entered an appeal against it. A new embassy was sent to
the pope who was then at Rome to get the appeal decided,
and was much more favourably received by Alexander who
seems to have been displeased with Becket's action. He
promised to send legates to Henry to settle the whole
question with him. The occupation of Britanny by which
it was brought under Henry's direct control and a short
and inconclusive war with the king of France took up
the interval until the legates reached Normandy in October,
1 167. Their mission proved a failure. Becket, who came
in person to the inquiry which they held, refused to accept
any compromise or to modify in any way his extreme posi-
tion. On the other side Henry was very angry because they
refused to deprive the archbishop.
The year 1168 was a troubled one for Henry, with revolts
in Poitou and Britanny, supported by the king of France, and
1 1 69 PROGRESS OF THE CONFLICT 293
with useless negotiations with Louis. Early in 11 69 the chap.
pope sent new envoys to try to reconcile king and primate ^^^^
with instructions to bring pressure to bear on both parties.
The king of France also came to the meeting and exerted
his influence, but the result was a second failure. Becket
had invented a new saving clause which he thought the
king might be induced to accept. He would submit " saving
the honour of God," but Henry understood the point and
could see no difference between this and the old reservation.
Becket finally stood firmly against the pressure of the en-
voys and the influence of Louis, and Henry was not moved
by the threats which the pope had directed to be made if
necessary. A third embassy later in the year seemed for
a moment about to find a possible compromise, but ended in
another failure, both parties refusing to make any real con-
cession. The interval between these two attempts at recon-
ciliation Becket had used to excommunicate about thirty of
his opponents in England, mostly churchmen, including the
Bishops of London and Salisbury.
For more than a year longer the quarrel went on, the
whole Church suffering from the results, and new points
arising to complicate the issue. The danger that England
would be placed under an interdict Henry met by most
stringent regulations against the admission of any communi-
cations from the pope, or any intercourse with pope or
archbishop. On the question which arose in the constant
negotiations as to the compensation which should be made to
Becket for his loss of revenue since he had left England,
he showed himself as unyielding as on every other point, and
demanded the uttermost farthing. For some time the king
had wished to have his son Henry crowned, and on June 14,
1 1 70, that ceremony was actually performed at Westminster
by the Archbishop of York, who had, as Henry believed or
asserted, a special permission from the pope for the purpose.
Of course Becket resented this as a new invasion of his
rights and determined to exact for it the proper penalties.
Finally, towards the end of July, an agreement was reached
which was no compromise; it simply ignored the points in
dispute and omitted all the qualifying phrases. The king
agreed to receive the archbishop to his favour and to restore
294 KJ[^G AND ARCHBISHOP 1170
CHAP, him his possessions, and Becket accepted this. The agree-
^^^^ ment can hardly have been regarded by either side as any-
thing more than a truce. Neither intended to abandon any
right for which he had been contending, but both were ex-
hausted by the conflict and desired an interval for recovery,
perhaps with a hope of renewing the strife from a better
position.
It was December i before Thomas actually landed in
England. He then came bringing war, not peace. He
had sent over, in advance of his own crossing, letters which
he had solicited and obtained from the pope, suspending
from their functions all the bishops who had taken part in
the coronation of the young king, and reviving the excom-
munications of the Bishops of London and Salisbury. Then,
landing at Sandwich, he went on to Canterbury, where he
was received with joy. But there was little real joy for
Becket or his friends in the short remainder of his life, unless
it may have been the joy of conflict and of anticipated mar-
tyrdom. To messengers who asked the removal of the sen-
tence against the bishops, he refused any concession except
on their unconditional promise to abide by the pope's
decision ; and the three prelates most affected — York, Lon-
don, and Salisbury — went over to Normandy to the king. A
plan to visit the court of the young king at London was
stopped by orders to return to Canterbury. On Christmas
day, at the close of a sermon from the text " Peace on earth
to men of good-will," he issued new excommunications against
some minor offenders, and bitterly denounced, in words that
seemed to have the same effect, those who endangered the
peace between himself and the king.
