Henry the Second - Mrs. J. R. Green
But no kiss of peace given at Henry's orders could turn away the rising
wrath of the Church. A general feeling of danger was in the air, and both
sides, in preparing for the inevitable future, chose the same man to
fight their battle,--Thomas, the disciple and secretary of Theobald,
Thomas, the minister of the king's reforms. The young king had turned
with passionate affection to his brilliant chancellor. In hall, in
church, in council-chamber, on horseback, he was never separated from his
friend. Thomas, like his master, was always ready for hunting, or for
hawking, or for a game of chess. He was willing, too, to save the king
the cost and burden of entertainment and display. He was careful to
magnify his office. He held a splendid court, where Henry's son and a
train of young nobles were brought up to knightly accomplishments. He was
dressed in scarlet and furs, and his clothes were woven with gold. His
table was covered with gold and silver plate, and his servants had orders
to buy the most costly provisions in the shops for cooked meat, which
were then the glory of the city. His household was the talk of London.
The king himself, curious to see how things went on, would sometimes come
on horseback to watch the chancellor sitting at meat, or, bow in hand,
would turn in on his way from hunting, and, vaulting over the table,
would sit down and eat with him. Henry lavished gifts on him, so that
according to one of his chroniclers, "when he might have had all
the churches and castles of the kingdom if he chose since there was none
to deny him, yet the greatness of his soul conquered his ambition; he
magnanimously disdained to take the poorer benefices, and required only
the great things--the provostship of Beverley, the deanery at Hastings,
the Tower of London with the service of the soldiers belonging to it, the
castle of Eye with 140 soldiers, and that of Berkhampstead." or was the
king's favour misplaced, for Thomas was an excellent servant. Business
was rapidly despatched by him; and Henry found himself relieved of the
most irksome part of his work. The chancellor surrounded himself by
able men, looking even as far as Gaul for poor Englishmen who were
distinguished for their talent; fifty-two clerks were employed under him
in the Chancery. As he grew more and more important to his master,
unlimited powers were put in his hand. There are even entries in the Pipe
Roll of pardons issued by him, the first instance of such a right ever
used by any save king or queen. It was said that those who had the king's
favour might count it as a vain thing, unless they had also the friendship
of the chancellor. "The king's dominions, which reach from the Arctic
Ocean to the Pyrenees, he put into your power, and in this alone was any
man thought happy, that he should find favour in your eyes," runs a letter
written afterwards to Thomas.
To complete the king's schemes, however, one dignity yet remained
to be conferred on Thomas. He was eager, in view of his proposed
reconstruction of Church and State, to adopt the Imperial system of a
chancellor-archbishop. The difficulties in the way were great, for ancient
custom limited the technical supremacy of the king's will in the choice
of the Primate. No archbishop since the Conquest had been chosen for other
reasons than those of piety and learning; no secular primate had been
appointed since Stigand, and before Stigand there had never been one at
all; no deacon had ever been chosen for this high office; and never had a
king's officer been made archbishop, however common it may have been to
put chancellor or treasurer in less important sees. Amid the anxiety and
questioning which followed the death of Theobald in 1161, Thomas himself
clearly saw the parting of the ways: "Whoever is made archbishop," he
said, "must quickly give offence to God or to the king." Henry alone knew
no hesitation. Fresh from his triumphs abroad, master of his great empire,
clear and decided in his projects for the ordering of his dominions, eager
with the force and determination of twenty-eight years, recognizing no
check to his imperious will and the dictates of his friendship, he chose
Thomas as archbishop, "Matilda dissuading, the kingdom protesting, the
whole Church sighing and groaning." The king, who was then in France, sent
his envoy, Richard de Lucy, to Canterbury to press the essential problem
home in plain words: "If," he said, "the king and the archbishop are
joined together in affection, the state of the Church will still be quiet
and happy; but if the thing should fall out otherwise, what strife may
come from it, what difficulties and tumults, what loss and peril to souls,
I cannot hide from you." The argument prevailed, and in London, in the
presence of the king's little son Henry, then seven years old, Thomas
was chosen archbishop, "the multitude acclaiming with the voice of God
and not of man." The deacon-chancellor was ordained priest on the 2d of
June 1162, and the next day consecrated archbishop by Henry of Winchester.
