It was however John’s friendship with Nicolas of Langley which in these years of his residence in the primate’s household made him so valuable to Theobald as a medium of communication with Rome. We can hardly doubt that this acquaintance, too, had begun in Paris; now, as the English cardinal-secretary and the envoy of the English primate discussed in the Roman court the prospects of their common mother-country and mother-Church, their acquaintance ripened into a friendship which no change of outward circumstances could alter or disturb. Nicolas cared more for John than for his own nearest relatives; he declared in public and in private that he loved him above all men living; he delighted in unburthening his soul to him. When he became Pope there was no change; a visit from John was still Adrian’s greatest pleasure; he rejoiced in welcoming him to his table, and despite John’s modest remonstrances insisted that they should be served from the same dish and flagon.[1583] King and primate were both alike quick to perceive and use such an opportunity of strengthening the alliance between England and Rome; while Adrian on his part was all the more ready to give a cordial response to overtures made to him from the land of his birth, when they came through the lips of his dearest friend. As a matter of course, it was John who very soon after the accession of Henry II. was sent to obtain a Papal authorization for the king’s projected conquest of Ireland.[1584] Naturally, too, it was John who now became Theobald’s private secretary and confidential medium of communication with Pope Adrian. A considerable part of the correspondence which goes under John’s name really consists of the archbishop’s letters, John himself being merely the amanuensis. This part of his work, however, was a relaxation which he only enjoyed at intervals; he was still constantly on active duty of some kind or other not only at the court of the primate but also at that of the king; and sorely did he long to escape from its weary trifling, to find rest for his soul in the pursuit of that “divine philosophy” which had been the delight of his youth.[1585] But obedience, not inclination, had brought him to court, and obedience kept him there. Thomas knew his worth and would not let him go; at last, to pacify his uneasiness, he bade him relieve his mind by pouring it out in a book. John protested he had scarce time to call his soul his own, much less his intellect or his hands.[1586] He was, however, set free by the removal of the court over sea for the expedition against Toulouse; and while Thomas was riding in coat of mail at the head of his troops against Count Raymond and King Louis, John was writing his Polycraticus in the quiet cloisters of Canterbury.[1587]

This book of Polycraticus on the Triflings of Courtiers and the Foot-prints of Philosophers[1588] is a strange medley of moral and political speculations, personal experiences, and reflections upon men and things, old and new. Its greatest charm lies in the revelation of the writer’s pure, sweet, child-like character, shining unconsciously through the veil of his scholastic pedantries and rambling metaphysics; its historical value consists in the light which it throws on the social condition of England with respect to a crowd of matters which the chroniclers leave wholly in the dark. “Part of it,” says the author in his dedication, “deals with the trifles of the court; laying most stress on those which have chiefly called it forth. Part treats of the foot-prints of the philosophers, leaving, however, the wise to decide for themselves in each case what is to be shunned and what to be followed.”[1589] We need not weary ourselves with John’s meditations upon Aristotle and Plato and their scholastic commentators; they all come round to one simple conclusion—that the fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom, and the love of Him the end of all true philosophy.[1590] It is in the light of this truth that he looks at the practical questions of the day, and reviews those “trifles of the court” which are really the crying abuses of the government, the ecclesiastical administration, and society at large. In the forefront of all he does not hesitate, although dedicating his book to the chancellor whose passion for hunting almost equalled that of the king himself, to set the inordinate love of the chase and the cruelties of the forest-law.[1591] The tardiness of the royal justice and the corruption of the judges—“justitiæ errantes, justices errant are they rightly called who go erring from the path of equity in pursuit of greed and gain”[1592]—was also, after seven years of Henry’s government, still a ground of serious complaint. So, too, was the decay of valour among the young knighthood of the day—a consequence of the general relaxation of discipline, first during the years of anarchy, and then in the reaction produced by the unbroken peace which England had enjoyed since Henry’s accession. Chivalry was already falling back from its lofty ideal; military exercises were neglected for the pleasures and luxury of the court; the making of a knight, in theory a matter almost as solemn as the making of a priest, was sinking into a mere commonplace formality;[1593] and the consequences were beginning to be felt on the Welsh border.[1594] John was moved to contrast the present insecurity of the marches with their splendid defence in Harold’s time,[1595] and to lament that William the Conqueror, in his desire to make his little insular world share the glories of the greater world beyond the sea, had allowed the naturally rich and self-sufficing island to be flooded with luxuries of which it had no need, and thus fostered rather than checked the indolent disposition which had helped to bring its people under his sway.[1596]

