The dread of this catastrophe explains also the attitude of the Pope. In the long dreary tale of negotiation and intrigue which has to be traced through the maze of the Becket correspondence, the most inconsistent and self-contradictory, the most undecided and undignified, the most unsatisfactory and disappointing part of all is that played by Alexander III. It is however only fair to remember that, in this and in all like cases, the Pope’s part was also the most difficult one. No crown in Christendom pressed so sorely on its wearer’s brow as the triple tiara:—“It may well look bright,” Adrian IV. had been wont to say to his friend John of Salisbury, “for it is a crown of fire!” Adrian indeed, though his short reign was one of marked vigour and prosperity, declared that if he had had any idea of the thorns with which S. Peter’s chair was filled, he would have begged his bread in England or remained buried in the cloisters of S. Rufus to the end of his days sooner than thrust himself into such a thicket of troubles.[213] For it was not only “the care of all the churches” that rested upon a medieval Pope, but the care of all the states as well. The court of Rome had grown into the final court of appeal for all Christendom; the Pope was expected to be the universal referee, arbitrator and peacemaker of Europe, to hold the balance between contending parties, to penetrate and disentangle the intricacies of political situations which baffled the skill of the most experienced diplomatists, to exercise a sort of equitable jurisdiction on a vast scale over the whole range of political as well as social life. Earlier and later pontiffs may have voluntarily brought this burthen upon themselves; most of the Popes of the twelfth century, at any rate, seem to have groaned under it as a weight too heavy for any human strength to bear. Unprincipled as their policy often seemed, there was not a little justice in the view of John of Salisbury, that a position so exceptional could not be brought within the scope of ordinary rules of conduct, and that only those who had themselves felt its difficulties could be really competent to judge it at all.[214] Adrian’s energetic spirit was worn out by it in four years;[215] yet his position was easy compared to that of Alexander III. Alexander was a pontiff without a throne, the head of a Church in captivity and exile; dependent on the support of the most selfish and untrustworthy of living sovereigns; with Italy and Germany arrayed against him under the rule of a schismatic Emperor, and with the fidelity of the Angevin house hanging upon a thread which the least strain, the lightest touch, might break at any moment. Moreover Alexander was no Englishman like his predecessor. He had no inborn comprehension and no experience of the ways and tempers of the north; he had no bosom-friend, no John of Salisbury, to stand as interpreter between him and the Angevin king or the English primate; he understood neither of them, and he was almost equally afraid of both. His chief anxiety was to have as little as possible to do with them and their quarrel, and the fugitive archbishop was to him anything but a welcome guest.

It was of course impossible for the Pope to withhold his sympathy and his support from a prelate who came to him as a confessor for the privileges of the Church. But it was equally impossible for him to run the risk of driving Henry and his dominions into schism by espousing Thomas’s cause as decisively as Thomas himself desired. Placed thus in what Adrian had once declared to be the ordinary position of a Roman pontiff—“between hammer and anvil”—Alexander drifted into a policy of shifts and contradictions, tergiversations and double-dealings, which irritated Henry and which Thomas simply failed to comprehend. If Gilbert Foliot and Arnulf of Lisieux could have succeeded in their efforts to induce the contending parties to accept a compromise, the Pope would have been only too glad to sanction it. But it was useless to talk of compromise where Thomas Becket was concerned. To all the remoter consequences, the ultimate bearings of the quarrel, he was totally blind. For him there was but one question in the world, the one directly before him; it could have but two sides, right and wrong, between which all adjustment was impossible, and with which considerations of present expediency or future consequences had nothing to do. All Gilbert’s arguments for surrender, his solemn warnings of the peril of schism, his pleadings that it was better for the English Church to become for a while a sickly member of the ecclesiastical body than to be cut off from it altogether,[216] Thomas looked upon, at best, as proposals for doing evil that good might come. After his humiliating experience at Clarendon he seems to have felt that he was no match for Henry’s subtlety; his flight was evidently caused chiefly by dread of being again entrapped into a betrayal of what he held to be his duty; and once, in an agony of self-reproach and self-distrust, he laid his archiepiscopal ring at the Pope’s feet and prayed to be released from the burthen of an office for which he felt himself unworthy and unfit.[217] Strong as was the temptation to pacify Henry thus easily, Alexander felt that the Church could not allow such a sacrifice of her champion; and Thomas never again swerved from his determination to be satisfied with nothing short of complete surrender on the part of the king. For this one object he laboured, pleaded, argued, censured, during the next six years without ceasing; his own suffragans, the monastic orders, Pope, cardinals, the Empress Matilda, the king of France, none of them had a moment’s peace from his passionate endeavours to press them into a service which he seemed to expect them all to regard as a matter of life and death not merely for England but for all Christendom. Doubtless it was a sad waste of energy and a sad perversion of enthusiasm; yet the enthusiasm contrasts pathetically, almost heroically, with the spirit in which it was met. There was something noble, if there was also something exasperatingly unpractical, in a man who, absorbed in his devotion to one mistaken idea, never even saw that he and his cause were becoming the pretexts and the tools of half the political intrigues of Europe, and whom the experience of a lifetime failed to teach that all the world was not as single-hearted as himself. Intellectually, a mind thus constituted must needs provoke and deserve the impatient scorn of a cool clear brain such as Gilbert Foliot’s; but its very intellectual weakness was the source of its true strength. It is this dogged adherence to one fixed idea, this simplicity of aim, which appeals to the average crowd of mankind far more strongly than the larger and more statesmanlike temper of men like Foliot, or like Henry himself. Whether or no the cause be worthy—whether or no the zeal be according to knowledge—it is the zealot, not the philosopher, who becomes the popular hero and martyr.

