It is significant that this enthusiastic outburst of the historian-canon of Newburgh is called forth by the contemplation not of his own order, but of three great Cistercian houses, Byland, Rievaux and Fountains. Buried in their lonely wildernesses, the Cistercians seem at first glance to have been intent only on saving their own souls, taking no part in the regeneration of society at large. But the truth is far otherwise. While the other orders were—if we may venture to take up the suggestive figure employed by William of Newburgh—the working, fighting rank and file of the spiritual army, the White Monks were at once its sentinels, its guides and its commanding officers; they kept watch and ward over its organization and its safety, they pointed the way wherein it should go, they directed its energies and inspired its action. For the never-ending crusade of the Church against the world had at this time found its leader in a simple Cistercian monk, who never was Pope, nor legate, nor archbishop, nor even official head of his own order—who was simply abbot of Clairvaux—yet who, by the irresistible, unconscious influence of a pure mind and a single aim, had brought all Christendom to his feet. It was to the “Bright Valley,” to Clairvaux, that men looked from the most distant lands for light amid the darkness; it was to S. Bernard that all instinctively turned for counsel and for guidance. The story of S. Gilbert of Sempringham may serve for an example. The father of Gilbert was a Norman holding property in Lincolnshire in the time of Henry I.; his mother was a woman of Old-English descent. The boy ran away from school and made his escape to France; there he repented of his idleness, threw himself zealously into the pursuit of letters, and after some years came home to set up in his native place a school for boys and girls. He taught them a great deal more than mere book-learning; his purity, sweetness and fervour won the very hearts and souls of all who came under his influence; and there was something in his lofty yet tender nature which made him seem peculiarly fitted for a spiritual director of women. Seven maidens first devoted themselves to the religious life under his guidance; others soon followed their example; several men did the like. A double monastery thus grew up at Sempringham, under the protection of Bishop Alexander of Lincoln, in the earliest years of Stephen’s reign. For some time it continued subject to no other rule than its founder’s own will. He saw, however, the necessity for a more lasting basis of organization; instead of trying to devise one himself, he applied to the general chapter of Cîteaux and besought them to take charge of his little flock. They, however, refused; since Gilbert had been inspired to found a new religious society, they would not presume to interfere with his mission; he must draw up a rule for his own spiritual children. He ended by working out his scheme into a composite institution which aimed at combining the excellencies of all earlier rules, but in which the Cistercian element strongly predominated. The Gilbertine priories, when fully constituted, consisted of four orders of persons: canons, who followed the rule of S. Austin; lay-brethren, nuns and lay-sisters, all bound by the rule of Cîteaux; while the whole community was held together by certain additional regulations specially devised by the founder. The new order spread rapidly through eastern England; and before S. Gilbert’s own life reached its close, he had the satisfaction of seeing his spiritual children take a highly honourable part in the great ecclesiastical struggle of which the foremost champion and victim was S. Thomas of Canterbury.[1040]

One sees in this story how instinctively the religious reformers of the day went to Cîteaux for a model and a guide; and one sees, too, how little the Cistercians were as yet inclined to abuse their influence by reaping where they had not sown. The extraordinary position of Bernard himself was not of his own seeking; the “care of all the churches” came upon him whether he would or not; as one of his biographers expresses it, all Christendom looked upon him as a divinely-appointed Moses of whom the ordained hierarchy and even the supreme pontiff himself were but subordinate mouthpieces and representatives.[1041] Like their prototype in the Old Testament, the Aarons of the time did not always understand the policy or appreciate the aims of their inspired brother, and the spiritual party in the Church sometimes found its worst stumbling-block within the walls of the Lateran. Year by year, however, its influence grew and spread, till on the death of Pope Lucius II. in February 1145 a Cistercian, Bernard abbot of S. Anastasius at Rome, was raised to the chair of S. Peter by the name of Eugene III. With him the anti-Bernardine party had no chance of a moment’s hearing; threats, flatteries or bribes were all alike thrown away upon a pontiff whose glory and whose strength lay in having no will of his own, in being simply the voice which proclaimed and the hand which executed the thoughts of his greater namesake at Clairvaux. “They say I am Pope, not you!” wrote S. Bernard to him,[1042] half playfully, half in gentle reproach, and Eugene gloried in the saying. A new departure in the policy of the Roman see was marked by the fulfilment of one of Bernard’s most cherished schemes, the preaching of a new crusade for the deliverance of the Holy Land, whence an imploring cry for help came from the widowed Queen Melisenda—for King Fulk of Anjou had been cut off suddenly in the midst of his labours, and his realm, left to the rule of a woman and a child, was rapidly falling a prey to the Infidels.[1043] At Vézelay, on Easter-day 1146, the young King Louis of France took the cross from S. Bernard’s own hands amid a scene of the wildest enthusiasm. The Emperor Conrad soon followed his example, and at Pentecost 1147 the expedition set out.

