and of Thomas; but both men gave valiant service in the cause of
liberty in England, and both are placed in the calendar of the saints.
For Thomas and Anselm alike the choice was between the favour of
the King of England, the safe broad road of passive obedience, and
the following of the call of conscience on the craggy way of royal
displeasure; and to the everlasting honour of these two men, and of the
religion they professed, they chose the steep and narrow path with no
faltering step, and followed the gleam, heedless of this world’s glory,
heedless of life itself.
Thomas was no monk as Anselm was, when the king nominated him for
the archbishopric of Canterbury. His early life was not spent in the
cloister but in the employment of a wealthy London sheriff, in the
office of Archbishop Theobald, at Lambeth, and as Chancellor of England.
The son of gentle parents--his father Gilbert sometime
sheriff--“London citizens of the middle class, not usurers nor engaged
in business, but living well on their own income,” according to
FitzStephen, Thomas was the first Englishman to be made archbishop.
His gifts marked him out for high office. Theobald had sent him abroad
to study law at the great school at Bologna, and at the age of 36 made
him archdeacon of Canterbury, at that time “the dignity in the Church
of England next after the bishops and abbots, and which brought him an
hundred pounds of silver.” A year later, 1155, the young newly crowned
king, Henry II., on the advice of old Archbishop Theobald, made Thomas
the Chancellor. Theobald, anxious about the present, and apprehensive
for the future--for the king was very young, and those about him were
known to be hostile to the freedom of the Church and willing to treat
England as a conquered land--sought to prevent the evils which seemed
to be at hand by making Thomas a partner of the King’s counsels. He
could say, after ten years’ experience, that Thomas was high-principled
and prudent, wisely zealous for justice, and whole-hearted for the
freedom of the Church, and he held forth to the king on the wisdom,
the courage and the faithfulness of his archdeacon, “and the admirable
sweetness of his manners.”
The appointment was made, nor could anyone say that it was ill done, or
that Theobald in his recommendation, or Henry II. in his acceptance, of
Thomas for the chancellorship could have done better for England.
The chancellor was magnificent, and his dignity was accounted second
from the king. Nobles sent their children to Thomas to be trained in
his service. The king commended to him his son, the heir to the throne.
Barons and knights did homage to him. On his embassy to the French king
never had been seen such a retinue of followers, and such a lavish
display of the wealth and grandeur of England. The proud and mighty he
treated with harshness and violence. Yet it was said, by those who knew
him intimately, that he was lowly in his own eyes, and gentle and meek
to those who were humble in heart. And in the courts of kings, where
chastity is never commonly extolled, or purity of life the fashion,
Thomas, the chancellor, was known for his cleanness of living and his
unblemished honour. Many enemies he had, many who hated him for his
power; but never was breath of scandal uttered against the chancellor’s
private life, or suggestion made that the carnal lusts and appetites
which, unbridled, play havoc with men great and small, could claim
Thomas for their subject.
He might be reproached by a monk for that he, being an archdeacon,
lived so secular a life, wearing the dress of a courtier, and charging
on the field with knights in France, but it could not be alleged that
church or realm suffered neglect from the chancellor. “By divine
inspiration and the counsel of Thomas, the lord king did not long
retain vacant bishoprics and abbacies, so that the patrimony of the
Crucified might be brought into the treasury, as was afterwards
done, but bestowed them with little delay on honourable persons, and
according to God’s law.” (W. FitzStephen.)
The close friendship and warm affection of the king for his chancellor
were known to all. When the day’s business was done “they would play
together like boys of the same age.” They sat together in church and
hall and rode out together. “Never in Christian times were there two
men more of one mind or better friends.” It was natural on the death of
Archbishop Theobald, in 1161, that people should point to Thomas as his
successor, though the chancellor shrank, as Anselm had done, from the
post.
“I know three poor priests in England any one of whom I would rather
see advanced to the archbishopric than myself,” he declared earnestly,
when his friend the prior of Leicester (who also remonstrated with him
for his unclerical dress) told him the rumours of the court. “For as
for me, if I was appointed, I know the king so through and through that
I should be forced either to lose his favour or, which God forbid, to
lay aside the service of God.”
