had already increased so greatly since the death of Stephen.
A year later the other branch of Stephen's family came
into a new relationship to the politics of France and England.
At the beginning of October, 1160, Louis's second wife died,
leaving him still without a male heir. Without waiting till
the end of any period of mourning, within a fortnight, he
married the daughter of Stephen's brother, Theobald of
Blois, sister of the counts Henry of Champagne and Theobald
of Blois, who were already betrothed to the two daughters of
his marriage with Eleanor. This opened for the house of
Blois a new prospect of influence and gain, and for the king
of England of trouble which was in part fulfilled. Henry
saw the probable results, and at once responded with an
effort to improve his frontier defences. The marriage of the
young Henry and Margaret of France was immediately
celebrated, though the elder of the two was still a mere
infant. This marriage gave Henry the right to take posses-
sion of the Norman Vexin and its strong castles, and this he
did. The war which threatened for a moment did not break
out, but there was much fortifying of castles on both sides of
the frontier.
It is said that the suggestion of this defensive move came
from Thomas Becket. However this may be, Thomas was
272 THE EARLY YEARS OF HENRY H 1161
CHAP, now near the end of his career of service to the state as
^^^ chancellor, and was about to enter a field which promised
even greater usefulness and wider possibilities of service.
Archbishop Theobald of Canterbury died on April 18, 1161.
For some months the king gave no sign of his intentions as
to his successor. Then he declared his purpose. Thomas,
the chancellor, was about to cross to England to carry out
another plan of Henry's. The barons were to be asked to
swear fealty to the young Henry as the direct heir to the
crown. Born in February, 1155, Henry was in his eighth
year when this ceremony was performed. Some little time
before he had been committed by his father to the chancellor
to be trained in his courtly and brilliant household, and there
he became deeply attached to his father's future enemy.
The swearing of fealty to the heir, to which the barons
were now accustomed, was performed without objection,
Thomas himself setting the example by first taking the oath.
This was his last service of importance as chancellor.
Before his departure from Normandy on this errand, the
king announced to him his intention to promote him to the
vacant primacy. The appointment would be a very natural
one. Archbishop Theobald is said to have hoped and prayed
that Thomas might succeed him, and the abilities which the
chancellor had abundantly displayed would account for a
general expectation of such a step, but Thomas himself hesi-
tated. We are dependent for our knowledge of the details
of what happened at this time on the accounts of Thomas's
friends and admirers, but there is no reason to doubt their
substantial accuracy. It is clear that there were better
grounds in fact for the hesitation of Thomas than for the in-
sistence of Henry, but they were apparently concealed from
the king. His mother is said to have tried to dissuade him,
and the able Bishop of Hereford, Gilbert Foliot, records his
own opposition. But the complete devotion to the king's will
and the zealous services of Thomas as chancellor might well
make Henry believe, if not that he would be entirely subser-
vient to his policy when made archbishop, at least that Church
and State might be ruled by them together in full harmony
and co-operation, and the days of William and Lanfranc be
brought back. Becket read his own character better and
ii6i THOMAS BECKET MADE PRIMATE 273
knew that the days of Henry I and Anselm were more chap.
likely to return, and that not because he recognized in him- ^^^
self the narrowness of Anselm, bu'. because he knew his
tendency to identify himself to the uttermost with whatever
cause he adopted.
Thomas had come to the chancellorship at the age of thirty-
seven. He had been a student, attached to the household
of Archbishop Theobald, and he must long have looked for-
ward to promotion in the Church as the natural field of his
ambition, and in this he had just taken the first step in his
appointment to the rich archdeaconry of Canterbury by
his patron. As chancellor, however, he seems to have faced
entirely about. He threw himself into the elegant and
luxurious life of the court with an abandon and delight
which, we are tempted to believe, reveal his natural bent.
