Henry, like his father, aimed at establishing perfect harmony between Church and State, keeping both alike in absolute dependence upon himself. Accordingly he resisted any unauthorized interference on the part of the Pope with the affairs of the Church. Early in the reign a Burgundian archbishop landed here without invitation, claiming legatine authority over the whole kingdom. His claim was pronounced “unheard of.” Although the Conqueror had invited the Pope to send him legates for a specified purpose, the archbishop of Canterbury was held to be the permanent representative of the Holy See in England, a legatus natus, whose authority was not to be superseded by a special legate, or legatus a latere. No one acknowledged the legate’s authority, and “he went back,” Eadmer remarks, “as he came.” A more serious attempt to override the rights of the Church was made in the time of Anselm’s successor, Ralph. The king was in Normandy, and when it became known that a legate, Anselm’s nephew and namesake, was on his way hither, the bishops and nobles of the kingdom met in council, and sent Ralph over to Henry to request that he “would bring the innovation to nought,” and the king prevented the legate Anselm from landing. In the time of the next archbishop, William of Corbeuil, Henry was, for political reasons, anxious to stand well with Rome, and accordingly admitted into the kingdom a legate from Honorius II., named John of Crema. Men saw with indignation that this legate sat in the highest seat in the metropolitan church, and said mass in the archbishop’s stead, clad in episcopal vestments, though he was only a priest; “for both England and other countries knew that, from St. Augustin onwards, the archbishops were held to be primates and patriarchs, and were never made subject to a Roman legate.” At the same time, though John occupied the seat of honour at the council of 1125, the summons ran in the name of the archbishop and the decrees were confirmed by the king. While, then, the Crown, the English Church, and the papal representative acted concurrently, the royal authority was saved. It was not so with the see of Canterbury or with the national interests it represented, and the archbishop went to Rome to complain of the injury done to his see. Honorius silenced his complaints by giving him a legatine commission, a measure which, while gratifying William personally, lessened the inherent dignity of his see and the independence of the Church.

In spite of various efforts, the archbishops of York had hitherto been unable to evade the profession of obedience to Canterbury. Thurstan, the fourth since the Conquest, was a man of different mould from his predecessors, and refused to make the profession. Archbishop Ralph accordingly refused to consecrate him, and the king upheld the right of the primatial see, bidding Thurstan do what was due according to ancient usage. Thurstan was encouraged in his revolt by Popes Paschal II. and Calixtus II., who treated it as a good opportunity for a covert attack on the greatness of the English primate. The see of York remained vacant for about five years. At last Thurstan obtained leave from the king to attend the council held by Calixtus at Rheims, promising that he would not accept consecration from the Pope, while Calixtus undertook that he would do nothing to the prejudice of the see of Canterbury. Nevertheless Thurstan received consecration from Calixtus, and so escaped making the profession. Henry refused to allow him to return to England; and the next Pope, Honorius II., seems to have actually declared the kingdom under an interdict, though the sentence was not published here. The dispute went on for some years, and the old question appears even now to excite the local patriotism of some of the clergy of York. Yet it can scarcely be denied that Thurstan sacrificed the interests of the national Church to the aggrandizement of his see, and that both he and Calixtus got the better of the king by a somewhat discreditable trick. York was freed for ever from the obligation of obedience by a bull of Calixtus.

One phase of the quarrel between Canterbury and York concerned the Scottish bishops. On a vacancy of the see of St. Andrews, Alexander, king of Scots, was induced to write to Ralph of Canterbury, asking him to recommend a new bishop, and reminding him that the bishops of St. Andrews were always consecrated by the Pope or the archbishop of Canterbury, which was, of course, the reverse of the truth, for they were suffragans of York. Ralph highly approved of this new doctrine, and in course of time Eadmer, the historian, a monk of Canterbury, was duly elected. Meanwhile, however, Alexander had changed his mind, and commanded Eadmer to receive consecration from Thurstan. This he refused to do, for he was heart and soul a Canterbury man, and after much disputing, he was forced to return to his convent unconsecrated. The dispute between Canterbury and York encouraged some of the Scottish bishops to revolt against Thurstan, whose authority was upheld by Calixtus. This quarrel is memorable because the Pope accepted Thurstan’s theory that the king of Scots was the man of the king of England for Scotland, and not, as the Scots held, merely for Lothian or any other fief: in other words, he declared Scotland a vassal kingdom, a decision that became of importance later on. The question of canonical subjection was debated between St. Andrews and York, until, in 1188, Clement III. declared the Scottish Church immediately dependent on the Holy See. The upshot of these disputes was, that the archbishops of Canterbury ceased to be the “primates and patriarchs of Britain,” for York was freed from dependence upon them, and their attempt to extend their jurisdiction over Scotland utterly failed. On the other hand, the authority of Canterbury was established in Wales by the election to the see of St. David’s of the Norman Bernard, who received consecration from Archbishop Ralph, and made profession to him.

