With the archbishop’s flight into France the struggle between him and the king entered upon a new phase. Its intrinsic importance was almost entirely lost, and it became simply an element in the wider questions of general European politics. In England Thomas’s departure left Henry sole master of the field; the Constitutions of Clarendon were put in force without delay and without difficulty; a year later they were followed up by an Assize, significantly issued from the same place, which laid the foundations of the whole later English system of procedure in criminal causes; and thenceforth the work of legal and judicial reform went on almost without a break, totally unaffected by the strife which continued to rage between king and primate for the next five years. The social condition of the country was only indirectly affected by it. The causes which had ostensibly given rise to it—the principle involved in the acceptance or rejection of the Constitutions—did not appeal strongly to the national mind, and had already become obscured and subordinated to the personal aspect which the quarrel had assumed at Northampton. As in the case of Anselm, it was on this personal aspect alone that popular feeling really fastened; and in this point of view the advantage was strongly on the archbishop’s side. Thomas, whose natural gifts had already made him a sort of popular idol, was set by the high-handed proceedings of the council in the light of a victim of regal tyranny; and the sweeping and cruel proscriptions inflicted upon all who were in the remotest way connected with him tended still further to excite popular sympathy for his wrongs and turn it away from his persecutor. But the sympathy was for the individual, not for the cause. The principle of the clerical immunities had no hold upon the minds of the people or even of the clergy at large. Even among the archbishop’s own personal friends, almost the only men who clave to it with anything like the same ardour as himself were his two old comrades of the Curia Theobaldi, Bishop John of Poitiers and John of Salisbury; and even the devotion of John of Salisbury, which is one of the brightest jewels in Becket’s crown, was really the devotion of friend to friend, of Churchman to primate, of a generous, chivalrous soul to what seemed the oppressed and down-trodden side, rather than the devotion of a partizan to party principle. Herbert of Bosham, the primate’s shadow and second self, who clave to his side through good report and evil report and looked upon him as a hero and a martyr from first to last, was nevertheless the author of the famous verdict which all the searching criticism of later times has never yet been able to amend: “Both parties had a zeal for God; which zeal was according to knowledge, His judgement alone can determine.”[210]
Cool, dispassionate thinkers like Gilbert Foliot, on the other hand, while inclining towards the cause which Thomas had at heart, recoiled from his mode of upholding it as little less than suicidal. In Gilbert’s view it was Thomas who had betrayed those “rights of his order” which he proclaimed so loudly, by forsaking the attitude of passive resistance which the bishops had adopted at Westminster and in which they were practically unassailable, and staking everything upon the king’s good faith, without security, in the meeting at Oxford and the council at Clarendon:—it was Thomas who by his subsequent conduct—his rash attempts at flight, his rapid changes of front at Northampton in first admitting and then denying the royal jurisdiction, his final insult to the king in coming to the council cross in hand, and his undignified departure from the realm—had frustrated the efforts whereby wiser and cooler heads might have brought the king to a better mind and induced him to withdraw the Constitutions:—and it was not Thomas, but his suffragans, left to bear the brunt of a storm which they had neither deserved nor provoked, who were really in a fair way to become confessors and martyrs for a Church brought into jeopardy by its own primate.[211] Gilbert in fact saw clearly that the importance of the point at issue between king and archbishop was as nothing compared to the disastrous consequences which must result from their protracted strife. It threatened nothing less than ruin to the intellectual and religious revival which Theobald had fostered so carefully and so successfully. The best hopes of the movement were bound up with the alliance between Church and state which had been cemented at Henry’s accession; that alliance was now destroyed; instead of the Church’s most valuable fellow-worker, the king had been made her bitter foe; and the work of revival was left to be carried on—if it could be carried on at all—in the teeth of the royal opposition and without a leader, while the man who should have directed it was only a perpetual stumbling-block in the path of those who had to supply as best they could the place left deserted by his flight. It was upon Gilbert of London that this burthen chiefly fell; and it is in Gilbert’s position that we may find a key to the subsequent direction of the controversy, as far as England was concerned.
