CHAPTER IV. CHURCH MILITANT: THOMAS Thomas CAMBRENSIS. BECKET-GIRALDUS ALTHOUGH Thomas Becket left to literature only a collection of letters, which were first arranged with many by other persons in four books by John of Salisbury, the Becket. spirit of our more Saxon writers in the generations after him will, in some points, hardly be interpreted aright if nothing is said here of the conflict between Archbishop Becket and the king. The Church, in which the Norman Becket represented only a disease of his own day, preached the upholding of all clerical immunities, it claimed to be as gold against the mere lead of the State-to be of the race of Abel, while the other was of Cain. It even ventured on more violent antithesis. It said, I have my authority from Heaven, you obtain your strength from hell. In Italy and France nothing was known to pope, king, or people of the substantial grievance out of which the quarrel arose in England between king and archbishop. "Liberty of the Church in danger!" was the vague cry that awakened sympathy. But what was that liberty of the Church? Exemption of all clerical offenders from the jurisdiction of the civil law. When Henry II. came to the throne there lay sub judice the case of Osbert Archdeacon of York, charged with having administered poison to his archbishop in the Eucharistic cup. The accused not only withdrew himself from the control of English civil law, but escaped among the intricacies of the canon law, and was able to refer his case wholly to Rome. In the beginning of King Henry's reign, men whom a contemporary entitles "tonsured demons, workmen of the devil, clerks in name only, but belonging to Satan's portion;" furnished "murderers, thieves, robbers, assassins, and practisers of other atrocities." In rough times the immunities of the Church sheltered persons of this class, of whom we learn that a great number obtained ordination without cures. A chronicler of the time says roughly that a hundred murders had been committed by clerks since the beginning of Henry's reign. Men with no benefices to lose cared little for the sentence of deprivation, which they could for a long time escape, and by which the utmost rigour of the Church was represented. The ecclesiastical law was weak and slow to seize, and at the worst, inflicted punishment that was no terror to this class of evil-doers. Henry II., hard-handed and passionate, but animated with his own rude sense of his own rights, asserted the liberty of England in demanding that such men should not be sheltered by immunities that were withdrawing a large number of his subjects from responsibility towards their fellow-subjects and their lawful rulers. Becket, too, a London citizen's son, was from the first swift-tempered and ambitious. The white and slenderhanded clerk to a rich merchant kinsman, and to the chief magistrates of London, was introduced through the chance friendship of Norman ecclesiastics into the service of Archbishop Theobald. He made the best of that position, obtained among other preferments, which were pure matters of income, the living of the old church of St. Mary-le-Strand (pulled down in the reign of Edward VI. to make room for Somerset House), received prebends, acquired wealth, indulged his taste for pomp and luxury; went to study ecclesiastical law, for the grief of his king, during a year, under Gratian at Bologna; undertook delicate missions, and among them that which paved the way for the succession of Henry II., by causing Eugenius III. to forbid the coronation of Eustace as his father's colleague. This mission it was that gave to Becket a strong hold on the goodwill of Henry. Ecclesiastical gifts, of an archdeaconry, a provostship, and "very many parish churches," had made Becket, mere deacon as he was, rich before he owed anything to Henry's favour. Pluralities and other matters of that kind tending to promote luxury and stifle conscience in the Church, were not among the ecclesiastical abuses which we find Becket in later days reforming. His labour simply was to reform that which deprived the Church of influence or money into a shape that brought to it increase of worldly power. When Henry came to the throne, Becket was thirty-six years old, " tall and handsome in person, of eloquent and witty speech, of an apprehension so quick as to give him an advantage over men of greater knowledge, an accomplished chess-player, a master in hunting, falconry, and other manly exercises. His tastes were luxurious. If he mortified himself it was by limiting his allowance of a dainty dish, and not by substitution of coarse fare. It is said, indeed, that when entertained in exile by the poor Cistercians of Pontigny, he ate for a time pulse, privately introduced into the show of delicate food, with which, that he might keep his fasting secret, he maintained his dignity before the brethren. But the unwholesome diet disagreed with him, it is said. He had a comely face in those days, and looked stout; but after his death it was revealed that the stoutness was produced by a hair shirt; and it was found on the day after his martyrdom, that under his fair outside of pomp he was so religiously beset with vermin, that, wrote Grim, "anyone would think that the martyrdom of the preceding day was less grievous than that which these small enemies continually inflicted." A story told by Hoveden may or may not illustrate to the incredulous the true character of some of Becket's secret mortifications. One day, as he was dining with Pope Alexander, one who knew his custom of living on bread and water, although dainties were served up to him, placed on the table a cup of water. The Pope tasted it, and found it excellent wine; whereupon, saying, "I thought this was water," he set it before the archbishop, and immediately it became water again! When going disguised as a poor monk into exile, travelling a French road painfully on foot, Becket is said to have betrayed himself by the sportsman's interest he displayed in a hawk carried by. At Pontigny the Bishop of Poitiers had to urge on him repeatedly the duty of " condescension to the religious house which entertained him," by reducing the number of his train of men and horses; and his wise friend John of Salisbury, whose letters show him to have been the most honest Churchman who contributed his thread to the webs of chicanery, deceit, violence, and overbearing pride, of which broken and matted threads are left to us in the ecclesiastical correspondence of that time, attacked wisely the worst pride of Becket. He was using his leisure for more controversial study of the canons. "Laws and canons," John wrote, "are indeed useful; but believe me these are not what will now be needed. Who ever rises pricked in heart from the reading of laws or even of canons ?" Having been given by the Church to the king as a friend and favourite who would watch subtly over the material interests of Churchmen, and having profited by an undue exercise of the king's authority in obtaining his archbishopric, Becket used no moderation in advancing the claims of himself and of his order. For his submission to the constitutions of Clarendon, which hedged the power he was striving to make boundless, Becket, as a priest of his century, is hardly to be blamed. He was compelled by force; not he only, but also his cause was lost if he resisted them. His conscience was not for one man to bind by inconvenient promises. In the latter phases of his struggle want of self-control is always manifest. At Vézeley he was embarrassing the Pope by dealing excommunications on men personally hostile to himself, when he aroused Henry to seek his expulsion from the shelter he had found with the Cistercians. The king's acts of persecution were two in number only; and, however little to be admired, each following upon distinct provocation. The banishment of Becket's kindred followed on the return of Henry's envoys from the Papal court at Christmas, 1164; the dislodging of the exiles followed only upon Becket's excommunication of the king's adherents, and the threat of a like censure on himself. Even against Rome and the Pope Becket stormed when they were not ready enough to serve him. A letter from the Pope himself, ordering the absolution of one whom the archbishop had cursed, was described as an order "that Satan might be let loose for the ruin of the Church." "I know not how it is," he cries, "that in the court of Rome the Lord's side is always sacrificed-that Barabbas escapes and Christ is put to death." Such was the witness to Rome of one of her own saints. To the last the turbulent mind was the character of this saint, and a foul epithet, applied to one of the knights under whose blows he fell, seems to have stung them to his murder, when possibly their first intention may have been only to seize his person. Becket. Canon Robertson has edited "The Life, Passion, and Miracles" of Becket, by William, a Monk of Canterbury, Lives of who was present at the beginning of the murder in the Cathedral, and when Fitzurse cried "Strike! strike!" fled because he expected a general slaughter and felt himself unfit for martyrdom. From the same editor we have the Life of St. Thomas by Edward Grim, who was Becket's crossbearer, and was |