The Project Gutenberg eBook, Leaders of the People, by Joseph Clayton

Transcriber’s Note

Larger versions of most illustrations may be seen by right-clicking them and selecting an option to view them separately, or by double-tapping and/or stretching them.

John Hampden.

From a print by J. Houbraken 1740.

LEADERS OF
THE PEOPLE

STUDIES IN DEMOCRATIC HISTORY

By JOSEPH CLAYTON ❦ ❦

WITH A FRONTISPIECE IN PHOTOGRAVURE
AND NUMEROUS OTHER ILLUSTRATIONS

NEW YORK:  MITCHELL KENNERLEY
TWO EAST TWENTY-NINTH STREET · MCMXI

To the Memory of

FREDERICK YORK POWELL

Regius Professor of Modern History
at the University of Oxford
1894–1904

“I loved him in life and I love him
none the less in death: for what
I loved in him is not dead.”

CONTENTS

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

PREFACE

“Let us now praise famous men, and our
fathers who begat us.”

The names of the seventeen men, here named “Leaders of the People,” are for the most part familiar in our mouths as household words. Those who triumphed, like Anselm and Stephen Langton; or whose cause triumphed, like Simon of Montfort, Eliot, Pym and Hampden, are beyond any loss of fame. Those who in high place quitted themselves like men and died game (if the phrase may be permitted), as did Thomas Becket and Sir Thomas More, have, for all time, deservedly their reward. The unsuccessful rebels, FitzOsbert (called Longbeard), Wat Tyler, Jack Cade and Robert Ket, are hard put to get rid of the obloquy heaped upon them by contemporary authority; while the later rebels, equally unsuccessful, Lilburne, Winstanley, Major Cartwright and Ernest Jones, relying on the pen rather than the sword, escaped the hangman, and in so doing narrowly escaped oblivion. Good Bishop Grosseteste, living out his long life, thwarted often, but unmartyred, enjoys the reputation commonly awarded to conscientious public servants who die in harness.

On the whole, re-perusing the records of these seventeen men, who would altogether reverse the verdicts of time? The obloquy may be removed when the work of the rebels is fairly seen, and it may be judged that they deserved better of the State than appeared when they troubled its peace. The rebels of the pen, too, should be worthy of recollection in this age, for they wrought manfully with the weapon now at once so powerful and so popular. The greater men of our series stand out higher as the distance increases. So far readjusted, the awards of history may be accepted.

But with all the differences of character, one common quality binds these men whose stories are here retold—a resolute hatred of oppression. And one common work, successful or unsuccessful, was theirs—to labour for the liberties of England and the health of its people. The value of each man’s work can only be stated approximately: it is difficult to make full allowance for the vastly different parts our heroes, statesmen and rebels alike, were called to play. The great thing is, that whatever the part, they played it faithfully, as they read it, to the end. We may admit the degrees of service given: it is impossible to do otherwise. Some of these Leaders shone as great orbs of light in their day and generation, lighting not only England, but all western Europe—and still their light burns true and clear across the centuries. Others were but flickering rush-lights—long extinct now. But none were will-o’-the-wisps, for all helped to show the road to be travelled by English men and women seeking freedom, and moving ever towards democracy. At the least, we—enjoying an inheritance won at a great price, and only to be retained on terms no easier—can keep the memory green of some few valiant servants of our liberties. What is wanted is a real history of the growth of the idea of freedom and of popular liberty in this country; and these rough biographical sketches may be accepted as a contribution to the materials for such a book. “Biography is a department of history, and stands to it as the life-history of a plant or an animal does to general biology.”

I have gone back to all the original sources to get once more at the lives of these “Leaders of the People,” and to see them as they were seen by their contemporaries; but I have also done my best to read what the historians of our own day have written concerning them, and in mentioning my authorities I have, in each case, given a list of the modern books that seem to me valuable.

J. C.

September, 1910.

Archbishop Anselm and Norman Autocracy
1093–1109

Authorities: Eadmer—Historia Novorum and Life of Anselm; Orderic of St. Evroul; The English Chronicle; Florence of Worcester; William of Malmesbury; (Rolls Series); Sir Francis Palgrave—England and Normandy; Freeman—Norman Conquest, Vol. V., Reign of William Rufus; Dean Church—St. Anselm.

ARCHBISHOP ANSELM

(From an old French Engraving in the British Museum.)

ARCHBISHOP ANSELM AND
NORMAN AUTOCRACY 1093–1109.

The first real check to the absolutism of Norman rule in England was given by Anselm, Archbishop of Canterbury.

The turbulent ambition of Norman barons threatened the sovereignity of William the Conqueror and of his son, the Red King, often enough, but these outbreaks promised no liberty for England. The fires of English revolt were stamped out utterly five years after Senlac, and the great Conqueror at his death left England crushed; but he left it under the discipline of religion, and he left it loyal to the authority of the crown, grateful for the one protection against the lawless rule of the barons.

The English Chronicler, writing as “one who knew him and once lived at his court,” summed up the character of the Conqueror’s life and work in words that have been freely quoted through the centuries:—

“King William was wiser and mightier than any of his forerunners. He built many minsters, and was gentle to God’s servants, though stern beyond all measure to those who withstood his will.... So stark and fierce was he that none dared resist his will. Earls that did aught against his bidding he put in bonds, and bishops he set off their bishoprics, and abbots off their abbacies, and thanes he cast into prison. He spared not his own brother, called Odo, who was the chief man next to the king, but set him in prison. So just was he that the good peace he made in this land cannot be forgotten. For he made it so that a man might fare alone over his realm with his bosom full of gold, unhurt; and no man durst slay another man whatsoever the evil he hath done him; and if any man harmed a woman he was punished accordingly. He ruled over England, and surveyed the land with such skill that there was not one hide but that he knew who held it, and what it was worth, and these things he set in a written book. So mighty was he that he held Normandy and Brittany, won England and Maine, brought Scotland and Wales to bow to him, and would, had he lived two years longer, have won Ireland by his renown, without need of weapons. Yet surely in his time men had much travail and very many sorrows; and poor men he made to toil hard for the castles he had built. He fell on covetousness, and the love of gold; and took by right and by unright many marks of gold and more hundred pounds of silver of his people, and for little need. He made great deer-parks, and ordered that whoso slew hart or hind, him men should blind; and forbade men to slay deer or boar, and made the hare go free; he loved the big game as if he were their father. And the poor men that were oppressed he recked nought of. All must follow the king’s will if they would live, or have land, or even a quiet life.”

But now, in September, 1087, the great King William was dead, with his life-work done; and from the tyranny of a strong and just ruler, England passed to the despotism of his fearless son, William the Red, who was “terrible and mighty over his land and his men and towards all his neighbours;” in whose reign “all that was loathsome in the eyes of God and righteous men was of common use; wherefore he was loathed by well-nigh all his people, and hateful to God as his end showed.”

There was much of the later Puritan in William I. in the steadfastness of purpose, the suppression of “malignants,” and determination to have justice done, no less than in the sincerity for Church reform, and the deep respect for the ordinances of religion. No king of England worked more harmoniously with a strong archbishop than William I. with Lanfranc—save, perhaps, Charles I. with Laud.

Then on the death of William I., followed less than two years later by Lanfranc’s, came the reaction in Church and State from the efforts after law, religion, and social decency under the Conqueror’s rule.

The Red King had all his father’s sternness and strength, but was without any of that belief in justice, that faith in the Sovereign Power of a Living God, that desire for law and order, and that grave austerity in morals, which saved the Conqueror from baseness in his tyranny.

William II., unmarried, made the wildest and most brutish profligacy fashionable at court. To pay for his debaucheries and extravagances he plundered all who could pay, in especial the Church, enjoying the revenues of all vacant sees and abbeys, and declining to fill up the vacancies so that this enjoyment might remain. After Lanfranc, as the king’s chief adviser, came Ranulf (nicknamed the Torch, or Firebrand), a coarse, unscrupulous bully, with the wit of a criminal lawyer. This man was made Bishop of Durham, and Justiciar. For him government meant nothing but the art of getting money for his royal master, and silencing all opposition.

For over three years there was no Archbishop of Canterbury, and the Red King refused to fill up the vacancy caused by Lanfranc’s death, preferring to enjoy the revenues and possessions of the see; a thing that was shocking to all lovers of religion, and scandalous to those who cared for public decency and the good estate of the country.

Eadmer, a contemporary, describes the condition of England in those early years of William II.:—

“The king seized the church at Canterbury, the mother of all England, Scotland, and Ireland, and the neighbouring isles; he bade his officers to make an inventory of all that belonged to it, within and without; and after he had fixed an allowance for the support of the monks who served God in that place, he ordered the remainder to be disposed of at a rent and brought under his domain. So he put up the Church of Christ to sale; giving the power of lordship over it to anyone who, however hurtful he might be, would bid the highest price. Every year, in wretched succession, a new rent was set; for the king would allow no bargain to remain settled, and whoever promised more ousted him who was paying less, unless the former tenant, giving up his original bargain, came up of his own accord to the offer of the later bidder: and every day might be seen, besides, the most abandoned of men on their business of collecting money for the king, marching about the cloisters of the monastery, heedless of the religious rule of God’s servants, and with fierce and savage looks giving their orders on all sides; uttering threats, lording it over every one, and showing their power to the utmost. What scandals and quarrels and irregularities arose from this I hate to remember. Some of the monks of the church were dispersed at the coming of this misfortune, and sent to other houses, and those who remained suffered many tribulations and indignities. What shall I say of the church tenants, ground down by such wasting and misery, that one might doubt, but that worse followed, whether escaping with bare life they could have been more cruelly oppressed. Nor did all this happen only at Canterbury. The same savage cruelty raged in all her daughter churches in England, which, when bishop or abbot died, at that time fell into widowhood. And this king, too, was the first who ordered this woeful oppression against the churches of God; he had inherited nothing of this sort from his father, but was alone in keeping the vacant churches in his own hands. And thus, wherever you looked, there was wretchedness before your eyes; and this distress lasted for nearly five years over the Church of Canterbury, always increasing, always, as time went on, growing more cruel and evil.”

There is no word of exaggeration in this pitiful lament of Eadmer’s. England under William II. was at the mercy of a Norman whose notion of absolute monarchy was to bleed the land as a subject province. Courageous in battle he was, and skilful in arms, but utterly heedless of the welfare of the people he ruled. It was enough for the Red King if his demands for money were met. There was no one strong enough to gainsay his will, or stand before him as the prophets of old stood before the kings of Israel, until Anselm came to Canterbury. It is only in the utterances of men like Eadmer we learn something of the misery of the nation.[1]

The king was with his court at Gloucester at Christmas, 1092, and Anselm, then abbot of the famous monastery of Bec in Normandy, was in England at that time; partly to comfort his friend, Earl Hugh of Chester, who was sick, and partly to attend to the English affairs of his monastery.

Anselm was known as the friend of Lanfranc. He had been a welcome guest at the court of the Conqueror and in the cloisters at Canterbury. His character stood high above all contemporaries in England or Normandy. Anselm was surely the right man to be made archbishop, and so put an end to a state of things which even to the turbulent barons was discreditable to the country.

The Red King bade Anselm come to his court, and received him with great display of honour. Then came a private interview, and Anselm at once told the king how men spoke ill of his misrule: “Openly or secretly things were daily said of him by nearly all the men of his realm which were not seemly for the king’s dignity.” They parted, and Anselm was busy for some time in England. When the abbot wished to return to Bec William refused him leave to quit the country.

