The departure of the Empress was followed by a time of comparative quiet; but it was the quiet of exhaustion, not of rest. In the twelve years which had passed away since King Henry’s death all his work seemed to have been utterly undone. Every vestige of law and authority, order and peace, had been swept away by the torrent of destruction which in those twelve years had overwhelmed the whole country. When at last the waves began to subside, one ark of refuge was found to have escaped the general desolation; one vessel alone had been able to outride the storm. The state was a wreck; the Church remained.
The pilot of the sacred bark, during the first seven years of Stephen’s reign, had been the king’s brother Henry, bishop of Winchester. The youngest child of Stephen-Henry and Adela of Blois, devoted by his mother to the religious life, had been brought up in the famous abbey of Cluny; thence, in 1126, he was summoned by his uncle the king of England to become abbot of one of the most ancient and illustrious monasteries in Britain, that of Glastonbury; and three years later the young abbot—he cannot have been more than twenty-eight—was raised to the bishopric of Winchester.[1007] His rapid advancement was no doubt owing to the personal favour of his uncle; but none the less did it place in the important see of Winchester a prelate as different in temper as in origin from the crowd of low-born secular clerks who then filled the ranks of the English episcopate. Steeped in ecclesiastical and monastic traditions from his very cradle, Henry was before all things a churchman and a monk. It was to him and to men like him that the religious revival which sprang up in his uncle’s later years naturally looked for the guidance which it could not find either in the secular bishops or in the shy, irresolute primate; and the consequences appeared as soon as the king was dead, when the helm of the state and that of the Church—the one dropped by Roger of Salisbury, the other never firmly grasped by William of Canterbury—were both at once taken by the young bishop of Winchester. His personal influence sufficed to ensure his brother’s election to the throne; the legatine commission sent to him in 1139, overriding the claims of the new primate, made him the acknowledged leader of the English Church, and, coinciding as it did with the complete break-down of all secular government at Bishop Roger’s fall, practically vested in him and in the clerical synods which he convened the sole remnant of deliberative and legislative authority throughout the kingdom. Clergy and people followed him like a flock of sheep; yet he was never really trusted by either of the two political parties, because he never really belonged to either. His own political ideal was independent of all party considerations. It was the ideal of the ecclesiastical statesman in the strictest sense: to insure the well-being of the state by securing the rights and privileges and enforcing the discipline of the Church. In his eyes the whole machinery of secular government, including the sovereign, existed solely for that one end, and he carried out his theory to its logical result in the synods which deposed Stephen and Matilda each in turn, as each in turn broke the compact with the Church which had raised them to the throne. Of the use to be made in later days of the precedent thus created he and his brother-clergy never dreamed; they are, however, entitled to the credit of having been the only branch of the body-politic which made an organized effort to rescue England from the chaos into which she had fallen. The failure of their efforts hitherto was due partly to the overwhelming force of circumstances, partly to the character of Henry himself. His temper was like that of the uncle whose name he bore—the calm, imperturbable Norman temper which neither interest nor passion could throw off its balance or off its guard; and with the Norman coolness he had also the Norman tenacity, fearlessness and strength of will. But although the main elements of his nature were thus derived from his mother’s ancestors, he had not altogether escaped the doom of his father’s house. He was free from the worst defect of his race, their fatal unsteadiness of purpose; but he had his full share of their rashness, their self-will, and their peculiar mental short-sightedness. His policy really had a definite and a noble end, but his endeavours to compass that end were little more than a series of bold experiments. Moreover, his conception of the end itself was out of harmony with the requirements of the time. Churchman as he was to the core, his churchmanship was almost as unlike that of the rising generation, trained up under the influence of the new religious orders, as the downright worldliness of the Salisbury school with which some of them were, though most unjustly, half inclined to confound him. He belonged to a type of ecclesiastical statesmen, or rather political churchmen, who did not shrink from arraying the Church militant in the spoils of earthly triumph, and would fain elevate her above the world in outward pomp and majesty no less than in inward purity and holiness. This was the school of which Cluny had been, ever since the days of Gregory VII., the citadel and stronghold; and Henry was thus attached to it by all the associations of his youth as well as by his own natural disposition. But in the second quarter of the twelfth century this Cluniac school was losing its hold upon the finer and loftier spirits of the time, and the influence of Cluny was beginning to pale before the purer radiance diffused from S. Bernard’s “bright valley,” Clairvaux.