The ecclesiastical system of the Norman kings may be summed up as a generally successful attempt to give the Church power of action apart from the State, so far as was consistent with the supremacy of the Crown. Under Rufus this system became a mere means of tyranny; and among the many glories that attend the memory of St. Anselm, not the least is that he delivered the Church from the domination of the feudal idea, which would have destroyed her spirituality and left her helpless before the royal power. By the Conqueror and Henry I. the supremacy was used to establish harmony of action between Church and State, and to preserve the national character of the Church. Nevertheless the new relations with Rome introduced by the Conquest began to bear fruit in Henry’s time, for on all occasions, both by the grant of legatine commissions and by upholding the pretensions of York, the Popes strove to depress the primatial see and to increase their own authority in England.

Although Henry had none of the brutal contempt for law that distinguished his brother, he was not less despotic, and his policy towards the Church differed from that pursued by his father in that, while the Conqueror made her co-ordinate under himself with the State, he degraded her to the position of a servant. He kept the see of Canterbury vacant for five years after the death of Anselm; all ecclesiastical matters were governed by political or personal considerations rather than with an eye to the true interests of the Church, and Henry was not above making money from ecclesiastical appointments. His chief adviser was Roger, bishop of Salisbury, an able minister and a magnificent noble, who owed his preferment to his administrative talents; for Henry employed clerical ministers, partly because he was thus enabled to secure men who had received a regular official training as royal clerks, and partly, no doubt, because their celibacy made it less likely that they would put their authority to a dangerous use. He rewarded them with bishoprics and other preferments, and thus secularized the Church in order to make her serve the State. At the same time, his reign saw the beginning of a movement that was destined to revive her spiritual character, and by that revival to increase her power and dignity. This quickened influence was due to the higher life that followed the introduction of the Cistercian rule.

CHAPTER VI.

Under the Norman dynasty the natural results of the Conqueror’s ecclesiastical policy were controlled by the power of the Crown. Appeals to Rome were almost unknown; the principles which the Conqueror had laid down as defining the relations between the Crown and the papacy were maintained, and the establishment of ecclesiastical courts had not as yet proved mischievous; for in all serious cases the criminous clerk, after having been degraded by the spiritual judge, was handed over to the secular authority. Under a weak king, and then during a period of anarchy, the Church became invested with extraordinary power; her relations with Rome were increased, and new privileges were asserted which became dangerous to civil order. The weakness in Stephen’s title was a moral one, for he and the nobles of the kingdom were pledged by oath to Matilda. His right then depended on a question that especially concerned the Church; and though he had received civil election, Archbishop William hesitated to crown him. His scruples were overcome, and the approval of the Church was secured by Henry, bishop of Winchester, Stephen’s brother. Stephen was crowned, after swearing to maintain the liberty of the Church, and put forth a charter promising good government in general terms. The next year, at Oxford, the bishops swore fealty to him “as long as he should maintain the liberty and discipline of the Church,” a ceremony that may be described as a separate election by the Church, dependent on the king’s conduct towards her. Stephen, who had received a letter of congratulation from Innocent II., now put forth a charter in which he recited his claims. As king by the grace of God, elected by the clergy and people, hallowed by William, archbishop and legate, and “confirmed by Innocent, pontiff of the Holy Roman See,” he promised that he would avoid simony, and that the persons and property of clerks should be under the jurisdiction of their bishops. Thus, in order to strengthen his position, he not only gave prominence to the assent of the Church, but even cited the approval of the Pope, as though it conferred some special validity on the national election. This was, under the circumstances, the natural result of Duke William’s petition that Rome would sanction his invasion, and justified Hildebrand’s policy in espousing his cause.