For full twenty years before Becket’s rise to the primacy Gilbert Foliot had been one of the most respected members of the reforming party in the English Church. While Thomas was a worldly young subdeacon in the household of Archbishop Theobald, while as chancellor he was outshining the king in luxurious splendour or riding in coat of mail at the head of his troops, Gilbert was setting the pattern of ecclesiastical discipline and furnishing the steadiest and most valued assistance to the primate’s schemes of reform. Trained no less than Henry of Winchester in the old Cluniac traditions of ecclesiastical authority, his credit had never been shaken by rashness and inconsistency such as had marred Henry’s labours; and it would have been neither strange nor blameworthy if he had cherished a hope of carrying on Theobald’s work as Theobald’s successor. Gilbert, however, solemnly denied that he had ever sought after or desired the primacy;[212] and his conduct does not seem to furnish any just ground for assuming the falsehood of the denial. His opposition to the election of Thomas was thoroughly consistent with his position and known views; equally so was the support and co-operation which Thomas, as soon as he was fairly launched into his new course of action, anxiously sought to obtain from him, and which he for a while steadily gave. He had begun to find such co-operation difficult even before the question of the clerical immunities arose at the council of Westminster. On that question, in itself, the primate and the bishop of London were at one; but they differed completely in their way of treating it. To the impulsive, short-sighted, downright Thomas it was the one, sole, all-absorbing question of life and death; to the calm, far-seeing, cautious Gilbert it was a provoking hindrance—raised up partly by the primate’s own bad management—to the well-being of interests far too serious and too wide-reaching to be imperilled for a mere point of administrative detail. He took up his position definitely at the council of Northampton. The customs being once accepted, he held it the true Churchman’s duty to obey them, to make the best and not the worst of them, while desiring and labouring for their abrogation, but only by pacific means. A temporary submission was the least of two evils. It was infinitely safer to bend to the storm and trust to the influences of time and conciliation for turning the mind of the king, than to run the risk of driving him into irreconcileable hostility to the Church. For hostility to the Church meant something far worse now than in the days when William Rufus and Henry I. had set up their regal authority against primate and Pope. It meant a widening of the schism which was rending western Christendom in twain; it meant the accession of the whole Angevin dominions to the party of the Emperor and the anti-Pope, and the severance of all the ties between the English Church and her continental sisters which Theobald, Eugene and Adrian had laboured so diligently to secure.
The dread of this catastrophe explains also the attitude of the Pope. In the long dreary tale of negotiation and intrigue which has to be traced through the maze of the Becket correspondence, the most inconsistent and self-contradictory, the most undecided and undignified, the most unsatisfactory and disappointing part of all is that played by Alexander III. It is however only fair to remember that, in this and in all like cases, the Pope’s part was also the most difficult one. No crown in Christendom pressed so sorely on its wearer’s brow as the triple tiara:—“It may well look bright,” Adrian IV. had been wont to say to his friend John of Salisbury, “for it is a crown of fire!” Adrian indeed, though his short reign was one of marked vigour and prosperity, declared that if he had had any idea of the thorns with which S. Peter’s chair was filled, he would have begged his bread in England or remained buried in the cloisters of S. Rufus to the end of his days sooner than thrust himself into such a thicket of troubles.[213] For it was not only “the care of all the churches” that rested upon a medieval Pope, but the care of all the states as well. The court of Rome had grown into the final court of appeal for all Christendom; the Pope was expected to be the universal referee, arbitrator and peacemaker of Europe, to hold the balance between contending parties, to penetrate and disentangle the intricacies of political situations which baffled the skill of the most experienced diplomatists, to exercise a sort of equitable jurisdiction on a vast scale over the whole range of political as well as social life. Earlier and later pontiffs may have voluntarily brought this burthen upon themselves; most of the Popes of the twelfth century, at any rate, seem to have groaned under it as a weight too heavy for any human strength to bear. Unprincipled as their policy often seemed, there was not a little justice in the view of John of Salisbury, that a position so exceptional could not be brought within the scope of ordinary rules of conduct, and that only those who had themselves felt its difficulties could be really competent to judge it at all.[214] Adrian’s energetic spirit was worn out by it in four years;[215] yet his position was easy compared to that of Alexander III. Alexander was a pontiff without a throne, the head of a Church in captivity and exile; dependent on the support of the most selfish and untrustworthy of living sovereigns; with Italy and Germany arrayed against him under the rule of a schismatic Emperor, and with the fidelity of the Angevin house hanging upon a thread which the least strain, the lightest touch, might break at any moment. Moreover Alexander was no Englishman like his predecessor. He had no inborn comprehension and no experience of the ways and tempers of the north; he had no bosom-friend, no John of Salisbury, to stand as interpreter between him and the Angevin king or the English primate; he understood neither of them, and he was almost equally afraid of both. His chief anxiety was to have as little as possible to do with them and their quarrel, and the fugitive archbishop was to him anything but a welcome guest.