It was on the news of this Christmas proclamation, or per-
haps on the report of the bishops who had come from Eng-
land, that Henry gave way to his violent temper, and in an
outburst of passion denounced those whom he had cherished
and covered with favours, because they could not avenge
him of this one priest. On these words four knights of his
household resolved to punish the archbishop, and, leaving the
court secretly, they went over to England. They were Regi-
nald Fitz Urse, William of Tracy, Hugh of Morville, and
Richard le Breton. An attempt to stop them when their
II70 THE MURDER OF BECKET 295
departure was observed did not succeed, and, collecting sup- chap.
porters from the local enemies of the archbishop, they forced ^^^^
their way into his presence on the afternoon of December
29. Their reproaches, demands, and threats Becket met
with firmness and dignity, refusing to be influenced by fear.
Finding that they could gain nothing by words, they with-
drew to get their arms, and Becket was hurried into the
cathedral by his friends. As they were going up the steps
from the north-west transept to the choir, their enemies
met them, calling loudly for " the traitor, Thomas Becket."
The archbishop turned about and stepped down to the floor
of the transept, repelling their accusations with bitter words
and accusations of his own, and was there struck down by
their swords and murdered ; not before the altar, as is some-
times said, though within the doors of his own church.
CHAPTER XIV
CONQUEST AND REBELLION
CHAP. The martyrdom of Thomas Becket served his cause better
^^^ than his continuance in life could have done. Even if his
murderers foolishly thought to serve the king by their deed,
Henry himself was under no delusion as to its effect. He
was thunderstruck at the news, and, in a frenzy of horror
which was no doubt genuine, as well as to mark his re-
pudiation of all share in the deed, he fasted and shut him-
self from communication with the court for days. But the
public opinion of Europe would not acquit Henry of the
guilt. Letters poured in upon the pope denouncing him and
demanding his punishment. The interdict of his Norman
dominions which had been threatened was proclaimed by the
Archbishop of Sens, but suspended again by an appeal to
the pope. Events moved slowly in the twelfth century, and
before the pope could take any active steps in the case, an
embassy which left Normandy almost immediately had time
to reach him and to promise on the part of the king his com-
plete submission to whatever the pope should decree after
examination of the facts. Immediate punishment of any
severity was thus avoided, and the embassy of two cardinals
to Normandy which the pope announced could act only after
some delay.
In the meanwhile in England Thomas the archbishop was
being rapidly transformed into Thomas the saint. Miracles
were reported almost at once, and the legend of his saint-
ship took its rise and began to throw a new light over
the events of his earlier life. The preparation of his body
for the grave had revealed his secret asceticism, — the hair
garments next his skin and long unchanged. The people
beheved him to be a true martyr, and his popular canoniza-
tion preceded by some time the official, though this followed
296
1 171 THOMAS BECKET CANONIZED 297
with unusual quickness even for the middle ages. It was chap.
pronounced by the pope in whose reign he had died on Feb- ^^^
ruary 21, 1173. For generations he remained the favourite
saint of England, and his popularity in foreign lands is sur-
prising, though it must be remembered that he was a great
and most conspicuous martyr of the official Church, of the
new Hildebrandine Church, of the spirit and ideas which
were by that date everywhere in command.
This long and bitter struggle between Church and State,
unworthy of both the combatants, was now over except for
the consequences which were lasting, and the interest of
Henry's reign flows back into the political channel. The
king did not wait in seclusion the report of the pope's-
mission. It may have been, as was suggested even at the
time, that he was glad of an excuse to escape from Nor-
mandy before the envoys' coming and to avoid a meeting
with them until time had done something to soften the feeling
against him. Before his departure his hold on Britanny was
strengthened by the death, in February, 1171, of Conan the
candidate whom he had recognized as count. Since 1166 the
administration of the country had been practically in his
hands ; and in that year his son Geoffrey had been betrothed
to Constance, the daughter and heiress of Conan. Geoffrey
would now succeed to the countship, but he was still a
child; and Britanny was virtually incorporated in Henry's
continental empire.
