Harassed by disaster and revolt, provoked by the primate’s former letters, Henry, upon reading this one and hearing the messenger’s comment upon it—for Thomas had charged him to say a good deal more than he wrote[266]—might well feel that he was standing on the brink of a volcano. He turned desperately upon the bishops around him, half imploring, half commanding them to help him out of his strait, abusing them for a pack of traitors who would not trouble themselves to rid him of this one unmanageable foe, and exclaiming with a burst of tears that the archbishop was destroying him soul and body together; for he naturally expected nothing less than an interdict on his dominions and an anathema against himself, and both sanctioned by the Pope. When Henry was thus at his wits’ end, the only one among his continental advisers who was likely to have any counsel to offer him was Arnulf of Lisieux. Once more Arnulf proved equal to the occasion; he suggested that the primate’s intended censures should be forestalled by an appeal to the Pope. The remedy was a desperate one, for, as John of Salisbury triumphantly remarked when he heard of it, the king was flying in the face of his own Constitutions and confirming that very right of appeal which he was so anxious to abolish, by thus having recourse to it for his own protection. But there was no other loophole of escape; so the appeal was made, a messenger was despatched to give notice of it in England, close the ports and cut off all communication with Thomas and with the Pope; while the bishops of Lisieux and Séez set out for Pontigny to bid the primate stay his hand till the octave of Easter next, which was fixed for the term of Henry’s appeal.[267]

They were too late. No sooner had the barefooted messenger returned with his tidings of the king’s irreconcileable wrath than Thomas hurried to Soissons on a pilgrimage to its three famous shrines:—those of the Blessed Virgin, who had been the object of his special reverence ever since he learned the Ave Maria at his mother’s knee; of S. Gregory the Great, the patron of the whole English Church and more particularly of Canterbury and its archbishops; and of S. Drausius, who was believed to have the power of rendering invincible any champion who spent a night in prayer before his relics. Before each of these shrines Thomas, like a warrior preparing for mortal combat, passed a night in solemn vigil, the last night being that of the festival of S. Drausius, and also of Ascension-day.[268] On the morrow he left Soissons;[269] on Whitsun-eve[270] he reached Vézelay, a little town distant only a day’s journey from Pontigny, and made famous by its great abbey, which boasted of possessing the body of S. Mary Magdalene. Thomas found the place crowded with pilgrims assembled to keep the Whitsun feast on this venerated spot. He was invited by the abbot to celebrate High Mass and preach on the festival day;[271] his sermon ended, he solemnly anathematized the royal customs and all their upholders, and excommunicated by name seven persons whom he denounced as special enemies to the Church; the two first being Henry’s confidential envoys John of Oxford and Richard of Ilchester, who had been the medium of his communications with the Emperor; while a third, Jocelyn de Bailleul, was one of his chief advisers, and a fourth was no less a personage than the justiciar, Richard de Lucy.[272] Thomas had set out from Soissons in the full determination to excommunicate Henry himself at the same time; but on his way he learned that the king was dangerously ill; he therefore contented himself with a solemn warning publicly addressed to him by name, calling him to repentance for the last time, and in default, threatening him with immediate excommunication.[273]

The news of these proceedings reached Henry when, sick and anxious, he was trying to gather up strength and energy for a campaign against the Bretons. He instantly despatched another messenger to England, bidding Richard de Lucy call an assembly of the bishops and clergy and compel them to make a general appeal to the Pope against the authority and jurisdiction of their primate.[274] The meeting was held in London[275] at midsummer.[276] The appeal was made and sent to the Pope in the name of all the bishops and clergy of England; but it is tolerably clear that the main body were merely passive followers, more or less willing, of Gilbert of London and Jocelyn of Salisbury, the former of whom was almost certainly the writer of the letter which conveyed the appeal to the Pope, as well as of that which announced it to the primate.[277] The hand of Gilbert Foliot was indeed so plainly visible that Thomas’s reply was addressed with equal plainness to him personally.[278] The long and sarcastic letter with which he retorted[279] was answered in a yet more startling fashion at the opening of the next year. As Gilbert stood before the high altar of his cathedral church on the feast of its patron saint a paper was thrust into his hand; to his dismay it proved to be a papal brief granting to Archbishop Thomas a commission as legate for all England, and commanding the bishops to render him unqualified obedience and to resign within two months whatever confiscated church property had been placed in their charge by the king. In an agony of distress Gilbert, who himself had the custody of the Canterbury estates, sent this news to the king, imploring him to grant permission that the Pope’s mandate might be obeyed, at least till some method could be devised for escaping from a dilemma which now looked well-nigh hopeless.[280] Henry, absorbed in a struggle with the Bretons, had already been provoked into a vengeance as impolitic as it was mean. He threatened the Cistercian abbots assembled on Holy Cross day at the general chapter of their order that if Thomas were not immediately expelled from Pontigny, he would send all the White Monks in his dominions to share the primate’s exile.[281] When the abbot of Pontigny carried this message home, Thomas could only bid him farewell and betake himself to the sole protection left him—that of the king of France. He left Pontigny on S. Martin’s day[282] 1166, and took up his abode as the guest of Louis in the abbey of S. Columba at Sens.[283]

