, or because he saw that Becket had taken on himself the maintenance of the extreme views propounded by the canonists as to the immunity of spiritual men, we cannot now venture to determine. The breach between the two was never healed; both probably saw that it never could even be compromised. The dispute had its real basis in the difficulty of adjusting legal and spiritual relations, which even at the present day seems no nearer receiving a permanent settlement.

Soon after Christmas another court was held, at Clarendon, one of those forest palaces at which, as at Woodstock, Henry and his sons used to call the counsellors together, and diversify business with sport. It was called for the purpose of finishing the business began at Westminster. The archbishop was asked whether he would accept the ancient customs; he declined to do it without making conditions. The king then ordered that the 'recognition of the customs' should be read. This was the report of the great committee appointed to ascertain and commit them to writing, a committee which nominally contained nearly all the bishops and barons, but which Becket declared to consist only of Richard de Lucy, the justiciar, and Jocelin de Bailleul, a French lawyer. This report was the celebrated Constitutions of Clarendon, a sort of code or concordat, in sixteen chapters, which included not merely a system of definite rules to regulate the disposal of the criminal clergy, but a method of proceeding by which all quarrels that arose between the clergy and laity might be satisfactorily heard and determined. Questions of advowsons, of disputed estates, of excommunication, the rights of the spiritual courts over laymen, and of lay courts over spiritual men, the rights of the crown in vacant churches and in the nomination to benefices, and the right of appeal in ecclesiastical causes, were all defined. No one was to carry a suit farther than the archiepiscopal court; that is, no one was to appeal to the Pope without the king's leave. Prelates and parsons were not to quit the kingdom without license. The sons of rustics or villeins were not to be ordained without leave of the lords on whose lands they were born. Many similar customs were recorded which show that Henry had determined to set the jurisprudence of the kingdom, as touching laymen and clergy alike, on a just and equal basis; no unfairness towards the spiritual estate was intended, but simply the extinction or restriction of the immunities, the existence of which threw the whole system into disorder. An appeal to Rome must not be allowed to paralyze the whole ecclesiastical jurisdiction, any more than an assertion that the murderer or the murdered man--for the immunity told both ways--was a clerk, should be allowed to insure the escape and impunity of the murderer. Becket was perhaps, at the first sight of these Constitutions, inclined or, as he would have said, tempted to yield. He accepted the Constitutions. Almost as soon as he had done so he drew back; either he recalled his concession or refused to set his seal to the acceptance, or in some way recanted. We have no entirely trustworthy evidence; but it would seem he declared that he had sinned, that he would go to Rome, that he would resign his see, that he would not act as archbishop without first receiving special absolution.

However informal this was, Becket complied, rather than by absenting himself from the court to leave his cause in hands he could not trust. He attended, and was overwhelmed. First he was sentenced to pay 500 marks to John the Marshal, who was declared to have proved his claim against him. Then he was called on to present the accounts of the Chancery, of which he had been acquitted by a general discharge when he became archbishop. He now put on the aspect of a martyr, and declared himself ready to die for the rights of his Church. Henry and his agents declared that it was the person, not the prelate, who was aimed at; that they were not assailing the rights of the Church but vindicating the laws of the land. The bishops advised unconditional submission, which would, no doubt have been the wisest course, for it would have disarmed the king without conceding any matter of principle; for Henry was not the man to make an extreme use of victory, and might still perhaps have been induced to act with moderation. Instead of this, as Henry grew more peremptory Thomas grew more provoking; at last he declared himself really in danger, turned and fled.

He went off in disguise from Northampton, and, after several trying adventures, landed in Flanders, whence he made his way to join the pope at Sens, and thence to Pontigny.

After his return to England, later in the year, Henry made his third Welsh expedition, which had no more permanent effect than the former ones, as an attempt either to subdue the country or to secure the peace of the borders. It was carried out with an amount of cruelty which shows Henry's character to have already deteriorated. After his return he held, early in 1166, another council at Clarendon, also marked by an important act of legislation, the Assize of Clarendon, by which the criminal law was reformed, and the grand jury system established or reformed in every shire.