The family of a wealthy burgher of London in the last part
of the reign of Henry I may easily have been a better school
of manners and taste than the court of Anjou. Certainly in
refinement, and in the order and elegance of his household as
it is described, the chancellor surpassed the king. Provided
with an ample income both from benefices which he held in
the Church and from the perquisites of his office, he indulged
in a profusion of expenditure and display which the king
probably did not care for and certainly did not equal, and
collected about himself such a company of clerks and laymen
as made his household a better place for the training of the
children of the nobles than the king's. In the king's ser-
vice he spent his money with as lavish a hand as for himself,
in his embassy to the French court or in the war against
Toulouse. He had the skill to avoid the envy of either king
or courtier, and no scandal or hint of vice was breathed
against him. The way to the highest which one could hope
for in the service of the state seemed open before him, and he
felt himself peculiarly adapted to enjoy and render useful such
a career. One cannot help speculating on the interesting but
hopeless problem of what the result would have been if Becket
had remained in the line of secular promotion and the primacy
had gone to the next most likely candidate, Gilbert Foliot,
whose type of mind would have led him to sympathize more
naturally with the king's views and purposes in the questions
VOL. II. 18
274 THE EARLY YEARS OF HENRY II 1162
CHAP, that were so soon to arise between Church and State in
^^^ England.
The election of Becket to the see of Canterbury seems to
have followed closely the forms which had come into use
since the compromise between Henry I and Anselm, and
which were soon after described in the Constitutions of
Clarendon. The justiciar, Richard de Lucy, with three
bishops went down to Canterbury and made known the will
of the king and summoned the monks to an election. Some
opposition showed itself among them, apparently because of
the candidate's worldly life and the fact that he was not a
monk, but they gave way to the clearly expressed will of the
king. The prior and a deputation of the monks went up to
London ; and there the formal election took place " with the
counsel of " the bishops summoned for the purpose, and was
at once confirmed by the young prince acting for his father.
At the same time Henry, Bishop of Winchester, made a
formal demand of those who were representing the king
that the archbishop should be released from all liability for
the way in which he had handled the royal revenues as
chancellor and treasurer, and this was agreed to. On the
next Sunday but one, June 3, 1162, Thomas was consecrated
Archbishop at Canterbury by the Bishop of Winchester, as the
see of London was vacant. As his first official act the new
prelate ordained that the feast in honour of the Trinity should
be henceforth kept on the anniversary of his consecration.
CHAPTER XIII
KING AND ARCHBISHOP
Thomas Becket, who thus became the head of the EngUsh chap.
Church, was probably in his forty-fourth year, for he seems ^^^^
to have been born on December 21, 11 18. All his past had
been a training in one way or another for the work which he
was now to do. He had had an experience of many sides of
life. During his early boyhood, in his father's house in Lon-
don, he had shared the life of the prosperous burgher class ;
he had been a student abroad, and though he was never a
scholar, he knew something of the learned world from within ;
he had been taken into the household of Archbishop Theo-
bald, and there he had been trained, with a little circle of
young men of promise of his own age, in the strict ideas of
the Church ; he had been employed on various diplomatic
missions, and had accomplished what had been intrusted to
him, we are told, with skill and success ; last of all, he had
been given a high office in the state, and had learned to know
by experience and observation the life of the court, its methods
of doing or preventing business, and all its strength and
weakness.
As Archbishop of Canterbury, Thomas Becket became
almost the independent sovereign of a state within the state.
