All Henry’s endeavours for the material and political revival of his kingdom had been regulated thus far by one simple, definite principle:—the restoration of the state of things which had existed under his grandfather. In his own eyes and in those of his subjects the duty which lay before him at his accession, and which he had faithfully and successfully fulfilled, was to take up the work of government and administration not at the point where he found it, but at the point where it had been left by Henry I. and Roger of Salisbury: to pull down and sweep away all the innovations and irregularities with which their work had been overlaid during the last nineteen years, and bring the old foundations to light once more, that they might receive a legitimate superstructure planned upon their own lines and built upon their own principles. In law, in finance, in general administration, there was one universal standard of reference:—“the time of my grandfather King Henry.”
But there was one side of the national revival, and that the most important of all, to which this standard could not apply. The religious and intellectual movement which had begun under Henry I., far from coming to a standstill at his death, had gone on gathering energy and strength during the years of anarchy till it had become the one truly living power in the land, the power which in the end placed Henry II. on his throne. It looked to find in him a friend, a fellow-worker, a protector perhaps; but it had no need to go back to a stage which it had long since overpassed and make a new departure thence under the guidance of a king who was almost its own creation. At the very moment of Henry’s accession, the hopes of the English Church were raised to their highest pitch by the elevation of an Englishman to the Papal chair. Nicolas Breakspear was the only man of English birth who ever attained that lofty seat; and the adventures which brought him thither, so far as they can be made out from two somewhat contradictory accounts, form a romantic chapter in the clerical history of the time. Nicolas was the son of a poor English clerk[1538] at Langley, a little township belonging to the abbey of S. Alban’s.[1539] The father retired into the abbey,[1540] leaving his boy, according to one version of the story, too poor to go to school and too young and ignorant to earn his bread; he therefore came every day to get a dole at the abbey-gate, till his father grew ashamed and bade him come no more; whereupon the lad, “blushing either to dig or to beg in his own country,” made his way across the sea.[1541] Another version asserts that Nicolas, being “a youth of graceful appearance, but somewhat lacking in clerkly acquirements,” sued to the abbot of S. Alban’s for admission as a monk; the abbot examined him, found him insufficiently instructed, and dismissed him with a gentle admonition: “Wait awhile, my son, and go to school that you may become better fitted for the cloister.”[1542] Whether stung by the abbot’s hint or by his father’s reproofs, young Nicolas found his way to Paris and into its schools, where he worked so hard that he out-did all his fellow-students.[1543] But the life there wearied him as it had wearied Thomas Becket; he rambled on across Gaul into Provence, and there found hospitality in the Austin priory of S. Rufus. His graceful figure, pleasant face, sensible talk and obliging temper so charmed the brotherhood that they grew eager to keep him in their midst,[1544] and on their persuasion he joined the order.[1545] It seems that he was even made superior of the house, but the canons afterwards regretted having set a stranger to rule over them, and after persecuting him in various ways appealed to the Pope to get rid of him. The Pope—Eugene III.—at first refused to hear them; but on second consideration he decided to give them over to their own evil devices and offer their rejected superior a more agreeable post in his own court.[1546] Nicolas, who had already twice visited Rome, proceeded thither a third time and was made cardinal[1547] and bishop of Albano.[1548] Shortly afterwards he was appointed legate to Norway and Denmark, an office which he filled with prudence and energy during some years.[1549] Returning to Rome about 1150, he apparently acted as secretary to Eugene III. until the latter’s death in July 1153.[1550] The next Pope, Anastasius III., reigned only sixteen months, and dying on December 2, 1154, was succeeded by the bishop of Albano, who took the name of Adrian IV.[1551]
The English Church naturally hailed with delight the accession of a pontiff who was at once one of her own sons and a disciple of Eugene, whom the leaders of the intellectual and spiritual revival in England had come to regard almost as their patron saint.[1552] Adrian indeed shared all their highest and most cherished aspirations far more deeply and intimately than Eugene himself could have done. It was in the cloisters of Canterbury that these aspirations were gradually taking definite shape under the guidance of Archbishop Theobald. There, beneath the shadow of the cathedral begun by Lanfranc and completed by S. Anselm, their worthy successor had been throughout the last ten or twelve years of the anarchy watching over a little sanctuary where all that was noblest, highest, most full of hope and promise in the dawning intellectual life of the day found a peaceful shelter and a congenial home. The Curia Theobaldi, the household of Archbishop Theobald, was a sort of little school of the prophets, a seminary into which the vigilant primate drew the choicest spirits among the rising generation, to be trained up under his own eyes in his own modes of thought and views of life, till they were fitted to become first the sharers and then the continuators of his work for the English Church and the English nation. Through his scholars had come the revival of legal and ecclesiastical learning in England; through them had come the renewal of intercourse and sympathy with the sister-Churches of the west; through them had been conducted the negotiations with Rome which had led to the restoration of order and peace; and in them, as Theobald hoped, the Church, having saved the state, would find her most fitting instruments for the work of reform and revival which still remained to be done within her own borders. One by one, as the occasion presented itself, he began to send them forth to take independent positions in the Church or in the world. Of the chosen three whom he specially trusted, the first who thus left his side was John of Canterbury, who in 1153 succeeded Hugh of Puiset as treasurer of York. Next year Theobald was able to place another of his disciples in the northern metropolis in a far more important capacity: he succeeded in obtaining the royal assent to the appointment of Roger of Pont-l’Evêque as archbishop of York, in succession to S. William, who had been restored by Pope Anastasius after Henry Murdac’s death, but died six weeks after his restoration.[1553]