Two months later John of Salisbury brought him the pall from Pope
Alexander at Montpellier, and for the first time since the Norman
Conquest, a man born on English soil was set at the head of the
English Church.
CHAPTER V
THE CONSTITUTIONS OF CLARENDON
In the January of 1163 Henry once more landed in England. His absence off
our and a half years had given time for dangers and alarms to spring up
in the half-settled realm. Mysterious prophecies passed from mouth to
mouth that the king would never be seen in the island again, and even
Theobald, before his death in 1161, had sent urgent entreaties for his
return. The king had, in fact, during the first eight years of his rule
been mainly occupied in building up his empire, and providing for its
defence against external dangers. He had only twice visited the kingdom,
each time for little more than a year. He was now, however, prepared to
take the work of administration seriously in hand. In the next eighteen
years, from 1163 to 1180, he landed on its shores seven times, and spent
altogether eight years in the country. Once he was busied with the
conquest of Ireland; one visit of a month was spent in crushing a
dangerous rebellion; but with these two exceptions every coming of the
king was marked by the carrying out of some great administrative reform.
In his half-compacted empire order was still only maintained by his
actual presence and the sheer force of his personal authority, as he
hurried from country to country to quell a rising in Gascony or a revolt
in Galloway, to wage war in Wales, to finish the conquest of Britanny or
of Ireland, to order the administration of Poitou or Normandy. But in the
swift and terrible progresses of a king who visited the shires to north
and south and west in the intervals of foreign war, a long series of
experiments as to the best forms of internal government was ceaselessly
carried out, and the new administration securely established.
Henry, however, was at once met by a difficulty unknown to earlier days.
The system which the Conqueror had established of separate courts for
secular and ecclesiastical business had utterly broken down for purposes
of justice. Until the reign of Stephen much of the business of the
bishops was done in the courts of the hundred and the shire. The Church
courts also had at first been guided by the customary law and traditions
of the early English Church, which had grown up along with the secular
laws and had a distinctly national character. So long, indeed, as the
canon law remained somewhat vague, and the Church courts incomplete, they
could work peaceably side by side with the lay courts; but with the
development of ecclesiastical law in the middle of the twelfth century,
it was inevitable that difficulties should spring up. The boundaries of
civil and ecclesiastical law were wholly uncertain, the scientific study
of law had hardly begun, and there was much debatable ground which might
be won by the most arrogant or the most skilful of the combatants. Every
brawl of a few noisy lads in the Oxford streets or at the gates of some
cathedral or monastic school was enough to kindle the strife as to the
jurisdiction of Church or State which shook medieval society to its
foundation.
The Church courts not only had jurisdiction over the whole clerical order,
but exercised wide powers even over the laity. To them alone belonged the
right to enforce spiritual penalties, to deal with cases of oaths,
promises, anything in which a man's faith was pledged; to decide as to the
property of intestates, to pronounce in every case of inheritance whether
the heir was legitimate, to declare the law as to wills and marriage.
Administering as they did an enlightened system of law, they profited by
the new prosperity of the country, and the judicial and pecuniary disputes
which came to them had never been so abundant as now. Henry was keenly
alive to the fact that the archdeacons' courts now levied every year by
their fines more money than the whole revenue of the crown. Young
archdeacons were sent abroad to be taught the Roman law, and returned to
preside over the newly-established archdeacons' courts; clergy who sought
high office were bound to study before all things, even before theology,
the civil and canon law. The new rules, however, were as yet incomplete
and imperfectly understood in England; the Church courts were without the
power to put them in force; the procedure was hurried and irregular; the
judges were often ill-trained, and unfit to deal with the mass of legal
business which was suddenly thrown on them; the ecclesiastical authorities
themselves shrank from defiling the priesthood by contact with all this
legal and secular business, and kept the archdeacons in deacons' orders;
the more religious clergy questioned whether for an archdeacon salvation
were possible. In the eight years of Henry's rule one hundred murders had
been committed by clerks who had escaped all punishment save the light
sentences of fine and imprisonment inflicted by their own courts, and
Henry bitterly complained that a reader or an acolyte might slay a man,
however illustrious, and suffer nothing save the loss of his orders.