Lanfranc had held no such place, nor had Anselm. No
earlier archbishop indeed had found himself at his consecra-
tion so free from control and so strong. The organization
apart from the state, the ideal liberty of the Church, to which
Anselm had looked forward somewhat vaguely, had been in
some degree realized since his time. The death of Henry I
had removed the restraining hand which had held the Church
within its old bounds. For a generation afterwards it was
free — free as compared with any earlier period — to put into
practice its theories and aspirations, and the new Archbishop
275 18*
276 KING AND ARCHBISHOP 11 62
CHAP, of Canterbury inherited the results still unquestioned and
^^"^ undiminished. Henry II had come to the throne young and
with much preliminary work to be done. Gradually, it would
seem, the reforms necessary to recover the full royal power,
and to put into most effective form the organization of the
state, were taking shape In his mind. It is possible, it is per-
haps more than possible, that he expected to have from his
friend Thomas as archbishop sympathy and assistance in these
plans, or at least that he would be able to carry them out
with no opposition from the Church. This looks to us now
like a bad reading of character. At any rate no hope was
ever more completely disappointed. In character, will, and
ideals, at least as these appear from this time onward, sover-
eign and primate furnished all the conditions of a most bitter
conflict. But to understand this conflict it is also necessary
to remember the strength of Becket's position, the fact that
he was the ruler of an almost independent state.
What was the true and natural character of Thomas Becket,
what were really the ideals on which he would have chosen
to form his life if he had been entirely free to shape it as he
would, is a puzzle which this is not the place to try to solve.
Nor can we discuss here the critical questions, still unsettled,
which the sources of our knowledge present. Fortunately
no question affects seriously the train of events, and, in regard
to the character of the archbishop, we may say with some con-
fidence that, whatever he might have chosen for himself, he
threw himself with all the ardour of a great nature into what-
ever work he was called upon to do. As chancellor, Thomas's
household had been a centre of luxurious court life. As
archbishop his household was not less lavishly supplied, nor
less attractive ; but its elegance was of a more sober cast, and
for himself Thomas became an ascetic, as he had been a
courtier, and practised in secret, according to his biographers,
the austerities and good works which became the future saint.
Six months after the consecration of the new archbishop.
King Henry crossed from Normandy to England, at the end
of January, 1163, but before he did so word had come to him
from Becket which was like a declaration of principles.
Henry had hoped to have him at the same time primate of
the Church and his own chancellor. Not merely would this
1 1 63 THE COUNCIL AT WOODSTOCK 277
add a distinction to his court, but we may believe that the chap.
king would regard it as a part of the co-operation between ^^^^
Church and State in the reforms he had in mind. To Thomas
the retention of his old office would probably mean a pledge
not to oppose the royal will in the plans which he no doubt
foresaw. It would also interfere seriously with the new
manner of life which he proposed for himself, and he firmly
declined to continue in the old office. In other ways, unim-
portant as yet, the policy of the primate as it developed was
coming into collision with the king's interests, in his deter-
mined pushing of the rights of his Church to every piece of
land to which it could lay any claim, in some cases directly
against the king, and in his refusal to allow clerks in the ser-
vice of the State to hold preferments in the Church, of which
he had himself been guilty; but all these things were still
rather signs of what might be expected than important in
themselves. There was for several months no breach between
the king and the archbishop.
For some time after his return to England Henry was
occupied, as he had been of late on the continent, with minor
details of government of no permanent importance. The
treaty of alliance with Count Dietrich of Flanders was re-
newed. Gilbert Foliot was translated to the important
bishopric of London. A campaign in South Wales brought
the prince of that country to terms, and was followed by
homage from him and other Welsh princes rendered at a
great council held at Woodstock during the first week of July,
1 163. It was at this meeting that the king first met with
open and decided opposition from the archbishop, though
this was still in regard to a special point and not to a general
Une of policy. The revenue of the state which had been
left by the last reign in a disordered condition was still the
subject of much concern and careful planning. Recently, as
our evidence leads us to believe, the king had given up the
Danegeld as a tax which had declined in value until it was
no longer worth collecting. At Woodstock he made a propo-
sition to the council for an increase in the revenue without an
increase in the taxation. It was that the so-called " sheriff's
aid," a tax said to be of two shillings on the hide paid to the
sheriffs by their counties as a compensation for their services,
278 KING AND ARCHBISHOP 1163
CHAP, should be for the future paid into the royal treasury for the
^^^^ use of the crown. That this demand was in the direction of
advance and reform can hardly be questioned, especially if,
as is at least possible, it was based on the declining impor-
tance of the sheriffs as purely local officers, and their in-
creasing responsibilities as royal officers on account of the
growing importance of the king's courts and particularly
of the itinerant justice courts. So decided a change, how-
ever, in the traditional way of doing business could only be
made with consent asked and obtained. There is no evidence
that opposition came from any one except Becket. He flatly
refused to consent to any such change, as he had a right to
do so far as his own lands were concerned, and declared that
this tax should never be paid from them to the public treas-
ury. The motive of his opposition does not appear and is
not easy to guess. He stood on the historical purpose of
the tax and refused to consider any other use to which it
might be put. Henry was angry, but apparently he had to
give up his plan. At any rate unmistakable notice had been
served on him that his plans for reform were likely to meet
with the obstinate opposition of his former chancellor.