For a while the Church remained faithful to Stephen. The statesmen-bishops, Roger, the justiciar, and his nephews, the bishop of Ely, the treasurer, and the bishop of Lincoln, together with Bishop Roger’s son, also called Roger, the chancellor, continued to carry on the administration. In the north a Scottish invasion was checked by the energy of the aged Archbishop Thurstan, who from his sick-bed stirred the Yorkshire men to meet the invaders. He was represented in the camp by his suffragan, the bishop of the Orkneys. The standard of the English army bore aloft the Host, and the figures of the patron saints of the three great Yorkshire churches, and the “Battle of the Standard,” in which the Yorkshire men were completely victorious, had something of the character of a Holy War, in which the archbishop acted, as of old, as the natural head of the northern people.

The mischievous results of the appointment of Archbishop William as legate were apparent at his death; for Innocent granted a legatine commission, not to his successor, Theobald, but to Henry of Winchester. The authority of the see of Canterbury was thus grievously diminished, and the archbishop was made second to a resident representative of the Pope, one of his own suffragans. Stephen’s quarrel with the Church.The abasement of Canterbury naturally drew the Church into greater dependence on Rome, and appeals, which had hitherto been almost unknown, became of constant occurrence. Equally unlike the justiciar, Roger of Salisbury, who devoted himself to secular administration and ambitions, and the churchmen who, full of the new fervour of the Cistercian movement, sought to raise the spiritual dignity of the Church, Henry of Winchester used his vast powers to exalt her temporal greatness. His jealousy for the privileges of the clergy brought him into collision with the king, who now by an act of extreme folly provoked a quarrel with the clerical order. Stephen suspected the loyalty of the bishop of Salisbury and his house, and caused him and the bishop of Lincoln to be arrested at Oxford. They were powerful lords and had reared several mighty castles. These they were forced to surrender by threats and ill-treatment. Stephen acted with the violence of a weak man; he had already lost the obedience of the barons, and the people must have learnt that his promises were not to be relied on; now he ensured his fall by offending the clergy. The legate summoned him to appear before a synod at Winchester, and the king of England actually appeared by his counsellor, Alberic de Vere, who made his defence. When he refused to restore the bishops’ castles there was some talk of laying the case before the Pope. This he forbade, and yet appealed to Rome himself. At last he appeared before the legate stripped of his royal robes, and humbly received his censure “for having stretched out his hand against the Lord’s anointed ones.” Nevertheless the Church was alienated from him, and after his defeat at Lincoln the legate held another council at Winchester, and announced as its result that the majority of the clergy, “to whom the right of electing a prince chiefly belonged,” had decided to transfer their allegiance to the Empress. The legate found that Matilda had little respect for the rights of the Church, and after a while turned against her. The result of these rapid changes was to destroy the unity of the clerical party.

Hitherto Archbishop Theobald had generally followed the legate’s lead, and had played a secondary part in the affairs of the Church. In 1141, however, a cause of difference arose between them. The York chapter elected Stephen’s nephew, William, to succeed Archbishop Thurstan. A minority of the chapter declared that simony and undue influence had been practised, and Theobald took their part, while Henry consecrated his nephew in spite of him. Anxious to put his power beyond the reach of fortune, the bishop of Winchester petitioned the Pope to make his see a third archbishopric. His request was refused, and his legatine commission expired in 1143, with the death of Innocent, the Pope who had granted it. Chief among the opponents of the new archbishop of York were the Cistercian abbeys of the north; and Bernard, abbot of Clairvaux, the head of the order, who was the guiding spirit of the papacy at this time, threw all his weight on their side. He disapproved of the diminution of the rights of Canterbury, and held that, in securing the see of York for their nephew, Stephen and Henry were injuring the Church to serve their own ends. Eugenius III. accordingly gave the legatine commission to Theobald. Enraged at the opposition offered to Archbishop William by Henry Murdac, abbot of Fountains, his partizans sacked and burnt the abbey. As an answer to this outrage, Eugenius deprived William, and Murdac was elected archbishop by his authority, and received consecration from him. Stephen and Henry made a fatal mistake in matching themselves against the papacy, with Bernard and the whole Cistercian order at its back. They did not yield without a further struggle. Stephen forbade Theobald to attend the Pope’s Council at Rheims in 1148. In spite of this prohibition he went to Rheims. Stephen banished him and seized his temporalities, until an interdict was laid upon the royal lands, and he was forced to be reconciled to him. Murdac made his position good at York. His rival, William, outlived him, was re-elected, and died a month after he had received the pall. During his retirement he led a holy and humble life, and after his death became the special saint of his church. Stephen had one more quarrel with Archbishop Theobald. He desired to have his son Eustace, an evil and violent man, crowned as his successor. This was forbidden by the Pope, and the primate and his suffragans refused the king’s request. He tried to frighten them by shutting them in the house where they were consulting. The archbishop escaped across the Thames in a boat, and went abroad, and the king again seized the temporalities of the see.