Roger’s history before his entrance into the primate’s household is so completely lost that even the rendering of his surname is a matter of some doubt; it may have been derived from the English town of Bishopsbridge, and if so Roger was now going back as primate to his own native shire; it seems however more probable that he came from Pont-l’Evêque in Normandy.[1554] He was evidently some years older than Theobald’s other favourites, John of Canterbury and Thomas of London; for we find him and Gilbert Foliot quarrelling, apologizing, lecturing and forgiving each other with an outspoken freedom and familiarity possible only between two men of equal standing who have been friends from their youth.[1555] With Thomas Becket, on the other hand, Roger was never upon really friendly terms; jealous, no doubt, of the younger man who seemed likely to supersede him in the primate’s confidence, Roger lost no opportunity of teasing the “hatchet-clerk” (as he called Thomas, from the nickname of the man who had first introduced him to Theobald), and made his life so wretched that he was twice driven to quit the archbishop’s house and take refuge with Theobald’s brother, Walter, archdeacon of Canterbury, till the latter smoothed the way for his return.[1556] On Walter’s elevation to the see of Rochester in 1148 his archdeaconry was given to Roger;[1557] he also held some other preferments, all of which he was at one time in great danger of losing—most likely on account of his share in the famous “swimming-voyage” to Reims; but his friend Gilbert Foliot secured him the protection of the Pope;[1558] and the restoration of the archbishop would naturally involve that of the archdeacon. After six years’ tenure of his office at Canterbury Roger was called to go up higher. Theobald had more than one reason for desiring his archdeacon’s elevation. He wished it for Roger’s own sake; he wished it still more for the sake of his younger favourite, whom he longed to establish in a position of dignity and importance, yet close to his own side; above all, he wished it for the sake of the Church;[1559] for he naturally hoped that in leaving one of his own foremost disciples seated on the metropolitan chair of York, he would be leaving at least one prelate of the highest rank firmly pledged to those schemes of ecclesiastical policy and organization which he himself had most at heart. His confidence in Roger was over-great. After all the disputes about the canonical relations between Canterbury and York which had wasted the energies of Lanfranc and embittered the last days of S. Anselm, Theobald missed his opportunity of securing at last a full acknowledgement of Canterbury’s superior rights, and was rash enough to consecrate Roger without requiring from him a profession of obedience.[1560] The large-hearted primate evidently never dreamed that any question of obedience could arise between himself and one of his spiritual sons, or that Roger’s loyalty to him could fail to be extended to his successor. He never discovered his mistake; it was Roger’s old rival, and with him the English Church, who ultimately had to bear its unhappy consequences.
Immediately after Roger’s consecration Thomas was raised by his primate to deacon’s orders and made archdeacon of Canterbury.[1561] A few months later the accession of Henry II. opened the way for his advancement in another direction. His appointment to the chancellorship involved a great self-sacrifice on the part of Theobald; for the chancellor’s duties—at least as conceived by Thomas, and as Theobald had intended him to conceive them—took him not only quite away from those of his archdeaconry and from his primate’s side, but very often out of the country altogether; so that Theobald in giving him up to the king had condemned himself to pass his declining years apart from the object of his warmest earthly affections. But the Curia Theobaldi was by no means deserted; though it had lost its most brilliant star, there was no lack of lesser lights to brighten the primate’s home-circle; there was one whose soft mild radiance, less dazzling than the glory of Thomas, was a far truer and steadier reflex of Theobald’s own calm and gentle spirit. Yet John of Salisbury had entered the archbishop’s household within a comparatively recent period. His father’s name seems to have been Reinfred;[1562] his family connexions were all in or around the city whence his surname was derived;[1563] but there is some indication that John himself may have been born in London.[1564] In the year after the death of Henry I. he went to study in Paris, and there received his first lessons in dialectics from the greatest scholar of the day—sitting at the feet of Peter Abelard, and eagerly drinking in, to the utmost capacity of his young mind, every word that fell from the master’s lips. Abelard departed all too soon, and John pursued his studies for about two years under his successors Alberic and Robert, of whom the latter, although commonly called “Robert of Melun” from having taught with distinction in that place, was an Englishman by birth, and will come before us again in later days as Gilbert Foliot’s successor in the bishopric of Hereford. It must have been precisely during those two years that Thomas of London also was in Paris for the first time, striving for his mother’s sake to overcome his dislike of books; and it was possibly there that the two young Englishmen, who must have been of nearly the same age, began to form an acquaintance which afterwards ripened into a lifelong friendship. And it can only have been about the same time, and in that same wonderful meeting-place where so many of the happiest and most fruitful associations of the time had their beginnings, that John of Salisbury first met with Nicolas of Langley.