Thomas uttered the same warning to Henry when the king proposed the
primacy to him. “I know certainly,” he said, “that if God should so
dispose that this happen, you would soon turn away your love, and the
favour which is now between us would be changed into bitterest hate. I
know that you would demand many things in Church matters, for already
you have demanded them, which I could never bear quietly, and the
envious would take occasion to provoke an endless strife between us.”
But Henry’s mind was made up. Residing largely in France, he would
have Thomas, Archbishop of Canterbury and Chancellor, to rule England
as his vice-regent. Six years had Thomas been the king’s friend and
chancellor, but the king did not know at all the real character of
his man, or rather it was inconceivable to the royal mind that
Thomas, whom the king had raised from a mere nobody, from Archdeacon
of Canterbury, an important ecclesiastic at best, to the chief man in
the realm, should ever dare set himself at variance with the king’s
will. Henry, with his untiring energy, was earnest enough for good
government in Church and State under an absolute monarchy, and he
counted on greater co-operation with Thomas in carrying out his plans,
were the latter archbishop. Hitherto, more than once the chancellor
had succeeded in moderating the king’s outbursts of wrath against some
hapless offender, but he had never shown himself a partisan of the
clergy at the expense of the commonwealth,[11] and his lack of pride in
his order had even incurred rebuke, so little of the ecclesiastic did
this statesman appear.
Thomas understood the king better than the king understood his
chancellor. But his protests were in vain. He was as surely marked for
the archbishopric as Anselm had been. Bishops of the province approved
and the monks of Canterbury duly voted for the king’s chancellor in
common consent, Gilbert Foliot, the Bishop of Hereford, and afterwards
of London, and the archbishop’s enemy to the end, alone opposing the
election.
“Then the archbishop-elect was by the king’s authority declared free of
all debts to the crown and given free to the Church of England, and in
that freedom he was received by the Church with the customary hymns and
words of praise.” (Herbert of Bosham.)
On June 2nd, 1162, the Saturday after Whit Sunday, Thomas was
ordained priest and on the following day consecrated bishop. (The new
archbishop instituted the festival of Trinity Sunday to commemorate
his consecration, and some 200 years later the festival was made of
general observance in the Catholic Church.) The king realised the
mistake he had made within a year of the consecration. The brilliant
chancellor was no sooner archbishop than he turned from all the
gaieties of the world, and while no less a statesman, adopted the life
of his monks--though never himself a monk--at Canterbury. Henceforth
Archbishop Thomas was the unflinching champion of the poor and them
that had no helper, the resolute defender of the liberties of the
Church against all who would make religion subject to the autocracy of
the king of England.
Thomas was forty-four years old, in the full strength of his manhood,
when he was made archbishop, and for eight years he did battle with the
crown, only laying down his charge at the call of martyrdom.
The first disappointment to Henry was the resignation of the
chancellor’s seal.[12] It was clear to Thomas that he could no longer
serve the crown and do the work of a Christian bishop at the same
time, and he had accepted with full sense of responsibility the see of
Canterbury. There was no room for the egotism that loves power, the
vaulting ambition that o’erleaps itself, or even the self-deception
that persuades a man holding to high position at sacrifice of principle
that his motive is disinterested, in St. Thomas of Canterbury. More
than once England was to see in later years men who strove vainly to
serve with equal respect the Christian religion and the royal will--the
service always ended in the triumph of the latter. Thomas was far too
clearly-sighted to imagine such joint service possible, and for him,
elected and consecrated to the primacy of the English Church, there was
no longer any choice. As chancellor, keeping his conscience clear, he
had done the best he could for law and order as the king’s right hand
man. As Archbishop of Canterbury his duty, first and foremost, was to
maintain the Christian religion and defend the cause of the poor and
needy.
But to Henry the resignation of the chancellorship was an act of
desertion, a declared challenge to the royal supremacy. Henry II.
was no more the man than his grandfather Henry I. had been to brook
anything that threatened resistance to the king’s rule.
