BIOGRAPHYCAL UNIVERSAL LIBRARY

RICHARD THE LION HEART

EARLY PLANTAGENETS

III.

HENRY II AND THOMAS BECKET.

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

This was on the 25th of January, 1163. Henry found, as was to be expected, that considerable arrears of business had accrued during his long absence.

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

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

Immediately after the king went on his second Welsh war, a sort of military demonstration marked by no great victory or defeat, and on the 1st July called a great court at Woodstock to witness the homage of the princes. The King of Scots made his appearance at this council, and took the oath of fealty to the little heir to the crown, Henry, who was now eight years old. This Woodstock, was the first opportunity that the archbishop had of declaring his new attitude. He had been to visit the Pope, Alexander III, at Tours. The Pope was in exile from his see; the Emperor Frederick had refused to acknowledge him, and had set up an anti-Pope. Henry and Lewis, the former probably acting by Becket’s advice, had in 1161 recognized Alexander as the Catholic Pope, and Tours, where he was holding the council at which Becket attended, was within the dominions of Henry. We can only suppose that the sight of the Pope kindled Becket’s zeal, not so much against his own lord who was the Pope’s friend, as against the secular power in general, of which he had been hitherto a devoted servant. Anyhow he came back from Tours prepared, on the first question, ecclesiastical or civil, which might arise, to take the lead of what might be called the con­stitutional opposition ; an idea which is, for the first time since the Norman Conquest, realized in the course he now adopted.

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

Two most important points stand out here. This is the first case of any express opposition being made to the king’s financial dealings since the Conquest. Until now, whenever money was wanted, the royal necessities were laid before the national council, the assembly of bishops, earls, and great vassals, and others, and the method was explained by which they were to be satisfied. If he wanted to marry his daughter, or to knight his son, or to tax his towns, he said how much he wanted, and it was paid. Here, however, we find the archbishop objecting to the royal dealings with the Danegeld, and thus asserting the right of the national council to refuse as well as to bestow money. A second point is, that although ever since the reign of Ethelred, with the exception of a few years of Edward the Confessor—who had, as the legend ran, seen the devil sitting on the money-bags, and had, therefore, abolished the tax and certainly ever since the days of the Conqueror, this odious impost had been levied, from this time it ceases to appear by this name in the rolls of the revenue. Henry II devised other ways of getting money, but the Danegeld appears no more; and thus the first-fruit of the first constitutional opposition is the abolition of the most ancient property-tax, imposed as a bribe for the Danes. We may well imagine how angry Henry would be at this interference, coming from the man who had hitherto been his right hand in all his reforms.

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

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

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

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

All this had no other effect than to exasperate Henry the more, and to encourage the rapidly increasing crowd of Becket’s enemies. Unfortunately we have no details for the next six months, save that the archbishop once or twice saw the king in vain. In October, 1164, at Northampton, the cloud finally broke. Becket’s enemies saw their way to crush him altogether, and Henry yielded to them. The council was formally summoned; all the persons who held of the king directly—that is, who were subject to no lord coming between them and the king—were duly invited; the greater barons probably, as had been usual under Henry I, and as the Great Charter afterwards enjoined, by special letters; the minor ones by a general summons made known through the sheriff in each shire. It was to the archbishop that the first letter of summons ought by ancient rule to have been directed. Instead of that he received a writ through the Sheriff of Kent ordering him to present himself at Northampton to answer the complaint of John the Marshal.

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

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

It would be a tedious task to trace the minute circumstances of Becket’s life during the next six years; they are somewhat obscure, and the large number of undated letters of the period makes even the sequence of the main events puzzling. The upshot of the story is briefly this:—At Pontigny Becket remained until Henry threatened the whole Cistercian body if they did not expel him; in consequence of that he threw himself on the friendship of Lewis VII, who appointed as his resting-place the abbey of St. Colombe, at Sens. There he remained, making occasional journeys on his own business, until he returned to Canterbury in 1170. Whilst at Pontigny and Sens he acted up to his new character—wore a hair shirt, practised great mortifications, and behaved as if he believed himself to be undergoing a sort of modified martyrdom. All the time he was bringing all the influence which he had to bear upon Lewis VII, the Counts of Champagne and Flanders, and other potentates, to induce them to take up his cause, and either by urging the Pope to extreme measures, or by direct negotiation with Henry, to procure his honorable recall. The Pope would have given anything for peace and quietness, but he could not afford to alienate Henry so long as he was on bad terms with the Emperor. He sent commissions with legations to Normandy, of which Henry disposed either by promises or by plausible professions of his own good-will, or by substantial presents of the strongest of all the powers of silence, a handsome sum of gold. Had he rested here he might have been forgiven. But unfortunately for his own credit he determined to persecute the archbishop in the person of his relations, and by a cruel edict sent many inoffensive families, who were connected with Thomas, into exile. Then Becket answered with excommunication, including in his ban all the king’s closest counsellors, some of whom had very little to do with the proceedings against him. From time to time Becket saw the king, under the wing of Lewis VII; once at Montmirail, in January, 1169, once at Montmartre, in November of the same year. In each case either Henry was hypocritical or Becket offensive: we cannot decide. At length a new point of quarrel brought about a reconciliation, and the reconciliation immediately resulted in Becket’s death.

Before ending the story we may briefly recapitulate the chief events of these years, outside the Becket struggle. In the year 1165, that succeeding the archbishop’s flight from Northampton, Henry paid a short visit to Normandy, and received a proposal from Frederick I for a couple of marriages, a close league of alliance, and a joint action against the Pope, who was supposed to be abetting Becket. The only result of this was the marriage of Henry’s eldest daughter, Matilda, with Henry the Lion, Duke of Saxony and Bavaria, at this moment Frederick’s most intimate friend and kinsman, later on his enemy and victim. Neither Henry nor England could be persuaded to accept the anti-Pope, but the temporizing action of the king’s agents in Germany gave Becket an opportunity of involving all alike in a charge of heresy and apostacy.

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

As soon as this was done he went to Normandy, in March, 1166, and stayed away until March, 1170. During this time little or nothing but the ordinary business of justice and taxation is recorded in English authorities. The Becket quarrel was the all-engrossing subject, the sole question of public interest. Abroad the view is only diversified by negotiation and border warfare with Lewis VII, and by the carrying out of Henry’s plan for securing possession of Brittany by the marriage of his third son, Geoffrey, with the heiress of the count. Having spent nearly four years in this way he returned, in order to look after business at home, and in particular to see his eldest son, who was fifteen, crowned as his associate and successor in the kingdom. The importance of the former acts comes into prominence in the later history of the reign. The coronation was the first of a series of events which sealed Becket’s fate. It was solemnized on the 14th of June, at Westminster. The Archbishop of York, Roger of Pont l’Eveque, an old rival of Thomas Becket, placed the crown on the boy’s head, in contravention of the right of Canterbury, and in the absence of the little Queen Margaret. Lewis was exasperated by this act of neglect or disre­spect shown to his daughter; Becket was maddened by the contempt shown for his authority. The storm began to rage; Lewis went to war; Thomas, and the counts whom he made his friends, besieged the Pope with prayers, and at last he sent or promised to send a definitive legation to place Henry’s dominions under interdict, and compel him to recall the archbishop.

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

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

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

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

EARLY PLANTAGENETS.

IV.

THE LATTER YEARS OF HENRY II.