Unlike Henry of Winchester, Theobald was guided by the new ideas which were born of the Cistercian revival. While desire for the secular greatness of the Church, her splendour and her wealth, led Henry to scheme and change sides according as he found Stephen or the Empress acting against her interests, Theobald sought a higher power for her, and attached himself to Bernard, who ruled Christendom by his sanctity and his intellectual gifts. Theobald’s household was the home of a little society of men of like mind with himself. One of them was a young clerk of London, named Thomas, who soon became his chief adviser; another was John of Salisbury, who held a new office, that of the archbishop’s secretary, or, as he would be called now, his chancellor; for Theobald saw that the archdeacons were by no means trustworthy officers, and appointed a secretary to control the administration of ecclesiastical law. This was a matter in which he took a deep interest, and the frequent appeals that were now made to Rome gave it a special importance. Study of civil law.In 1149 he brought over from Italy a doctor named Vacarius, and set him to give lectures at Oxford on the civil law, which supplied the method of procedure in ecclesiastical cases. In the next reign the study of the canon law, which was first systematized by Gratian of Bologna, was introduced into England, and then the clergy had a code as well as a method of procedure of their own. Stephen sent Vacarius out of the country, probably because he hated new things; but the study of the civil law could not be stopped so easily.

With aims and interests such as these, Theobald had no desire to see the anarchy which is generally called Stephen’s reign prolonged. How terrible in some parts that anarchy was, when men “said openly that Christ and His saints slept,” need not be described here. Some of the bishops rode to war and behaved like lay barons; others were held back by fear from censuring the ungodly. Nevertheless the Church still exhibited a pattern of order, and strove to restore peace to the kingdom. Although Theobald entered into no schemes for dethroning Stephen, he was fully convinced of the importance of securing the succession for Henry of Anjou. His counsellor, Thomas, now archdeacon of Canterbury, was urgent on the same side, and they were at last joined in their efforts after peace by Henry of Winchester. The chief obstacle was removed by the death of Eustace, and the Treaty of Wallingford soon followed. Henry II. owed his throne in no small degree to the support of the clergy.

The young king chose for his chancellor Thomas, the archdeacon, to whose good offices he was much indebted. Thomas’s father, Gilbert Becket, a wealthy trader, had been port-reeve of London. Thomas was sent to school at Merton priory, and was taken away from the school there while still young because his parents suffered serious losses. Nevertheless he was able to study at Paris, and after his return to England was often the companion of a rich noble named Richer de l’Aigle, who took him out hunting and hawking. As his father was now badly off, he became clerk to a merchant, whose name in English was Eightpenny, and after a while was introduced to the archbishop, entered his household, and soon became his most trusted adviser. He took orders, and received many rich preferments. As chancellor, he held one of the most important offices in the kingdom, and his duties brought him into constant companionship with the king, who treated him as an intimate friend. He was diligent in his secular work; he loved magnificence, and lived with grace and splendour. No chancellor had been so great a man before. He probably had a large share in the reorganization of the administrative machinery. One change was certainly due to him—the commutation of military service for a money payment. Taxation of ecclesiastical knights’ fees.A step in this direction was made in 1156, when Henry laid a tax called scutage on Church lands held by knight’s service. Theobald objected to this imposition, but his objections were fruitless. Three years later, when the king was undertaking a war in Toulouse, the chancellor advised him to take money from all who owed him military service, instead of calling upon them to go to the war. The general importance of this measure does not belong to our subject; the scutage of Toulouse concerns us here simply because it was levied on church-lands. It excited far more indignation among the clergy than the earlier tax, because they saw that it was the beginning of a system, not an isolated expedient. The chancellor was held to have done the Church a grievous injury, and even his friends traced his later troubles to his sin against her.