As far as its direct object was concerned, this second crusade failed completely; yet it had not been projected in vain. As said a friend and biographer of S. Bernard: “If it was God’s will thereby to deliver, not the bodies of many eastern folk from the bondage of the heathen, but the souls of many western folk from the bondage of sin, who shall dare to ask why He has thus done?”[1044] If the movement did nothing for Palestine, it did something for England. Torn and exhausted with her internal divisions, she could take no part in it as a state; but nowhere was it more readily joined by individual volunteers. The preaching of the Crusade was a spark which kindled into flame, in the heart of more than one of the troublers of the land, the smouldering embers of a capacity for better things; it was a trumpet-call which roused more than one brave knight to forsake the miserable party-strife with which perhaps in his secret soul he had long been growing disgusted, and fling into a better cause the energies which he had been wasting upon his country’s ruin.[1045] But the movement did more for England than this. It brought to light among the English people a spirit whose existence at such a time could otherwise hardly have been suspected. The one success of the Crusade was achieved by a little independent squadron of one hundred and sixty-four ships which sailed from Dartmouth on May 23, six days before the feast of the Ascension, 1147. The expedition consisted of Germans, Flemings and Englishmen, the latter being the most numerous. Nearly all were men of low degree; they had no commander-in-chief; each nationality chose its own leader. The “men of the Empire”—a body of Low-Germans who, for some unknown reason, chose to be independent of the great Imperial host—followed Count Arnold of Aerschot, who seems to have been the only person of rank in the whole assemblage; the Flemings and the men of Queen Matilda’s county of Boulogne were led by Christian of Gistelles. The English grouped themselves according to the districts of their birth under the guidance of four marshals; Hervey of Glanville led the men of Norfolk and Suffolk; Simon of Dover[1046] commanded the ships of Kent; a man named Andrew was chief of the Londoners; and a miscellaneous contingent from other parts of the country was headed by Saher de Arcelles. The whole company bound themselves by vows almost as stringent as those of a religious order; they were pledged to eschew all fine clothes and personal indulgences, and to help and avenge one another in all things as sworn brethren; each ship had its own chaplain and its regular services, as if it were a parish; every man confessed and communicated once a week; and for the enforcement of all these rules two men were elected out of every thousand to form a body of sworn judges[1047] who should administer the common funds and assist the marshals in maintaining order. These warrior-pilgrims, sailing down the western coast of the Spanish peninsula on their way to the Mediterranean Sea, touched at Oporto; at the entreaty of the Portuguese King Alfonso and his people they exchanged their intended crusade in Holy Land for one which was perhaps more useful—a campaign for the deliverance of Christian Portugal from its Moorish oppressors. The Moors who occupied Lisbon were starved into surrender by a four months’ blockade; the crusaders entered the city in triumph; in the hour of temptation English discipline proved strong enough to control German greed,[1048] and renouncing all share in the fruit of their victory these single-hearted soldiers of the Cross made over the future capital of Portugal to its Christian sovereign and went home rejoicing that they, a few poor men of lowly birth and no reputation, had been counted worthy to strike a successful blow for the Faith, while its royal and imperial champions at the head of their countless hosts met with nothing but disaster and disgrace.[1049]

There was no need to despair of a country whose middle and lower classes could still produce men capable of an exploit such as this. When a spontaneous gathering of poor yeomen, common sailors and obscure citizens could reveal such a spirit, it was plain that all England wanted to rescue her from her misery was a competent leader. S. Bernard, watching over the fortunes of the English Church through the eyes of his brethren at Fountains and Rievaux, had seen this already; and he saw, too, that it was vain to look for such a leader in either the king or the king-maker, Henry of Winchester. Before the Church of England could rescue the state, she must be freed from the political entanglements into which she had been dragged by Henry’s impetuosity, and enabled to resume a position of spiritual independence under her rightful leader, the archbishop of Canterbury. With this view the whole Cistercian order in England, supported and directed by S. Bernard, had set their faces against William Fitz-Herbert’s appointment to the see of York, as an attempt of king and legate to override the constitutional rights of the southern primate and of the Church as a whole. “The bishop of Winchester and the archbishop of York do not walk in the same spirit with the archbishop of Canterbury, but go their own way in opposition to him; and this comes from the old quarrel about the legation”—thus Bernard summed up the case.[1050] Moreover the saving clause whereby William of Durham was allowed to swear by proxy in behalf of his namesake appears to have been interpolated by the latter’s friends into the Papal decree; for “One William has not sworn, yet the other is archbishop”[1051] was the burthen of S. Bernard’s cry to the Pope; and when in 1144 a cardinal-legate, Hicmar, came to England with a pall for William of York, he promised Bernard not to give it till he should have received the oath from the bishop of Durham in person.[1052]