Henry the Second - Mrs. J. R. Green
Henry had, however, peculiar advantages in the contest. He was master of
a disciplined body of ministers and servants, in whom he could confidently
trust. He was sure, in this matter at least, of the support of the lay
baronage, who had long arrears of jealousy to make up against their
hereditary opponents the clergy, and who were not likely now to forget
that no party in the Church had ever made common cause with the feudal
lords. He could count on the obedience of the secular clergy. In France
or Germany the bishops were members of the great houses, and as powerful
local rulers wielded a vast feudal authority. In England their position
was very different. They were drawn from the staff of the king's chapel,
and had their whole training in the administration of the court; and they
formed an official nobility who were charged, in common with the secular
nobility, with the conduct of the general business of the realm. They were
appointed to their places by the king for services done to him, and as
instruments of his policy. Neither Pope nor people had any share in their
election. Their estates were granted them by the same titles, and with the
same obligations as those of feudal barons; the king could withhold their
temporalities, sequestrate their lands, confiscate their personal goods,
and burden them with heavy fines; they lay absolutely at his mercy without
appeal. Every tie of feudal duty, of official training, of prudent
self-interest, forced them into subjection to the Crown. Their Roman
sympathies were quenched as they watched the growing independence of the
monasteries, and saw Church endowments taken to enrich the new religious
houses of every kind which were springing up all over England. They feared
the new authority claimed by legates, which threatened to withdraw the
clergy, if they chose to assert their claims, from regular episcopal
jurisdiction. They were thrown on the side of the king in ecclesiastical
questions, drawn together by a common cause, both alike found their
interest in the defence of national tradition as opposed to foreign
custom.
Their leaders too looked coldly on the cause of the Primate. The
Archbishop of York, Roger of Pont l'Eveque, once the companion of Thomas
in Theobald's household, was now his personal enemy and rival. The two
prelates inherited the secular strife as to which see should have the
precedence. Moreover, while Canterbury represented the papal policy and
always looked to Rome, York preserved some faint traditional leanings
towards the liberties of the Irish and Scotch churches from whence the
Christianity of the north had sprung. The Bishop of London, Gilbert
Foliot, who, with the approval of Thomas, had been translated from
Hereford only five months before, was, by his mere position, marked out
as the chief antagonist of the archbishop, for St Pauls was at the head
of the whole body of secular clergy throughout southern England, and to
its bishop inevitably fell the leadership of this party against
Canterbury, which was in the hands of a monastic chapter. The Bishop of
Winchester, Henry of Blois, could well remember the struggle between
Church and Crown under a far weaker king twenty six years before, when
the bishops had wisely withdrawn from a contest where they had "seen
swords unsheathed and knew it was no longer a joking matter, but a
struggle of life and death," and with the prudence born of long political
experience he was for moderate counsels. The Bishop of Chichester, Hilary,
doubtless remembered the inconvenient part which Thomas as chancellor had
played in his own trial a few years before, and might gladly recognize a
poetic justice in seeing Thomas's old doctrines of the supremacy of the
State now applied to himself. "Every plant," he once said with taunting
reference to the king's part in Thomas's election, "which my heavenly
Father has not planted shall be rooted up." Thomas bitterly added another
verse as he heard of the saying, "This man had among the brethren the
place of Judas the traitor." There seems to have been a general impression
that the position of the Primate was extremely critical, and he was
besieged by advisers who urged submission, by messengers from pope and
cardinals, by panic-stricken churchmen. Beset on all sides the Primate
wavered, and at last promised to swear obedience to the "customs of the
kingdom." Immediately the king summoned prelates and barons to witness
his submission, and the famous Council of Clarendon met for this purpose
in 1164.
At Clarendon, however, after three days' conference, the archbishop
hesitated and hung back, he had grievously sinned in yielding, and he
now refused the promised oath. The bishops, finding courage in his
firmness, declared themselves ready to follow him in his refusal. At the
news the fury of the king burst forth, and "he was as a madman in the
eyes of those who stood by." The court broke into wild disorder, the
servants of the king, "with faces more truculent than usual," burst into
the assembly of the prelates, and flinging aside their long cloaks,
flourished their axes aloft, and threatened to strike them into the
heads of the bishops. Two nobles were sent to warn Thomas that orders
for his death were already given unless he would submit. The weeping
bishops with lamentable voices besought him to save them; knights of the
Hospital and the Temple from the king's household knelt before him,
sighing and pouring forth tears. "In fear of death," says one chronicler,
he yielded. "I am ready," he said, "to keep the customs of the kingdom."