At the beginning of Lent, March, 1093, the king was lying sick at Gloucester. It was believed the sickness was mortal. Certainly the king thought himself dying. Anselm was summoned to minister to him, and on his arrival bade the king “make a clean confession of all that he knows that he has done against God, and promise that, should he recover, he will without pretence amend in all things. The king at once agreed to this, and with sorrow of heart engaged to do all that Anselm required, and to keep justice and mercy all his life long. To this he pledged his faith, and made his bishops witnesses between himself and God, sending persons in his stead to promise his word to God on the altar. An Edict was written and sealed with the king’s seal that all prisoners should be set free in all his dominions, all debts forgiven, all offences heretofore committed pardoned and forgotten for ever. Further, good and holy laws were promised to the whole people, and the sacred upholding of right and such solemn inquest into wrongdoing as may deter others.”

Thus Eadmer.

Florence of Worcester puts the matter more briefly. “When the king thought himself about to die he vowed to God, as his barons advised him, to amend his life, to sell no more churches nor farm them out, but to defend them by his kingly might, and to end all bad laws and to establish just laws.”

There was still the vacant archbishopric to be filled, and the king named Anselm for Canterbury.

In vain Anselm pleaded that he was an old man—he was then sixty—and unfit for so great a responsibility, that he was a monk and had shunned the business of the world.

The bishops assembled round the sick king’s bed would not hear the refusal. Here was religion well nigh destroyed in England, and evil rampant, and the Church of God stricken almost to death, and at such a time was Anselm to prefer his own ease and quiet to the call to deliver Canterbury from its bondage? By main force they placed a pastoral staff within his hands, and while the crowd shouted “Long live the bishop!” he was “carried rather than led to a neighbouring church.” The king at once ordered that Anselm should be invested with all the temporal rights of the see, as Lanfranc had held them, and in September, 1093, Anselm was enthroned at Canterbury, and in December he was consecrated.

Anselm warned the bishops and nobles when they forced the archbishopric upon him that they were making a mistake. “You have yoked to the plough a poor weak sheep with a wild bull,” he said. “This plough is the Church of God, and in England it has been drawn by two strong oxen, the king and the Archbishop of Canterbury, one to do justice and to hold power in the things of this world, the other to teach and govern in the things eternal. Now Lanfranc is dead, and with his untamed companion you have joined an old and feeble sheep.”

That the king and the archbishop were unevenly yoked was manifest on William’s recovery, but it was no poor sheep with whom Rufus had to deal, but a man as brave and steadfast as he was gentle and wise.

Trouble began at once when William rose from his sick-bed. Anselm was now enthroned and no attempt was made to revoke the appointment. But the king’s promises of public amendment were broken without hesitation. The pardoned prisoners were seized, the cancelled debts redemanded and the proceedings against offenders revived.

“Then was there so great misery and suffering through the whole realm that no one can remember to have seen its like in England. All the evil which the king had wrought before he was sick seemed good by the side of the wrong which he did when he was returned to health.”

The king wanting money for his expedition against his brother, Robert of Normandy, tried to persuade Anselm to allow the Church lands, bestowed since Lanfranc’s death on vassals of the crown on tenure of military service, to remain with their holders. He was answered by steady refusal. Had Anselm yielded, he would have been a party to the alienation of lands, that, as part of the property of the see, he was bound to administer for the common good; he would have been a party not only to the spoiling of the Church, but to the robbery of the poor and needy, whose claims, in those days, to temporal assistance from Church estates were not disputed. Any subsequent restitution of such lands was impossible, he foresaw, if it was shown that the archbishop had confirmed what the king had done.

Then came the question of a present of money to the king. Anselm brought five hundred marks, and, but for his counsellors and men of arms, who told him the archbishop ought to have given twice as much, William would have taken the gift gladly enough. As it was, to show his dissatisfaction, the money was returned. Anselm went boldly to the king and warned him that money freely given was better than a forced tribute. To this frank rebuke of the extortion practised by the king’s servants, William answered that he wanted neither his money, nor his preaching, nor his company. Anselm retired not altogether displeased at the refusal, for too many of the clergy bought church offices by these free gifts after they were instituted. In vain his friends urged him to seek the king’s favour by increasing his present, Anselm gave the five hundred marks to the poor, and shook his head at the idea of buying the king’s favour.

But if Anselm declined to walk in the path of corruption to oblige the king, William was equally resolute to make the path of righteousness a hard road for the archbishop.

In February, 1094, when the Red King was at Hastings waiting to cross to Normandy, Anselm appealed to him to sanction a council of bishops, whose decisions approved by the crown should have the authority of law. There were two things for such a council to do: (1) stop the open vice and profligacy which ravaged the land; (2) find abbots for the many monasteries then without heads. In Anselm’s words, the council was “to restore the Christian religion which was well-nigh dead in so many.”

William treated the request with angry contempt, and when Anselm sent bishops to him asking why the king refused him friendship, an evasive answer was returned.

“Give him money,” said the bishops again to Anselm, “if you want peace with him. Give him the five hundred marks, and promise him as much more, and you will have the royal friendship. This, it seems to us, is the only way out of the difficulty.”

But it was not Anselm’s way. He would not even offer what had been rejected. “Besides, the greater part of it was spent on the poor.”

William burst out into wrathful speech when he was told of this reply. “Never will I hold him as my father and archbishop, and ever shall I hate him with bitter hatred. I hated him much yesterday, and to-day I hate him still more.”

A year later (March, 1095) at a great council of bishops and nobles, held at the castle of Rockingham, the king’s hatred had full vent. From the first the Archbishop of Canterbury received from the Pope a pallium, the white woollen stole with four crosses, which was “the badge of his office and dignity,”[2] and Anselm was anxious to journey to Rome to obtain his pallium from Pope Urban. William objected to this on the ground that there was another claimant to the papacy, and that until he had decided who was the rightful pope no one in England had a right to do so. In vain Anselm pointed out that he, with all Normandy, had acknowledged Urban before he had become archbishop. William retorted angrily that Anselm could only keep his faith to the Apostolic See by breaking his faith to the king.

The council of Rockingham met to settle the question—not the question of the supremacy of Rome in Western Christendom[3]—but the question whether, in England, there was any higher authority than the crown. William did not pretend to dispute the papal supremacy in the Church. His claim was that the king alone must first acknowledge the pope before any of his subjects could do so. In reality the king’s one desire was “to take from Anselm all authority for maintaining the Christian religion. For as long as any one in all the land was said to hold any power except through him, even in the things of God, it seemed to him that the royal dignity was diminished.” (Eadmer.) William acknowledged Pope Urban readily enough, but he would have Archbishop Anselm understand that the papacy must be acknowledged by permission of the king of England. That was the real ground of contention between these two men: was there any power on earth higher in England than the English crown? According to William, to appeal to Rome was to dispute the absolutism of the crown. Anselm maintained that in all things of God he must render obedience to the Chief Shepherd and Prince of the Church, to the Vicar of St. Peter; and in matters of earthly dignity he must render counsel and service to his lord the king.

The bishops at Rockingham were the king’s men. Many of them had bought their bishoprics, all were afraid of the royal displeasure. The stand made by Anselm, unsupported though he was, did something to inspire a better courage in the ranks of the clergy[4]; but in that Lent of 1095 there was no sign of support for the archbishop. William only wanted to break the will of this resolute old man, the one man in all the kingdom who dared to have a mind and utterance of his own, and the mitred creatures of the king supported their lord even to the point of recommending the forcible deposition of Anselm from his see, or at least of depriving him of the staff and ring of office. With one consent the bishops accepted the king’s suggestion of renouncing all obedience to Anselm.

But the barons were not so craven. To the king’s threat, “No man shall be mine, who will be his” (Anselm’s), the nobles said bluntly that not having taken any oath of fealty to the archbishop they could not abjure it. And Anselm was their archbishop. “It is his work to govern the Christian religion in this land, and we who are Christians cannot deny his guidance while we live here.”

The three days’ conference at Rockingham ended in disappointment to the hopes of William of absolute autocracy, and in general contempt for the prelates whose abject servility had availed nothing.

Anselm alone stood higher in the eyes of the men of England, and greater was the ill-will of William. For another two years Anselm held his ground against the king. The pallium was brought from Rome by Walter, Bishop of Albano, and placed on the altar at Canterbury, and Anselm was content to take it from the altar. William had written in vain to Pope Urban praying for the deposition of Anselm, and promising a large annual tribute to Rome if his prayer was granted. The pope, of course, declined to do anything of the sort, and William had to make the best of the situation. He wanted money for his own purposes, and his barons were now against him in his quarrel with the archbishop. For a time William adopted a semblance of peace with Anselm, but his anger soon blazed out again. The ground of complaint this time was that the soldiers whom the archbishop had sent to the king for his military expedition against Wales were inadequate—without proper equipment, and unfit for service. The archbishop was summoned to appear before the King’s Court to “do the king right.”

From the time of his acceptance of the archbishopric, Anselm had been hoping against hope that the king would support him, as the Conqueror had supported Lanfranc, in the building up of the Christian religion in England—this summons to the King’s Court was the death-blow to all these hopes. The defendant in the King’s Court was at the mercy of the king, who could pronounce whatever judgment he pleased.[5] Anselm returned no answer to the summons, but his mind was made up.

“Having knowledge that the king’s word ruled all judgment in the King’s Court, where nothing was listened to except what the king willed, it seemed to Anselm unbecoming that he should contend, as if disputing, as litigants do, about a matter of words, and should submit the justice of his cause to the judgment of a court where neither law, nor equity, nor reason prevailed. So he held his peace, and gave no answer to the messenger.” (Eadmer.)

From the despotism of the Red King Anselm would turn for justice to the centre of Christendom. In England he was impotent to stem the evil that flowed from the savage absolutism of the throne. All that one man could do to resist the royal tyranny Anselm had done, and now this summons to the King’s Court was the final answer to all his efforts to restrain a lawless king, and to promote the Christian religion in England. He would not go through the farce of pleading in the King’s Court, where judgment was settled by the unbridled caprice of the king, self-respect forbade the archbishop from that; he would appeal to the only court on earth higher than the courts of kings—the court whose head, in those days, was the head of Christendom.[6]

William dropped the summons to the King’s Court, and for a time refused permission to Anselm to leave the country. Bishops and barons now urged Anselm not to persist in his appeal to Rome. But the archbishop was resolute, and in the autumn of 1097 the king yielded, and Anselm left the country.[7]

The first campaign against despotism in England was over—the battle was to be renewed when Henry I. wore the crown.

At Rome Pope Urban, with all the goodwill in the world, and with a very real affection and regard for Anselm, could do nothing against the Red King except rebuke his envoys, and do honour to the much-tried archbishop. Anselm himself prevented the excommunication of William when it was proposed at the Council of Bari, October, 1098.

But Pope Urban would not allow Anselm to resign his archbishopric, and this in spite of all Anselm’s entreaties.

In the spring of 1099 came a General Council at Rome—at which Anselm assisted—a council remarkable for its decision against allowing clergy to receive investiture of churches from the hands of laymen, and by so doing to become the vassals of temporal lords. Excommunication was declared to be the penalty for all who gave or received Church appointments on such conditions.

It was at the close of this council that an outspoken Bishop of Lucca called attention to Anselm’s case. “One sits amongst us in silence and meekness who has come from the far ends of the earth. His very silence cries aloud. His humility and patience, so gentle and so deep, as they rise to God should set us on fire. This one man has come here, wronged and afflicted, seeking judgment and justice of the Apostolic See. And now this is the second year, and what help has he found?”

