“Bien valt dis mars par an la rente qu’ele en a.”[495]
Henry’s rival and suzerain, the King of France, the former crusader, brave, pious and inefficient Louis VII, came shortly after; a prodigious and unparalleled event, the first time a king of France had ever set foot on British soil. Feeling that for him death was near, and having had, although three times married, only one son, he decided in 1179 to have the young prince crowned at once, but before the ceremony, Philip, aged fourteen, while boar hunting, lost his way in the forest of Compiègne, and, separated from his companions, endured for days such hardships before a charcoal-burner found him and led him out of the maze that his life was despaired of. The king, in his anguish, had at night a vision of St. Thomas Becket, whom he had well known, promising life for his son if he himself went to Canterbury as a pilgrim. Louis’s advisers recommended not to risk a journey which would place him at the mercy of his enemy, the Plantagenet king. But again, and yet again, St. Thomas appeared at night, now threatening disaster. Louis started then with a brilliant retinue, and no untoward event marred the journey. Henry II, on the contrary, very meek {354} now when his former chancellor was in question, came to meet the French monarch at Dover; both went together to Canterbury; Louis remained two days in prayer, and offered the monks a gold cup and a magnificent gem shown henceforth to pilgrims as the “regale of France.” By a special charter he granted them, besides, one hundred casks of wine to be taken yearly for ever, at vintage time, from his cellars of Poissy-sur-Seine.
He returned to find his son on the way to recovery; and, having had him crowned, died within a year. The son, one of whose first acts was to confirm his father’s hundred casks’ charter, was that famous Philip August whose victory at Bouvines, in 1214, settled the fate of France and made it certain that she would be a great nation.[496]
It became henceforth a sort of tradition for British kings to make this pilgrimage. Back from Palestine and his Austrian prison, Richard Cœur-de-Lion went, on his return, to Canterbury out of gratitude for his recovered freedom. When king in his turn, his brother, John, went too; so did Henry III, Edward I, and nearly all English monarchs; so did the French king, John the Good, when a prisoner in England[497]; so did, in {355} December 1400, Manuel II, Palæologus, emperor of Constantinople[498]; so did, in 1416, Emperor Sigismund, grandson of the blind King Jean de Luxembourg, who had been killed at Crécy, himself then the dominant figure in Europe, a quick-witted and, for the time, liberal-minded sovereign, who, present one day in the Paris Parliament, when justice was being rendered, and seeing a plebeian about to lose his suit simply because he was a plebeian, rose from his seat, and, to the wonder of the assembly, touching him with his sword, made him a knight. A remarkable man was that Canterbury pilgrim, as a man as well as an emperor.
Accompanied by another emperor, Charles V, King Henry VIII came too, but having changed his mind later about a great many matters, he ordered every shrine to be destroyed, showing especial vindictiveness towards all that recalled Thomas Becket. If alive, he thought, the archbishop would have probably been, just as the recently beheaded More and Fisher, opposed to the new dogma of the royal supremacy: most probably, indeed. No mercy should therefore be shown to his bones and to that shrine, where Henry must have seen in former days a silver image of his own father bequeathed to be placed as near the tomb as it could possibly be. The monument was razed with particular care, and the long venerated bones scattered. Having appointed himself Head of the Church, Henry considered that he was free to undo what another Head of the Church, a Pope of long ago, had done, and, if it so pleased him, to un-canonize a saint. While, therefore, allowing many other British saints to remain on the calendar, he issued in 1539 “certain injunctions,” in which, after having informed his {356} priests that if they continued to marry he would send them to jail, he reviewed the life of Becket, showed to his own satisfaction that he was no saint, but rather “a rebel and a traitor to his prince,” that “he gave opprobious names to the gentlemen which then counselled him to leave his stubornness,” that a scuffle ensued with these “gentlemen,” and so “in the throng Becket was slain.”
The King, therefore, commands English people to cease calling the most famous of all the saints they had a saint, “and that his images, and pictures, through the whole realm . . . be plucked down . . . to the intent his grace’s loving subjects shall be no longer blindly lead and abused to commit idolatry”; if they persist, they will go to jail, “at his grace’s pleasure.”[499] In the same way had they been recommended shortly before not to call this one, or that one, of their loving sovereign’s daughters legitimate, so long as he himself chose to call them bastards; there was a gradation in the penalties, and in the case of the daughters it was death.
Equally inimical dispositions were shown during the next reign by Archbishop Cranmer towards his predecessor, and one of the articles of his “Visitation to be had within the diocese of Canterbury” had for its object to ascertain “whether they have put out of their church books this word Papa and the name and service of Thomas Becket.”[500]
Times had changed. But,
“Whan that Aprille, with his showres swoote,”
had long before, in the year 1388, caused spring flowers {357} to bloom, matters were different, and, as all know who can read English,