This first quarrel was the immediate prelude to another
concerning a far more important matter and of far more last-
ing consequences. Administration and jurisdiction, revenue
and justice, were so closely connected in the medieval state
that any attempt to increase the revenue, or to improve and
centralize the administrative machinery, raised at once the
question of changes in the judicial system. But Henry H
was not interested in getting a larger income merely, or a
closer centralization. His whole reign goes to show that he
had a high conception of the duty of the king to make justice
prevail and to repress disorder and crime. But this was a
duty which he could not begin to carry out without at once
encountering the recognized rights and still wider claims of
the Church. Starting from the words of the apostle against
going to law before unbelievers, growing at first as a pro-
cess of voluntary arbitration within the Church, adding a
criminal side with the growth of disciplinary powers over
clergy and members, and greatly stimulated and widened by
the legislation of the early Christian emperors, a body of
1 1 63 THE BEGINNING OF CONFLICT 279
law and a judicial organization had been developed by the chap.
Church which rivalled that of the State in its own field and ^^^^
surpassed it in scientific form and content. In the hundred
years since William the Conqueror landed in England this
system had been greatly perfected. The revival of the Ro-
man law in the schools of Italy had furnished both model
and material, but more important still the triumph of the
Cluniac reformation, of the ideas of centralization and empire,
had given an immense stimulus to this growth, and led to clearer
conceptions than ever before of what to do and how to do it.
When the state tardily awoke to the same consciousness of
opportunity and method, it found a large part of what should
have been its own work in the hands of a rival power.
In no state in Christendom had the line between these
conflicting jurisdictions been clearly drawn. In England no
attempt had as yet been made to draw it ; the only legisla-
tion had been in the other direction. The edict of William I,
separating the ecclesiastical courts from the temporal, and
giving them exclusive jurisdiction in spiritual causes, must be
regarded as a beneficial regulation as things then were. The
same thing can hardly be said of the clause in Stephen's
charter to the Church by which he granted it jurisdiction
over all the clergy ; yet under this clause the Church had
in fifteen years drawn into its hands, as nearly as we can
judge, more business that should naturally belong to the
state than in the three preceding reigns. This rapid attain-
ment of what Anselm could only have wished for, this en-
larged jurisdiction of the Church, stood directly in the way
of the plans of the young king as he took up the work of
restoring the government of his grandfather. He had found
out this fact before the death of Archbishop Theobald and
had taken some steps to bring the question to an issue at
that time, but he had been obliged to cross to France and had
not since been able to go on with the matter. Now the refusal
of Archbishop Thomas to grant his request about the sheriff's
aid probably did not make him any less ready to push what
he believed to be the clear rights of the state against the
usurpations of the clergy.