The refuge which the repentant Henry may have sought
from the necessity of giving an answer to the pope at once,
or a kind of preliminary penance for his sin, he found in
Ireland. Since he received so early in his reign the sanction
of Pope Hadrian IV of his plan of conquest, he had done
nothing himself towards that end, but others had. The adven-
turous barons of the Welsh marches, who were used to the
idea of carving out lordships for themselves from the lands
of their Celtic enemies, were easily persuaded to extend their
civilizing operations to the neighbouring island, where even
richer results seemed to be promised. In 1 166 Dermot, the
dispossessed king of Leinster, who had found King Henry
too busily occupied with affairs in France to aid him, had
secured with the royal permission the help he needed in
298 CONQUEST AND REBELLION 1171
CHAP. Wales, and thus had connected with the future history of
'^^^ Ireland the names of " Strongbow " and Fitzgerald. The
native Irish, though the bravest of warriors, were without
armour, and their weapons, of an earlier stage of military-
history, were no match for the Norman ; especially had they
no defence against the Norman archers. The conquest of
Leinster, from Waterford to Dublin, and including those two
cities, occupied some years, but was accomplished by a few
men. " Strongbow " himself, Richard de Clare, Earl of Pem-
broke, did not cross over till the end of August, 11 70, when
the work was almost completed. He married the daughter of
Dermot and was recognized as his heir, but the death of his
father-in-law in the next spring was followed by a general
insurrection against the new rulers, and this was hardly
under control when the earl was summoned to England to
meet the king.
Henry could not afford to let the dominion of Ireland,
to which he had looked forward for himself, sHp from his
hands, nor to risk the danger that an independent state
might be formed so close to England by his own vassals.
Already the Earl of Pembroke was out of favour ; it was said
that his lands had been forfeited, and he might easily become
a rebel difficult to subdue in his new possessions. At the
moment he certainly had no thought of rebellion, and he at
once obeyed the summons to England. Henry had crossed
from Normandy early in September, 1171, had paid a brief
visit to Winchester, where Henry of Blois, once so powerful in
Church and State, was now dying, and then advanced with his
army through southern Wales into Pembrokeshire whence he
crossed to Ireland in the middle of October. As he passed
from Waterford to Cashel, and then again from Waterford to
Dublin, chiefs came in from all sides, many of whom had
never submitted to the Norman invaders, and acknowledged
his overlordship. Only in the remoter parts of the west and
north did they remain away, except Roderick of Connaught,
the most powerful of the Irish kings, who was not yet ready
to own himself a vassal, but claimed the whole of Ireland for
himself. The Christmas feast Henry kept in Dublin, and
there entertained his new subjects who were astonished at the
splendour of his court.
1 172 HENRY IN IRELAND 299
A few weeks later a council of the Irish Church was held at chap.
Cashel, and attended by all the prelates of the island except ^^^
the Archbishop of Armagh whose age prevented his coming.
The bishops swore allegiance to Henry, and each of them is
said to have made a formal declaration, written and sealed,
recognizing the right of Henry and his heirs to the kingdom
of Ireland. The canons adopted by the council, putting into
force rules of marriage and morals long established in prac-
tice in the greater part of Christendom, reveal the reasons
that probably led the Church to favour the English conquest
and even to consider it an especially pious act of the king.
A report of Henry's acceptance by the Irish kings and of
the acts of the council was sent at once to the pope, who
replied in three letters under date of September 20, 1172,
addressed to Henry, to the Irish bishops, and to the Irish
kings, approving fully of all that had been done.
It is not clear that Henry had in mind any definite plan
for the political government of the conquest which he had
made. The allegiance of those princes who were outside the
territories occupied by the Norman adventurers could have
been no more than nominal, and no attempt seems to have
been made to rule them. Meath was granted as a fief to
Hugh of Lacy on the service of fifty knights. He was also
made governor of Dublin and justiciar of Ireland, but this
title is the only evidence that he was to be regarded as the
representative of the king. Waterford and Wexford were
made domain towns, as well as Dublin, and the earl of Pem-
broke, who gave up the royal rights which he might inherit
from King Dermot, was enfeoffed with Leinster on the service
of a hundred knights. Plainly the part of Ireland which
was actually occupied was not treated in practice as a sepa-
rate kingdom, whatever may have been the theory, but as a
transplanted part of England under a very vague relationship.
