“The king has wrought a miracle,” sneered the sarcastic bishop of Hereford, Gilbert Foliot; “out of a soldier and man of the world he has made an archbishop.”[24] The same royal power helped to smooth the new primate’s path a little further before him. He was not, like most of his predecessors, obliged to go in person to fetch his pallium from Rome; an embassy which he despatched immediately after his consecration obtained it for him without difficulty from Alexander III., who had just been driven by the Emperor’s hostility to seek a refuge in France, and was in no condition to venture upon any risk of thwarting King Henry’s favourite minister.[25] The next messenger whom Thomas sent over sea met with a less pleasant reception. He was charged to deliver up the great seal into the king’s hands with a request that Henry would provide himself with another chancellor, “as Thomas felt scarcely equal to the cares of one office, far less to those of two.”[26]

Henry was both surprised and vexed. It was customary for the chancellor to resign his office on promotion to a bishopric; but this sudden step on the part of Thomas was quite unexpected, and upset a cherished scheme of the king’s. He had planned to rival the Emperor by having an archbishop for his chancellor, as the archbishops of Mainz and Cöln were respectively arch-chancellors of Germany and Italy;[27] he had certainly never intended, in raising his favourite to the primacy, to deprive himself of such a valuable assistant in secular administration; his aim had rather been to secure the services of Thomas in two departments instead of one.[28] To take away all ground of scandal, he had even procured a papal dispensation to sanction the union of the two offices in a single person.[29] Thomas, however, persisted in his resignation; and as there was no one whom Henry cared to put in his place, the chancellorship remained vacant, while the king brooded over his friend’s unexpected conduct and began to suspect that it was caused by weariness of his service.

Meanwhile Thomas had entered upon the second phase of his strangely varied career. He had “put off the deacon” for awhile; he was resolved now to “put off the old man” wholly and for ever. No sooner was he consecrated than he flung himself, body and soul, into his new life with an ardour more passionate, more absorbing, more exclusive than he had displayed in pursuit of the worldly tasks and pleasures of the court. On the morrow of his consecration, when some jongleurs came to him for the largesse which he had never been known to refuse, he gently but firmly dismissed them; he was no longer, he said, the chancellor whom they had known; his whole possessions were now a sacred trust, to be spent not on actors and jesters but in the service of the Church and the poor.[30] Theobald had doubled the amount of regular alms-givings established by his predecessors; Thomas immediately doubled those of Theobald.[31] To be diligent in providing for the sick and needy, to take care that no beggar should ever be sent empty away from his door,[32] was indeed nothing new in the son of the good dame Rohesia of Caen. The lavish hospitality of the chancellor’s household, too, was naturally transferred to that of the archbishop; but it took a different tone and colour. All and more than all the old grandeur and orderliness were there; the palace still swarmed with men-at-arms, servants and retainers of all kinds, every one with his own appointed duty, whose fulfilment was still carefully watched by the master’s eyes; the bevy of high-born children had only increased, for by an ancient custom the second son of a baron could be claimed by the primate for his service—as the eldest by the king—until the age of knighthood; a claim which Thomas was not slow to enforce, and which the barons were delighted to admit. The train of clerks was of course more numerous than ever. The tables were still laden with delicate viands, served with the utmost perfection, and crowded with guests of all ranks; Thomas was still the most courteous and gracious of hosts. But the banquet wore a graver aspect than in the chancellor’s hall. The knights and other laymen occupied a table by themselves, where they talked and laughed as they listed; it was the clerks and religious who now sat nearest to Thomas. He himself was surrounded by a select group of clerks, his eruditi, his “learned men” as he called them: men versed in Scriptural and theological lore, his chosen companions in the study of Holy Writ into which he had plunged with characteristic energy; while instead of the minstrelsy which had been wont to accompany and inspire the gay talk at the chancellor’s table, there was only heard, according to ecclesiastical custom, the voice of the archbishop’s cross-bearer who sat close to his side reading from some holy book: the primate and his confidential companions meanwhile exchanging comments upon what was read, and discussing matters too deep and solemn to interest unlearned ears or to brook unlearned interruption.[33] Of the meal itself Thomas partook but sparingly;[34] its remainder was always given away;[35] and every day twenty-six poor men were brought into the hall and served with a dinner of the best, before Thomas would sit down to his own midday meal.[36]

The amount of work which he had got through by that time must have been quite as great as in the busiest days of his chancellorship. The day’s occupations ostensibly began about the hour of tierce, when the archbishop came forth from his chamber and went either to hear or to celebrate mass,[37] while a breakfast was given at his expense to a hundred persons who were called his “poor prebendaries.”[38] After mass he proceeded to his audience-chamber and there chiefly remained till the hour of nones, occupied in hearing suits and administering justice.[39] Nones were followed by dinner,[40] after which the primate shut himself up in his own apartments with his eruditi[41] and spent the rest of the day with them in business or study, interrupted only by the religious duties of the canonical hours, and sometimes by a little needful repose,[42] for his night’s rest was of the briefest. At cock-crow he rose for prime; immediately afterwards there were brought in to him secretly, under cover of the darkness, thirteen poor persons whose feet he washed and to whom he ministered at table with the utmost devotion and humility,[43] clad only in a hair-shirt which from the day of his consecration he always wore beneath the gorgeous robes in which he appeared in public.[44] He then returned to his bed, but only for a very short time; long before any one else was astir he was again up and doing, in company with one specially favoured disciple—the one who tells the tale, Herbert of Bosham. In the calm silent hours of dawn, while twelve other poor persons received a secret meal and had their feet washed by the primate’s almoner in his stead, the two friends sat eagerly searching the Scriptures together, till the archbishop chose to be left alone[45] for meditation and confession, scourging and prayer,[46] in which he remained absorbed until the hour of tierce called him forth to his duties in the world.[47]

He was feverishly anxious to lose no opportunity of making up for his long neglect of the Scriptural and theological studies befitting his sacred calling. He openly confessed his grievous inferiority in this respect to many of his own clerks, and put himself under their teaching with child-like simplicity and earnestness. The one whom he specially chose for monitor and guide, Herbert of Bosham, was a man in whom, despite his immeasurable inferiority, one can yet see something of a temper sufficiently akin to that of Thomas himself to account for their mutual attraction, and perhaps for some of their joint errors. As they rode from London to Canterbury on the morrow of the primate’s election he had drawn Herbert aside and laid upon him a special charge to watch with careful eyes over his conduct as archbishop, and tell him without stint or scruple whatever he saw amiss in it or heard criticized by others.[48] Herbert, though he worshipped his primate with a perfect hero-worship, never hesitated to fulfil this injunction to the letter as far as his lights would permit; but unluckily his zeal was even less tempered by discretion than that of Thomas himself. He was a far less safe guide in the practical affairs of life than in the intricate paths of abstract and mystical interpretation of Holy Writ in which he and Thomas delighted to roam together. Often, when no other quiet time could be found, the archbishop would turn his horse aside as they travelled along the road, beckon to his friend, draw out a book from its hiding-place in one of his wide sleeves, and plunge into an eager discussion of its contents as they ambled slowly on.[49] When at Canterbury, his greatest pleasure was to betake himself to the cloister and sit reading like a lowly monk in one of its quiet nooks.[50]