Thomas went home to the plodding life of a city merchant’s clerk; Nicolas set out on the long course of wandering which was to bring him at last to the Papal chair; John, having as he says “steeped himself to the finger-tips in dialectics, and moreover learned to think his knowledge greater than it really was,” applied himself for the next three years to the schools of the grammarians William of Conches and Richard l’Evêque, with whom he went over again the whole course of his previous studies, penetrated somewhat deeper into those of the quadrivium which he had begun under the direction of a German named Hardwin, and improved some slight notions of rhetoric which he had acquired at the lectures of a certain Master Theodoric. His relatives were quite unable to maintain him all this while; like all poor students of the day, he earned his living and his college-fees by teaching others, and as he pleasantly says “What I learned was the better fixed in my mind, because I constantly had to bring it out for my pupils.” One of these pupils was William of Soissons, to whom he taught the elements of logic, “and who afterwards contrived, as his followers say, a method of breaking down the old strongholds of logic, producing unexpected consequences, and overthrowing the opinions of the ancients.” John however declined to believe in a “system of impossibilities,” for which he at any rate was clearly not responsible; for he had soon transferred his pupil to the care of one Master Adam, an English teacher deeply versed in Aristotelian lore. It seems just possible that this Master Adam, who was at this time helping John in his studies not as a teacher but as a friend,[1565] was the same who many years before had stood in a somewhat similar relation to Gilbert Foliot.[1566] He may, however, perhaps be more probably identified with Adam “du Petit-Pont”—so called from the place where he lectured in Paris—who in 1176 became bishop of S. Asaph’s.[1567] After a while John found that with all his efforts he could hardly earn enough to live upon in Paris; so by the advice of his friends he determined to set up a school elsewhere.[1568] While sitting at the feet of the “Peripatetic” doctors on the Mont-Ste.-Geneviève he had become acquainted with a young native of Champagne, Peter by name, who was studying in the school of S. Martin-des-Champs.[1569] The two friends, it seems, settled together at Provins in Peter’s native land, and there, under the protection of the good Count Theobald,[1570] laboured and prospered for three years.[1571] Long afterwards, from his anxious post at the side of the dying Archbishop Theobald, John’s thoughts strayed tenderly back to the days which he and his young comrade, with hearts as light as their purses, had spent among the roses of Champagne: “I am the same that ever I was,” he wrote to Peter, now abbot of Celle, “only I possess more than you and I had between us at Provins.”[1572] He returned to Paris, revisited his old haunts on the Mont-Ste.-Geneviève, and was amused to find his old school-companions just where and as he had left them. “They did not seem to have advanced an inch towards disposing of the old questions, nor to have added one new proposition.” He, in his three years of healthy meditation in the country, had discovered that their dialectics, however useful as a help to other studies, were in themselves but a fruitless and lifeless system; he therefore now gave himself up to the study of theology under a certain Master Gilbert, Robert “Pullus”—in whom one is tempted to recognize the Robert Pulein who had planted the seed of the first English University by his divinity-lectures at Oxford in 1133—and lastly, Simon of Poissy.