Since the beginning of Henry's reign, too, there had been an enormous
increase of appeals to Rome. Questions quite apart from faith or morals,
and that mostly concerned property, were referred for decision to a
foreign court. The great monasteries were exempted from episcopal control
and placed directly under the Pope; they adopted the customs and laws
which found favour at Rome; they upheld the system of appeals, in which
their wealth and influence gave them formidable advantages. The English
Church was no longer as in earlier times distinct from the rest of
Christendom, but was brought directly under Roman influence. The clergy
were more and more separated from their lay fellow citizens; their rights
and duties were determined on different principles; they were governed by
their own officers and judged by their own laws, and tried in their own
courts; they looked for their supreme tribunal of appeal not to the King's
Court, but to Rome; they became, in fact, practically freed from the
common law.
No king, and Henry least of all, could watch unmoved the first great
body which threatened to stand wholly outside the law of the land; and
the ecclesiastical pretensions of the time were perhaps well matched by
the pretensions of the State. The king had prepared for the coming
conflict by a characteristic act of high-handed imperiousness in the
election of the chancellor-archbishop to carry out his policy. But all
such schemes of imperative despotism were vain. No sooner was Thomas
consecrated than it became plain that his ecclesiastical training would
carry the day against the influence of Henry. As rapidly as he had "thrown
off the deacon" to become the chancellor, so he now went through the
sharper change of throwing off the chancellor to become the archbishop.
With keen political sagacity he at once sought the moral support of the
religious party who had so vehemently condemned his appointment. The
gorgeous ostentation of his old life gave way to an equally elaborate
scheme of saintliness. He threw away with tears his splendid dress to put
on sackcloth and the black cloak of the monk. His table was still covered
with gold and silver dishes and with costly meats, but the hall was now
crowded with the poor and needy, and at his own side sat only the most
learned and holy among the monks and clergy. Forty clerks "most learned
in the law" formed his household. He visited the sick in the infirmary,
and washed the feet of thirteen poor men daily. He sat in the cloister
like one of the monks, studying the canon law and the Holy Scriptures. He
joined their prayers in the Church and took part in their secret councils.
The monks who had suffered under the heavy hand of Theobald, when their
dainty foods were curtailed and their cherished privileges sharply denied
them, hailed joyfully the unexpected attitude of their new master. "This
is the finger of God," men said, "this, indeed, is the work of the right
hand of the Most High." "As he had been accustomed to the pre-eminence
over others in worldly glory," commented another observer, "so now he
determined to be the foremost in holy living."
Rumours spread that there were to be other changes besides that of "holy
living." The see of Canterbury under the new primate was to win back all
lands and privileges lost during the civil wars, at whatever cost to the
interests of the whole court party, of barons who found their rights to
Church appointments and Church lands questioned, and of clerks of the
royal household who trembled for their posts and benefices. There was
soon no lack of enemies at court, old and new, ready to carry to Henry
whispers that would appeal most subtly to his fears,--whispers that the
royal dignity itself was in danger; that he must look to himself and his
heirs, or the story of Stephen's time would be told over again, and that
man alone would in future be king, whom the clergy should elect and the
archbishop approve. Henry's bitter anger was aroused when Thomas
resigned the chancellorship, "not now wishing to be in the royal court,
but desiring to have leisure for prayers, and to superintend the
business of the Church." The king retorted by forcing Thomas to resign
his archdeaconry with its rich fees; and at his landing in January 1163
he received the archbishop, who came to meet him, "with averted face."