Pope Urban answered that attention should be given, but nothing further was done.

Anselm left Rome and went to Lyons, remaining in France until the death of William in August, 1100. Henry was at once chosen king in his room, and crowned at Westminster three days after his brother’s death. Six weeks later, at Henry’s earnest request—he prayed him “to come back like a father to his son Henry and the English people”—Anselm landed at Dover and returned to take up the task allotted to him on his consecration as archbishop.

Henry at the outset of his reign promised “God and all the people” that the old scandals of selling and farming out the Church lands should be stopped, and “to put down all unrighteousness that had been in his brother’s time, and to hold the best laws that ever stood in any king’s day before him.” That this charter was of value may be taken from the verdict on the king by the Chronicler of the time. “Good man he was and great awe there was of him. No man durst misdo against another in his day. He made peace for man and beast. Whoso carried a burden of gold and silver no man durst do him wrong.”

Two evils that pressed very hardly on the mass of hard-working people, the devastation that attended the king’s progress through the land[8], and the coining of false money, were at Anselm’s instigation checked by the king.

But with all Henry’s desire for the restoration of religion and law in the land, he was the Conqueror’s son, and for Anselm the struggle against absolutism in government was not yet over. Only now the battle was not with a fierce, untamed despot like the Red King, but with an autocrat of an even more formidable type, a stern man of business, in whose person alone must be found the source of all law and order, and who would brook no questioning of the royal will.

At the beginning of his reign Henry found the archbishop’s loyalty and good sense invaluable. As Lanfranc had stood by the Conqueror in a marriage which was objectionable from the point of view of Church law, so Anselm stood by his son when he sought the hand of Edith, daughter of the sainted Queen Margaret of Scotland. Here the objection to the marriage was not on the grounds of affinity or consanguinity, but in the fact that Edith was an inmate of the convent at Romsey, and, it was alleged, a professed nun. Edith insisted that she had but taken refuge in the convent to obtain the protection of her aunt Christina, the abbess, and she had worn the habit of a nun as a safeguard against the brutal passions of the Red King and his courtiers. The fear of violence at the hands of the Normans had driven women to take the veil, and Lanfranc had been known to grant release from vows taken under such mortal pressure. Anselm was not the man to exalt the letter of the law above the spirit of liberty. He was content that a council of the great men in Church and State should hold an inquiry, and on their verdict declaring Edith free of her vows, the archbishop gave his blessing on the marriage.

The same great qualities of loyalty and good sense made Anselm stand by the king when the Norman lords, pricked on by Ranulf the Torch, the rascally Bishop of Durham (who had escaped from imprisonment in the Tower by making his gaolers drunk), and hating Henry for “his English ways,” proposed to back up Robert of Normandy in his attempts to seize the crown. According to Eadmer, but for Anselm’s faithfulness and labours, which turned the scale when so many were wavering, King Henry would have lost the sovereignty of the realm of England at that time.

But Anselm’s services to the king are of small account by the side of his services to English liberty, and Anselm’s resistance to Henry’s demands for an absolute monarchy was of lasting influence in the centuries that followed.[9]

The struggle began when Henry called upon Anselm for a new declaration of homage to the crown, and required him to receive the archbishopric afresh by a new act of investiture. This was a claim that had never been made before. “It imported that on the death of the sovereign the archbishop’s commission expired, that his office was subordinate and derivative, and the dignity therefore reverted to the crown.” (Sir F. Palgrave.)

Anselm met the demand with the answer that such a course was impossible. Nay, the very ecclesiastical “customs” which for some time past had given the appointment of bishops and abbots to the crown, and had made the bishops “the king’s men” by obliging them to do homage and to receive investiture of their office with ring and staff at the royal hands, were now impossible for Anselm. The Council at the Lateran, at which Anselm had been present, had forbidden the bishops of the Church to become the vassals of the kings of the earth, and Anselm was not the man to question this decision. He had seen only too much, under William the Red, of the curse of royal supremacy in the Church. He had stood up alone against the iniquities of misrule, just because the bishops, who should have been pastors and overseers of a Christian people, were the sworn creatures of the king. Henceforth it was forbidden by the authority that rested in the seat of St. Peter at Rome for a bishop to receive consecration as a king’s vassal.

But if Anselm would be no party to what had become an intolerable evil, Henry would not give up the rights his father had exercised without a contest. He was willing to do his best for the Church, but it must be in his own way. “Pledging himself in his own heart and mind not to abate a jot of his supremacy over the clergy, he would exercise his authority in Church affairs somewhat more decently than his father, and a great deal more than his brother; but that was all.” (Sir F. Palgrave.)

Both Henry and Anselm recognized the gravity of the issue. Were the bishops and abbots to continue to receive investiture from the king they were “his men,” and his autocracy was established over all. Stop the investiture and the bishops were first and chiefly the servants of the Most High, acknowledging a sovereignty higher than that exercised by the princes of this world, and preferring loyalty to the Church Catholic and its Father at Rome, to blind obedience to the crown.

In brief, the question in dispute really was—Was there, or was there not, any power on earth greater than the English crown?—a question which no English king before Henry VIII. answered successfully in the negative. In contending for the freedom of the bishops of the Church from vassalage to the crown, Anselm was contending for the existence of an authority to which even kings should pay allegiance. It was not the rights of the clergy that were at stake, for the terrors of excommunication did not prevent bishops from receiving consecration on Henry’s terms, and Anselm stood alone now, as in the days of the Red King, in the resistance to despotism. It was the feeling and the knowledge, which Anselm shared with the best churchmen of his day, that great as the power of the king must be, it was a bad thing for such power to exist unchecked, and that it were well for the world that its mightiest monarchs should know there was a spiritual dominion given to the successor of St. Peter, and to his children, a dominion of divine foundation that claimed obedience even from kings.

Anselm put it to the king that the canons of the Church, and the decrees of a great council had forbidden the “customs” of investiture which the king claimed; and he pleaded that he was an old man, and that unless he could work with the king on the acceptance of the Church canons, it was no use his remaining in England, “for he could not hold communion with those who broke these laws”: Henry, for his part, was much disturbed. It was a grave matter to lose the investiture of churches, and the homage of prelates; it was a grave matter, too, to let Anselm leave the country while he himself was hardly established in the kingdom. “On the one side it seemed to him that he should be losing, as it were, half of his kingdom; on the other, he feared lest Anselm should make his brother Robert King of England,”—for Robert might easily be brought to submit to the Apostolic See if he could be made king on such terms.

Henry suggested an appeal to the pope on the question of the right of the crown to “invest” the bishops, and Anselm, who all along was anxious for peace—if peace could be obtained without acknowledgment of royal absolutism—at once agreed.

The pope, of course, could not grant Henry’s request. To allow the high offices of the Church to be disposed of at the caprice of kings and princes, without any recognition of the sacredness of these offices, to admit that the chief ministers of religion were first and foremost “the king’s men,” seemed to Pope Paschal, as it seemed to Anselm, a concession to evil, and the establishment of a principle which experience had proved thoroughly vicious and mischievous.

Then for nearly three years a correspondence dragged on between Henry and the pope, neither wishing for an open rupture, and in the meantime, Henry, backed by most of the bishops and nobles in setting at nought the canons which had forbidden investiture, proposed to go on appointing and investing new bishops as before.

Finally, the king appealed to Anselm to go to Rome “and try what he could do with the pope, lest the king by losing the rights of his predecessors should be disgraced.”

Anselm was now (1103) an old man of seventy, but he agreed to go; only “he could do nothing to the prejudice of the liberty of the Church or his own honour.” What Henry hoped for was that the pope would grant some personal dispensation in the matter of the royal “customs,” and he had tried to persuade Anselm that such dispensation was sure to be granted. Anselm did not believe the dispensation possible or desirable, but left the decision with the acknowledged head of Christendom at Rome; and though for another three years Henry urged his suit, no dispensation could be wrung from the pope. All that the pope would grant was that the bishops might do “homage” to the crown for their temporal rights.

At last, in April, 1106, Anselm returned to England. The bishops themselves, who had sided with the king against him, implored him to return, so wretched had become the state of religion in England in his absence. They promised to do his commands and to fight with him the battle of the Lord.

Henry, fresh from the conquest of Normandy, sent word of his good-will, and of his desire for the archbishop’s presence. The long drawn-out battle was over, and the king had to be content with “homage,” and to resign the claim to investiture.

“On August 1st (1107) an assembly of bishops, abbots, and chief men of the realm, was held in London, in the king’s palace, and for three days the matter of the investiture of churches was fully discussed between the king and the bishops in Anselm’s absence. Then, in the presence of Anselm and before the whole multitude, the king granted and decreed that henceforth and for ever no one should be invested in England with bishopric or abbey by staff and ring, either by the king or the hand of any layman; while Anselm allowed that no one chosen for a bishopric should be refused consecration for having done homage to the king. This having been settled, the king, by the counsel of Anselm and the chief men of the realm, appointed priests in nearly all those churches in England which had long been widowed of their pastors.” (Eadmer.)

Victory rested with Anselm. The old archbishop had done his best for the liberty of religion, and by contending for this liberty he had wrought for common freedom.[10] Later ages and struggles were to bring out more clearly that some measure of political and social liberty must follow the demand for freedom in religion. “Religious forces, and religious forces alone, have had sufficient influence to ensure practical realisation for political ideas.” (Figgis, Studies of Political Thought.)

Anselm’s life was nearly over, his work was accomplished, a philosophical treatise “Concerning the agreement of Foreknowledge, Predestination and the Grace of God with Free Will” was written with difficulty in the last years. Then his appetite failed him, and all food became loathsome. At last he was persuaded to take to his bed, and on April 21st, 1109—the Wednesday of Holy Week—at daybreak Anselm passed away.

Anselm’s name has long been enrolled in the calendar of the saints of the Church Catholic, no less is it to be cherished by all who love liberty. Well may it be said of him, “he was ever a close follower of Truth, and walked in noble companionship with Pity and Courage.” Anselm’s plain good sense and charity were conspicuous in his benediction of the marriage of Henry and Edith, but these great qualities were earlier displayed when Lanfranc consulted him as to the claims of the English Archbishop Ælphege to be canonised as a martyr. Ælphege had been slain by the Danes for refusing to ransom his life at the expense of his tenants; and Anselm replied to Lanfranc that he who would die rather than oppress his tenants dies for justice’ sake, and he who dies for justice dies a martyr for Christ.

His sympathy and humaneness shone out a thousand times. There is the story Eadmer tells of an abbot, who came to Anselm at Bec, and deplored that he could do no good with the boys at his monastery. “In spite of all we do they are perverse and incorrigible,” said the abbot, despondently. “We are always beating them, but they only get worse: and though we constrain them in every way we can, it’s all of no use.” “Constrain them!” answered Anselm. “Tell me, my lord abbot, when you plant a tree in your garden, do you so tie it up that it cannot stretch forth its branches? And if you did so, what sort of tree would it become a few years hence when you released it? But this is just what you do with your boys. You cramp them in with terrors and threats and blows, so that it is quite impossible for them to grow or enjoy any freedom. And kept down in this way their temper is spoilt by evil thoughts of hatred and suspicion against you, and they put down all you do to ill-nature and dislike. Why are you so harsh with them? Are they not human beings of the same nature as yourself? How would you like to be treated as you treat them?” The abbot was finally persuaded that he had been all wrong. “We have wandered,” he said, “from the way of truth, and the light of discretion hath not shone on us.”