When, in 1162, Henry bade his chancellor accept the primacy, he hoped to find him a powerful ally in carrying out the reforms he contemplated. Thomas assented unwillingly, for he was resolved, if he took the office, to maintain the claims of the Church to the utmost, and he knew that this would bring him into collision with the king. Although his life had been pure, it had not been clerical, and he had not even taken priest’s orders when he was elected archbishop. He now entered on a new life. Everything that was then held becoming in a churchman and an archbishop he practised to the utmost. With the whole-heartedness with which he had thrown himself into his work as chancellor, he now, in a post that must have been less congenial to his nature, set himself to live up to the highest ideal then current of what an archbishop ought to be as regards both life and policy. He had enemies, for some were jealous of him, and some were honestly scandalized at his appointment. Ever regardless of the fear or favour of men, he added to their number by prosecuting the rights of his see to lands that had been alienated from it. In acting thus, his conduct, though perhaps injudicious, certainly became his office. His position as the head of the nation first brought him into opposition to the Crown. Henry wished that a certain tax, probably a survival of the Danegeld, which was paid to the sheriffs, should be brought into the royal revenue. The archbishop objected, no doubt because he thought that this would revive the old tax. “Saving your pleasure, lord king, we will not give it as revenue; but if the sheriffs and officers of the counties do their duty by us, we will never refuse it them by way of aid.” The king was wroth. “By the eyes of God!” he cried, “it shall be given as revenue, and entered in the king’s books; and you ought not to oppose me, for I am not oppressing any man of yours against your will.” The archbishop answered, “By the eyes you have sworn by, my lord king, it shall not be levied from any of my lands, and from the lands of the Church not a penny!” He seems to have carried his point, and thus the first successful opposition to the will of the Crown in a financial matter proceeded from the Church of England. Nor was the archbishop slack in asserting the spiritual rights of his office; for he excommunicated one of the king’s tenants-in-chief, and when Henry bade him absolve him, answered that it was not the king’s business to say who should be bound and who unbound. In this matter the king demanded no more than the observance of one of the Conqueror’s rules; the archbishop asserted no more than one of the eternal rights of the Church, which she had now become strong enough to claim.

A greater conflict between the claims of the Crown and of the Church was at hand. The Conqueror had strengthened himself by increasing the power of the clergy; Henry could only establish the strong and orderly government he aimed at by lessening it. We have seen how rapidly clerical influence had grown during the anarchy owing to the suspension of the royal authority, the multiplication of appeals, the attention paid by Theobald to ecclesiastical law, and other causes. Clergy guilty of secular offences were tried solely by ecclesiastical courts; and as the spiritual judges, after inflicting an ecclesiastical penalty, refused to give up the clerical offender to a secular court, many gross crimes met with wholly inadequate punishments. For the number of persons in orders of different degrees was very large, and all alike claimed immunity from civil jurisdiction; and it is evident, though this was a matter of less consequence, that all offences against the clergy were also claimed as belonging to the province of the ecclesiastical courts.

At a great council, held at Westminster in 1163, Henry asked if the bishops would obey the “customs of his grandfather,” if they would agree that clerks convicted of secular crimes should, after degradation, be punished as laymen. The primate declared that clerks were not subject to the jurisdiction of an earthly king, and would only agree that a clerk already degraded should for another offence be punished by a lay judge. Henry asked the bishops if they would obey the “customs,” and their reply, “Saving our order,” was virtually a refusal. At a later interview he persuaded Archbishop Thomas to promise obedience to the customs unreservedly. He then summoned a council at Clarendon, and there, under strong pressure, the primate and his suffragans took the required pledge. The council then proceeded to inquire what the customs were, and a body of rules was drawn up called the “Constitutions of Clarendon.” By these Constitutions all cases touching advowsons and presentations were to be tried in the king’s court. The convicted clerk was no longer to be protected by the Church. Appeals from the archbishop were to be heard by the king, and were not to be carried further without his leave. Bishops and all who held of the Crown as by barony were to take part in the proceedings of the king’s court until it came to sentence touching life or limb. Elections to bishoprics and royal abbeys were to be made by the higher clergy of the church in the king’s chapel and with his assent, and the elect was to do homage and fealty to the king as his liege lord before he was consecrated. And the son of a villein was not to be ordained without his lord’s leave. When the primate heard the Constitutions he refused to set his seal to them, declared he would not assent to them as long as he had breath in his body, and suspended himself from his sacred office until he had received the Pope’s absolution from his hasty promise. The Constitutions, which were founded on the relations existing between the Church and the State in the reign of Henry I., were an attempt to bring matters back to a stage which had now been passed, to define relations that had hitherto been continually changing, and to establish a system which, however generally excellent, was contrary to the spirit of the age.