Courtiers who hated Thomas were always at hand to poison the ears
of the king by defaming the archbishop, and this, says William
FitzStephen, was the first cause of the trouble. Another cause was the
hatred of the king for the clergy of England, hatred provoked by the
notoriously disreputable lives of more than one clerk in holy orders.
The battle between Henry and Thomas began on this matter of criminous
clerks.
William the Conqueror and Lanfranc recognizing that the Church,
strong and well ordered, made for national well-being, had set up
ecclesiastical courts wherein all matters affecting church law and
discipline were to be dealt with by the clergy, to the end that the
clergy should not be mixed up in lawsuits and should be excluded from
the lay courts. Henry II. was not satisfied that criminous clerks
were adequately dealt with in these ecclesiastical courts, where no
penalty involving bloodshed might be inflicted, and where the savage
punishments of mutilation had no place. Thomas was as anxious as the
king for the Church to be purged of abuses, but he was resolved not
to hand over offenders to the secular arm. The archbishop was an
ardent reformer. “He plucked up, pulled down, scattered and rooted
out whatever he found amiss in the vineyard of the Lord,” wrote a
contemporary; but he would shelter his flock as far as he could by the
canon law from the hideous cruelties of the King’s Courts.[13] It was
not for the protection of the clergy alone the archbishop was fighting
in the councils summoned by the king at Westminster in 1163, and at
Clarendon in 1164.
“Ecclesiastical privileges were not so exclusively priestly privileges
as we sometimes fancy. They sheltered not only ordained ministers,
but all ecclesiastical officers of every kind; the Church Courts also
claimed jurisdiction in the causes of widows and orphans. In short,
the privileges for which Thomas contended transferred a large part of
the people, and that the most helpless part, from the bloody grasp of
the King’s Courts to the milder jurisdiction of the bishop.” (Freeman,
_Historical Essay_, First Series.)
Before the climax of the dispute between Henry and Thomas was reached
at Clarendon, the archbishop had resisted the king in a matter of
arbitrary taxation--“the earliest recorded instance of resistance to
the royal will in a matter of taxation”[14]--and had fallen still
further in the king’s disfavour.
Henry was at Woodstock, on July 1st, 1163, with the archbishop and the
great men of the land, and among other matters a question was raised
concerning the payment of a two shillings land tax on every hide of
land. This was an old tax dating from Saxon times, which William the
Conqueror had increased. It was paid to the sheriffs, who in return
undertook the defence of the county, and may be compared with the
county rates of our own day. The king declared this tax should in
future be collected for the crown, and added to the royal revenue; and
no one dared to question this decision until Archbishop Thomas arose
and told the king to his face that the tax was not to be exacted as
revenue, but was a voluntary offering to be paid to the sheriffs only
“so long as they shall serve us fitly and maintain and defend our
dependants.” It was not a tax that could be enforced by law.
Henry, bursting with anger, swore, “By God’s Eyes” it should be given
as revenue, and enscrolled as a king’s tax.
The archbishop replied with quiet determination, “aware lest by his
sufferance a custom should come in to the hurt of his successors,”
that, “by the reverence of those Eyes,” by which the king had sworn,
not one penny should be paid from his lands, or from the rights of
the Church. The king was silenced, no answer was forthcoming to the
objector, and the tax was paid as before to the sheriffs. But “the
indignation of the king was not set at rest,” and in October came the
Council of Westminster.
The king at once demanded that criminous clerks should not only
be punished in the Church Courts by the sentence of deprivation,
but should further be handed over to the King’s Courts for greater
penalties, alleging that those who were not restrained from crime by
the remembrance of their holy orders would care little for the loss of
such orders.
The archbishop replied quietly that this proposed new discipline was
contrary to the religious liberty of the land, and that he would never
agree to it. The Church was the one sanctuary against the barbarities
of the law, and Thomas to the end would maintain the security it
offered. More important it seemed to him that clerical offenders should
escape the king’s justice, than that all petty felons who could claim
the protection of the Church should be given over to mutilation by the
king’s officers. The bishops silently supported the primate in this
matter, though they told him plainly, “Better the liberties of the
Church perish than that we perish ourselves. Much must be yielded to
the malice of the times.”