From the moment of Thomas’s arrival in France, then, little though he perceived it himself, the direct question at issue between him and the king became in every point of view save his own entirely subordinate to the indirect consequences of their quarrel; the ecclesiastical interest became secondary to the political, which involved matters of grave importance to all Europe. The one person to whom the archbishop’s flight was most thoroughly welcome was Louis of France. Louis and Henry were nominally at peace; but to Louis their alliance was simply a shield behind which he could plan without danger his schemes for undermining Henry’s power on the continent, and no better tool for this purpose could possibly have fallen into his hands than the fugitive archbishop of Canterbury. Thomas had indeed just enough perception of the state of affairs between the two kings—of which he must have acquired considerable experience in his chancellor days—to choose going to live on his own resources at Pontigny rather than accept the hospitality of his sovereign’s enemy.[218] This arrangement probably delighted Louis, for it furnished him with a safe answer to Henry’s complaints and remonstrances about harbouring the “traitor”—Thomas was in sanctuary in a Cistercian abbey in Burgundy, and France was not harbouring him at all; while the welcome which Louis gave to the primate’s exiled friends and the sympathy which he displayed for their cause heightened his own reputation for devotion to the Church and served as a foil to set off more conspicuously the supposed hostility of Henry. To Louis in short the quarrel was something which might turn to his own advantage by helping to bring Henry into difficulties; and he used it accordingly with a skill peculiar to himself, making a great shew of disinterested zeal and friendly mediation, and all the while taking care that the breach should be kept open till its healing was required for his own interest.

With such an onlooker as this Henry knew that he must play his game with the utmost caution. He had been provoked by the personal opposition of his old friend into standing upon his regal dignity more stiffly than he would have thought it worth while to do so long as it remained unchallenged. On his side, too, there was a principle at stake, and he could not give it up unconditionally; but he might have been induced to accept a compromise, had not the obstinacy of Thomas forced him into a corresponding attitude of unbending determination. So keen was his sense of the danger attendant upon the fugitive archbishop’s presence in France that it led him to postpone once more the work which he had been planning in England and cross over to Normandy again early in 1165.[219] Lent was passed in fruitless attempts to bring about a triple conference between the two kings and the Pope; Henry refused to allow Thomas to be present; Thomas begged the Pope not to expose himself to Henry’s wiles without him who alone could help him to see through them; and Alexander, now busy with preparations for his return to Rome, was probably not sorry to escape by declaring that for a temporal prince to dictate who should or who should not form part of the Pope’s suite was a claim which had never been heard of before and which he could not possibly admit.[220] Immediately after Easter he set out on his journey homewards.

The rival party saw their opportunity and seized it without delay. Their fortunes were now at a very low ebb; the antipope Victor had died in April; his chief supporter, Cardinal Guy of Crema, had succeeded him under the title of Paschal III.; but Italy had cast him off, and even in Germany the tide was turning against him. The Emperor, however, clung with unwavering determination to his original policy; and he at once saw in the English king’s quarrel with the Church a means of gaining for Paschal’s cause what would amply compensate for all that had been lost. Before Alexander was fairly out of the French kingdom an embassy from Germany came to Henry at Rouen, bringing proposals for an alliance to be secured by two marriages: one between the English princess Matilda, Henry’s eldest daughter, and the Emperor’s cousin Duke Henry of Saxony; the other between Henry’s second daughter and Frederic’s own little son. The chief ambassador was Reginald, archbishop-elect of Cöln, who from the time of Frederic’s accession—two years before that of Henry—had been his chancellor and confidential adviser, playing a part curiously like that of Thomas Becket, till in the very year of the English chancellor’s removal to Canterbury he was appointed to the see of Cöln. There the parallel with Thomas ended; for Reginald was the most extreme champion of the privileges not of the Church but of the Imperial Crown, and was even more closely identified with the schismatic party than Frederic himself. Henry sent him over to the queen, who had been left as regent in England, to receive from her a formal promise of her daughter’s hand to the duke of Saxony, in a great council convened at Westminster for that purpose. The old justiciar Earl Robert of Leicester refused the kiss of peace to the schismatic and caused the altars at which he had celebrated to be thrown down,[221] thereby saving Henry from the fatal blunder of committing himself publicly to the cause of the anti-pope, and England from the dangers of open schism. But he could not prevent the king from sending two clerks to a council which met at Würzburg on Whit-Sunday to abjure Pope Alexander and acknowledge Paschal; and although the fact was strenuously denied, it seems impossible to doubt that they did take the oath at the Emperor’s hands in their master’s name;[222] indeed, Reginald of Cöln boasted that Henry had promised to make all the bishops in his dominions do the same.