The ills of the state had each its counterpart in the Church; the extortions and perversions of justice committed by the secular judges were paralleled by those of the ecclesiastical officials, deans and archdeacons;[1597] and at the bottom of the mischief lay the old root of all evil. Simony was indeed no longer public; spiritual offices were no longer openly bought with hard cash; but they were bought with court-interest instead;[1598] the Church’s most sacred offices were filled by men who came straight from the worldly life of the court to a charge for which they were utterly unfit;[1599] although, in deference to public opinion, they were obliged to go through an elaborate shew of reluctance, and Scripture and hagiology were ransacked for examples of converted sinners, which were always found sufficient to meet any objections against a candidate for consecration and to justify any appointment, however outrageous.[1600] All the sins of the worldly churchmen, however, scarcely move John’s pure soul to such an outburst of scathing sarcasm as he pours upon the “false brethren” who sought their advancement in a more subtle way, by a shew of counterfeit piety:—the ultra-monastic, ultra-ascetic school, with their overdone zeal and humility, and their reliance on those pernicious exemptions from diocesan jurisdiction which the religious orders vied with each other in procuring from Rome, and which were destroying all discipline and subverting all rightful authority.[1601]

Over against the picture of the world and the Church as they actually were, the disciple of Archbishop Theobald sets his ideal of both as they should be—as the primate and his children aimed at making them. For John’s model commonwealth, built up in a somewhat disjointed fashion on a foundation partly of Holy Writ and partly of classic antiquity, is not, like the great Utopia of the sixteenth century, the product of one single, exceptionally constituted mind; it is a reflection of the plans and hopes of those among whom John lived and worked, and thus it helps us to see something of the line of thought which had guided their action in the past and which moulded their schemes for the future. Like all medieval theorists, they began at the uppermost end of the social and political scale; they started from a definite view of the rights and duties of the king, as the head on which all the lower members of the body politic depended. The divine right of kings, the divine ordination of the powers that be, were fundamental doctrines which they understood in a far wider and loftier sense than the king-worshippers of the seventeenth century:—which they employed not to support but to combat the perverted theory that “the sovereign’s will has the force of law,” already creeping in through the influence of the imperial jurisprudence;[1602]—and which were no less incompatible with the principle of invariable hereditary succession. “Lands and houses and suchlike things must needs descend to the next in blood; but the government of a people is to be given only to him whom God has chosen thereto, even to him who has God’s Spirit within him and God’s law ever before his eyes.... Not that for the mere love of change it is lawful to forsake the blood of princes, to whom by the privilege of the divine promises and by the natural claims of birth the succession of their children is justly due, if only they walk according to right. Neither, if they turn aside from the right way, are they to be immediately cast off, but patiently admonished till it become evident that they are obstinate in their wickedness”[1603]—then, and then only, shall the axe be laid to the root of the corrupt tree, and it shall cumber the ground no more.[1604]

Such was the moral which the wisest and most thoughtful minds in England drew from the lessons of the anarchy. On a like principle, it was in the growth of a more definite and earnest sense of individual duty and responsibility, as opposed to the selfish lawlessness which had so long prevailed, that they trusted for the regeneration of society. They sought to teach the knights to live up to the full meaning of their vows and the true objects of their institution—the protection of the Church, the suppression of treason, the vindication of the rights of the poor, the pacification of the country;[1605] so that the consecration of their swords upon the altar at their investiture should be no empty form, but, according to its original intention, a true symbol of the whole character of their lives and, if need be, of their deaths.[1606] And then side by side with the true knight would stand the true priest:—both alike soldiers of the Cross, fighting in the same cause though with different weapons—figured, according to John’s beautiful application of a text which medieval reformers never wearied of expounding, by the “two swords” which the Master had declared “enough” for His servants, all the lawless undisciplined activity of self-seekers and false brethren being merely the “swords and staves” of the hostile multitude.[1607] Into a detailed examination of the rights or the duties of the various classes of the people no one in those days thought it necessary to enter; their well-being and well-doing were regarded as dependent upon those of their superiors, and the whole question of the relation between rulers and ruled—“head and feet,” according to the simile which John borrows from Plutarch—was solved by the comprehensive formula, “Every one members one of another.”[1608] To watch over and direct the carrying-out of this principle was the special work of the clergy; and the clerical reformers were jealous for the rights of their order because, as understood by them, they represented and covered the rights of the whole nation; the claims which they put forth in the Church’s name were a protest in behalf of true civil and religious liberty against tyranny on the one hand and license on the other.[1609] “For there is nothing more glorious than freedom, save virtue; if indeed freedom may rightly be severed from virtue—for all who know anything aright know that true freedom has no other source.”[1610]