Hardly were the words out of his mouth, when Henry commanded him to order
the bishops to give the same promise, and again the Primate obeyed. But
the king was still unsatisfied. His temper had risen in the discussions
of the last few months; his determination was fixed that the matter should
be settled once for all. With the sharp decision of a keen and practical
administrator, he ordered that the "customs of the kingdom" should be
written down, so that no question might ever arise as to the laws which
Thomas had sworn to observe; and "wise men" passed into the next room to
write according to the king's will. They returned with a draft of sixteen
articles, the famous "Constitutions of Clarendon." To these the king
commanded that the Primate should set his seal; but Thomas, agitated by
fear and anxiety, was no longer of the same mind. "By the omnipotent God,"
he cried, "while I live, I will never set my seal to it!" Whether he
finally submitted it is impossible now to say. But he left the court with
a last protest. A copy of the writing was torn down the middle, and one
half, after the fashion of the "tallies" of the day, was given to Thomas
in token of his promise, while the other was laid up in the royal
treasury. "I take this," said the archbishop, "not consenting nor
approving," and turning to the clergy: "By this we may know the malice
of the king, and those things which we must beware of." He left the
council and retired to Winchester, where in sackcloth and penance, shut
out from the services of the Church, he condemned himself to wait in
deepest humiliation till he should receive the Pope's absolution for his
momentary betrayal of duty. For years to come a furious battle was to rage
round the sixteen articles drawn up at Clarendon. According to Thomas, the
Constitutions were a mere act of arbitrary violence, a cunning device of
tyranny. He asserted that they were the sole deed of the justiciar
De Lucy, and of Jocelyn de Bailleul, a French lawyer. In any case he
frankly denied the authority of "custom," that tyrannous law of medieval
times. "God never said," writes one of his defenders, "I am Custom, but I
am Truth." Thomas rested his case not on the customary law of the land,
but on the code of Rome; to English tradition he opposed the Italian
lawyers. Henry, on his part, declared that the Constitutions were drawn
up by the common witness of bishops, earls, barons, and wise men; that
they were, in fact, part of a system actually in operation, and which had
been administered by Thomas himself when he was chancellor. It was
certainly a startling novelty to have the customs of the realm drawn up in
a written code to which men were required to swear obedience; but still
the "Constitutions" professed to be no new legislation, but to be simply a
statement of recognized national tradition. The changes that had followed
on the Conquest had modified older customs profoundly. The conditions, not
only of England but of Europe, had changed with confusing rapidity, and it
was no longer easy to say exactly what was "custom" and what was not. To
Henry the Constitutions did fairly represent the system which had grown up
with general consent under the Norman kings. Thomas, on the other hand,
might argue with equal conviction that he was asked to sign as "customs"
what was practically a new code; and he had neither the wisdom nor the
temper to reconcile the dispute by a reasonable compromise.
No question seems to have been raised as to some of the statutes which
were certainly of recent growth, though they touched Church interests.
One of these repeated unreservedly the assertion that bishops held a
feudal position in all points the same as that of barons or direct
vassals of the king, being bound by all their obligations, and entitled
to sit with them in judgment in the Curia Regis till it came to a
question of blood. Others dealt with disorders which had grown up from
the mutual jealousy of Church and lay courts, and the difficulties thus
thrown in the way of administering laws which were not disputed; rules
were made for the securities to be taken from excommunicated persons;
for the giving up to the king of forfeited goods of felons deposited in
churches or churchyards; and forbidding the ordination of villeins
without their lord's consent,--a provision which possibly was intended
to prevent the withdrawal of an unlimited number of people from secular
jurisdiction. Two other clauses touched upon the new legal remedies, the
use of the jury in the accusation of criminals, and in the decision of
questions of property; it was decreed that laymen should not be accused
in Church courts save by lawful witness, or by the twelve legal
men of the hundred--in other words, by the newly-developed jury of
"presentation"; while the jury of "recognition" was ordered to be used
in disputed titles to ecclesiastical estates.