Then Henry gave way. Crossing to Normandy a few days after the coronation, he met Becket at Freteval in July, and there consented to the return of his great enemy. Three months, however, intervened before Becket started for home, and during that time he had several meetings with the king, in which he behaved, or his behaviour was interpreted, in a way very prejudicial to his reputation for sincerity. At last he reached England, early in December, and as soon as he landed began to excommunicate the bishops who had crowned the boy Henry. At London and at Canterbury he was received with delight. Henry had become unpopular: the archbishop's popularity had been increased by his absence, and the multitude does occasionally sympathize with a man who has been oppressed. The news of his rash, intemperate conduct reached Henry at court, at Bur, near Bayeux, where he had established himself after a very severe illness in the autumn. In high passion the king spoke words which he would have recalled at once, but which laid on him a life-long burden: "Would all his servants stand by and see him thus defied by one whom he had himself raised from poverty to wealth and power? Would no one rid him of the troublesome clerk?"

Armed by no public grievance, moved by no loyal zeal, but simply private enemies who saw their way to revenge and impunity, Reginald Fitz Urse, Hugh de Morville, Richard Brito, and William de Tracy, came to Canterbury, sought out the archbishop, and slew him. The cruelty on the one side, the heroism on the other--the savage barbarity of the desperate man, the strange passionate violence of the would-be martyr, finding at the last that he could not place a curb on his words or temper, even when he was, as he may be truly believed to have been, offering up his life for his Church--forms a sad but a thrice-told tale.

Becket died on the 29th of December, 1170, and for 350 years and more that day was kept in the Church of England as one of the chief festivals after Easter, Whitsuntide, and Christmas. It is no small proof of the strength of character which certainly marks Becket throughout his versatile career, that he should have made so deep an impression not only on England but on Christendom. Although some allowance must be made for the influence of superstition, and doubtless of imposture also, in the spread of the honor paid to him so widely, even such superstitions could not have gathered round one whose reputation was a mere figment of monks and legend-writers. He was undoubtedly recognized as the champion of a great cause which was then believed to need championship, and which through the greatness of the need served to excuse even such championship as it found in him. But whatever were the cause which he was maintaining, he had some part of the glory that belongs to all who vindicate liberty, to all who uphold weakness against overwhelming strength.

And in this view of him, in which Englishmen may have regarded him as the one man able and daring to beard the mighty king whom the memory of his forefathers had clothed with enhanced terrors, and whose designs for their good they were too ignorant to appreciate, Continental Christendom saw him the champion of the papacy as against the secular power. Later generations under the recoil of the Reformation viewed him merely as a traitor, and his cultus as an organized imposture. More calmly regarded--as now perhaps we may afford to regard him--he appears, as we have described him, a strong, impulsive man, the strength of whose will is out of all proportion to the depth of his character, with little self-restraint, little self-knowledge, no statesmanlike insight, and yet too much love of intrigue and craft. He is not a constructive reformer in the Church; in the state he is obstructive and exasperating. Even on the estimate of his friends he does not come within the first rank of great men. The cause for which he fought was not the cause for which he fell, and the cause of liberty, which to some extent benefited by his struggle, was not the actual cause for which he was consciously fighting. He appears small indeed by the side of Anselm, who knew well how to distinguish between the real and factitious importance of the claims which he made or resisted; small indeed by the side of his successor, St. Edmund, who, brave as Thomas himself was to declare the right, chose the part of the peacemaker rather than that of the combatant and recognized the glory of suffering patiently. Yet the world's gratitude has often been abundantly shown to men who deserved it less.

Continued reforms--Revolt of 1173-1174--Renewed industry of Henry--His later years--Quarrel with Richard--Fall and death.

Of the effects of this system one, the abatement of the power of the feudal courts of justice by forcing them under royal jurisdiction, has been noticed already. A second was the training of the people generally, through the use of juries which were employed both for legal and fiscal business; they thus learned to manage their own affairs and to keep up an intelligent interest in legislation and political business. A third was, to limit the power of the sheriffs, who being the sole royal representatives in the shires, judicial, military, and fiscal, had great chances of exercising irresponsible tyranny, of which the books of the time contain many complaints. Besides the visitations of the judges Henry from time to time used still stronger measures of remedy or precaution against the oppressions of the sheriffs. In 1170 he turned them all out of office, and held a very strict inquiry into the amount of money they had received, filling up their places with servants and officers of his own court, by whose action the local government would be placed in more direct relation to the central.