Henry’s legatine commission, too, which was a chief source of his strength, was really a source of moral and spiritual weakness to the English Church; for it set him over the head of the man who ought to have been her representative and leader, and placed in the hands of a mere diocesan bishop all, and more than all, the power and authority which belonged of right to the primate of all Britain.[1008] Until very recent times the English Church had been, by an unwritten but perfectly well-established privilege of immemorial antiquity, exempt from all legatine control; papal envoys were admitted only for special purposes, and exercised no authority within the province of the “transmarine Pope”—the primate of all Britain. In technical language, the archbishop of Canterbury, as successor of S. Augustine, was by virtue of his office legatus natus of the Holy See, and therefore not subject to the jurisdiction of a legatus a latere. During the reign of Henry I. three attempts had been made to break through this venerable tradition; on the third occasion, in 1125, the outrageous behaviour of the legate John of Crema roused Archbishop William to go and protest at Rome, whence he returned clothed in his own person with the functions of legatus a latere.[1009] This commission, granted by Honorius II., was renewed by Innocent,[1010] and William thus retained it until his death. When that event occurred Henry of Winchester must have felt himself, and must have been generally felt throughout the country, to be almost naturally marked out for William’s successor. It seems, indeed, that he was actually elected to the vacant primacy. There was however a difficulty which proved to be insuperable. The translation of a bishop from one see to another could only be effected by a special license from the Pope; and in this case the license was apparently refused.[1011] Driven thus to seek elsewhere for a primate, Stephen, or it may be Stephen’s wiser queen, sought him in the home of Lanfranc and Anselm, and brought over a third abbot of Bec to walk in the steps and sit on the throne of his sainted predecessors at Canterbury.[1012] Theobald came of a good Norman family, and was well reported of for learning, virtue and piety;[1013] further than that, the world as yet knew nothing of him; it was therefore not unnatural, though it was distinctly unfortunate, that when Pope Innocent II. determined to appoint a resident legate in England he appointed Henry instead of Theobald.
For several years the archbishop bore his supersession quietly. His political sympathies appear to have always inclined to the side of the Empress, but his conduct shewed no trace of party spirit; no personal jealousy on his part ever thwarted Henry’s attempts at pacification. He doubtless felt that he could afford to wait; for his metropolitical rights, though kept in abeyance for a time, were inalienable and independent of all outward accidents, while the legatine authority was drawn solely from the commission of an individual Pope, and a change either of persons or of policy at Rome might at any moment reduce Henry of Winchester to the rank of a mere suffragan bishop. Henry himself was so conscious of this danger that he began to urge upon his patron Innocent a project for raising the see of Winchester to metropolitical rank and furnishing it with two (or, according to another account, seven) suffragan sees, to be carved out of the southern part of the province of Canterbury. This wild scheme was so far endorsed by Innocent that he actually sent Henry a pall, the emblem of archiepiscopal dignity, in 1142; so, at least, the story ran.[1014] As yet, however, the matter rested wholly between legate and Pope; if the archbishop knew anything of their plots against him, he was wise enough to let them plot undisturbed. Instead of trying to fish in the troubled waters of the present, he was looking to the open sea of the future and meditating how best to prepare himself, his Church and his adopted country for the voyage which lay before them. While the legate was making and unmaking sovereigns and plotting a revolution in the Anglican hierarchy, the primate was quietly gathering into his own household the choicest spirits of the time, drawing around him a group of earnest, deep-thinking students, of highly-cultured, large-minded, dispassionate politicians; in a word, making his palace the seminary and the training-college, the refuge and the home, of a new generation of English scholars and English statesmen.