The real strife was about the seven remaining statutes, which declared
that an accused clerk must first appear before the king's court, and that
the justiciar should then send a royal officer with him to watch the trial
at the ecclesiastical court, and if he were found guilty the Church should
no longer protect him; that the chief clergy might not leave the realm
without the king's permission; that appeals might not be carried to the
Papal Court without the king's consent; that no tenant-in-chief of the
king might be excommunicated without the leave of the king; that the
revenues of vacant sees should fall to the king, until a new appointment
had been made in his court; that questions of advowsons or presentations
to livings questions which at that time represented comparatively a vast
amount of property--should be tried in the king's court; and that the
king's judges should decide in matters of debt, even where the case
included a question of perjury or broken faith, which was claimed as a
matter for ecclesiastical jurisdiction. Such laws as these were no doubt
in Henry's mind simply part of his scheme for establishing a general order
and one undivided authority in the realm. But they opened very much wider
grounds of dispute between Church and State than the mere question of how
criminal clerks were to be dealt with. They boldly attacked the whole of
the pretensions of the Church; they threatened to rob it of a mass of
financial business, to wrest from its control an enormous amount of
property, to deprive it of jurisdiction in the great majority of criminal
suits, to limit its power of irresponsible self-government, and to prevent
its absorption into the vast organization of the Church of Western
Christendom. They defined the relations of the English Church to the see
of Rome. They established its position as a national Church, and declared
that its clergy should be brought under the rule of national law.
The eight months which followed the Council of Clarendon were spent in a
vain attempt to solve an insoluble problem. Messengers from king and
archbishop hastened again and again to the Pope, with no result. Henry
set his face like a flint. "_Verba sunt_," he said to a mediating
bishop; "you may talk to me all the days that we both shall live, but
there shall be no peace till the archbishop wins the Pope's consent to
the customs." Fresh cases arose of clerks accused of theft and murder,
but as the personal quarrel between Henry and Thomas increased in
bitterness, questions of reform fell into the background. "I will humble
thee," the king declared, "and will restore thee to the place from
whence I took thee." Thomas, on his part, knew how to awaken all Henry's
secret fears. All Europe was concerned in the dispute of king and
archbishop. The Pope at Sens, the French king, the "eldest son of the
Church," the princes of the House of Blois, as steadfast in their
orthodoxy as in their hatred of the Angevin, the Emperor, ready to use
any quarrel for his own purposes, were all eagerly watching every turn
of the strife. In August Henry was startled by the news that Thomas
himself had fled to seek the protection of the Pope at Sens. He was,
however, recognized by sailors, and carried back to English shores.
Henry immediately dealt his counter-blow. The archbishop was summoned in
September to London to answer in a case which John, the marshal, an
officer of the Exchequer, had withdrawn from the Archbishop's to the
King's Court. Thomas pleaded illness, and protested that the marshal had
been guilty of perjury. The king retorted by calling a council for the
trial of the archbishop on a charge of contempt of the royal summons.
With the insolence of power and the bitter anger of outraged confidence,
Henry heaped humiliations on his enemy. The Primate had a right, by
ancient custom, to be summoned first among the great lords called to the
king's council; he was now merely served with an ordinary notice from
the sheriff of Kent to attend his trial. When he arrived at Northampton
there was no lodging left free for himself and his attendants. The king
had gone out hunting amid the marshes and streams, and only the next
morning met the Primate roughly after mass, and refused him the kiss of
peace.
In the council which opened in Northampton Castle on Wednesday, 7th
October, we see the Curia Regis in the developed form which it had taken
under Henry and his justiciar, De Lucy, carrying out an exact legal
system, and observing the forms of a very elaborate procedure. The king
and his inner council of the great lords, the prelates, and the officers
of the household, withdrew to an upper chamber of the castle; the whole
company of sheriffs and lesser barons waited in the great hall below
till they were specially summoned to the king's presence, crowding round
the fire that burned in the centre of the hall under the opening in the
roof through which the smoke escaped, or lounging in the straw and
rushes that covered the floor. For seven days the trial dragged on, as
lawyers and bishops and barons anxiously groped their way through
baffling legal problems which had grown out of legislation new and old.