As the state assumed more and more the condition of settled
order under the new king, and the courts were able to enforce
28o KIF^G AND ARCHBISHOP 1163
CHAP, the laws everywhere, the failures of justice which resulted
^^" from the separate position of the clergy attracted more at-
tention. The king was told that there had been during his
reign more than a hundred murders by clerks and great num-
bers of other crimes, for none of which had it been possible
to inflict the ordinary penalties. Special cases began to be
brought to his attention. The most important of these
was the case of Philip of Broi, a man of some family and a
canon of Bedford, who, accused of the murder of a knight,
had cleared himself by oath in the bishop's court. After-
wards the king's justice in Bedford summoned him to appear
in his court and answer to the same charge, but he refused
with insulting language which the justice at once repeated to
the king as a contempt of the royal authority. Henry was
very angry and swore "by the eyes of God," his favourite
oath, that an insult to his minister was an insult to himself
and that the canon must answer for it in his court. " Not
so," said the archbishop, " for laymen cannot be judges of the
clergy. If the king complains of any injury, let him come or
send to Canterbury, and there he shall have full justice by
ecclesiastical authority." This declaration of the archbishop
was the extreme claim of the Church in its simplest form.
Even the king could not obtain justice for a personal injury
in his own courts, and the strength of Becket's position is
shown by the fact that, in spite of all his anger, Henry was
obliged to submit. He could not, even then, get the case of
the murder reopened, and in the matter of the insult to his
judge the penalties which he obtained must have seemed to
him very inadequate.
It seems altogether probable that this case had much to do
with bringing Henry to a determination to settle the question,
what law and what sovereign should rule in England. So
long as such things were possible, there could be no effective
centralization and no supremacy of the national law. Within
three months of the failure of his plan of taxation in the
council at Woodstock the king made a formal demand of the
Church to recognize the right of the State to punish crimi-
nous clerks. The bishops were summoned to a conference
at Westminster on October i. To them the king proposed an
arrangement, essentially the same as that afterwards included
1 1 63 RIVAL JURISDICTIONS 281
in the Constitutions of Clarendon, by which the question of chap.
guilt or innocence should be determined by the Church court, ^^^^
but once pronounced guilty the clerk should be degraded by
the Church and handed over to the lay court for punishment.
The bishops were not at first united on the answer which
they should make, but Becket had no doubts, and his opinion
carried the day. One of his biographers, Herbert of Bosham,
who was his secretary and is likely to have understood his
views, though he was if possible of an even more extreme
spirit than his patron, records the speech in which the arch-
bishop made known to the king the answer of the Church.
Whether actually delivered or not, the speech certainly states
the principles on which Becket must have stood, and these
are those of the reformers of Cluny in their most logical form.
The Church is not subject to an earthly king nor to the law
of the State alone : Christ also is its king and the divine law
its law. This is proved by the words of our Lord concerning
the "two swords." But those who are by ordination the
clergy of the Church, set apart from the nations of men and
peculiarly devoted to the work of God, are under no earthly
king. They are above kings and confer their power upon
them, and far from being subject to any royal jurisdiction they
are themselves the judges of kings. There can be no doubt
but that Becket in his struggle with the king had consciously
before him the model of Anselm ; but these words, whether
he spoke them to the king's face or not, forming as they did
the principles of his action and accepted by the great body of
the clergy, show how far the English Church had progressed
along the road into which Anselm had first led it.
Henry's only answer to the argument of the archbishop was
to adopt exactly the position of his grandfather in the earlier
conflict, and to inquire whether the bishops were willing to
observe the ancient customs of the realm. To this they made
answer together and singly that they were, " saving their
order." This was of course to refuse, and the conference
came to an end with no other result than to define more
clearly the issue between Church and State. In the interval
which followed Becket was gradually made aware that his
support in the Church at large was not so strong as he could
wish. The terror of the king's anger still had its effect in
282 KING AND ARCHBISHOP 1164
CHAP. England, and some of the bishops went over to his side and
^^^^ tried to persuade the archbishop to some compromise. The
pope, Alexander III, who had taken refuge in France from
the Emperor and his antipope, saw more clearly than Becket
the danger of driving another powerful sovereign into the
camp of schism and rebellion and counselled moderation. He
even sent a special representative to England, with letters to
Becket to this effect, and with instructions to urge him to
come to terms with the king.
At last Becket was persuaded to concede the form of words
desired, though his biographers asserted that he did this on
the express understanding that the concession should be no