Foremost among them stood Thomas the son of Gilbert Becket, ex-port-reeve of London. Troubles had fallen heavy upon Gilbert and his wife since the days when from their comfortable home in Cheapside their boy rode forth to his school at Merton or to his hawking excursions with Richer de l’Aigle. A series of disastrous fires had brought them down from affluence almost to poverty[1015] and compelled them to take their son away from school at an earlier age than the mother, at least, would have desired. She watched over his studies with the deepest interest and care,[1016] and it was probably her influence and good management which, after an interval of idleness at home, sent him off again to study for a short time in Paris.[1017] The boy learned quickly and easily, as he did everything to which he chose to put his hand and give his mind; but his heart was set upon riding and hawking and the sports and occupations of active life, far more than upon the book-learning to which he devoted himself chiefly for the sake of pleasing his mother; and when she died, in his twenty-second year,[1018] his studies came to an end. Her death broke up the home; Gilbert, worn out with age and grief, was powerless to guide or help his son; and Thomas soon found it impossible to make their scanty means sufficient to maintain them both.[1019] Irksome as the work must have been to such a temper as his, he took a situation as clerk in the counting-house of a kinsman, Osbern Huitdeniers, or “Eightpenny” as we might perhaps call him now.[1020] Osbern was a wealthy man, enjoying great consideration both in the city and at court;[1021] at this time—just after the outbreak of the civil war—he seems to have been one of the sheriffs of London, for we are told that Thomas himself held a subordinate civic post as clerk and accountant to those functionaries.[1022] For two or three years, the years of the personal struggle between Stephen and Matilda, Thomas endured the drudgery of the office as best he might,[1023] till at length a more congenial position was offered him, first in the household of his old friend Richer de l’Aigle[1024] and then in that of Archbishop Theobald. When the war-storm had partly subsided and the primate was beginning to organize his plans, some of his clerks who had been guests at the little house in Cheapside in its prosperous days remembered the bright boy whom they had often noticed there, and determined to enlist him in their own ranks. One of them, known to us only by his nickname of “Baille-hache” or the “Hatchet,” undertook to persuade the young man himself;[1025] two others, Baldwin the archdeacon and Eustace his brother, commended him and his father to the primate. It chanced that Gilbert, though he had been domiciled at Rouen before his emigration to England, was a native of Thierceville, close to the Bec-Herlouin. A chat with Thomas’s father over old times and old names around Bec made its former abbot all the more disposed to welcome Thomas himself, when he rode out to Harrow and let his friend Baille-hache present him to the archbishop.[1026] Before many months had passed he was admitted to the innermost circle of Theobald’s confidential counsellors. That circle consisted of three young men—John of Canterbury, Roger of Pont-l’Evêque and Thomas of London. Without consulting one or other of these three the archbishop rarely did anything;[1027] and in matters of special difficulty or delicacy he relied mainly upon Thomas.[1028]
He had secured his services at the right moment; for the long impending crisis between himself and the legate was now fast drawing near. In purely secular politics Theobald had hitherto been content to follow Henry’s lead; on a question of ecclesiastical politics they had now come to a distinct severance. Archbishop Thurstan of York had died in February 1140;[1029] in January 1141 William, treasurer of the see, was appointed in his stead, and received the investiture of the temporalities from Stephen in the camp before Lincoln.[1030] The appointment had somewhat the look of a court job; for William was a nephew of the king and the legate;[1031] he had been brought up in wealth, luxury and idleness, and although of amiable and blameless character, was obviously not the man for such a post as the northern primacy. A minority of the York chapter therefore, supported by many of the most respected clergy of the province, chief among whom was Abbot Richard of Fountains, protested against the election as having been procured by undue influence, in the form of bribery on William’s own part and intimidation on that of William of Aumale, earl of York, acting on behalf of the king and the legate; and this view was shared by the southern primate. The legate, apparently shrinking from the responsibility of consecrating his nephew by his own sole authority (for Theobald absolutely refused to assist him), let the matter rest during the remainder of that troubled year and then sent the elect of York to plead his own cause at Rome. In Lent 1143 the Pope gave his decision: “If Dean William of York can swear that the chapter did not receive through the earl of Aumale a command from the king to elect his nephew: and if the archbishop-elect himself can swear that he did not seek his