Henry saw his own blunder as soon as it was made, and endeavoured to neutralize its effects by despatching an embassy to the Pope, requesting that he would send a legatine commission to settle the controversy. One of his envoys was the excommunicate John of Oxford; to the horror of Thomas and the indignation of Louis, John came back in triumph, boasting not only that he had been absolved by the Pope, but that two cardinals, William and Otto—the former of whom was a determined opponent of Thomas—were coming with full powers to sit in judgement on the case between primate and king and decide it without appeal.[284] The first half of the boast was true, but not the second; the cautious Pope instructed his envoys to do nothing more than arbitrate between the contending parties, if they could.[285] They did not reach Normandy till the autumn of 1167; Thomas came to meet them on the French border on November 18; he refused to enter upon any negotiations till the property of the metropolitan see was restored;[286] the legates carried their report to the king at Argentan, and were dismissed with an exclamation of disappointment and disgust—“I wish I may never set eyes upon a cardinal again!”[287] Five of the English bishops whom Henry had summoned to advise him renewed their appeal,[288] its original term having expired six months ago; and the legates insisting that Thomas should respect the appeal,[289] another year’s delay was gained.

At last, when the two kings made their treaty at Montmirail at Epiphany 1169, Thomas, who had come to the spot under the protection of Louis, suddenly entered the royal presence and fell at Henry’s feet, offering to place himself unreservedly in his hands. All parties thought the struggle was over, till the archbishop added once again the words which had so exasperated Henry at Oxford and at Clarendon: “Saving God’s honour and my order.” The king burst into a fury, and the meeting broke up in confusion.[290] Three months later, on Palm Sunday, from the high altar of Clairvaux, Thomas excommunicated ten of his opponents, first among whom was Gilbert Foliot.[291] Gilbert, who knew that the sentence had been hanging over him for more than a year, had appealed against it before it was uttered;[292] the king, too, was forewarned, and at every seaport guards were set to catch and punish with the utmost rigour any messenger from the primate. It was not till Ascension-day that a young layman named Berengar made his way up to the altar of Gilbert’s cathedral church in the middle of High Mass and thrust into the hand of the celebrant the archbishop’s letter proclaiming the excommunication of the bishop.[293] On that very day Thomas issued another string of excommunications.[294] Gilbert, driven to extremity, renewed his appeal two days later; and he added to it a formal refusal to acknowledge the jurisdiction of a metropolitan to whom he had made no profession, and a declaration—so at least it was reported in Gaul—of his intention to claim the metropolitical dignity for his own see, as an ancient right of which it had been unjustly defrauded by Canterbury.[295] A storm of indignant protest and vehement denunciation arose from the archbishop’s party; and the terrified Pope checked further proceedings by despatching another pair of envoys, who as usual failed to agree either with the king, with the archbishop, or even with each other, and after wasting the summer in misunderstandings and recriminations left the case just where they had found it.[296] By this time king and primate were both weary of their quarrel, and still more weary of mediation. In November they had another personal interview at Montmartre, and the archbishop’s unconditional restoration was all but decided.[297] Thomas, however, rashly attempted to hasten the completion of the settlement by a threat of interdict;[298] and the threat stung Henry into an act of far greater rashness. He had met Louis, as well as Thomas, at Montmartre, and had gained his immediate object of restraining the French king yet a little longer from direct hostilities; the settlement of Britanny was completed at Christmas, that of Aquitaine was so far secure that its conclusion might safely be left to Eleanor’s care; in March 1170 Henry went to England[299] with the fixed determination of seeing his eldest son crowned there before he left it again.