Even the king himself, fiery, imperious, dictatorial, clung with a kind
of superstition to the forms of legal process. The archbishop asked
leave to appeal to the Pope. "You shall first answer in my court for the
injury done to John the marshal," said Henry. The next day, Thursday,
this matter was decided. Bishops and barons alike, lacking somewhat of
the king's daring, shrank at first from the responsibility of pronouncing
judgment. "We are laymen," said the barons; "you are his fellow-priests
and fellow-bishops, and it is for you to declare sentence." "Nay,"
answered the bishops, "this is not an ecclesiastical but a secular
judgment, and we sit here not as bishops but as barons; if you heed our
orders you should also take heed of his." The dispute was a critical one,
leading as it did directly to questions about the jurisdiction of the
Curia Regis over ecclesiastical persons, and the obligation asserted in
the Constitutions of Clarendon, that bishops should sit with barons in the
King's Court till it came to a question of blood. The king was seized with
one of his fierce fits of anger, and the discussion "immediately ended."
The unwilling Bishop of Winchester was sent to pronounce sentence of fine
for neglect of the king's summons. Matters then moved quickly. A demand
was made for L300 which Thomas had received from Eye and Berkhampstead
when he was chancellor; and in spite of his defence that it had been spent
in building the palace in London and repairing the castles, judgment went
against him. The next day a further demand was made for money spent in the
war of Toulouse, and this, too, Thomas agreed to pay, though it was now
hard to find sureties. Then the king dealt his last blow. Thomas was
required to account for the sums he had received as chancellor from vacant
sees and abbeys. "By God's eyes," the king swore, when the Primate and the
bishops threw themselves in despair at his feet, he would have the
accounts in full. He would only grant a day's delay for Thomas to take
counsel with his friends.
By this time there was no doubt of the king's purpose to force upon
Thomas the resignation of his archbishopric. The courtiers and lay
barons no longer thought it expedient to visit him, and the prelates
gave counsel with divided hearts. "Remembering whence the king took
you," said Foliot, "and what he has bestowed on you, and the ruin which
you prepare for the Church and for us all, not only the archbishopric
but ten times as much, if it were possible, you should yield to him. It
may be that seeing in you this humility he may yet restore all." To this
argument Thomas had curt answer. "Enough--it is well enough known how
you, being consulted, would answer!" "You know the king better than we,"
urged Hilary of Chichester; "in the chancery, in peace and war, you
served him faithfully, but not without envy. Those who then envied now
excite the king against you. Who dare answer for you? The king has said
that you can no longer both be at one time in England--he as king, you
as archbishop." Henry of Winchester took his stand on the side of
Thomas. "If the authority of the king was to prevail," he argued, "what
remains but that nothing shall henceforth be done according to law, but
all things shall be disturbed for his pleasure--and the priesthood shall
be as the people," he concluded, with a stirring of the churchman's
temper. The Bishop of Exeter added another plea to induce Thomas to
stand firm: "Surely it is better to put one head in peril than to set
the whole Church in danger." Not so, thought the Bishop of Lincoln, "a
simple man and of little discretion;" "for it is plain," he said, "that
this man must yield up either the archbishopric or his life; but what
should be the fruit of his archbishopric to him if his life should
cease, I see not." The Bishop of Worcester, son of the famous Robert of
Gloucester, and Henry's own cousin and playmate in old days took an
eminently prudent course. "I will give no counsel," he said, "for if I
say our charge of souls is to be given up at the king's threats, I
should speak against my conscience, and to my own condemnation; and if I
should advise to resist the king, there are those here who will bring
him word of it, and I shall be cast out of the synagogue, and my lot
shall be with outlaws and public enemies." At last, by the advice of the
politic Henry of Winchester, Thomas offered to pay the king 2000 marks,
but this compromise was refused. He urged that he had been freed at
his consecration from all secular obligations, but the plea was
rejected on the ground that it was done without the king's orders. An
adjournment over Sunday was again granted; but on Monday Thomas was ill,
and unable to attend the Council. Three days had now passed in fruitless
negotiations, and the rising wrath of the king made itself felt. Rumours
of danger grew on all sides, and the archbishop prostrated himself
before the altar in an agony of prayer, "trembling in his whole body,"
as he afterwards confessed, less from fear of death than from the more
terrible fear of the savage blinding and cruel punishments of those days.
