At the close of the year Henry determined to go and see for himself the truth of these strange rumours.[57] The negotiations concerning the papal question had detained him on the continent throughout the summer; in the end both he and Louis gave a cordial welcome to Alexander, and a general pacification was effected in a meeting of the two kings and the Pope which took place late in the autumn at Chouzy on the Loire. Compelled by contrary winds to keep Christmas at Cherbourg instead of in England as he had hoped,[58] the king landed at Southampton on S. Paul’s day.[59] Thomas, still accompanied by the little Henry, was waiting to receive him; the two friends met with demonstrations of the warmest affection, and travelled to London together in the old intimate association.[60] One subject of disagreement indeed there was; Thomas had actually been holding for six months the archdeaconry of Canterbury together with the archbishopric, and this Henry, after several vain remonstrances, now compelled him to resign.[61] They parted however in undisturbed harmony, the archbishop again taking his little pupil with him.[62]

The first joint work of king and primate was the translation of Gilbert Foliot from Hereford to London. Some of those who saw its consequences in after-days declared that Henry had devised the scheme for the special purpose of securing Gilbert’s aid against the primate;[63] but it is abundantly clear that no such thought had yet entered his mind, and that the suggestion of Gilbert’s promotion really came from Thomas himself.[64] Like every one else, he looked upon Gilbert as the greatest living light of the English Church; he expected to find in him his own most zealous and efficient fellow-worker in the task which lay before him as metropolitan, as well as his best helper in influencing the king for good. Gilbert was in fact the man who in the natural fitness of things had seemed marked out for the primacy; failing that, it was almost a matter of necessity that he should be placed in the see which stood next in dignity, and where both king and primate could benefit by his assistance ever at hand, instead of having to seek out their most useful adviser in the troubled depths of the Welsh marches. The chapter of London, to whom during the pecuniary troubles and long illness of their late bishop Gilbert had been an invaluable friend and protector, were only too glad to elect him; and his world-wide reputation combined with the pleadings of Henry to obtain the Pope’s consent to his translation,[65] which was completed by his enthronement in S. Paul’s cathedral on April 28, 1163.[66]

The king spent the early summer in subduing South-Wales; the primate, in attending a council held by Pope Alexander at Tours.[67] From the day of his departure to that of his return Thomas’s journey was one long triumphal progress; Pope and cardinals welcomed him with such honours as had never been given to any former archbishop of Canterbury, hardly even to S. Anselm himself;[68] and the request which he made to the Pope for Anselm’s canonization[69] may indicate the effect which they produced on his mind—confirming his resolve to stand boldly upon his right of opposition to the secular power whenever it clashed with ecclesiastical theories of liberty and justice. The first opportunity for putting his resolve in practice arose upon a question of purely temporal administration at a council held by Henry at Woodstock on July 31, after his return from Wales. The Welsh princes came to swear fealty to Henry and his heir; Malcolm of Scotland came to confirm his alliance with the English Crown by doing homage in like manner to the little king.[70] Before the council broke up, however, Henry met the sharpest constitutional defeat which had befallen any English sovereign since the Norman conquest, and that at the hands of his own familiar friend.

The king had devised a new financial project for increasing his own revenue at the expense of the sheriffs. According to current practice, a sum of two shillings annually from every hide of land in the shire was paid to those officers for their services to the community in its administration and defence. This payment, although described as customary rather than legal,[71] and called the “sheriff’s aid,”[72] seems really to have been nothing else than the Danegeld, which still occasionally made its appearance in the treasury rolls, but in such small amount that it is evident the sheriffs, if they collected it in full, paid only a fixed composition to the Crown and kept the greater part as a remuneration for their own labours. Henry now, it seems, proposed to transfer the whole of these sums from the sheriff’s income to his own, and have it enrolled in full among the royal dues. Whether he intended to make compensation to the sheriffs from some other source, or whether he already saw the need of curbing their influence and checking their avarice, we know not; but the archbishop of Canterbury started up to resist the proposed change as an injustice both to the receivers and to the payers of the aid. He seems to have looked upon it as an attempt to re-establish the Danegeld with all the odiousness attaching to its shameful origin and its unfair incidence, and to have held it his constitutional duty as representative and champion of the whole people to lift up his voice against it in their behalf. “My lord king,” he said, “saving your good pleasure, we will not give you this money as revenue, for it is not yours. To your officers, who receive it as a matter of grace rather than of right, we will give it willingly so long as they do their duty; but on no other terms will we be made to pay it at all.”—“By God’s Eyes!” swore the astonished and angry king, “what right have you to contradict me? I am doing no wrong to any man of yours. I say the moneys shall be enrolled among my royal revenues.”—“Then by those same Eyes,” swore Thomas in return, “not a penny shall you have from my lands, or from any lands of the Church!”[73]

How the debate ended we are not told; but one thing we know: from that time forth the hated name of “Danegeld” appeared in the Pipe Rolls no more. It seems therefore that, for the first time in English history since the Norman conquest, the right of the nation’s representatives to oppose the financial demands of the Crown was asserted in the council of Woodstock, and asserted with such success that the king was obliged not merely to abandon his project, but to obliterate the last trace of the tradition on which it was founded. And it is well to remember, too, that the first stand made by Thomas of Canterbury against the royal will was made in behalf not of himself or his order but of his whole flock;—in the cause not of ecclesiastical privilege but of constitutional right. The king’s policy may have been really sounder and wiser than the primate’s; but the ground taken by Thomas at Woodstock entitles him none the less to a place in the line of patriot-archbishops of which Dunstan stands at the head.[74]