Thomas, on his part, added another grievance by refusing on ecclesiastical
grounds to allow Henry to marry his brother to Stephen's daughter-in-law,
the Countess of Warenne; and on the general question of the relations of
Church and State, he hastened to define his views with sharp precision in
an eloquent sermon preached before the king. "Henry observing it word by
word, and understanding from it how greatly Thomas put the ecclesiastical
before the civil right, did not receive this doctrine with an equal mind,
for he perceived that the archbishop was far from his own view, that the
Church had neither rights nor possessions save by his favour." The
attitude of Thomas was yet further strengthened and defined when, in May
1163, he went to attend a great Council held at Tours, where he was
brought more immediately under the influence of the ecclesiastical
movement of the day. There he sought, with a meaning that Henry must
clearly have understood, to procure the canonization of Anselm from Pope
Alexander, who, however, was far too politic amid his own difficulties,
and in his need for Henry's help, to commit himself either by consent or
by refusal.
The inevitable controversy declared itself soon after the return of
Thomas from Tours. Throughout July and August one question after another
was hurried forward for settlement between king and primate. On July 1
the king proposed a change in the collection of the land tax, which
would have increased the royal revenues at the expense of the revenues
of the shire. Since the Conquest there had never been a single instance
of an attempt to resist the royal will in matters of finance, but Thomas
showed no hesitation. He flatly refused consent to an arbitrary act of
this kind. He made no objection to the payment of the tax, but he was
determined to prevent the local revenues being seized in this way by the
king. His action seems to have been wise and patriotic, and his triumph
was complete. Henry was forced to abandon the scheme. Having awakened
the anger of the king, Thomas next alienated the whole party of the
barons by pressing his demands for the recovery of lands belonging to
his see. Tunbridge, Rochester, now in the custody of the crown itself,
Hythe, Saltwood, and a number of other manors became the subjects of
sharp contention. The archbishop urged a doubtful claim, which he had
inherited from Theobald, to appoint the priest to a church on the land
of William of Eynesford, a tenant of the king. William resisted, and
Thomas made his first false move by excommunicating him. Henry at once
appealed to the "customs" of the kingdom, which forbade such sentence on
the king's barons without the royal consent, and Thomas had to withdraw
his excommunication. "I owe him no thanks for it!" cried the angry king.
A more serious strife was raised when Thomas came into direct collision
with Henry on the inevitable question of the punishment of clerks for
crime against the common law. If the king was determined to bring about
a fundamental reform in the administration of justice, the Primate was
equally resolute that as archbishop he would have nothing to do with
reforms which he might have countenanced as chancellor. He prudently
sought at first to divert attention from the real issue by increasing
the severity of judgments in the ecclesiastical courts. A clerk had
stolen a chalice; he insisted on his trial in the Church Court, but to
appease the king ordered him to be branded,--a punishment condemned by
ecclesiastical law which considered all injury to the person as defiling
the image of God. Such devices, however, were thrown away on Henry. When
another clerk, Philip de Broc, who had been accused of manslaughter, was
set free by the Church courts, the king's justiciar ordered him to be
brought to a second trial before a lay judge. Philip refused to submit.
The justiciar then charged him with contempt of court for his vehement
and abusive language to the officer who summoned him, but the archbishop
demanded that for this charge, too, he should be tried by ecclesiastical
law. Henry was forced to content himself with sending a detachment of
bishops and clergy to watch the trial. They returned with the news that
the court had refused to reconsider the charge of manslaughter, and had
merely condemned Philip for insolence; he was ordered to make personal
satisfaction to the sheriff, standing (clerk as he was) naked before
him, and submitting to a heavy fine; his prebend was to be forfeited to
the king for two years; for those two years he was to be exiled and his
movable goods were confiscated.