Thomas answered this pitiful plea by admitting the times were bad.
“But,” he added, “are we to heap sin upon sin? It is when the Church is
in trouble, and not merely when the times are peaceful, that a bishop
must cleave to the right. No greater merit was there to the bishops of
old who gave their blood for the Church than there is now to those who
die in defence of her liberties.”
But the bishops were wavering, fearful of defying the king’s will. And
when Henry, defeated for the moment by the archbishop’s stand, angrily
called upon them to take an oath to observe in future “the royal
customs” of the realm as settled by his grandfather, Henry I., they all
agreed to do so, adding the clause “saving the rights of their order.”
The king objected, calling for the promise to be made “absolutely and
without qualifications,” until Thomas reminded him that the fealty the
bishops swore to give the crown “in life and limb and earthly honour”
was sworn “_salvo ordine suo_,” and that the “earthly honour” promise,
which included all the royal “customs” of Henry I., was not to be given
by bishops in any other way.
It was now late at night, and the king broke up the council in anger,
leaving the bishops to retire as they would.
Henry was resolved to abolish the Church Courts and destroy the
protection they afforded. He would have all brought under the severity
of his law, in spite of the archbishop. He knew the bishops were
wavering and were fearful of the royal displeasure. Thomas Becket, and
Thomas Becket alone, was the obstruction to the king’s schemes, and
firm as Becket might stand, the king would break down his opposition.
The very day after Westminster the king demanded the resignation of all
the fortresses and honours Thomas had held under the crown since he had
been made chancellor, and these were surrendered at once.
Then Henry tried a personal appeal, and once more the two met together
in a field near Northampton. Henry began by reminding Thomas of all he
had done for him.
“Have I not raised you from a mean and lowly state to height of honour
and dignity? How is it after so many benefits and so many proofs of my
affection, which all have seen, you have forgotten these things, and
are now not only ungrateful, but my opponent in everything?”
The archbishop answered: “Far be it from me, my lord. I am not
forgetful of the favours which God has conferred upon me at your
hands. Far be it from me to be so ungrateful as to resist your will
in anything so long as it is in accord with God’s will.” St. Thomas,
enlarging on the necessity of obedience to God rather than to men,
should the will of man clash with the will of God, the king at last
interrupted him impatiently with the intimation that he did not want a
sermon just then.
“Are you not my man, the son of one of my servants?”
“In truth,” the archbishop answered, “I am not sprung from a race of
kings. Neither was blessed Peter, the prince of the apostles, to whom
was committed the leadership of the Church.”
“And in truth Peter died for his Lord,” said the king.
“I too will die for my Lord when the time comes,” replied the
archbishop.
“You trust too much to the ladder you have mounted by,” said the king.
But the archbishop answered: “I trust in God, for cursed is the man
that putteth his trust in man.” Then the archbishop went on to remind
Henry of the proofs he had given of his fidelity in the years when he
was chancellor, and warned him that he would have done well to have
taken counsel with his archbishop concerning spiritual things than with
those who had kindled the flame of envy and vengeance against one who
had done them no wrong.
The only reply the king gave was to urge that the Archbishop should
drop the words “saving their order” in promising to obey the royal
customs.
The archbishop refused to yield, and so they parted.[15]
At the close of the year the archbishop’s difficulties had been
increased by appeals on all sides to yield to the king. The bishops
were for peace at any price, and the Pope, Alexander III., threatened
by an anti-pope, and anxious for the good will of the king of England,
sent an abbot to Thomas urging him to give way, on the ground that
Henry only wanted a formal assent to the “customs” for the sake of his
dignity, and had no intention of doing anything harmful to the Church.
Under these circumstances Thomas decided to yield. He went to the king
at Woodstock and declared that the obnoxious phrase, “saving our
order,” should be omitted from the promise to observe the “customs.”