There is another story which gives Anselm’s pity and feeling of kinship with the whole animal creation. It was when he was archbishop, and was riding one day from Windsor to Hayes that a hare chased by the dogs of some of his company took refuge under the feet of his horse. Anselm at once pulled up and forebade the hare to be molested, and when his escort laughed gleefully at the capture, the archbishop said: “You may laugh, but it is no laughing matter for this poor unhappy creature, which is like the soul of a departing man pursued by evil spirits. Mortal enemies attack it, and it flies to us for its life: and while it turns to us for safety we laugh.” He rode on, and in a loud voice forbade the dogs to touch the hare; which, glad to be at liberty, darted off to the fields and woods.

That Anselm never wavered in his tenderness for the weak and oppressed may be learnt from the great Church Synod held at Westminster in 1102—a council summoned on the strong request of the archbishop. The slave trade was specially denounced at this council as a “wicked trade used hitherto in England, by which men are sold like brute animals,” and a canon was drawn up to that effect.

Anselm’s enduring courage and desire for truth are conspicuous all his life. He fought single-handed against both William and Henry, and no weight of numbers, no world-wise talk from other prelates could make him budge. If he withstood the Red King and his court at Rockingham, equally firm was he in withstanding the Norman barons who were inclined to break away from their sworn allegiance to Henry. No Englishman by birth or blood was Anselm, for he was born at Aosta, and spent the greater part of his life on the Continent, but he brought to England the finest gifts of life, and gave them freely in service to England’s liberty. He withstood an absolutism that threatened the total enslavement of the nation, and the witness he bore to liberty was taken up and renewed in the centuries that followed. “Anselm was truly a great man. So good that he was held a saint in his very lifetime, so meek that even his enemies honoured him, so wise that he was the foremost thinker of his day, and the forerunner of the greatest philosophers of ours.” (F. York Powell.)

Thomas of Canterbury
The Defender of the Poor 1162–1170

Authorities: Benedict of Peterborough; Garnier; William FitzStephen; John of Salisbury; Herbert of Bosham; Alan of Tewkesbury; Edward Grim; Roger of Pontigny; William of Canterbury; Robert of Cricklade—Materials for the History of Thomas Becket, 7 vols.; Thomas Saga (Icelandic), translated by Magnusson; Giraldus Cambrensis; Gervase of Canterbury; William of Newburgh; Roger of Hoveden, III.; Ralph Diceto (Rolls Series); Froude, R. H.—Remains, Vol. 3; Life of Becket, by Canon J. C. Robertson; Life of St. Thomas Becket, by John Morris, S.J.; Stubbs—Constitutional History, Vol. I; Freeman—Historical Essays, 1st Series; W. H. Hutton—English History by Contemporary Writers—St. Thomas of Canterbury.

THOMAS A BECKET

(From an old Engraving after Van Eyck.)

THOMAS OF CANTERBURY
THE DEFENDER OF THE POOR 1162–1170

Fifty years after the death of Anselm the struggle with absolute monarchy had to be renewed in England, and again the Archbishop of Canterbury was the antagonist of the crown, standing alone for the most part, as Anselm stood, in his resistance to autocracy.

The contrast is great between the upbringing and character of Anselm and of Thomas; but both men gave valiant service in the cause of liberty in England, and both are placed in the calendar of the saints. For Thomas and Anselm alike the choice was between the favour of the King of England, the safe broad road of passive obedience, and the following of the call of conscience on the craggy way of royal displeasure; and to the everlasting honour of these two men, and of the religion they professed, they chose the steep and narrow path with no faltering step, and followed the gleam, heedless of this world’s glory, heedless of life itself.

Thomas was no monk as Anselm was, when the king nominated him for the archbishopric of Canterbury. His early life was not spent in the cloister but in the employment of a wealthy London sheriff, in the office of Archbishop Theobald, at Lambeth, and as Chancellor of England.

The son of gentle parents—his father Gilbert sometime sheriff—“London citizens of the middle class, not usurers nor engaged in business, but living well on their own income,” according to FitzStephen, Thomas was the first Englishman to be made archbishop. His gifts marked him out for high office. Theobald had sent him abroad to study law at the great school at Bologna, and at the age of 36 made him archdeacon of Canterbury, at that time “the dignity in the Church of England next after the bishops and abbots, and which brought him an hundred pounds of silver.” A year later, 1155, the young newly crowned king, Henry II., on the advice of old Archbishop Theobald, made Thomas the Chancellor. Theobald, anxious about the present, and apprehensive for the future—for the king was very young, and those about him were known to be hostile to the freedom of the Church and willing to treat England as a conquered land—sought to prevent the evils which seemed to be at hand by making Thomas a partner of the King’s counsels. He could say, after ten years’ experience, that Thomas was high-principled and prudent, wisely zealous for justice, and whole-hearted for the freedom of the Church, and he held forth to the king on the wisdom, the courage and the faithfulness of his archdeacon, “and the admirable sweetness of his manners.”

The appointment was made, nor could anyone say that it was ill done, or that Theobald in his recommendation, or Henry II. in his acceptance, of Thomas for the chancellorship could have done better for England.

The chancellor was magnificent, and his dignity was accounted second from the king. Nobles sent their children to Thomas to be trained in his service. The king commended to him his son, the heir to the throne. Barons and knights did homage to him. On his embassy to the French king never had been seen such a retinue of followers, and such a lavish display of the wealth and grandeur of England. The proud and mighty he treated with harshness and violence. Yet it was said, by those who knew him intimately, that he was lowly in his own eyes, and gentle and meek to those who were humble in heart. And in the courts of kings, where chastity is never commonly extolled, or purity of life the fashion, Thomas, the chancellor, was known for his cleanness of living and his unblemished honour. Many enemies he had, many who hated him for his power; but never was breath of scandal uttered against the chancellor’s private life, or suggestion made that the carnal lusts and appetites which, unbridled, play havoc with men great and small, could claim Thomas for their subject.

He might be reproached by a monk for that he, being an archdeacon, lived so secular a life, wearing the dress of a courtier, and charging on the field with knights in France, but it could not be alleged that church or realm suffered neglect from the chancellor. “By divine inspiration and the counsel of Thomas, the lord king did not long retain vacant bishoprics and abbacies, so that the patrimony of the Crucified might be brought into the treasury, as was afterwards done, but bestowed them with little delay on honourable persons, and according to God’s law.” (W. FitzStephen.)

The close friendship and warm affection of the king for his chancellor were known to all. When the day’s business was done “they would play together like boys of the same age.” They sat together in church and hall and rode out together. “Never in Christian times were there two men more of one mind or better friends.” It was natural on the death of Archbishop Theobald, in 1161, that people should point to Thomas as his successor, though the chancellor shrank, as Anselm had done, from the post.

“I know three poor priests in England any one of whom I would rather see advanced to the archbishopric than myself,” he declared earnestly, when his friend the prior of Leicester (who also remonstrated with him for his unclerical dress) told him the rumours of the court. “For as for me, if I was appointed, I know the king so through and through that I should be forced either to lose his favour or, which God forbid, to lay aside the service of God.”

Thomas uttered the same warning to Henry when the king proposed the primacy to him. “I know certainly,” he said, “that if God should so dispose that this happen, you would soon turn away your love, and the favour which is now between us would be changed into bitterest hate. I know that you would demand many things in Church matters, for already you have demanded them, which I could never bear quietly, and the envious would take occasion to provoke an endless strife between us.”

But Henry’s mind was made up. Residing largely in France, he would have Thomas, Archbishop of Canterbury and Chancellor, to rule England as his vice-regent. Six years had Thomas been the king’s friend and chancellor, but the king did not know at all the real character of his man, or rather it was inconceivable to the royal mind that Thomas, whom the king had raised from a mere nobody, from Archdeacon of Canterbury, an important ecclesiastic at best, to the chief man in the realm, should ever dare set himself at variance with the king’s will. Henry, with his untiring energy, was earnest enough for good government in Church and State under an absolute monarchy, and he counted on greater co-operation with Thomas in carrying out his plans, were the latter archbishop. Hitherto, more than once the chancellor had succeeded in moderating the king’s outbursts of wrath against some hapless offender, but he had never shown himself a partisan of the clergy at the expense of the commonwealth,[11] and his lack of pride in his order had even incurred rebuke, so little of the ecclesiastic did this statesman appear.

Thomas understood the king better than the king understood his chancellor. But his protests were in vain. He was as surely marked for the archbishopric as Anselm had been. Bishops of the province approved and the monks of Canterbury duly voted for the king’s chancellor in common consent, Gilbert Foliot, the Bishop of Hereford, and afterwards of London, and the archbishop’s enemy to the end, alone opposing the election.

“Then the archbishop-elect was by the king’s authority declared free of all debts to the crown and given free to the Church of England, and in that freedom he was received by the Church with the customary hymns and words of praise.” (Herbert of Bosham.)

On June 2nd, 1162, the Saturday after Whit Sunday, Thomas was ordained priest and on the following day consecrated bishop. (The new archbishop instituted the festival of Trinity Sunday to commemorate his consecration, and some 200 years later the festival was made of general observance in the Catholic Church.) The king realised the mistake he had made within a year of the consecration. The brilliant chancellor was no sooner archbishop than he turned from all the gaieties of the world, and while no less a statesman, adopted the life of his monks—though never himself a monk—at Canterbury. Henceforth Archbishop Thomas was the unflinching champion of the poor and them that had no helper, the resolute defender of the liberties of the Church against all who would make religion subject to the autocracy of the king of England.

Thomas was forty-four years old, in the full strength of his manhood, when he was made archbishop, and for eight years he did battle with the crown, only laying down his charge at the call of martyrdom.

The first disappointment to Henry was the resignation of the chancellor’s seal.[12] It was clear to Thomas that he could no longer serve the crown and do the work of a Christian bishop at the same time, and he had accepted with full sense of responsibility the see of Canterbury. There was no room for the egotism that loves power, the vaulting ambition that o’erleaps itself, or even the self-deception that persuades a man holding to high position at sacrifice of principle that his motive is disinterested, in St. Thomas of Canterbury. More than once England was to see in later years men who strove vainly to serve with equal respect the Christian religion and the royal will—the service always ended in the triumph of the latter. Thomas was far too clearly-sighted to imagine such joint service possible, and for him, elected and consecrated to the primacy of the English Church, there was no longer any choice. As chancellor, keeping his conscience clear, he had done the best he could for law and order as the king’s right hand man. As Archbishop of Canterbury his duty, first and foremost, was to maintain the Christian religion and defend the cause of the poor and needy.

But to Henry the resignation of the chancellorship was an act of desertion, a declared challenge to the royal supremacy. Henry II. was no more the man than his grandfather Henry I. had been to brook anything that threatened resistance to the king’s rule.

Courtiers who hated Thomas were always at hand to poison the ears of the king by defaming the archbishop, and this, says William FitzStephen, was the first cause of the trouble. Another cause was the hatred of the king for the clergy of England, hatred provoked by the notoriously disreputable lives of more than one clerk in holy orders. The battle between Henry and Thomas began on this matter of criminous clerks.