election by bribery:—then let him be consecrated.” A council met at Winchester in September to receive the two oaths and witness the consecration. The dean of York, however, was unable to attend; he had been elected to the bishopric of Durham, and was absorbed in struggling for the possession of his see with an intruder named William Cumin, who had been placed there by the king of Scots. The partizans of the archbishop-elect, foreseeing some obstacle of this kind, had procured the addition to the Pope’s decree of a saving clause whereby they were permitted to substitute “some other approved person” for the dean: such, at least, was their account of the matter. Ralf, bishop of Orkney, and two abbots therefore took the required oath in the place of William of Durham, and William of York was consecrated by his uncle the legate, three days before Michaelmas 1143.[1032] Theobald still refused his assent to the whole proceeding.[1033]
Henry was triumphant; but it was his last triumph. On that very day a new Pope, Celestine II., was chosen in place of Innocent, who had died two days before. The legatine commission expired with the Pope who had granted it; the bishop of Winchester became again a mere suffragan of Canterbury, and Theobald suddenly found himself primate in fact as well as in name. Everything now depended on the dispositions of the new Pope. Accordingly, early in November both Theobald and Henry set out for Rome.[1034] The latter soon learned that his journey was useless; Celestine was “a favourer of the Angevins”;[1035] and when Theobald and his confidant Thomas arrived at Rome they found no difficulty in persuading the Pope to transfer the legatine commission from the bishop of Winchester to the primate.[1036] Henry consoled himself by turning aside to Cluny and spending a quiet winter in the home of his boyhood. Next spring came another change; Celestine died on March 9, 1144, and was succeeded by Lucius II. To Lucius Henry went, and in his eyes he found at least so much favour that he was acquitted of sundry charges brought against him by emissaries from Anjou. But the legation was apparently left altogether in abeyance; if it was not renewed to Theobald—a point which is not quite clear—it was at any rate not restored to Henry.[1037]
The tide which had borne both Henry and Stephen to their triumph was in truth now rising far above their heads. The religious movement of which Henry had once seemed destined to become a leader had gone sweeping on till it left him far behind. It was the one element of national life whose growth, instead of being checked, seems to have been actually fostered by the anarchy. The only bright pages in the story of those “nineteen winters” are the pages in the Monasticon Anglicanum which tell of the progress and the work of the new religious orders, and shew us how, while knights and barons, king and Empress, were turning the fairest regions of England into a wilderness, Templars and Hospitaliers were setting up their priories, Austin canons were directing schools and serving hospitals, and the sons of S. Bernard were making the very desert to rejoice and blossom as the rose. The vigour of the movement shewed itself in the diversity of forms which it assumed. Most of them were offshoots of the Order of S. Augustine. The Augustinian schools were the best in England; the “Black Canons” excelled as teachers; they excelled yet more as nurses and guardians of the poor. One of the most attractive features of the time is the great number of hospices, hospitals, or almshouses as we should call them now, established for the reception and maintenance of the aged, the needy and the infirm. Such were the two famous houses of S. Giles, Cripplegate, and S. Bartholomew, Smithfield; such was the Hospital of S. Katharine near the Tower, founded in 1148 by Stephen’s queen Matilda, and served by the canons of Holy Trinity at Aldgate, to whom the younger “good Queen Maude” was almost as devoted a friend as her aunt and namesake had been. Such, too, was another foundation whose white church, nestling amid a clump of trees in the meadows through which the little blue Itchen goes winding down to the sea, is the only unmutilated remnant that Winchester still retains of the handiwork of her legate-bishop Henry. There, before he built his own fortified house, Henry founded for thirteen poor old men the Hospital of the Holy Cross; and there, while the dwelling which he made so strong for himself has perished, the “Almshouse of noble Poverty” still stands—the hospital indeed rebuilt by a later bishop to whom it owes its poetical name, but the church unaltered since its founder’s days—a lasting memorial of that better, spiritual side of his character which the world least saw and least believed in. Another class of hospitals was destined for the reception of poor travellers, especially pilgrims. Such had been, in far-off Palestine, the original purpose of two societies of pious laymen which had now made their way back into Europe and even into England in the shape of two great military orders, the Hospitaliers or Knights of S. John and the Templars. They, too, lived by the rule of S. Austin. Another offshoot of the Augustinian order consisted of the White Canons or Premonstratensians (so called from their first establishment at Prémontré in the diocese of Laon), for whom, in the midst of the civil war, Peter de Gousla endowed a priory at Newhouse in Lincolnshire, while his wife founded a house at Brodholm in Nottinghamshire for sisters of the same order.