The punishment might seem severe enough, but Henry would accept no
compromise. With a burst of fury he declared that just judgment for
murder was refused because the offender was in orders. Resolute that the
question should once for all be settled, he summoned a council at
Westminster on October 1. There he demanded, "for love of him and for
safety of the kingdom," that accused clerks should be tried by the
common law, and that if proved guilty, they should be degraded by the
bishops, and given up to the executioner for punishment. He complained
of the exactions of the ecclesiastical courts, and urged that in all
matters concerning these courts or the rights of the clergy, the bishops
should return to the customs of Henry the First. Such a course would
have left them at the king's mercy, and the prelates wavered in their
sore distress. The king's friends contended that a guilty clerk deserved
punishment double that of a layman, and urged the need of submission at
this moment when the Church was torn asunder by schism; and the bishops
frankly admitted a yet more pressing consideration: "For if we do not
what the king wishes," they said, "flight will be cut off from us, and
no man will seek after our souls; but if we consent to the king, we
shall own the sanctuary of God in heredity, and shall sleep safely in
the possession of our churches." On the other hand, the archbishop had
no mind to resign without a contest all the results of the great tide of
feeling which had swept the Church onward far past its old landmarks.
For him there was no going back to a traditional past from which the
Church had shaken itself free, and in which, though king and barons
might see the freedom of the State, he saw the enslaving and degradation
of the clergy. He vehemently asserted that the "customs" of the Church
were of greater authority than any "customs" of the kingdom, that its
canon law claimed obedience as against all traditional national law
whatever; and with keen political insight he insisted on the dangers that
would follow if once they allowed the charm of prescription to be broken,
or the ecclesiastical liberties to be touched. He boldly led the way in
his answer to the king: "We will obey in all things saving our order;" and
as the bishops were asked one by one, they took courage to follow, and
"one voice was in the mouth of all of them." Such a phrase had never been
heard in England before, and Henry, with ready indignation, at once
demanded the withdrawal of the words. When Thomas refused, he broke up the
council in a burst of anger, and suddenly rode away from London, instantly
followed by the whole body of trembling bishops, who hurried after him in
abject terror, "lest before they should be able to catch him up, they
should already have lost their sees." Thomas was left alone--"there was
not one who would know him,"--while the prelates, coming up in time with
their terrible lord, agreed henceforth to guide their words by his good
pleasure.
From this moment all the elements of strife were prepared, and there was
but outer show of harmony when king and archbishop, a few days later,
joined at Westminster to celebrate with solemn pomp the translation of
the remains of the sainted Confessor. In declaring war upon local
jurisdictions, whether of clergy, or nobles, or burghers, or independent
shire courts, Henry was defying all the traditions and convictions of
his age,--an age when local feeling was a force which we are now quite
unable to measure. The nobles, the guilds, and the rising towns had
already won long before, or were now seeking to win as their most
cherished privilege, the right to their own justice without interference
from any higher power. They naturally looked with sympathy on the rights
exercised by the clergy within their own body; they felt that whatever
had been won by one class might later be won by another, and that
liberties which were enjoyed by so enormous a body as the clerical order
were a benefit in which the whole people had a share. If the king was
determined to wage war on "privilege," clergy and people were equally
resolute to defend "liberty." Moreover, in attacking the special
jurisdiction of the Church, Henry had to encounter a force to which there
is no parallel in our own time. An English king had doubtless less to fear
from the Church than had any continental ruler. Abroad the bishop-stool,
the abbey, the Church, were oases in the midst of perpetual war,--the only
spots where peace and law and justice spoke in protest against the chaos
of the world. But England was, in comparison with the rest of the western
world, a country of peace and law. There the Church was less powerful
against the State because the State had never handed over its duty of
maintaining justice and law and right to the exclusive guardianship of the
Church. None the less it was a formidable matter to rouse the hostility of
a body which included not only all the religious world, but all the
educated classes, and penetrated even to the despised villeinage and the
poor freemen whose sons pressed into its lower ranks. The Church with
which Henry had to deal was no longer the same that the Conqueror had
easily bent to his will. It had received its training and felt its
strength in political action; it had developed a close corporate spirit;
it had an admirable organization; it possessed the most advanced as well
as the most merciful legal system of the age. Its courts had strong claims
to popular regard. Their punishments were more merciful than the savage
sentences of the lay courts; and they held out great advantages to the
rich, since the penances they inflicted could be commuted for money.
Their system of law, moreover, was far in advance of the barbarous rules
of customary law; and they were backed by all the authority of the Roman
Curia and of the religious feeling of the day.