William the Conqueror and Lanfranc recognizing that the Church, strong and well ordered, made for national well-being, had set up ecclesiastical courts wherein all matters affecting church law and discipline were to be dealt with by the clergy, to the end that the clergy should not be mixed up in lawsuits and should be excluded from the lay courts. Henry II. was not satisfied that criminous clerks were adequately dealt with in these ecclesiastical courts, where no penalty involving bloodshed might be inflicted, and where the savage punishments of mutilation had no place. Thomas was as anxious as the king for the Church to be purged of abuses, but he was resolved not to hand over offenders to the secular arm. The archbishop was an ardent reformer. “He plucked up, pulled down, scattered and rooted out whatever he found amiss in the vineyard of the Lord,” wrote a contemporary; but he would shelter his flock as far as he could by the canon law from the hideous cruelties of the King’s Courts.[13] It was not for the protection of the clergy alone the archbishop was fighting in the councils summoned by the king at Westminster in 1163, and at Clarendon in 1164.

“Ecclesiastical privileges were not so exclusively priestly privileges as we sometimes fancy. They sheltered not only ordained ministers, but all ecclesiastical officers of every kind; the Church Courts also claimed jurisdiction in the causes of widows and orphans. In short, the privileges for which Thomas contended transferred a large part of the people, and that the most helpless part, from the bloody grasp of the King’s Courts to the milder jurisdiction of the bishop.” (Freeman, Historical Essay, First Series.)

Before the climax of the dispute between Henry and Thomas was reached at Clarendon, the archbishop had resisted the king in a matter of arbitrary taxation—“the earliest recorded instance of resistance to the royal will in a matter of taxation”[14]—and had fallen still further in the king’s disfavour.

Henry was at Woodstock, on July 1st, 1163, with the archbishop and the great men of the land, and among other matters a question was raised concerning the payment of a two shillings land tax on every hide of land. This was an old tax dating from Saxon times, which William the Conqueror had increased. It was paid to the sheriffs, who in return undertook the defence of the county, and may be compared with the county rates of our own day. The king declared this tax should in future be collected for the crown, and added to the royal revenue; and no one dared to question this decision until Archbishop Thomas arose and told the king to his face that the tax was not to be exacted as revenue, but was a voluntary offering to be paid to the sheriffs only “so long as they shall serve us fitly and maintain and defend our dependants.” It was not a tax that could be enforced by law.

Henry, bursting with anger, swore, “By God’s Eyes” it should be given as revenue, and enscrolled as a king’s tax.

The archbishop replied with quiet determination, “aware lest by his sufferance a custom should come in to the hurt of his successors,” that, “by the reverence of those Eyes,” by which the king had sworn, not one penny should be paid from his lands, or from the rights of the Church. The king was silenced, no answer was forthcoming to the objector, and the tax was paid as before to the sheriffs. But “the indignation of the king was not set at rest,” and in October came the Council of Westminster.

The king at once demanded that criminous clerks should not only be punished in the Church Courts by the sentence of deprivation, but should further be handed over to the King’s Courts for greater penalties, alleging that those who were not restrained from crime by the remembrance of their holy orders would care little for the loss of such orders.

The archbishop replied quietly that this proposed new discipline was contrary to the religious liberty of the land, and that he would never agree to it. The Church was the one sanctuary against the barbarities of the law, and Thomas to the end would maintain the security it offered. More important it seemed to him that clerical offenders should escape the king’s justice, than that all petty felons who could claim the protection of the Church should be given over to mutilation by the king’s officers. The bishops silently supported the primate in this matter, though they told him plainly, “Better the liberties of the Church perish than that we perish ourselves. Much must be yielded to the malice of the times.”

Thomas answered this pitiful plea by admitting the times were bad. “But,” he added, “are we to heap sin upon sin? It is when the Church is in trouble, and not merely when the times are peaceful, that a bishop must cleave to the right. No greater merit was there to the bishops of old who gave their blood for the Church than there is now to those who die in defence of her liberties.”

But the bishops were wavering, fearful of defying the king’s will. And when Henry, defeated for the moment by the archbishop’s stand, angrily called upon them to take an oath to observe in future “the royal customs” of the realm as settled by his grandfather, Henry I., they all agreed to do so, adding the clause “saving the rights of their order.” The king objected, calling for the promise to be made “absolutely and without qualifications,” until Thomas reminded him that the fealty the bishops swore to give the crown “in life and limb and earthly honour” was sworn “salvo ordine suo,” and that the “earthly honour” promise, which included all the royal “customs” of Henry I., was not to be given by bishops in any other way.

It was now late at night, and the king broke up the council in anger, leaving the bishops to retire as they would.

Henry was resolved to abolish the Church Courts and destroy the protection they afforded. He would have all brought under the severity of his law, in spite of the archbishop. He knew the bishops were wavering and were fearful of the royal displeasure. Thomas Becket, and Thomas Becket alone, was the obstruction to the king’s schemes, and firm as Becket might stand, the king would break down his opposition.

The very day after Westminster the king demanded the resignation of all the fortresses and honours Thomas had held under the crown since he had been made chancellor, and these were surrendered at once.

Then Henry tried a personal appeal, and once more the two met together in a field near Northampton. Henry began by reminding Thomas of all he had done for him.

“Have I not raised you from a mean and lowly state to height of honour and dignity? How is it after so many benefits and so many proofs of my affection, which all have seen, you have forgotten these things, and are now not only ungrateful, but my opponent in everything?”

The archbishop answered: “Far be it from me, my lord. I am not forgetful of the favours which God has conferred upon me at your hands. Far be it from me to be so ungrateful as to resist your will in anything so long as it is in accord with God’s will.” St. Thomas, enlarging on the necessity of obedience to God rather than to men, should the will of man clash with the will of God, the king at last interrupted him impatiently with the intimation that he did not want a sermon just then.

“Are you not my man, the son of one of my servants?”

“In truth,” the archbishop answered, “I am not sprung from a race of kings. Neither was blessed Peter, the prince of the apostles, to whom was committed the leadership of the Church.”

“And in truth Peter died for his Lord,” said the king.

“I too will die for my Lord when the time comes,” replied the archbishop.

“You trust too much to the ladder you have mounted by,” said the king.

But the archbishop answered: “I trust in God, for cursed is the man that putteth his trust in man.” Then the archbishop went on to remind Henry of the proofs he had given of his fidelity in the years when he was chancellor, and warned him that he would have done well to have taken counsel with his archbishop concerning spiritual things than with those who had kindled the flame of envy and vengeance against one who had done them no wrong.

The only reply the king gave was to urge that the Archbishop should drop the words “saving their order” in promising to obey the royal customs.

The archbishop refused to yield, and so they parted.[15]

At the close of the year the archbishop’s difficulties had been increased by appeals on all sides to yield to the king. The bishops were for peace at any price, and the Pope, Alexander III., threatened by an anti-pope, and anxious for the good will of the king of England, sent an abbot to Thomas urging him to give way, on the ground that Henry only wanted a formal assent to the “customs” for the sake of his dignity, and had no intention of doing anything harmful to the Church.

Under these circumstances Thomas decided to yield. He went to the king at Woodstock and declared that the obnoxious phrase, “saving our order,” should be omitted from the promise to observe the “customs.”

Without delay the king ordered his justiciar, Richard of Lucy, and his clerk, Jocelin of Balliol, to draw up a list of the old “customs” and liberties of his grandfather Henry I., and on the 29th of January, 1164, a great council was held at Clarendon to ratify the agreement between the bishops and the king.

Sixteen constitutions or articles were drawn up, and Thomas, over-persuaded by the prayers of the bishops and the desire for peace, gave his promise unconditionally to observe them. But no sooner had he done so, and the articles were placed before him in black and white, than he repented.

The very first article declared that all disputes about Church patronage were to be tried in the King’s Court, and was intolerable, because while the State held it was a question of the rights of property, the Church view was that the main point was the care of souls, a spiritual matter for churchmen, not lawyers, to decide.

The other articles which Thomas objected to, and which the pope subsequently refused to ratify, decreed: (1) That clerks were to be tried in the King’s Courts for offences of common law. (2) That neither archbishops, bishops, nor beneficed clerks were to leave the kingdom without the king’s license. (This, said St. Thomas, would stop all pilgrimages and attendance at councils at Rome, and turn England into a vast prison. “It was right enough to apply for the king’s leave before the departure, but to bind one’s-self by an oath not to go without it was against religion and was evil.”) (3) That no member of the king’s household was to be excommunicated without the king’s permission. (4) That no appeals should be taken beyond the archbishop’s court, except to be brought before the king. (This was a definite attempt to prohibit appeals to Rome, and Thomas pointed out that the archbishop on receiving the pallium swore expressly not to hinder such appeals. The acceptance of this article left the king absolute master.)

The last article, declaring that serfs or sons of villeins were not to be ordained without the consent of the lord on whose land they were born, was not opposed by the pope, and the only contemporary objection seems to have been raised by Garnier, a French monk and a biographer of Thomas Becket.[16]

Thomas had promised obedience to these constitutions, but he would not put his seal to them. It seemed to him that it was not only the old “customs” that had been drawn up, but rather a new interpretation of these customs. The great Council of Clarendon was over. Thomas received a copy of the constitutions and rode off, and the king had to be content for the time with the promises delivered.

In abject remorse Thomas wrote to the pope confessing his assent to the Constitutions of Clarendon, and for forty days he abstained from celebrating the mass. The pope, still anxious to prevent any open rupture between the king and the archbishop, wrote in reply that “Almighty God watches not the deed, but considers rather the intention and judges the will,” and that Thomas was absolved by apostolic authority. All the same, Pope Alexander III., without in any way censuring Thomas, throughout the long struggle with Henry never stands up roundly for the archbishop.

Neither Henry nor Thomas could rest satisfied with Clarendon. The archbishop had compromised for the sake of peace, but his quick revulsion had provoked a keener hostility in the king. To Henry it seemed the time had come to drive Thomas out of public life by compelling him to resign the see of Canterbury. With Thomas out of the way Henry could carry out his plans for a strong central government, for bringing all under the pitiless arm of the law. Thomas was the one man in the kingdom who dared offer resistance, and if Thomas was no longer archbishop and some supple creature of the king was in his place, the royal power would be absolute, for there seemed no fear of any interference from Pope Alexander III.

There were plenty of the archbishop’s enemies among the nobles at the court ready to fan the king’s anger against Thomas, and by October, 1164, Henry was ready to crush the primate.

Another council was summoned to meet at Northampton, and now Archbishop Thomas was to learn the full significance of the Constitutions of Clarendon.

The first charge against Thomas was that he had refused justice to John, the Treasurer-Marshal, who had taken up some land under the see of Canterbury. John had taken his suit to the King’s Court, and Thomas was further charged with contempt of the majesty of the crown for not putting in a personal appearance at this court. The king now pressed for judgment against the archbishop for this contempt, and the council ordered that he should be condemned to the loss of all his moveable property, and 500 pounds of silver was accepted as an equivalent fine.

“It seemed to all that, considering the reverence due to the king and by the obligation of the oath of homage, which the archbishop had taken, and by the fealty to the king’s earthly honour which he had sworn, he was in no way to be excused, because when summoned by the king he had neither come himself, nor pleaded infirmity, or the necessary work of his ecclesiastical office.” (W. FitzStephen).

It was not easy to get the sentence pronounced against Thomas. Barons and bishops were willing enough to stand well with the king, and they agreed without contradiction to the fine. But the barons declined to act as judge on a spiritual peer, and insisted that one of the bishops must do this business. Henry, Bishop of Winchester, at last, on the king’s order, pronounced the sentence.