It was of course impossible for the Pope to withhold his sympathy and his support from a prelate who came to him as a confessor for the privileges of the Church. But it was equally impossible for him to run the risk of driving Henry and his dominions into schism by espousing Thomas’s cause as decisively as Thomas himself desired. Placed thus in what Adrian had once declared to be the ordinary position of a Roman pontiff—“between hammer and anvil”—Alexander drifted into a policy of shifts and contradictions, tergiversations and double-dealings, which irritated Henry and which Thomas simply failed to comprehend. If Gilbert Foliot and Arnulf of Lisieux could have succeeded in their efforts to induce the contending parties to accept a compromise, the Pope would have been only too glad to sanction it. But it was useless to talk of compromise where Thomas Becket was concerned. To all the remoter consequences, the ultimate bearings of the quarrel, he was totally blind. For him there was but one question in the world, the one directly before him; it could have but two sides, right and wrong, between which all adjustment was impossible, and with which considerations of present expediency or future consequences had nothing to do. All Gilbert’s arguments for surrender, his solemn warnings of the peril of schism, his pleadings that it was better for the English Church to become for a while a sickly member of the ecclesiastical body than to be cut off from it altogether,[216] Thomas looked upon, at best, as proposals for doing evil that good might come. After his humiliating experience at Clarendon he seems to have felt that he was no match for Henry’s subtlety; his flight was evidently caused chiefly by dread of being again entrapped into a betrayal of what he held to be his duty; and once, in an agony of self-reproach and self-distrust, he laid his archiepiscopal ring at the Pope’s feet and prayed to be released from the burthen of an office for which he felt himself unworthy and unfit.[217] Strong as was the temptation to pacify Henry thus easily, Alexander felt that the Church could not allow such a sacrifice of her champion; and Thomas never again swerved from his determination to be satisfied with nothing short of complete surrender on the part of the king. For this one object he laboured, pleaded, argued, censured, during the next six years without ceasing; his own suffragans, the monastic orders, Pope, cardinals, the Empress Matilda, the king of France, none of them had a moment’s peace from his passionate endeavours to press them into a service which he seemed to expect them all to regard as a matter of life and death not merely for England but for all Christendom. Doubtless it was a sad waste of energy and a sad perversion of enthusiasm; yet the enthusiasm contrasts pathetically, almost heroically, with the spirit in which it was met. There was something noble, if there was also something exasperatingly unpractical, in a man who, absorbed in his devotion to one mistaken idea, never even saw that he and his cause were becoming the pretexts and the tools of half the political intrigues of Europe, and whom the experience of a lifetime failed to teach that all the world was not as single-hearted as himself. Intellectually, a mind thus constituted must needs provoke and deserve the impatient scorn of a cool clear brain such as Gilbert Foliot’s; but its very intellectual weakness was the source of its true strength. It is this dogged adherence to one fixed idea, this simplicity of aim, which appeals to the average crowd of mankind far more strongly than the larger and more statesmanlike temper of men like Foliot, or like Henry himself. Whether or no the cause be worthy—whether or no the zeal be according to knowledge—it is the zealot, not the philosopher, who becomes the popular hero and martyr.