In the same way he varied the taxes, from year to year, not allowing the same interest to be oppressed with continual imposts, but taking now a tallage from the towns, now a scutage or an aid from the land-owners or knightly body; and on the occasion of the Crusade, in 1184 and 1188, calling for a contribution from personal property, a fixed proportion or a tithe of goods for the war against Saladin.

In order finally to secure the defence of the country, and to have a force on which he could depend for the maintenance of peace and order, he armed the whole free population, or ordered them to provide arms, according to a fixed scale, proportioned to their substance. Thus he restored the ancient Anglo-Saxon militia system, and supplied the requisite counterbalance to the military power of the great feudatories, which, notwithstanding the temptation to avoid service by payment of scutage, they were still able and too willing to maintain. In all these measures we may trace one main object, the strengthening of the royal power, and one main means or directing principle, the doing so by increasing the safety and security of the people. Whatever was done to help the people served to reduce the power of the great feudal baronage; to disarm their forces, to abolish their jurisdictions, to diminish their chances of tyranny. Now all this could not but make Henry very much disliked by the great nobles. The people of course were slow to see the benefit of the reforms, but the barons were quick enough at detecting the measures taken to humiliate and reduce them; so, before Henry gained the affection of the people, he had to encounter the hostility of the barons.

Henry well knew by what very discordant nationalities his states were peopled; and he entertained the idea of dividing his dominions among his sons at his death. To Richard, the second son, as his mother's heir, Aquitaine and Poictou were already given; for Geoffrey he had obtained the succession to the duchy of Brittany, and he was thinking of Ireland to be conquered for a kingdom for John. Henry, the eldest son, would of course have his father's inheritance, England, Normandy, and Anjou. Such a division the king actually made, when in the autumn of 1170 he believed himself to be at the point of death; and he brought up his sons among the people they were to rule, Henry among the Normans, Richard among the Poictevins. It would be still a question whether the elder brother should govern the family estates, as had been the case in the early Karolingian empire, his brethren owning his feudal superiority; or whether each should possess his provinces in sovereignty; subject only to the already existing feudal claims.

Henry--for we must now return to the direct string of our story--was momentarily paralyzed at the news of the martyrdom. He saw how the blame was sure to fall upon him, and how all his enemies would sooner or later take the opportunity to overwhelm him. Immediately, therefore, he sent envoys to Rome to promise any terms whatever for acquittal or absolution. Whilst this negotiation was pending, knowing that the legates, for whom Lewis, before the death of Becket, had applied, were on their way to Normandy, and would not scruple to exert the utmost of their power against him, he organized an expedition to Ireland, which for the last sixteen years had been his by papal grant, and for the last four had been undergoing the process of conquest in the hands of Richard de Clare, surnamed Strongbow. In Ireland he stayed from the autumn of 1171 to the Easter of 1172, receiving the submission of kings and bishops, and really keeping out of the way of the hostile legates: awaiting the arrival of the friendly legates who were coming to absolve him.

Now, no doubt it appears strange that the Court of Rome should at this same moment be pouring out both sweet water and bitter; that the supreme judge on earth should send forth a legation to put Henry's dominions under interdict for one act and directly after send another to absolve him for what seems a more heinous one. It must, however, be remembered that in this the papal court was rather acting as a great tribunal of international arbitration than as the council of a Christian bishop. The Court of Rome was a great legal machine, the disadvantages of which are manifest at first sight, but the benefit of which in a warlike age can scarcely be overrated, although less obvious at a glance. A very severe judgment may perhaps be allowable, as to the assumptions and arrogance and unrighteousness of the papacy in taking the office of international arbitration; but judged by its results it was for the time a great public benefit, for it stopped and hindered the constant appeals to war. Thus viewed the Court of Rome was as open for suitors as any simple court of justice: an applicant who wanted legal redress applied for a commission of inquiry or a legation. In so doing he brought the usual means to bear on the papal officials, who no doubt found it to their interest to keep their minds always open to hear both sides, and to keep their purses also open to receive the contributions of all sides in each suit, and thus maintain the wealth and power of the court itself. It is not to be denied that, however arrived at, the decisions ultimately given were in most cases fair and just.

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