Archbishop Thomas twice tried to flee to the Pope, and failed through stress of weather or because the sailors were afraid of the king’s anger. In October he was summoned to appear before the king’s council at Northampton, and there an effort was made to crush him by multiplied suits. At last the king demanded an account of all the sums that had passed through his hands during his chancellorship, though he had already received a quittance. At Westminster and at Clarendon the bishops had sided, though timidly, with their primate, for the nature of the dispute forced them to do so. Now, when the whole business was reduced to a personal attack upon him, they sided with the king, just as their predecessors had done when Rufus attacked Anselm and Henry disputed with him. For though the pretensions of the Church limited the power of the Crown, and though Anselm and Becket each in his own day struggled for those pretensions, the bishops as a body were always on the king’s side, for he had given them their office either because they had served him well, or because he expected them to be useful to himself. Accordingly Gilbert Foliot, bishop of London, a churchman of considerable worldly wisdom, who held that a quarrel with the king would injure the interests of the Church, advised the archbishop to submit to Henry, and other bishops said much the same. Thomas forbade them to sit in judgment on him, and appealed from his lay judges to the Pope. Before long he escaped from England, sorely against the king’s will, and went to Pope Alexander III. at Sens, who at once condemned the Constitutions.

Alexander III. was in exile in France, for his rival, Victor, who was upheld by the Emperor Frederic I., was powerful in Italy, and he naturally held that it was more important to secure his own position than to uphold the English primate. He could not afford to offend Henry, lest he should take the side of the Emperor and his schismatical Pope. Accordingly he bade the archbishop keep silence for a while; and as Thomas did not think it seemly to stay in the dominions of Lewis of France, who was at enmity with Henry, he took up his abode in the Cistercian abbey of Pontigny, in Burgundy. When Victor died, in 1165, the Emperor set up another Pope, and made alliance with Henry, who was, perhaps, only saved from actively espousing the cause of the imperialist antipope by the wisdom of his justiciar, the earl of Leicester. Indeed, the ambassador he sent to the Emperor’s council at Würzburg renounced the Pope in his master’s name and promised that Henry would help Frederic’s antipope. That year, however, Alexander returned to Rome, and felt himself strong enough to send the exiled primate a legatine commission. In virtue of this commission, Thomas in 1166 went to Vézelay, and there, in the abbey church, in the presence of a large congregation, excommunicated all the king’s party, both clergy and laymen. He had heard that Henry was ill, and therefore did not excommunicate him. Nevertheless, with a voice choked with tears, he threatened him by name with a like sentence. In return, Henry so frightened the Cistercians that Thomas was virtually forced to leave Pontigny. This retaliation was as foolish as it was tyrannical; for the archbishop took shelter in France, and so gave Lewis a fresh means of annoying the English king. The details of the quarrel are intricate and somewhat wearisome. None of those concerned acted with dignity. Henry weakened his own position by appealing to the Pope to judge between him and one of his own subjects; he assented to the Pope’s decrees when they were in his own favour, and resisted them when they were against him. Thomas was violent, and multiplied excommunications. Several efforts were made to bring about a reconciliation between him and Henry, and a meeting took place between them at Montmirail in 1169. The archbishop, however, would not be content with anything less than a complete surrender on the king’s part, and the conference ended fruitlessly. Alexander sometimes upheld, and sometimes thwarted Thomas, just as his own interests dictated, and pursued a course that seemed to the stout-hearted archbishop mean and pusillanimous. “In the Roman court,” he indignantly wrote, “Barabbas escapes and Christ is put to death.” Lewis simply used the quarrel to his own advantage, and supported the archbishop just as he supported the lords of Henry’s vassal states against him.