Thomas protested. “If I were silent at such a sentence posterity would not be. This is a new form of sentence, no doubt in accordance with the new laws of Clarendon. Never has it been heard before in England that an Archbishop of Canterbury has been tried in the King’s Court for such a cause. The dignity of the Church, the authority of his person, the fact that he is the spiritual father of the king and of all his subjects, require that he should be reverenced by all.” For an archbishop to be judged by his suffragans was, he declared, for a father to be judged by his sons.

The bishops implored him to bow to the decree of the council, and Thomas yielded, “not being willing that a mere matter of money should cause strife between the king and himself.”

The next day, Friday, October 9th, the king pressed Thomas more fiercely, calling upon him to give account for large sums spent during his chancellorship, and for various revenues of vacant churches during that period. The total amount was 30,000 marks.

In vain the archbishop urged that this demand was totally unexpected; that he had not been summoned to Northampton to render such an account; and that the justiciar, Richard, had declared that he was free of all claims when he laid down the chancellorship. The king demanded sureties, “and from that day barons and knights kept away from the archbishop’s house—for they understood the mind of the king.”

All Saturday Thomas was in consultation with the bishops, most of whom expressed themselves strongly on the king’s side. Henry of Winchester suggested the present of 2,000 marks to the king as a peace-offering, and this was done. But the king would not have it. Hilary, of Chichester, said, addressing the archbishop, “You ought to know the king better than we do, for you lived with him in close companionship and friendship when you were chancellor. Who is there who could be your surety for all this money? The king has declared, so it is said, that he and you cannot both remain in England as king and archbishop. It would be much safer to resign everything and submit to his mercy. God forbid lest he arrest you over these moneys of the chancellorship, or lay hands on you.” One or two less craven urged the archbishop to stand firm, as his predecessors had done, in the face of persecution.

“Oh, that you were no longer archbishop and were only Thomas,” said Hilary, putting the matter briefly.

All Sunday was spent in consultations. On Monday the archbishop was too ill to attend the council, but on Tuesday his mind was made up, and when he entered the council it was with the full dignity of an archbishop, carrying the cross of the archbishop in his hand.

The bishops were in despair. There were all sorts of rumours in the air. It was known the king was full of anger, and it was said that the archbishop’s life was in danger. The bishops implored him to resign, or else to promise complete submission to the councils of Clarendon. They said he would certainly be tried and condemned for high treason for disobedience to the king, and asked him what was the use of being archbishop when he had the king’s hatred.

Gilbert Foliot, Bishop of London, declared contemptuously of Thomas, when someone asked him why he did not carry the archbishop’s cross for him, “He always was a fool, and always will be.”

Thomas had now only one answer to the bishops. He forbad them to take any part in the proceedings against him, announced that he had appealed to “our Mother, the Church of Rome, refuge of all the oppressed,” to prevent any of them taking part, and ordered them to excommunicate any who should dare lay secular hands upon the primate.

Then, holding his cross, the archbishop took his usual place in the council-chamber, while the king sat in an inner room.

In the face of personal danger all the strength and courage of Thomas Becket were aroused. He had yielded at Clarendon for the sake of peace, and no good had come of it. He had submitted to be fined rather than be involved in a miserable dispute about money, and now he was threatened with demands for money which were beyond his resources. There was nothing to prevent the king piling up greater and greater sums against him, till hopeless ruin had been reached. He was powerless to withstand such an onslaught. To Rome, “the refuge of all the oppressed,” would Thomas appeal, and then, if it seemed well to the pope, he would retire from Canterbury. But he would not surrender his post, however great the wrath of the king, unless it were for the welfare of the Christian Church.

In the council-chamber Thomas sat alone, with one or two clergy attending him, including Herbert of Bosham and William FitzStephen, while the bishops went in to the king’s chamber. Among the nobles the cry was going up that the archbishop was a perjurer and a traitor, because, after signing at Clarendon, he now, in violation of those constitutions, forbad bishops to give judgment in a case that did not involve bloodshed, and had further made appeal to Rome.

Then the king sent to know whether the archbishop refused to be bound by the Constitutions of Clarendon, and whether he would find sureties to abide by the sentence of the court regarding the accounts of his chancellorship.

Thomas again pointed out that he had not been called there to give an account of his chancellorship, that on his appointment to the archbishopric he had been declared by the king free of all secular claims, and that he had forbidden the bishops to take part in any judgment against him, and had appealed to Rome, “placing his person and the church of Canterbury under the protection of God and the pope.”

At the end of this speech the barons returned in silence to the king, pondering the archbishop’s words.

But hostile murmuring soon broke the silence, and Thomas could overhear the barons grumbling that, “King William, who conquered England, knew how to tame his clerks. He had put his own brother Odo in prison, and thrown Stigand, Archbishop of Canterbury, into a dungeon.”

The bishops renewed their pitiful chorus. Thomas had placed them between the hammer and the anvil by his prohibition: of disobedience to Canterbury on the one hand, and of the king’s anger on the other. They had given their word at Clarendon, and now they were being forced to go against the promises they had made. They, too, would appeal to Rome against his prohibition, “lest you injure us still more.”

All that Thomas could say was that the Constitutions of Clarendon had been sent to the pope for confirmation, and had been returned, rather condemned than approved. “This example has been given for our learning, that we should do likewise, and be ready to receive what he receives at Rome, and reject what he rejects. If we fell at Clarendon, through weakness of the flesh, the more ought we to take courage now, and in the might of the Holy Ghost contend against the old enemy of man.”[17]

So bishops and nobles came and went between the king and the archbishop, and the day drew on. Henry allowed the bishops to stand apart from the judgment, and demanded sentence from the barons, and Earl Robert of Leicester advanced as the spokesman of the council to where the archbishop was sitting. The earl began to speak of the judgment of the court, when Thomas rose and refused to hear him.

“What is this you would do?” he cried. “Would you pass sentence on me? Neither law nor reason permit children to pass sentence on their father. You are nobles of the palace, and I am your spiritual father. I will not hear this sentence of the king, or any judgment of yours. For, under God, I will be judged by the pope alone, to whom before you all here I appeal, placing the church of Canterbury with all thereto belonging under God’s protection and the protection of the pope.” Then he turned to the bishops. “And you, my brethren, who have served man rather than God, I summon to the presence of the pope; and now, guarded by the authority of the Catholic Church and the Holy See, I go hence.”

So he passed out of the hall, no one gainsaying his passage, though some plucked rushes from the floor and threw at him. There were shouts of anger, and again the cries of “traitor” and “perjurer” were raised. The archbishop turned on Earl Hamelin, the king’s brother, and Randulf of Brok, who were calling “traitor,” and said sternly: “If I were not a priest, my own arms should quickly prove your lie. And you, Randulf, look at home (his cousin had lately been hanged for felony) before you accuse the guiltless!”

His horses were at the gate, and a great crowd that were afraid lest the archbishop had been killed. St. Thomas mounted, and accompanied by Herbert of Bosham, rode back to the monastery of St. Andrew, where he had been lodging. The crowd thronged him and prayed for his blessing all the way until the monastery was reached, and then he would have the multitude come in to the refectory and dine with him. Of his own retinue of forty who had come with him to Northampton, scarce six remained; and so the places of those who had thought it safer to desert their lord were filled by the hungry multitude. It was the archbishop’s farewell banquet, and he, the constant champion of the poor, had those whom he loved for his guests that day.

At nightfall, after compline had been sung and the monks dispersed to their cells, the archbishop, with three other men in the dress of lay brothers, rode out from Northampton by the north gate, and at dawn were at Grantham. Three weeks later Thomas had reached Flanders, and the exile had begun which was only to end six years later when death was at hand.

It was useless to remain in England, hopeless as Thomas was of any support from the bishops. He could but appeal, as Anselm had appealed, to the one court that alone was recognised as owning a higher authority than that of the kings of this world, the court of Rome.

But Pope Alexander, still harassed by an anti-pope set up by the Emperor Frederick, could do as little for Thomas as his predecessor had done for Anselm, though he refused to allow him to resign the archbishopric. Unlike Anselm, Thomas vigorously carried on his contest with the king from the friendly shelter of King Louis of France, and Henry retaliated without hesitation, driving out of England all the friends and kinsmen of Thomas, to the number of four hundred, and threatening a like banishment to the Cistercian monks, because Thomas had taken refuge in their monastery at Pontigny.

The fear that the pope would allow the archbishop to pronounce an interdict against England, and a sentence of personal excommunication against its king, drove Henry in 1166 to appeal himself to the pope. “Thus by a strange fate it happened that the king, while striving for those ‘ancient customs,’ by which he endeavoured to prevent any right of appeal (to the pope), was doomed to confirm the right of appeal for his own safety.” (John of Salisbury.)

Months and years passed in correspondence. More than once Henry and Thomas met at the court of Louis, but neither would yield. The pope, without blaming the archbishop, and without sanctioning any extreme step against Henry, did what he could to make peace between them.

At last, in the summer of 1170, the king really was disturbed by the fear of an interdict, for his last act against Archbishop Thomas had been to have his son crowned by the Archbishop of York, in defiance of all the rights and privileges of the see of Canterbury. Besides this, Louis was threatening war because his daughter, who was married to the young King Henry, had not been crowned with her husband. Henry hastened over to France and made friends with Thomas, and the reconciliation took place at Freteral. The king solemnly promised that the archbishop should enjoy all the possessions and rights of which he had been deprived in his exile, and that his friends and kinsmen should all be allowed to return home. He even apologised for the coronation of his son. It seemed as if the old friendship had been revived. “We conversed together until the evening as familiarly as in the days of our ancient friendship. And it was agreed I should arrange my affairs and then make some stay with the king before embarking for England; that the world might know how thoroughly we are restored to his favour and intimacy. We are not afraid that the king will not fulfil his promises, unless he is misled by evil counsellors.” So Thomas wrote to the pope in July, 1170. Yet there were many—including King Louis—who doubted the sincerity of the reconciliation, for Henry was not willing to give the kiss of peace to his archbishop.

On December 1st Thomas landed at Sandwich, and went at once to Canterbury. The townspeople and the poor of the land welcomed him with enthusiastic devotion. “Small and great, old and young, ran together, some throwing themselves in his way, others crying and exclaiming, ‘Blessed is he that cometh in the name of the Lord.’ In the same manner the clergy and their parishioners met him in procession, saluting their father and begging his blessing.... And when all things in the cathedral was solemnly ended, the archbishop went to his palace, and so ended that joyful and solemn day.” (Herbert of Bosham.)

But against the affection and goodwill of his own people at Canterbury, and a similar demonstration of rejoicing by multitudes of clergy and people in London, Thomas had to face the fact that the bishops generally hated his return, that the young Prince Henry, recently crowned, who had been his pupil, refused to see him and ordered his return to Canterbury, and that the nobles openly spoke of him as a traitor to the king. “This is a peace for us which is no peace, but rather war,” said the archbishop bitterly.

The end was not far off. Thomas, as zealous for good discipline in the Church as Henry was for strong authority in the State, was no sooner returned than he was asked to withdraw the sentence of excommunication against the Archbishop of York and the Bishops of London and Salisbury. He promised to do this if the bishops on their part would promise to submit to the decision of the pope on the matter. London and Salisbury were moved to receive absolution on these terms, but Roger, of York, who had always been against Becket, dissuaded them, urging them to throw themselves on the protection of the king, and threatening Thomas “with marvellous and terrible things at the hands of the king” unless he relented. Naturally, these threats left the archbishop undisturbed, and Roger of York, with Gilbert Foliot of London and Jocelin of Salisbury, at once hastened over to France to lay their case before the king.