But he showed no signs of yielding when on Tuesday morning, the last day
of the Council, the bishops again gathered round him beseeching him
to yield to the king's will. With a fierce outbreak of passionate
reproaches he solemnly forbade them to take part in any further
proceedings against him, and gave formal notice of an appeal to Rome.
Then kneeling before the altar of St. Stephen he celebrated mass, using
the service for St. Stephen's Day with its psalm, "Princes sat and spake
against me,"--"a magical rite," said Foliot, "and an act done in contempt
of the king"-and commended himself to the care of the first Christian
martyr, and of the martyred Archbishop of Canterbury, Aelfheah. Still
arrayed in his pontifical robes, he set out for his last ride to the
castle. Of the forty clerks "most learned in the law," who formed his
household, only two ventured to follow him; but "an innumerable
multitude" of people thronged round him as he passed bearing his cross
in his right hand, and followed him to the castle doors with cries of
lamentation, weeping and kneeling for his benediction, for it was spread
abroad that he should that day be slain. The gates were quickly closed in
the face of the tumultuous crowd, and Thomas passed up the great hall,
while the king, hearing of his coming in such dress and fashion, hastily
withdrew to the upper chamber to take counsel with his officers. "A fool
he was, and a fool he always will be," commented Foliot as Thomas entered
with his uplifted cross. "Lord archbishop, thou art ill-advised to enter
thus to the king with sword unsheathed--if now the king should take his
sword, we shall have a well-armed king and a well-armed archbishop!"
--"That we will commit to God," said Thomas. Thus he passed to his seat,
the troubled and perplexed bishops "sitting opposite to him both in place
and in heart."
Meanwhile the king and his inner council, to which the bishops were
now summoned, were busy discussing what must be done. Henry's position
was one of extreme difficulty, suddenly called on as he was to deal
with a legacy of difficulties which had been left from the unsettled
controversies of a hundred years. By coming to the court in his pontifical
dress Thomas had raised a claim that a bishop could only be tried dressed
in full pontificals by his fellow-bishops also in full dress. He had
thrown aside the king's jurisdiction by his appeal to Rome; and by his
orders to the bishops to judge no further with the barons in this suit
he had further violated the "customs" of the realm to which he had himself
commanded the bishops to swear obedience at Clarendon. None of the
questions raised by Thomas indeed were raised for the first time. William
of St. Carileph, when charged by Rufus with treason, had asserted the
privilege of a bishop to be tried in pontifical dress, and to be judged
only by the canon law in an ecclesiastical court, and had claimed the
right of appeal to Rome. But such doctrines were in those days new and
somewhat doubtful, not supported in any degree by the Church and quite
outside the sympathy of nobles and people, and Lanfranc had easily
eluded the Bishop of Durham's claims. Anselm himself had accepted
a number of points disputed now by Thomas. He frankly admitted the king's
authority in appointing him to the see of Canterbury; he submitted to the
jurisdiction of the King's Court; he made no claims to clerical privileges
or special forms of trial. He had indeed given the first example of a
saving clause in his oath to keep the customs of the kingdom; but the
clause he used, "according to God," was radically different from that of
Thomas, and asserted no different law of obedience for clerk and
for layman. In the reign of Stephen the question of ecclesiastical
jurisdiction ad been raised at the trial of Bishop Roger of Salisbury; but
in this case too the difficulty had been evaded by a temporary expedient,
and the real principle at issue was left untouched. Thomas had in fact
taken up a position which had never been claimed by any great churchman
of the past. The rising tide of ecclesiastical feeling had swept him on
far beyond any of his predecessors. Not even in Anselm's time had the
people in an ecstasy of religious fervour pressed to the gate of the
judgment hall and knelt for the blessing of the saint with a passion of
sympathy and devotion. No problem of such proportions in the relations of
Church and State had ever before presented itself to a king of England.