John’s whole career in the schools, after occupying about twelve years,[1573] apparently came to an end shortly before the council of Reims. His old friend Peter had already retired into the peace of the cloister, and about this time became abbot of Celle, near Troyes. There John, who was utterly without means of living, found a shelter and a home, nominally, it seems, in the capacity of Peter’s “clerk” or secretary, but in reality as the recipient of a generous hospitality which sought for no return save the enjoyment of his presence and his friendship.[1574] Such a light as John’s, however, could not long remain thus hidden under a bushel. So felt Peter himself;[1575] and at that moment a better place for it was easily found. At the council of Reims, or during his exile after it, the archbishop of Canterbury probably met the abbot of Celle and his English “clerk”;[1576] he certainly must have met the abbot of Clairvaux; and S. Bernard, with his unerring instinct, had already discovered John’s merits. He named him to Theobald in terms of commendation; and it was he who furnished the letter of introduction,[1577] as it was Peter who furnished the means,[1578] wherewith John at last made his way to the archbishop’s court,[1579] of which he soon became one of the busiest and most valued members. So busy was he—so “distracted with diverse and adverse occupations,” as he himself said—that he complained of being scarce able to steal an hour for the literary and philosophical pursuits which he so dearly loved. Ten times in the next thirteen years[1580] did he cross the Alps, twice did he visit Apulia, on business with the Roman court for his superiors or his friends; besides travelling all over England and Gaul on a variety of errands, and fulfilling a crowd of home-duties which left him scarcely time to look after his own private affairs, much less to indulge in study.[1581] The greater part of the communications between Theobald and Eugene III. must have passed through his hands, either as messenger or as amanuensis; but his name never figures in their diplomatic history; his place therein was a subordinate one. It was not in his nature to take the foremost rank. Not that he was unfit for it:—with his gracious, genial temper; his calm clear judgement, generally sound because always disinterested; his delicate wit, his easy, elegant scholarship, and his wide practical experience of the world—John of Salisbury might have adorned far higher positions in either Church or state than any which he ever actually occupied. But his own position was a thing of which he seems never to have thought, save as a means of serving others. His apology for his unwilling neglect of literature—“I am a man under authority”[1582]—might have been the motto of his life. He left it to others to lead; if they led in the way of righteousness, they might be sure of one faithful adherent who would serve and follow them through good report and evil report, who would try to clear the path before them at any risk to himself; who would criticize their conduct and tell them of their errors with fearless simplicity, while striving to avert the consequence of those errors and to cover their retreat; who in poverty and exile, incurred for another’s sake, would make light of his own sufferings and be constantly endeavouring to relieve those of his fellow-sufferers, and who would always find or make a silver lining to the darkest cloud. This was what John did for the possible acquaintance of his early student-days whom he had now rejoined in the household of Archbishop Theobald. To the end of his life he was more than satisfied to count the friendship of Thomas Becket as his chief title of honour, and to let whatever share of lustre might have been his own go to brighten the aureole of his friend. It brightened it far more than he knew. When detractors and panegyrists have both done their worst, there remains this simple proof of the real worth of Thomas—that he inspired such devotion as this in a man such as John of Salisbury, and that he knew how to appreciate it as it deserved.
It was however John’s friendship with Nicolas of Langley which in these years of his residence in the primate’s household made him so valuable to Theobald as a medium of communication with Rome. We can hardly doubt that this acquaintance, too, had begun in Paris; now, as the English cardinal-secretary and the envoy of the English primate discussed in the Roman court the prospects of their common mother-country and mother-Church, their acquaintance ripened into a friendship which no change of outward circumstances could alter or disturb. Nicolas cared more for John than for his own nearest relatives; he declared in public and in private that he loved him above all men living; he delighted in unburthening his soul to him. When he became Pope there was no change; a visit from John was still Adrian’s greatest pleasure; he rejoiced in welcoming him to his table, and despite John’s modest remonstrances insisted that they should be served from the same dish and flagon.[1583] King and primate were both alike quick to perceive and use such an opportunity of strengthening the alliance between England and Rome; while Adrian on his part was all the more ready to give a cordial response to overtures made to him from the land of his birth, when they came through the lips of his dearest friend. As a matter of course, it was John who very soon after the accession of Henry II. was sent to obtain a Papal authorization for the king’s projected conquest of Ireland.[1584] Naturally, too, it was John who now became Theobald’s private secretary and confidential medium of communication with Pope Adrian. A considerable part of the correspondence which goes under John’s name really consists of the archbishop’s letters, John himself being merely the amanuensis. This part of his work, however, was a relaxation which he only enjoyed at intervals; he was still constantly on active duty of some kind or other not only at the court of the primate but also at that of the king; and sorely did he long to escape from its weary trifling, to find rest for his soul in the pursuit of that “divine philosophy” which had been the delight of his youth.[1585] But obedience, not inclination, had brought him to court, and obedience kept him there. Thomas knew his worth and would not let him go; at last, to pacify his uneasiness, he bade him relieve his mind by pouring it out in a book. John protested he had scarce time to call his soul his own, much less his intellect or his hands.[1586] He was, however, set free by the removal of the court over sea for the expedition against Toulouse; and while Thomas was riding in coat of mail at the head of his troops against Count Raymond and King Louis, John was writing his Polycraticus in the quiet cloisters of Canterbury.[1587]