As a matter of fact, it was a purely feudal colony, under but
the slightest control by a distant overlord, and doomed both
from its situation in the midst of an alien, only partly civilized,
and largely unconquered race, and from its own organization
or lack of organization, to speedy troubles.
Henry returned to England at Easter time, and went on
almost at once to meet the papal legates in Normandy. By
3O0 CONQUEST AND REBELLION 1172
CHAP, the end of May his reconciliation with the Church was com-
^^^ pleted. First, Henry purged himself by solemn oath in the
cathedral at Avranches of any share in the guilt of Thomas's
assassination, and then the conditions of reconciliation were
sworn to by himself and by the young king. These condi-
tions are a very fair compromise, though Becket could never
have agreed to them nor probably would Henry have done so
but for the murder. The Church insisted on the one thing
which was most essential to its real interests, the freedom of
appeals to the pope. The point most important to the State,
which had led originally to the quarrel, — the question of the
punishment of criminous clerks by the lay courts, — was passed
over in silence, a way out of the difficulty being found by re-
quiring of the king a promise which he could readily make,
that he would wholly do away with any customs which had
been introduced against the churches of the land in his time.
This would not be to his mind renouncing the Constitution of
Clarendon. The temporalities of Canterbury and the exiled
friends of the archbishop were to be restored as before the
quarrel, and Henry promised not to withdraw his obedience
from the catholic pope or his successors. The other condi-
tions were of the nature of penance. The king promised to
assume the cross at the next Christmas for a crusade of three
years, and in the meantime to provide the Templars with a
sum of money which in their judgment would be sufficient
to maintain 200 knights in the Holy Land for a year.
Henry no doubt felt that he had lost much, but in truth he
had every reason to congratulate himself on the lightness of
his punishment for the crime to which his passionate words
had led. He did not get all which he had set out to recover
from the Church, but his gains were large and substantial.
The agreement is a starting-point of some importance in the
legal history of England. It may be taken as the beginning,
with more full consciousness of field and boundaries, of the
development of two long lines of law and jurisdiction, run-
ning side by side for many generations, each encroaching
somewhat on the occupied or natural ground of the other, but
with no other conflict of so serious a character as this. The
criminal jurisdiction of the state did not recover quite all
that the Constitutions of Clarendon had demanded. Clerks
1 1 72 HENRY AND HIS SONS 301
accused of the worst offences, of felonies, except high treason, chap.
were tried and punished by the Church courts, and from this ^^^
arose the privilege known as benefit of clergy with all its
abuses, but in all minor offences no distinction was made
between clerk and layman. In civil cases also, suits which
involved the right of property, even the right of presentation
to livings, the state courts had their way. Two large fields
of law, on the other hand, — marriage, and wills, — the Church,
much to its profit, had entirely to itself.
The interval of peace for Henry was not a long one.
Hardly was he freed from one desperate struggle when he
found himself by degrees involved in another from which he
was never to find relief. The policy which he was to follow
towards his sons had been already foreshadowed in the coro-
nation of the young Henry in 11 70, but we do not find it
easy to account for it or to reconcile it with other lines of
policy which he was as clearly following. The conflict of
ideas, the subtle contradictions of the age in which he lived,
must have been reflected in the mind of the king whose
dominions themselves were an empire of contrasts. Of all
the middle ages there is perhaps no period that saw the ideal
which chivalry had created of the wholly " courteous " king
and prince more nearly reaHzed in practice than the last half
of the twelfth century — the brave warrior and great ruler, of
course, but always also the generous giver, who considered
*' largesse" one of the chiefest of virtues and first of duties,
and bestowed with lavish hand on all comers money and
food, robes and jewels, horses and arms, and even castles and
fiefs, recognizing the natural right of each one to the gift
his rank would seem to claim. That such an ideal was actu-
ally realized in any large number of cases it would be absurd
to maintain. It is not likely that any one ever sought to
equal in detail the extravagant squandering of wealth in gifts
which figures in the poetry of the age — the rich mantles
which Arthur hung about the halls at a coronation festival
to be taken by any one, or the thirty bushels of silver coins
tumbled in a heap on the floor from which all might help
themselves. But these poems record the ideal, and probably
no other age saw more men, from kings down to simple
knights, who tried to pattern themselves on this model and
302 CONQUEST AND REBELLION 1172
CHAP, to look on wealth as an exhaustless store of things to be
^^^ given away. But in the mind of kings who reigned in a
world more real than the romances of chivalry, this duty had
always to contend with natural ambition and with their
responsibility for the welfare of the lands they ruled. The
last half of the twelfth century saw these considerations grow
rapidly stronger. The age that formed and applauded the
young Henry also gave birth to Philip Augustus.