From the moment of Thomas’s arrival in France, then, little though he perceived it himself, the direct question at issue between him and the king became in every point of view save his own entirely subordinate to the indirect consequences of their quarrel; the ecclesiastical interest became secondary to the political, which involved matters of grave importance to all Europe. The one person to whom the archbishop’s flight was most thoroughly welcome was Louis of France. Louis and Henry were nominally at peace; but to Louis their alliance was simply a shield behind which he could plan without danger his schemes for undermining Henry’s power on the continent, and no better tool for this purpose could possibly have fallen into his hands than the fugitive archbishop of Canterbury. Thomas had indeed just enough perception of the state of affairs between the two kings—of which he must have acquired considerable experience in his chancellor days—to choose going to live on his own resources at Pontigny rather than accept the hospitality of his sovereign’s enemy.[218] This arrangement probably delighted Louis, for it furnished him with a safe answer to Henry’s complaints and remonstrances about harbouring the “traitor”—Thomas was in sanctuary in a Cistercian abbey in Burgundy, and France was not harbouring him at all; while the welcome which Louis gave to the primate’s exiled friends and the sympathy which he displayed for their cause heightened his own reputation for devotion to the Church and served as a foil to set off more conspicuously the supposed hostility of Henry. To Louis in short the quarrel was something which might turn to his own advantage by helping to bring Henry into difficulties; and he used it accordingly with a skill peculiar to himself, making a great shew of disinterested zeal and friendly mediation, and all the while taking care that the breach should be kept open till its healing was required for his own interest.
With such an onlooker as this Henry knew that he must play his game with the utmost caution. He had been provoked by the personal opposition of his old friend into standing upon his regal dignity more stiffly than he would have thought it worth while to do so long as it remained unchallenged. On his side, too, there was a principle at stake, and he could not give it up unconditionally; but he might have been induced to accept a compromise, had not the obstinacy of Thomas forced him into a corresponding attitude of unbending determination. So keen was his sense of the danger attendant upon the fugitive archbishop’s presence in France that it led him to postpone once more the work which he had been planning in England and cross over to Normandy again early in 1165.[219] Lent was passed in fruitless attempts to bring about a triple conference between the two kings and the Pope; Henry refused to allow Thomas to be present; Thomas begged the Pope not to expose himself to Henry’s wiles without him who alone could help him to see through them; and Alexander, now busy with preparations for his return to Rome, was probably not sorry to escape by declaring that for a temporal prince to dictate who should or who should not form part of the Pope’s suite was a claim which had never been heard of before and which he could not possibly admit.[220] Immediately after Easter he set out on his journey homewards.
The rival party saw their opportunity and seized it without delay. Their fortunes were now at a very low ebb; the antipope Victor had died in April; his chief supporter, Cardinal Guy of Crema, had succeeded him under the title of Paschal III.; but Italy had cast him off, and even in Germany the tide was turning against him. The Emperor, however, clung with unwavering determination to his original policy; and he at once saw in the English king’s quarrel with the Church a means of gaining for Paschal’s cause what would amply compensate for all that had been lost. Before Alexander was fairly out of the French kingdom an embassy from Germany came to Henry at Rouen, bringing proposals for an alliance to be secured by two marriages: one between the English princess Matilda, Henry’s eldest daughter, and the Emperor’s cousin Duke Henry of Saxony; the other between Henry’s second daughter and Frederic’s own little son. The chief ambassador was Reginald, archbishop-elect of Cöln, who from the time of Frederic’s accession—two years before that of Henry—had been his chancellor and confidential adviser, playing a part curiously like that of Thomas Becket, till in the very year of the English chancellor’s removal to Canterbury he was appointed to the see of Cöln. There the parallel with Thomas ended; for Reginald was the most extreme champion of the privileges not of the Church but of the Imperial Crown, and was even more closely identified with the schismatic party than Frederic himself. Henry sent him over to the queen, who had been left as regent in England, to receive from her a formal promise of her daughter’s hand to the duke of Saxony, in a great council convened at Westminster for that purpose. The old justiciar Earl Robert of Leicester refused the kiss of peace to the schismatic and caused the altars at which he had celebrated to be thrown down,[221] thereby saving Henry from the fatal blunder of committing himself publicly to the cause of the anti-pope, and England from the dangers of open schism. But he could not prevent the king from sending two clerks to a council which met at Würzburg on Whit-Sunday to abjure Pope Alexander and acknowledge Paschal; and although the fact was strenuously denied, it seems impossible to doubt that they did take the oath at the Emperor’s hands in their master’s name;[222] indeed, Reginald of Cöln boasted that Henry had promised to make all the bishops in his dominions do the same.