A new phase of the dispute arose from Henry’s wish to have his eldest son crowned. The archbishop of Canterbury alone had the right to perform the ceremony; and when Thomas insisted on this right he was not contending for an empty honour; for coronation was held to be necessary to kingship, and it was the archbishop’s duty to receive a pledge of good government from the king he crowned. Alexander first agreed to allow Roger of York to crown the young king, and, later, sent to prohibit him from doing so. Henry prevented the prohibition from being brought into England, and Roger performed the ceremony. Lewis now threatened war, and the Pope’s advisers urged him to vindicate the rights of Canterbury. Henry was thus driven to a reconciliation, and Thomas returned to his see. He at once suspended the bishops who had taken part in the coronation, renewed the excommunications he had already pronounced against some of them, and excommunicated some of his personal enemies who had annoyed him by violent and brutal acts. The consciousness that he was endangering his own life had no weight with him, for he constantly anticipated and even aspired to martyrdom. When the king, who was still in Normandy, heard of his proceedings he was furiously angry, and thoughtlessly exclaimed to his courtiers, “Of the cowards who eat my bread, is there none that will rid me of this troublesome priest?” Moved by these hasty words, four knights crossed the Channel, proceeded to Canterbury, and after insulting the archbishop in his palace, broke into the church where the monks had compelled him to take shelter. One bade him flee, for else he was a dead man. “I welcome death,” he said, “for God and for the liberty of the Church.” They tried to lay hands on him, and then the feelings of his younger days, long kept down by self-mortification, asserted themselves. He struggled with the armed men, and threw one to the ground. He cried to another not to dare to touch him, and called him by a foul name. The knights shouted, “Strike! strike!” Then he commended his “soul and the Church’s cause to God, to St. Denys of France, to St. Elphege and all the Saints.” His murderers attacked him with their swords, and he died with holy words upon his lips. He fell a martyr to the privileges or “liberty” of the Church. That these privileges were not really beneficial to her is not to the purpose. Men and causes are to be judged by the standard of their own age, and neither then nor for centuries later did any doubt that he laid down his life for the cause of God and His Church.

The murder of the archbishop seemed likely to ruin the king. Miracles were worked at the tomb of the martyr, and he was at once accepted as a saint. Although his murder did not cause the revolt that followed it, the disorganization it produced made revolt opportune. Henry’s bishops.The only bishop concerned in this movement was Hugh Puiset of Durham, a crafty and powerful prelate, who had some underhand dealings with the Scots, and whose castles were in consequence seized by the king. Henry renounced the Constitutions, promised not to hinder appeals, and submitted to a scourging from the monks of Christ Church. Yet the Church lost much; for the quarrel put an end to the effort to attain to a higher ecclesiastical standard that had been made by Theobald and the clerks of his household, and a fresh wave of secularity swept over the Church. This was largely due to Henry’s policy. He kept sees vacant and took their revenues. “Is it not better,” he would say, “that the money should be spent on the necessary affairs of the kingdom than on the luxuries of bishops? For the bishops of our time are not like what bishops used to be; they are careless and slothful about their office, and embrace the world with all their arms.” He might have made bishops of another stamp, but when, after his absolution, six vacant sees were filled up, he took care that they should go to men who belonged to his own party. Lincoln he gave to his natural son, Geoffrey, who was then a mere lad. The Pope ordered that his consecration should be deferred; yet he held the see, though he was not even a priest, for eight years, until Alexander III. commanded him either to take episcopal orders or to give it up. Then he gave it up, became chancellor, and on his father’s death was elected to York. Towards the end of his reign Henry insisted on the election of a bishop of nobler character to the see of Lincoln. This was Hugh of Avalon, the bravest and noblest churchman of his day, whom the king had brought over from Burgundy to govern the little monastery he had founded at Witham, and whom, to his honour, he liked and reverenced. The Lincoln chapter would have preferred a more worldly bishop, and elected several ministers of state and courtiers, one after another. Henry would have none of them; he would not, he said, “for the future, give a bishopric to any one for favour, or relationship, or counsel, or begging, or buying, but only to those whom the Lord should choose for Himself.” Canterbury remained vacant for five years after the death of Archbishop Thomas, for some difficulties arose about the election. At last Richard, prior of Dover, was elected. The young King Henry, a worthless man and a rebellious son, affected to be scandalized at his father’s interference in episcopal elections, and declared that he managed matters by saying, “I charge you to hold a free election, yet I forbid you to elect any one but my clerk Richard.” The archbishop was an easy-going man, and did not please Becket’s party. Neither he nor the bishops caused the king any trouble during the remainder of his reign.

Although the Constitutions of Clarendon were nominally abandoned, they had considerable effect on the future relations between Church and State, and indeed determined their development. Even in Henry’s reign the privileges which Archbishop Thomas had claimed for the Church were slightly curtailed. With the papal sanction, clerks were made amenable to the forest laws; for what business had they to hunt? And the murderers of clerks were given up to the civil courts; for the claim of the Church to punish them was reduced to an absurdity when it sheltered Becket’s murderers from justice, and they were simply punished by such penalties as the Pope, the supreme spiritual judge, could inflict. As Henry caused the lands of the Church, which had hitherto escaped taxation, to bear their share of scutage, so when, for the first time, he introduced a tax on movables the clergy were taxed equally with the laity. This tax, called the Saladine tenth, was granted the king by a great council, and the property both of clerks and laymen was assessed by a jury.