Without delay the king ordered his justiciar, Richard of Lucy, and his
clerk, Jocelin of Balliol, to draw up a list of the old “customs” and
liberties of his grandfather Henry I., and on the 29th of January,
1164, a great council was held at Clarendon to ratify the agreement
between the bishops and the king.
Sixteen constitutions or articles were drawn up, and Thomas,
over-persuaded by the prayers of the bishops and the desire for peace,
gave his promise unconditionally to observe them. But no sooner had he
done so, and the articles were placed before him in black and white,
than he repented.
The very first article declared that all disputes about Church
patronage were to be tried in the King’s Court, and was intolerable,
because while the State held it was a question of the rights of
property, the Church view was that the main point was the care of
souls, a spiritual matter for churchmen, not lawyers, to decide.
The other articles which Thomas objected to, and which the pope
subsequently refused to ratify, decreed: (1) That clerks were to be
tried in the King’s Courts for offences of common law. (2) That neither
archbishops, bishops, nor beneficed clerks were to leave the kingdom
without the king’s license. (This, said St. Thomas, would stop all
pilgrimages and attendance at councils at Rome, and turn England into a
vast prison. “It was right enough to apply for the king’s leave before
the departure, but to bind one’s-self by an oath not to go without it
was against religion and was evil.”) (3) That no member of the king’s
household was to be excommunicated without the king’s permission.
(4) That no appeals should be taken beyond the archbishop’s court,
except to be brought before the king. (This was a definite attempt to
prohibit appeals to Rome, and Thomas pointed out that the archbishop on
receiving the pallium swore expressly not to hinder such appeals. The
acceptance of this article left the king absolute master.)
The last article, declaring that serfs or sons of villeins were not to
be ordained without the consent of the lord on whose land they were
born, was not opposed by the pope, and the only contemporary objection
seems to have been raised by Garnier, a French monk and a biographer of
Thomas Becket.[16]
Thomas had promised obedience to these constitutions, but he would not
put his seal to them. It seemed to him that it was not only the old
“customs” that had been drawn up, but rather a new interpretation of
these customs. The great Council of Clarendon was over. Thomas received
a copy of the constitutions and rode off, and the king had to be
content for the time with the promises delivered.
In abject remorse Thomas wrote to the pope confessing his assent to
the Constitutions of Clarendon, and for forty days he abstained from
celebrating the mass. The pope, still anxious to prevent any open
rupture between the king and the archbishop, wrote in reply that
“Almighty God watches not the deed, but considers rather the intention
and judges the will,” and that Thomas was absolved by apostolic
authority. All the same, Pope Alexander III., without in any way
censuring Thomas, throughout the long struggle with Henry never stands
up roundly for the archbishop.
Neither Henry nor Thomas could rest satisfied with Clarendon. The
archbishop had compromised for the sake of peace, but his quick
revulsion had provoked a keener hostility in the king. To Henry
it seemed the time had come to drive Thomas out of public life by
compelling him to resign the see of Canterbury. With Thomas out of the
way Henry could carry out his plans for a strong central government,
for bringing all under the pitiless arm of the law. Thomas was the
one man in the kingdom who dared offer resistance, and if Thomas was
no longer archbishop and some supple creature of the king was in his
place, the royal power would be absolute, for there seemed no fear of
any interference from Pope Alexander III.
There were plenty of the archbishop’s enemies among the nobles at the
court ready to fan the king’s anger against Thomas, and by October,
1164, Henry was ready to crush the primate.
Another council was summoned to meet at Northampton, and now Archbishop
Thomas was to learn the full significance of the Constitutions of
Clarendon.
The first charge against Thomas was that he had refused justice to
John, the Treasurer-Marshal, who had taken up some land under the see
of Canterbury. John had taken his suit to the King’s Court, and Thomas
was further charged with contempt of the majesty of the crown for not
putting in a personal appearance at this court. The king now pressed
for judgment against the archbishop for this contempt, and the council
ordered that he should be condemned to the loss of all his moveable
property, and 500 pounds of silver was accepted as an equivalent fine.