A crisis seemed imminent, but Henry managed to avoid it. From the Emperor’s solicitations, from the Pope’s remonstrances, from all the pleadings of friends and all the intrigues of foes, he suddenly made his escape by flying back to England and plunging into a Welsh war which kept him all the summer safe out of their reach,[223] and furnished him with an excuse for postponing indefinitely the completion of his alliance with the schismatic party. Such an alliance would in fact have cost far more than it was worth. Alexander was once more safely seated upon S. Peter’s chair, and was urging Thomas to throw himself wholly on the protection of the king of France; Louis was in the highest state of triumph, rejoicing over the birth of his long-desired son; while the whole Angevin dominions, which Eleanor was governing in her husband’s absence, were full of suppressed disaffection and surrounded with threatening or intriguing foes.[224] In Lent 1166 therefore Henry hurried back to Normandy to hold a conference with Louis, and, if possible, to free his own hands for the work which lay before him.
The work was in truth a vast and complex one. At the age of thirty-three Henry was already planning out an elaborate scheme for the future of his children and the distribution of his territories, in which the election of his eldest son as joint-king in England was but the first and least difficult step. Normandy and Anjou, as well as England, had to be secured for little Henry; Aquitaine was if possible to be settled upon Richard as his mother’s heir; for Geoffrey Henry was bent upon acquiring the Breton duchy.[225] Conan IV., whom Henry had in 1158 established as duke of Britanny, had but one child, a daughter, whose hand, together with the reversion of her father’s territories, the king was anxious to secure for his son. This however required the assent not only of Conan but of Louis of France, and also of the Breton barons, who bitterly resented the Norman interference which had set Conan as ruler over them, and were inclined to resist to the uttermost an arrangement which would bring them still more directly under the Norman yoke; while Louis was but too ready to encourage them in their resistance. A campaign in the summer of 1166, however, another in August 1167, and a third in the following spring so far broke their opposition[226] that in May 1169 Geoffrey was sent into Britanny to receive their homage as heir to the dukedom; three months later his father joined him,[227] and at Christmas they held their court together at Nantes,[228] whence they made a sort of triumphal progress through the duchy, receiving homage and fealty wherever they went.[229]
It had proved easier to subdue Britanny than to hold Aquitaine. The half independent princes of the south, so scornful of a king beyond the Loire, were at least equally scornful of a king from beyond the sea; in November 1166 Henry was obliged to summon them to a conference at Chinon,[230] and to relieve Eleanor of her task of government by sending her to keep Christmas in England,[231] while he himself took her place at Poitiers.[232] His foes seized their opportunity to revive the vexed question of Toulouse; a meeting with Raymond at Grandmont and an attempt to assert Henry’s ducal authority over the count of Auvergne led to a fresh rupture with Louis;[233] and in the spring of 1168 the discontented barons of Aquitaine, secure of the French king’s goodwill, broke into open revolt. In the midst of a negotiation with Louis, Henry hurried away to subdue them.[234] Scarcely had he turned northward again when Earl Patrick of Salisbury, whom he had appointed to assist Eleanor in the government of the duchy, was murdered by one of the rebel leaders;[235] and Eleanor was once more left to stand her ground alone in Poitou, while her husband was fighting the Bretons, staving off the ecclesiastical censures which threatened him, and vainly endeavouring to pacify Louis, who now openly shewed himself as the champion of all Henry’s disaffected vassals, Breton, Poitevin, Scottish and Welsh,[236] as well as of the exiled archbishop.
Henry meanwhile was endeavouring to strengthen his political position by alliances in more remote quarters; the marriage of his eldest daughter with the duke of Saxony had taken place early in 1168;[237] two years before, the hand of one of her sisters had been half promised to the marquis of Montferrat for his son, in return for his good offices with the Pope;[238] and a project was now on foot for the marriage of Henry’s second daughter, Eleanor, with the king of Castille—a marriage which took place in 1169;[239] while the infant Jane, who was scarcely four years old, was betrothed to the boy-king William of Sicily.[240] For Richard his father was now endeavouring to gain the hand of Adela of France, the younger daughter of Louis and Constance, as a sort of security for the investiture of Aquitaine; while at the same time Henry was on the one hand making interest with the Emperor’s Italian foes, the rising commonwealths of Lombardy and the jurisconsults of Bologna;[241] and on the other, Frederic was endeavouring to regain his alliance by an embassy headed by his own cousin, Henry’s new-made son-in-law, the duke of Saxony.[242]