The marriage with Eleanor added to the strange mixture
of blood in the Norman-Angevin house a new and warmer
strain. It showed itself, careless, luxurious, self-indulgent,
restless at any control, in her sons. But the marriage had
also its effect on the husband and father. It gave a strong
impetus to the conquest, which had already begun, of the
colder and slower north by the ideals of duty and manners
which had blossomed out into a veritable theory of Ufe in the
more tropical south. Henry could not keep himself from the
spell of these influences, though they never controlled him as
they did his children. It seems impossible to doubt, how-
ever, that he really believed it to be his duty to give his sons
the position that belonged to them as princes, where they
could form courts of their own, surrounded by their barons
and knights, and display the virtues which belonged to their
station. They had a rightful claim to this, which the ruling
idea of conduct befitting a king would not allow him to deny.
The story of Henry's waiting on his son at table after his
coronation " as seneschal " and the reply of the young king
to those who spoke of the honour done him, that it was a
proper thing for one who was only the son of a count to wait
on the son of a king, is significant of deeper things than mere
manners. But, though he might be under the spell of these
ideals, to partition his kingdom in very truth, to divest him-
self of power, to make his sons actually independent in the
provinces which he gave them, was impossible to him. The
power of his empire he could not break up. The real con-
trol of the whole, and even the greater part of the revenues,
must remain in his hands. The conflict of ideas in his mind,
when he tried to be true to them all in practice, led inevitably
to a like conflict of facts and of physical force.
The coronation of the young Henry as king of England,
1 172 THE CORONATION OF THE YOUNG HENRY 303
considered by itself, seems an unaccountable act. Stephen chap.
had tried to secure the coronation of his son Eustace in his ^^^
own lifetime, but there was a clear reason of policy in his
case. The Capetian kings of France had long followed the
practice, but for them also it had plainly been for many gen-
erations of the utmost importance for the security of the
house. There had never been any reason in Henry's reign
why extraordinary steps should seem necessary to secure the
succession, and there certainly was none fifteen years after
its beginning. No explanation is given us in any contem-
porary account of the motives which led to this coronation,
and it is not likely that they were motives of policy. It is
probable that it was done in imitation of the French custom,
under the influence of the ideas of chivalry. But even if the
king looked on this as chiefly a family matter, affecting not
much more than the arrangements of the court, he could not
keep it within those limits. His view of the position to
which his sons were entitled was the most decisive influence
shaping the latter half of his reign, and through its effect on
their characters almost as decisive for another generation.
Not long after his brother's coronation Richard received
his mother's inheritance, Aquitaine and Poitou ; Geoffrey was
to be Count of Britanny by his marriage with the heiress ;
Normandy, Maine, and Anjou were assigned to the young
king ; while the little John, youngest of the children of
Henry and Eleanor, received from his father only the name
"Lackland" which expresses well enough Henry's idea that
his position was not what it ought to be so long as he had no
lordship of his own. Trouble of one kind had begun with
the young king's coronation, for Louis of France had been
deeply offended because his daughter Margaret had not been
crowned queen of England at the same time. This omission
was rectified in August, 1172, at Winchester, when Henry
was again crowned, and Margaret with him. But more