These bishops were not the only men who troubled Thomas in these last days. Randulf de Broc, with others of his family, and certain knights, all known as strong “king’s men,” “sought every means to entangle him in a quarrel,” and did not stop from robbing a ship belonging to the archbishop and from seizing a number of horses, and mutilating one of them. Thomas replied by excommunicating Randulf and Robert de Broc, the boldest of these offenders.

At Christmas more than one of the archbishop’s followers warned him that his life was in danger, and Thomas seems to have realised that his position was hazardous. But he would not fly.

Already his murderers were at hand.

The excommunicated bishops had reached the king at Bur, near Bayeux, had told their story, and had coloured it with a fanciful description of Thomas making a circuit of England at the head of a large body of men.[18] Someone had said, “My lord, as long as Thomas lives, you will have neither peace nor quiet in your kingdom, nor will you ever see good days;” and at this Henry had burst out into a terrible rage of bitterness and passion, for such fits at times took possession of him, “Here is a man,” he cried out, “who came to my court a sorry clerk, who owes all he has to me, and insults my kingdom and lifts his heel against me. And not one of the cowardly sluggish knaves, whom I feed and pay so well, but suffers this, nor has the heart to avenge me!”

The words were spoken, and four of the king’s knights—Reginald FitzUrse, William of Tracy, Hugh of Morville, and Richard the Breton—hearing what was said, and that Roger of York had declared “as soon as Thomas is dead all this trouble will be ended, and not before,” at once departed. They sailed from different ports and met together at Saltwood, the castle of the Brocs, on December 28th. The following day they rode on to Canterbury, taking with them twelve of Randulf’s men and Hugh of Horsea, who was called the Evil Deacon.

The king, on finding the four knights had left the court, gave orders to have them stopped, but it was too late. They were then at Canterbury, and entering the hospitable doors of the palace had made direct for the archbishop’s private chamber.

It was four o’clock. Dinner had been at three, and Thomas was sitting on his bed talking to John of Salisbury, Edward Grim, and a few other friends. When the knights entered, Thomas recognized Reginald, William, and Hugh, for they had served under him years before, and waited for them to speak.

Reginald FitzUrse was the spokesman. He declared they had come from the king, that Thomas must take an oath of fealty to the newly-crowned prince, and must absolve the excommunicated bishops. Thomas answered that the bishops might have been absolved on their willingness to obey the judgments of the Church, and that the king had sanctioned what had been done at their reconciliation.

Reginald denied there had been any reconciliation, and swore that Thomas was imputing treachery to the king in saying such a thing.

The archbishop pointed out that the reconciliation had taken place in public, and that Reginald himself had been present.

Reginald swore he had never been there, and had not heard of it. And at this the other knights broke in, swearing again and again, by God’s wounds, that they had borne with him far too long already.

Then Thomas reminded them of the insults and losses he had endured, especially at the hands of the De Brocs, since his return.

Hugh of Morville answered him that he had his remedy in the King’s Courts, and ought not to excommunicate men on his own authority.

“I shall wait for no man’s leave to do justice on any that wrong the Church and will not give satisfaction,” Thomas replied.

“What do you threaten us! Threats are too much!” cried Reginald FitzUrse.

Then the knights bit their gloves and angrily defied the archbishop.

Thomas told them that they could not intimidate him. “Once I went away like a timid priest; now I have returned, and I will never leave again. If I may do my office in peace, it is well: if I may not, God’s will be done.” Then he turned to remind them they had once sworn fealty to him when he was chancellor.

“We are the king’s men,” they shouted out, “and owe fealty to no one against the king!”

Bidding his servants keep the archbishop within the precincts on peril of their lives, the knights withdrew.

“It is easy to keep me,” said Thomas, “for I shall not go away. I will not fly for the king or for any living man.”

“Why did you not take counsel with us and give milder answer to your enemies?” said John of Salisbury. “You are ready to die, but we are not. Think of our peril!”

“We must all die,” the archbishop answered, “and the fear of death must not turn us from doing justice.”

Word was quickly brought in that the knights were putting on their armour in the courtyard, and the monks, frightened at the sight of these men with drawn swords entering the orchard to the west of the cathedral, rushed to the archbishop and implored him to fly to the cathedral. Thomas smiled at their terror, saying, “All you monks are too cowardly, it seems to me.” And not till vespers had begun would he leave for the minster. The knights broke into the cloisters after him, and reaching St. Benet’s chapel began to hammer at the door, which for safety the monks had barred behind them.

Thomas at once ordered the door to be unbolted, saying, “God’s house shall not be made a fortress on my account.” He slipped back the iron bar himself, and the angry knights rushed in with cries of “Where is the traitor? Where is the archbishop?”

It was five o’clock and a dark winter’s night. Had Thomas chosen, he could easily have escaped death by concealing himself in the crypt or in one of the many hiding places in the cathedral. But he felt his hour had come and met it without faltering. John of Salisbury and the rest of the monks and clerks vanished away and hid themselves, leaving only Edward Grim, Robert of Merton and William FitzStephen with the archbishop. Soon only Grim was left, when the archbishop came out boldly, and standing by a great pillar near the altar of St. Benedict, answered his accusers. “Here I am: no traitor, Reginald, but your archbishop.”

They tried to drag him from the church, but he clung to the great pillar, with Edward Grim by his side. For the last time Reginald called on him to come out of the church. “I am ready to die, but let my people go, and do not hurt them,” was the archbishop’s answer. William Tracy seized hold of him, but Thomas hurled him back. Upon that FitzUrse shouted, “Strike! strike!” And Tracy cut savagely at the head of the archbishop. Grim sprang forward and the blow fell on his arm, and he fell back badly wounded.

Then Thomas commended his cause and that of the Church to St. Denis and the patron saints of the cathedral, and his soul to God, and without flinching bowed his head to his murderers. FitzUrse, Tracy and Richard the Breton struck the archbishop down, and Hugh the Evil Deacon mangled in brutal fashion the head of St. Thomas before calling out to the others: “Let us go now; he will never rise again!”

Then they all rushed from the church, and shouting, “King’s knights! King’s knights!” proceeded to plunder the palace. They fled north that night to the castle of Hugh of Morville at Knaresborough, where for a time they lived in close retirement. Tracy subsequently went on a pilgrimage to Rome and Palestine, but all four “within two years of the murder were living at court on familiar terms with the king.”[19]

Henry and all his court were horrified when the news was brought of the archbishop’s martyrdom, for all the people proclaimed the murdered prelate a saint and a martyr, and “a martyr he clearly was, not merely to the privileges of the Church or to the rights of the see of Canterbury, but to the general cause of law and order as opposed to violence.”[20] Had St. Thomas yielded in the matter of the excommunicated bishops, and sought favour with the king at the expense of the liberties and discipline of the Church, and had he given way to the savage, lawless turbulence of the king’s knights, he would not only have escaped a violent death, but might have lived long in the sunshine of the royal pleasure. He chose the rougher, steeper road, daring all to save the Church and the mass of the English people from being brought under the iron heel of a king’s absolute rule, and he paid the penalty, pouring out his blood on the stones of the minster at Canterbury to seal the vows he had taken when he first entered the city as archbishop.

In his dying St. Thomas was even stronger than in his life. Henry hastened to beg the forgiveness of Rome for his rash words that had provoked the murder, and in the presence of the pope’s legates in Normandy promised to give up the Constitutions of Clarendon and to stand by the papacy against the emperor. Nor did he make any further attempt in his reign to bring the Church under the subjection of the crown, but built up a great system of legal administration, which in substance exists to-day.

St. Thomas was canonised four years after his death. “There was no shadow of doubt in men’s minds that here was one who was a martyr as fully as any martyr of the catacombs and the Roman persecutions.” (R. H. Benson, St. Thomas of Canterbury.) Countless miracles were alleged to prove the sanctity of the dead hero, and pilgrims from all parts made their way to the shrine of the “blessful martyr” at Canterbury. Not only in England, but in France and Flanders, and particularly in Ireland was there an outburst of devotion to St. Thomas.

The shrine at Canterbury was destroyed by Henry VIII., who after a mock trial of the archbishop slain more than 300 years earlier, declared that “Thomas, sometime Archbishop of Canterbury, had been guilty of contumacy, treason and rebellion,” and “was no saint, but rather a rebel and traitor to his prince.”

But though Thomas, canonised by the pope on the prayers of the people of England, could be struck out of the calendar of the Church of England by the arbitrary will of King Henry VIII., as an enemy of princes, and his shrine destroyed, it is beyond the power of a king to reverse the sentence of history or to blast for ever the fame of a great and courageous champion of the poor of this land. Time makes little of the insults of Henry VIII. Thomas of Canterbury died for the religion that in his day protected the people against the despotism of the crown. “He was always a hater of liars and slanderers and a kind friend to dumb beasts (hence his rage with De Broc for mutilating a horse) and all poor and helpless folk.” (F. York Powell.)

That Henry II. strove to make law predominant in the spirit of a great statesman is as true as that Thomas strove to mitigate the harshness of the law. As a writer of the twelfth century put it: “Nothing is more certain than that both strove earnestly to do the will of God, one for the sake of his realm, the other on behalf of his Church. But whether of the two was zealous in wisdom is not plain to man, who is so easily mistaken, but to the Lord, who will judge between them at the last day.”

William FitzOsbert, called Longbeard
The First English Agitator 1196

Authorities: Roger of Hoveden; William of Newburgh; Gervase of Canterbury; Matthew Paris; Ralph Diceto; (Rolls Series); Rotuli Curiæ Regis (Sir F. Palgrave. Vol. I.).

WILLIAM FITZOSBERT
CALLED LONGBEARD, THE
FIRST ENGLISH AGITATOR 1196

When Richard I., on his accession, picked out Hubert Walter, Bishop of Salisbury, to be Archbishop of Canterbury, he chose a prelate whom he could rely upon as his representative. Hubert had been a crusader; he was the nephew of Ralph Glanville—who sold the justiciarship to William Longchamp, Bishop of Ely, for £3,000, and followed Richard to Palestine, dying of the plague at Acre in 1191—and though a man of little learning he was a capital lawyer, a strong administrator and expert at raising money for the king.[21] Hubert was no champion of the poor as St. Thomas had been, no preacher of righteousness like St. Anselm, no stickler for the rights of the Church or the liberties of the people; he was “the king’s man,” and “forasmuch as he was neither gifted with a knowledge of letters nor endued with the grace of lively religion, so in his days the Church of England was stifled under the yoke of bondage.” (Geraldus Cambrensis.)

Richard Cœur de Lion, occupied with the crusades, had no mind for the personal government of England. He depended on his ministers for money to pay for his military expeditions to Palestine. England was to him nothing more than a subject province to be bled by taxation. Both William Longchamp and Hubert Walter—to whom Richard committed the realm when he left England for good in 1194—did all that could be done to meet the king’s demands. Government offices, earldoms and bishoprics were sold to the highest bidder.[22] Judges bought their seats on the bench and cities bought their charters. Crown lands already granted to tenants were again taken up by the king’s authority, and the occupier compelled to pay for readmission to his holding. Tournaments were revived, because everyone taking part was obliged to take a royal license. Even the great seal was broken by the justiciar’s authority, and all documents signed by it had to be reissued, with the payment of the usual fees (or stamp duties) for new contracts. “By these and similar inquisitions England was reduced to poverty from one sea to the other,” for more than £1,000,000 was sent to Richard by Hubert in the first two years of his justiciarship.

