Life of Thomas à Becket

by Henry Hart Milman

Becket at Tours. May 19, 1163.

Henry was now fully occupied with the affairs of Wales. Becket, with the royal sanction, obeyed the summons of Pope Alexander to the Council of Tours. Becket had passed through part of France at the head of an army of his own raising, and under his command; he had passed a second time as representing the king; he was yet to pass as an exile. At Tours, where Pope Alexander now held his court, and presided over his council, Becket appeared at the head of all the Bishops of England, except those excused on account of age or infirmity. So great was his reputation, that the Pope sent out all the cardinals except those in attendance on his own person to escort the primate of England into the city. In the council at Tours not merely was the title of Alexander to the popedom avouched with perfect unanimity, but the rights and privileges of the clergy asserted with more than usual rigor and distinctness. Some canons, one especially which severely condemned all encroachments on the property of the Church, might seem framed almost with a view to the impending strife with England.

Beginning of strife.

That strife, so impetuous might seem the combatants to join issue, broke out, during the next year, in all its violence. Both parties, if they did not commence, were prepared for aggression. The first occasion of public collision was a dispute concerning the customary payment of the ancient Danegelt, of two shillings on every hide of land, to the sheriffs of the several counties. The king determined to transfer this payment to his own exchequer: he summoned an assembly at Woodstock, and declared his intentions. All were mute but Becket; the archbishop opposed the enrolment of the decree, on the ground that the tax was voluntary, not of right. "By the eyes of God," said Henry, his usual oath, "it shall be enrolled!" "By the same eyes, by which you swear," replied the prelate, "it shall never be levied on my lands while I live!"[41] On Becket's part, almost the first act of his primacy was to vindicate all the rights, and to resume all the property which had been usurped, or which he asserted to have been usurped, from his see.[42] It was not likely that, in the turbulent times just gone by, there would have been rigid respect for the inviolability of sacred property. The title of the Church was held to be indefeasible. Whatever had once belonged to the Church might be recovered at any time; and the ecclesiastical courts claimed the sole right of adjudication in such causes. The primate was thus at once plaintiff, judge, and carried into execution his own judgments. The lord of the manor of Eynsford in Kent, who held of the king, claimed the right of presentation to that benefice. Becket asserted the prerogative of the see of Canterbury. On the forcible ejectment of his nominee by the lord, William of Eynsford, Becket proceeded at once to a sentence of excommunication, without regard to Eynsford's feudal superior the king. |Claims of Becket.| The primate next demanded the castle of Tunbridge from the head of the powerful family of De Clare; though it had been held by De Clare, and it was asserted, received in exchange for a Norman Castle, since the time of William the Conqueror. The attack on De Clare might seem a defiance of the whole feudal nobility: a determination to despoil them of their conquests, or grants from the sovereign.

Immunities of the clergy.

The king, on his side, wisely chose the strongest and more popular ground of the immunities of the clergy from all temporal jurisdiction. He appeared as guardian of the public morals, as administrator of equal justice to all his subjects, as protector of the peace of the realm. Crimes of great atrocity, it is said, of great frequency, crimes such as robbery and homicide, crimes for which secular persons were hanged by scores and without mercy, were committed almost with impunity, or with punishment altogether inadequate to the offence by the clergy; and the sacred name of clerk, exempted not only bishops, abbots, and priests, but those of the lowest ecclesiastical rank from the civil power. It was the inalienable right of the clerk to be tried only in the court of his bishop; and as that court could not award capital punishment, the utmost penalties were flagellation, imprisonment, and degradation. It was only after degradation, and for a second offence (for the clergy strenuously insisted on the injustice of a second trial for the same act,)[43] that the meanest of the clerical body could be brought to the level of the most highborn layman. But to cede one tittle of these immunities, to surrender the sacred person of a clergyman, whatever his guilt, to the secular power, was treason to the sacerdotal order: it was giving up Christ (for the Redeemer was supposed actually to dwell in the clerk, though his hands might be stained with innocent blood) to be crucified by the heathen.[44] To mutilate the person of one in holy orders was directly contrary to the Scripture (for with convenient logic, while the clergy rejected the example of the Old Testament as to the equal liability of priest and Levite with the ordinary Jew to the sentence of the law, they alleged it on their own part as unanswerable.) It was inconceivable, that hands which had but now made God should be tied behind the back, like those of a common malefactor, or that his neck should be wrung on a gibbet, before whom kings had but now bowed in reverential homage.[45]

The enormity of the evil is acknowledged by Becket's most ardent partisans.[46] The king had credible information laid before him that some of the clergy were absolute devils in guilt, that their wickedness could not be repressed by the ordinary means of justice, and were daily growing worse.

Becket himself had protected some notorious and heinous offenders. A clerk of the diocese of Worcester had debauched a maiden and murdered her father. Becket ordered the man to be kept in prison, and refused to surrender him to the king's justice.[47] Another in London, guilty of stealing a silver goblet, was claimed as only amenable to the ecclesiastical court. Philip de Brois, a canon of Bedford, had been guilty of homicide. The cause was tried in the bishop's court; he was condemned to pay a fine to the kindred of the slain man. Some time after, Fitz-Peter, the king's justiciary, whether from private enmity or offence, or dissatisfied with the ecclesiastical verdict, in the open court at Dunstable, called De Brois a murderer. De Brois broke out into angry and contumelious language against the judge. The insult to the justiciary was held to be insult to the king, who sought justice, where alone he could obtain it, in the bishop's court. Philip de Brois this time incurred a sentence, to our notions almost as disproportionate as that for his former offence. He was condemned to be publicly whipped, and degraded for two years from the honors and emoluments of his canonry. But to the king the verdict appeared far too lenient; the spiritual jurisdiction was accused as shielding the criminal from his due penalty.

Character of the King.

Such were the questions on which Becket was prepared to confront and to wage war to the death with the king; and all this with a deliberate knowledge both of the power and the character of Henry, his power as undisputed sovereign of England and of continental territories more extensive and flourishing than those of the king of France. These dominions included those of the Conqueror and his descendants, of the Counts of Anjou, and the great inheritance of his wife, Queen Eleanor, the old kingdom of Aquitaine; they reached from the borders of Flanders round to the foot of the Pyrenees. This almost unrivaled power could not but have worked with the strong natural passions of Henry to form the character drawn by a churchman of great ability, who would warn Becket as to the formidable adversary whom he had undertaken to oppose,—"You have to deal with one on whose policy the most distant sovereigns of Europe, on whose power his neighbors, on whose severity his subjects look with awe; whom constant successes and prosperous fortune have rendered so sensitive, that every act of disobedience is a personal outrage; whom it is as easy to provoke as difficult to appease; who encourages no rash offence by impunity, but whose vengeance is instant and summary. He will sometimes be softened by humility and patience, but will never submit to compulsion; everything must seem to be conceded by his own free will, nothing wrested from his weakness. He is more covetous of glory than of gain, a commendable quality in a prince, if virtue and truth, not the vanity and soft flattery of courtiers, awarded that glory. He is a great, indeed the greatest of kings, for he has no superior of whom he may stand in dread, no subject who dares to resist him. His natural ferocity has been subdued by no calamity from without; all who have been involved in any contest with him, have preferred the most precarious treaty to a trial of strength with one so pre-eminent in wealth, in the number of his forces, and the greatness of his puissance."[48]