After Becket’s death Henry took care to keep on good terms with Rome. At his request a legate named Hugh visited this country, partly, at least, to settle a new dispute between Canterbury and York, and from him the king obtained leave to bring the clergy under the forest laws. So far had the martyrdom of St. Thomas injured the independence of the kingdom that even a matter of domestic law was submitted to the papal judgment. Hugh’s mission was not successful. At a council held at Westminster in 1176, Roger of York tried to squeeze himself into a more honourable seat than the archbishop of Canterbury. This led to a disturbance in which sticks and fists were freely used. Hugh ran about the chapel in terror, and finding “that he had no authority in England,” soon went his way. A few months later Henry showed that, in spite of his late humiliation, he was not prepared to be the Pope’s humble servant; for when another legate landed on his way to Scotland, he sent two bishops, who asked him “by whose authority he dared to enter his kingdom without his leave,” and exacted a promise from him that he would do nothing here without his will.

Early in the reign we find the spiritual and the secular power acting together in a case that was wholly new to Englishmen. Some thirty German-speaking heretics, probably natives of Flanders, landed here, and made one disciple—a woman. No Christian heretics had ever appeared in England before. Henry summoned a council of bishops to meet at Oxford in 1166; the heretics were found guilty, and were handed over to the “Catholic king.” They were condemned to be branded, flogged out of the city, and then to be shunned by all men. Left without food or shelter in the midst of winter, they soon perished. The special action taken with regard to these heretics illustrates the uncertainty of the law as to the punishment of heresy. Here as elsewhere the Church kept itself free from the pollution of blood, and handed the heretic over to the secular power. Although in the reign of John a clerk who apostatized to Judaism was burnt at Oxford, burning for heresy had no place in the common law of England, except such as was given it by writers of law-books, who were under the influence of the Roman jurisprudence. England was generally free from heresy until the time of Wyclif; the papal Inquisition, though used to some extent for the suppression of the Templars, was not introduced into the kingdom, and the subject of heresy and its punishment is of no practical importance until the appearance of the Lollards.

While the Scottish bishops were, as we have seen, released by the Pope from dependence on the see of York, the influence of the Church of England was extended both in Ireland and Wales. The Church in Ireland seems to have done little to civilize the people: it had lost the early glories of its missionary days, while it retained its lack of order and its inability to rule itself or others. Almost to the eve of the Conquest it had no archbishops, and had a crowd of bishops without a regular diocesan system. These and other irregularities caused some of the bishops of the Ostmen’s towns to seek consecration from Lanfranc and Anselm. St. Bernard and Eugenius III. tried hard to introduce some order into the Church, and their efforts were seconded by the Irish bishop, Malachi. Four sees were raised to metropolitan rank, and some steps were taken towards establishing an orderly system. Still, much remained to be done, and Hadrian IV. (Nicolas Brakespear), the only English Pope, willingly sanctioned Henry’s proposal to invade Ireland, and in 1155 sent him the bull “Laudabiliter,” bidding him conquer the land for the increase of the Church, together with a ring conveying investiture of the country. He did this in virtue of the forged donation of Constantine, which purported to put all islands under the lordship of the Pope. Hadrian’s answer to Henry’s request was, therefore, a repetition of the answer that Alexander II. made to the request of William. Both Popes alike sanctioned the invasion of a Christian land by a foreign enemy in order to spread the power of the Roman Church. Henry did not take advantage of Hadrian’s bull until after the death of Becket. Ireland was conquered by private adventurers, and it only remained for him to receive its submission. He held the land by the Pope’s gift, and he was not unmindful of the benefit he had received, for he called together a synod at Cashel, which passed decrees bringing the Church of Ireland into conformity with the Roman order. By far the larger part of the country, however, was virtually unaffected by the Conquest, and equally unaffected by the Council of Cashel. Nor did it become thoroughly papal until Henry VIII. quarrelled with the papacy. Then he disowned the Roman suzerainty by causing himself to be proclaimed king of Ireland, and the papacy appeared as the champion of a country which it had given over to foreign invasion. Unfortunately the bishops that Ireland received from the English kings were often mere ministerial officials, and sometimes little better than the fierce lords of the English Pale.