The only protest against the general distress came from London, and not from the aldermen or burghers, but from the voteless labouring people upon whom the whole burden of raising the city’s taxes had been thrown. Against this monstrous injustice William Longbeard FitzOsbert stood out as the spokesman of the poor of London, and died a martyr for their cause.

London’s political importance had been seen in the struggles against King Cnut and William the Conqueror. Its remarkable influence in national politics (an influence that endured to the middle of the nineteenth century) was manifest when London acclaimed Stephen as King of England in 1135. At the close of the twelfth century, London, with the civic charter it had just obtained from Richard, with its thirteen convent churches and more than a hundred parish churches within its boundaries, with its great cattle market at Smithfield and its growing riverside trade, was already prosperous and overcrowded. “The city was blessed with the healthiness of the air and the nature of its site, in the Christian religion, in the strength of its towers, the honour of its citizens and the purity of its women; it was happy in its sports and fruitful of high spirited men.” It had its darker side, but at that time “the only plagues were the intemperate drinking of foolish people and the frequent fires.”

Richard’s charter left to the citizens the business of assessing their own taxes, and in 1196 there was trouble over this matter; for in that year the city fathers decided that the large sums required by Archbishop Hubert for the king’s needs should be paid in full by the poorer craftsmen and labourers, who had no say in the matter.[23]

“And when the aldermen assembled according to usage in full hustings for the purpose of assessing the taxes, the rulers endeavoured to spare their own purses and to levy the whole from the poor.” (Roger of Hoveden.)

Whereupon up rose William Longbeard, the son of Osbert, and made his memorable protest against these rascally proceedings, to go down to history as the first popular agitator in England.

An exceptional man was this Longbeard, a man of commanding stature and great strength, ready witted, something of an orator and a lawyer, who “burning with zeal for righteousness and fair play made himself the champion of the poor,” holding that every man, rich or poor, should pay his share of the city’s burdens according to his means.

Longbeard was not of the labouring people himself. He was a member of the city council, though by no means a rich man. He had distinguished himself as a crusader in 1190, making the journey to Portugal against the Moors; and a vision of St. Thomas Becket had appeared to him and his fellow Londoners when their ship was beset by storms off the coast of Spain.

Longbeard was known to the king, and he was already hateful to the ruling class because he had declared that Richard was being defrauded by financial corruption of the money raised for the crown. He had also accused his brother of treason in 1194, but the case was not proved.

Richard was in Normandy in 1196, and Longbeard having banded together 15,000 men in London, under an oath that they would stick by him and each other, went to the king and laid their grievances before him. Richard heard the appeal sympathetically enough, for after all, as long as the money was forthcoming, he had no particular desire that the pockets of rich burghers should be spared at the expense of the poor, but left matters in the hands of Archbishop Hubert the justiciar. Longbeard returned to London, and with his 15,000[24] workmen in revolt, bid an open defiance to the justiciar.

Only a fragment of one of Longbeard’s speeches has been preserved, a solitary specimen of popular oratory in the twelfth century.[25]

Taking a passage from the prophet Isaiah for his text: “Therefore with joy shall ye draw water from the wells of the Saviour” (Isaiah xii, 3), the agitator delivers his message.

“I am,” he saith, “the saviour of the poor. You the poor, who have endured the hard hands of the rich, draw ye from my wells the waters of sound doctrine, and this with joy, for the time of your visitation is at hand. For I will divide the waters from the waters, and the People are the waters. I will divide the humble and faithful from such as are proud and froward. I will divide the just from the unjust, even as light from darkness.”

For a time Longbeard was too strong for the justiciar. Archbishop Hubert had no force at his disposal for the invasion of London, for a battle with Longbeard and his league.

At a great gathering of citizens, held in St. Paul’s Churchyard, the justiciar’s men sent to arrest Longbeard had been driven out of the city with violence. All that Hubert could do was to give orders for the arrest of any lesser citizens found outside London, and two small traders from the city actually were taken into custody at the town of Stamford on Mid-Lent Sunday, 1196, under this authority.

But the aldermen grew more and more frightened at Longbeard’s bold speeches and his big public meetings, and weakness and cowardice began to demoralise the league. The people, who had risen for “liberty and freedom,” fell away from their leader, and FitzOsbert was left with a comparatively small band to face the anger of the justiciar.

Backed up by the city fathers, Hubert’s officers again attempted to seize the agitator. Longbeard, hardly pressed, snatched an axe from one of his assailants—a citizen named Godfrey—and slew him; and then retreated, overwhelmed by numbers, to take refuge in the church of St. Mary-le-Bow in Cheapside. There was a right of sanctuary in this church, a right not to be denied to the commonest felon.

But what were rights of sanctuary to the justiciar—bent on hunting his prey to the death? He commanded Longbeard “to come out and abide by the law,” and gave orders to his men that, failing instant obedience, he was to be dragged out.

Longbeard’s answer was to climb up into the church tower, and thereupon Hubert ordered the tower to be set on fire, and this was done. And now the only chance of life for William Longbeard and his followers was to cut their way through the host of their enemies and make a bold rush for safety. It was a remote chance at the best, but sooner that than to perish in the burning tower.

At the very church door Longbeard was struck down—some say by Godfrey’s son—and his little company were quickly slain or taken prisoners. Loaded with chains, the once bold advocate of the poor of London, now badly hurt, was at once haled off to the Tower. Sentence was pronounced without delay of the law, William, the son of Osbert, was to be dragged to the elms at Tyburn and there hanged in chains.

A few days later—it was just before Easter—the wounded man was stripped naked, tried to the tail of a horse and dragged over the rough stones of the streets of London. He was dead before Tyburn was reached, but the poor broken body, on whom the full vengeance of the rich and mighty had been wreaked, was strung up in chains beneath the gallows elm all the same. Bravely had Longbeard withstood the rulers of the land in the day of his strength; now, when life had passed from him, his body was swinging in common contempt. And with him were nine of his followers hanged.

So died William, called Longbeard, son of Osbert, “for asserting the truth and maintaining the cause of the poor.” And since it is held that to be faithful to such a cause makes a man a martyr, people thought he deserved to be ranked with the martyrs. For a time multitudes—the very folk who had fallen away from their champion in the hour of battle and need—flocked to pay reverence to the ghastly, bloodstained corpse that hung at Tyburn, and pieces of the gibbet and of the bloodstained earth beneath were carried off and counted as sacred relics. All the great, heroic qualities of the man were recalled. He was accounted a saint. Miracles were alleged to take place when his relics were touched.

Then the dead man’s enemies were aroused, an alleged death-bed confession was published, wherein Longbeard was made out to be a sorry criminal. Not the least of the offences laid to his charge was that a woman, who was not his wife, had stood faithfully by the rebel, even when the church was on fire.

The times were rough. It is probable that Longbeard, crusader and fighting man, had sins enough to confess before death took him. But his traducers were silent as to these sins in the man’s lifetime. They waited until no answer could be given before uttering their miserable libels against the one courageous champion of the poor.

Longbeard had roused the common working people to make a stand against obvious oppression and injustice—there was the head and front of his offending, there was his crime; earning for him not only a felon’s death, but the loss of character, and the branding for all time with the contemptuous title “Demagogue.”

Yet in the slow building up of English liberties William FitzOsbert played his part, and laid down his life in the age-long struggle for freedom, as many a better has done.

In 1198, two years after the death of Longbeard, Hubert was compelled to resign the justiciarship. His monks at Canterbury, to whom the Church of St. Mary, in Cheapside, belonged, and who had no love for their archbishop,[26] indignant at the violation of sanctuary and the burning of their church, appealed to the king and to the pope, Innocent III. to make Hubert give up his political activities and confine himself to the work of an archbishop. In the same year a great council of the nation, led by St. Hugh of Lincoln, flatly refused a royal demand for money made by Hubert.

Innocent III. was against him, the great barons were against him, and Hubert resigned. But he held the archbishopric till 1205.

Stephen Langton and the Great Charter
1207–1228

Authorities: Roger of Wendover and Matthew Paris; Walter of Coventry; Ralph of Coggeshall (Rolls Series); Letters of Innocent III.; Rymer’s Fœdera; K. Norgate—John Lackland; Stubbs—Select Charters; Mark Pattison—Stephen Langton (Lives of the English Saints); C. E. Maurice—Stephen Langton.

STEPHEN LANGTON AND
THE GREAT CHARTER 1207–1228

When Hubert Walter, Archbishop of Canterbury—the old Justiciar of Richard I.—ended his long life of public service on July 12th, A.D. 1205, King John exclaimed, with frank satisfaction, “Now for the first time I am King of England!” As long as Hubert was alive there was one man strong enough to restrain the king, and the primate and William the Marshall together had done something to guard England against the foulest and most ruthless tyranny of all its kings. To the end William the Marshall was a brave and patriotic statesman, but he served the crown rather than the people.

On Hubert’s death John meant to have for archbishop a creature of his will, and he was defeated by Pope Innocent III., who, dismissing the appeal of the monks of Canterbury for Reginald, their subprior, and John’s appeal for his nominee, John de Gray, Bishop of Norwich, proposed the English-born Cardinal, Stephen Langton, “than whom there was no man greater in the Roman court, nor was there any equal to him in character and in learning.” The monks consented to Stephen’s appointment, but John’s reply was a flat refusal, and when on June 7th, 1207, Pope Innocent proceeded to consecrate Stephen Langton Archbishop of Canterbury, the king’s rage broke out. Innocent’s wise judgment gave England one of its noblest and greatest archbishops, and the service wrought by Langton for the liberties of England’s people was of deep and lasting value. But the immediate price to be paid for later profit was heavy.

John met Langton’s consecration by seizing the estates of Canterbury, driving the chapter into exile, and proclaiming that anyone who acknowledged Stephen as archbishop should be accounted a public enemy. The remonstrances and warnings of the pope were disregarded, and in March, 1208, all England was laid under an interdict, and there was an end to the public ministrations of religion in the country for six years—to the bitter distress of the common people.

Immediately the interdict came into force, John declared all the property of the clergy, secular or monastic, to be confiscated, and there was no one to stay his hand from speedy spoliation. For the barons were willing enough to see the clergy robbed and the king’s treasury filled at the expense of the Church, and of the bishops only two were left in England—Peter des Roches, of Winchester, and John de Gray, of Norwich—and both these were willing tools of the king. Never did John enjoy his royal will and pleasure with such unhindered ferocity as in that year 1209. Had the barons stood by the Church they might have saved England unspeakable miseries, and as it was the laity were soon in as sorry a plight as the clergy, “and it seemed as though the king was courting the hatred of every class of his subjects, so burdensome was he to both rich and poor.”[27]

In 1211 came Pandulf from Pope Innocent with suggestions for peace. Let the king restore the property of the clergy, and receive Archbishop Langton, with his kinsmen and friends, and the other exiled bishops “fairly and in peace” and the interdict should be withdrawn. John declined to receive Langton as archbishop, and Pandulf, in the presence of the whole council, pronounced the papal sentence of excommunication on the king, absolving all his subjects from allegiance, and commanding their obedience to whomsoever should be sent as John’s successor.

John treated the excommunication with cheerful contempt, and pursued the evil tenour of his way. But his position was precarious, for the barons—especially the northern barons—were plotting his overthrow, and the pope had decided that Philip of France should depose John and reign in his stead. John was driven to capitulate to the pope at the end of 1212, and in May, 1213, Pandulf arrived, and the invasion by Philip was stopped, to the exceeding annoyance of the French king.