Leaders of the People: Studies in Democratic History

by Joseph Clayton

“I know three poor priests in England any one of whom I would rather see advanced to the archbishopric than myself,” he declared earnestly, when his friend the prior of Leicester (who also remonstrated with him for his unclerical dress) told him the rumours of the court. “For as for me, if I was appointed, I know the king so through and through that I should be forced either to lose his favour or, which God forbid, to lay aside the service of God.”

Thomas uttered the same warning to Henry when the king proposed the primacy to him. “I know certainly,” he said, “that if God should so dispose that this happen, you would soon turn away your love, and the favour which is now between us would be changed into bitterest hate. I know that you would demand many things in Church matters, for already you have demanded them, which I could never bear quietly, and the envious would take occasion to provoke an endless strife between us.”

But Henry’s mind was made up. Residing largely in France, he would have Thomas, Archbishop of Canterbury and Chancellor, to rule England as his vice-regent. Six years had Thomas been the king’s friend and chancellor, but the king did not know at all the real character of his man, or rather it was inconceivable to the royal mind that Thomas, whom the king had raised from a mere nobody, from Archdeacon of Canterbury, an important ecclesiastic at best, to the chief man in the realm, should ever dare set himself at variance with the king’s will. Henry, with his untiring energy, was earnest enough for good government in Church and State under an absolute monarchy, and he counted on greater co-operation with Thomas in carrying out his plans, were the latter archbishop. Hitherto, more than once the chancellor had succeeded in moderating the king’s outbursts of wrath against some hapless offender, but he had never shown himself a partisan of the clergy at the expense of the commonwealth,[11] and his lack of pride in his order had even incurred rebuke, so little of the ecclesiastic did this statesman appear.

Thomas understood the king better than the king understood his chancellor. But his protests were in vain. He was as surely marked for the archbishopric as Anselm had been. Bishops of the province approved and the monks of Canterbury duly voted for the king’s chancellor in common consent, Gilbert Foliot, the Bishop of Hereford, and afterwards of London, and the archbishop’s enemy to the end, alone opposing the election.

“Then the archbishop-elect was by the king’s authority declared free of all debts to the crown and given free to the Church of England, and in that freedom he was received by the Church with the customary hymns and words of praise.” (Herbert of Bosham.)

On June 2nd, 1162, the Saturday after Whit Sunday, Thomas was ordained priest and on the following day consecrated bishop. (The new archbishop instituted the festival of Trinity Sunday to commemorate his consecration, and some 200 years later the festival was made of general observance in the Catholic Church.) The king realised the mistake he had made within a year of the consecration. The brilliant chancellor was no sooner archbishop than he turned from all the gaieties of the world, and while no less a statesman, adopted the life of his monks—though never himself a monk—at Canterbury. Henceforth Archbishop Thomas was the unflinching champion of the poor and them that had no helper, the resolute defender of the liberties of the Church against all who would make religion subject to the autocracy of the king of England.

Thomas was forty-four years old, in the full strength of his manhood, when he was made archbishop, and for eight years he did battle with the crown, only laying down his charge at the call of martyrdom.

The first disappointment to Henry was the resignation of the chancellor’s seal.[12] It was clear to Thomas that he could no longer serve the crown and do the work of a Christian bishop at the same time, and he had accepted with full sense of responsibility the see of Canterbury. There was no room for the egotism that loves power, the vaulting ambition that o’erleaps itself, or even the self-deception that persuades a man holding to high position at sacrifice of principle that his motive is disinterested, in St. Thomas of Canterbury. More than once England was to see in later years men who strove vainly to serve with equal respect the Christian religion and the royal will—the service always ended in the triumph of the latter. Thomas was far too clearly-sighted to imagine such joint service possible, and for him, elected and consecrated to the primacy of the English Church, there was no longer any choice. As chancellor, keeping his conscience clear, he had done the best he could for law and order as the king’s right hand man. As Archbishop of Canterbury his duty, first and foremost, was to maintain the Christian religion and defend the cause of the poor and needy.

But to Henry the resignation of the chancellorship was an act of desertion, a declared challenge to the royal supremacy. Henry II. was no more the man than his grandfather Henry I. had been to brook anything that threatened resistance to the king’s rule.

Courtiers who hated Thomas were always at hand to poison the ears of the king by defaming the archbishop, and this, says William FitzStephen, was the first cause of the trouble. Another cause was the hatred of the king for the clergy of England, hatred provoked by the notoriously disreputable lives of more than one clerk in holy orders. The battle between Henry and Thomas began on this matter of criminous clerks.