[1038] “What shall we think,” exclaims an inmate of one of the great Augustinian houses of Yorkshire, William of Newburgh,—“what shall we think of all these religious places which in King Stephen’s time began more abundantly to arise and to flourish, but that they are God’s castles, wherein the servants of the true Anointed King do keep watch, and His young soldiers are exercised in warfare against spiritual evil? For indeed at that time, when the royal authority had lost all vigour, the mighty men of the realm, and whosoever was able, were all building castles either for their own protection or for their neighbours’ hurt; and thus while through King Stephen’s weakness, or rather through the malice of the Devil, who is ever a nourisher of strife, evils were swarming and abundant, there did yet more abound and more gloriously shine forth the wise and salutary providence of the Almighty King, Who at that very time did the more mightily confound the king of pride by raising up for Himself such fortresses as beseemed the King of Peace. For in the short while that Stephen reigned, or rather bore the title of king, there arose in England many more dwellings of the servants and handmaids of God than had arisen there in the course of the whole previous century.”[1039]
It is significant that this enthusiastic outburst of the historian-canon of Newburgh is called forth by the contemplation not of his own order, but of three great Cistercian houses, Byland, Rievaux and Fountains. Buried in their lonely wildernesses, the Cistercians seem at first glance to have been intent only on saving their own souls, taking no part in the regeneration of society at large. But the truth is far otherwise. While the other orders were—if we may venture to take up the suggestive figure employed by William of Newburgh—the working, fighting rank and file of the spiritual army, the White Monks were at once its sentinels, its guides and its commanding officers; they kept watch and ward over its organization and its safety, they pointed the way wherein it should go, they directed its energies and inspired its action. For the never-ending crusade of the Church against the world had at this time found its leader in a simple Cistercian monk, who never was Pope, nor legate, nor archbishop, nor even official head of his own order—who was simply abbot of Clairvaux—yet who, by the irresistible, unconscious influence of a pure mind and a single aim, had brought all Christendom to his feet. It was to the “Bright Valley,” to Clairvaux, that men looked from the most distant lands for light amid the darkness; it was to S. Bernard that all instinctively turned for counsel and for guidance. The story of S. Gilbert of Sempringham may serve for an example. The father of Gilbert was a Norman holding property in Lincolnshire in the time of Henry I.; his mother was a woman of Old-English descent. The boy ran away from school and made his escape to France; there he repented of his idleness, threw himself zealously into the pursuit of letters, and after some years came home to set up in his native place a school for boys and girls. He taught them a great deal more than mere book-learning; his purity, sweetness and fervour won the very hearts and souls of all who came under his influence; and there was something in his lofty yet tender nature which made him seem peculiarly fitted for a spiritual director of women. Seven maidens first devoted themselves to the religious life under his guidance; others soon followed their example; several men did the like. A double monastery thus grew up at Sempringham, under the protection of Bishop Alexander of Lincoln, in the earliest years of Stephen’s reign. For some time it continued subject to no other rule than its founder’s own will. He saw, however, the necessity for a more lasting basis of organization; instead of trying to devise one himself, he applied to the general chapter of Cîteaux and besought them to take charge of his little flock. They, however, refused; since Gilbert had been inspired to found a new religious society, they would not presume to interfere with his mission; he must draw up a rule for his own spiritual children. He ended by working out his scheme into a composite institution which aimed at combining the excellencies of all earlier rules, but in which the Cistercian element strongly predominated. The Gilbertine priories, when fully constituted, consisted of four orders of persons: canons, who followed the rule of S. Austin; lay-brethren, nuns and lay-sisters, all bound by the rule of Cîteaux; while the whole community was held together by certain additional regulations specially devised by the founder. The new order spread rapidly through eastern England; and before S. Gilbert’s own life reached its close, he had the satisfaction of seeing his spiritual children take a highly honourable part in the great ecclesiastical struggle of which the foremost champion and victim was S. Thomas of Canterbury.[1040]