“I have lit my camp-fires on a frozen flood,
Methinks the ice wears thin.”
But he is a man as full of device as resolution, and at his back are men still fuller of device. The plot thickens, and at last even Rome seems to fall from the archbishop, and give him over to the power of
his enemies. Something of the old fierce spirit leaps up, and Rome itself is not spared, until he is reminded by John of Salisbury, his tried and faithful friend, of the Pope that
“Who sits there
Sits on God’s tower, and further sees than we.”
Whereupon Becket breaks out into a speech full of beauty and of truth, which we regret our limited space forbids us to quote. At the end of it the two cardinals enter to endeavor to find a way for patching up a peace between the archbishop and the king. It must be borne in mind that in those days the church was in sore straits: the pope in exile at Sens; an anti-pope backed by all the power of the German emperor. As Cardinal Otho truly says:
“A mutinous world uplifts this day its front
Against Christ’s Vicar! Save this France and England,
I know not kingdom sound.”