THE CONSTITUTIONS OF CLARENDON
In the January of 1163 Henry once more landed in England. His absence off
our and a half years had given time for dangers and alarms to spring up
in the half-settled realm. Mysterious prophecies passed from mouth to
mouth that the king would never be seen in the island again, and even
Theobald, before his death in 1161, had sent urgent entreaties for his
return. The king had, in fact, during the first eight years of his rule
been mainly occupied in building up his empire, and providing for its
defence against external dangers. He had only twice visited the kingdom,
each time for little more than a year. He was now, however, prepared to
take the work of administration seriously in hand. In the next eighteen
years, from 1163 to 1180, he landed on its shores seven times, and spent
altogether eight years in the country. Once he was busied with the
conquest of Ireland; one visit of a month was spent in crushing a
dangerous rebellion; but with these two exceptions every coming of the
king was marked by the carrying out of some great administrative reform.
In his half-compacted empire order was still only maintained by his
actual presence and the sheer force of his personal authority, as he
hurried from country to country to quell a rising in Gascony or a revolt
in Galloway, to wage war in Wales, to finish the conquest of Britanny or
of Ireland, to order the administration of Poitou or Normandy. But in the
swift and terrible progresses of a king who visited the shires to north
and south and west in the intervals of foreign war, a long series of
experiments as to the best forms of internal government was ceaselessly
carried out, and the new administration securely established.
Henry, however, was at once met by a difficulty unknown to earlier days.
The system which the Conqueror had established of separate courts for
secular and ecclesiastical business had utterly broken down for purposes
of justice. Until the reign of Stephen much of the business of the
bishops was done in the courts of the hundred and the shire. The Church
courts also had at first been guided by the customary law and traditions
of the early English Church, which had grown up along with the secular
laws and had a distinctly national character. So long, indeed, as the
canon law remained somewhat vague, and the Church courts incomplete, they
could work peaceably side by side with the lay courts; but with the
development of ecclesiastical law in the middle of the twelfth century,
it was inevitable that difficulties should spring up. The boundaries of
civil and ecclesiastical law were wholly uncertain, the scientific study
of law had hardly begun, and there was much debatable ground which might
be won by the most arrogant or the most skilful of the combatants. Every
brawl of a few noisy lads in the Oxford streets or at the gates of some
cathedral or monastic school was enough to kindle the strife as to the
jurisdiction of Church or State which shook medieval society to its
foundation.
The Church courts not only had jurisdiction over the whole clerical order,
but exercised wide powers even over the laity. To them alone belonged the
right to enforce spiritual penalties, to deal with cases of oaths,
promises, anything in which a man's faith was pledged; to decide as to the
property of intestates, to pronounce in every case of inheritance whether
the heir was legitimate, to declare the law as to wills and marriage.
Administering as they did an enlightened system of law, they profited by
the new prosperity of the country, and the judicial and pecuniary disputes
which came to them had never been so abundant as now. Henry was keenly
alive to the fact that the archdeacons' courts now levied every year by
their fines more money than the whole revenue of the crown. Young
archdeacons were sent abroad to be taught the Roman law, and returned to
preside over the newly-established archdeacons' courts; clergy who sought
high office were bound to study before all things, even before theology,
the civil and canon law. The new rules, however, were as yet incomplete
and imperfectly understood in England; the Church courts were without the
power to put them in force; the procedure was hurried and irregular; the
judges were often ill-trained, and unfit to deal with the mass of legal
business which was suddenly thrown on them; the ecclesiastical authorities
themselves shrank from defiling the priesthood by contact with all this
legal and secular business, and kept the archdeacons in deacons' orders;
the more religious clergy questioned whether for an archdeacon salvation
were possible. In the eight years of Henry's rule one hundred murders had
been committed by clerks who had escaped all punishment save the light
sentences of fine and imprisonment inflicted by their own courts, and
Henry bitterly complained that a reader or an acolyte might slay a man,
however illustrious, and suffer nothing save the loss of his orders.
Since the beginning of Henry's reign, too, there had been an enormous
increase of appeals to Rome. Questions quite apart from faith or morals,
and that mostly concerned property, were referred for decision to a
foreign court. The great monasteries were exempted from episcopal control
and placed directly under the Pope; they adopted the customs and laws
which found favour at Rome; they upheld the system of appeals, in which
their wealth and influence gave them formidable advantages. The English
Church was no longer as in earlier times distinct from the rest of
Christendom, but was brought directly under Roman influence. The clergy
were more and more separated from their lay fellow citizens; their rights
and duties were determined on different principles; they were governed by
their own officers and judged by their own laws, and tried in their own
courts; they looked for their supreme tribunal of appeal not to the King's
Court, but to Rome; they became, in fact, practically freed from the
common law.
No king, and Henry least of all, could watch unmoved the first great
body which threatened to stand wholly outside the law of the land; and
the ecclesiastical pretensions of the time were perhaps well matched by
the pretensions of the State. The king had prepared for the coming
conflict by a characteristic act of high-handed imperiousness in the
election of the chancellor-archbishop to carry out his policy. But all
such schemes of imperative despotism were vain. No sooner was Thomas
consecrated than it became plain that his ecclesiastical training would
carry the day against the influence of Henry. As rapidly as he had "thrown
off the deacon" to become the chancellor, so he now went through the
sharper change of throwing off the chancellor to become the archbishop.
With keen political sagacity he at once sought the moral support of the
religious party who had so vehemently condemned his appointment. The
gorgeous ostentation of his old life gave way to an equally elaborate
scheme of saintliness. He threw away with tears his splendid dress to put
on sackcloth and the black cloak of the monk. His table was still covered
with gold and silver dishes and with costly meats, but the hall was now
crowded with the poor and needy, and at his own side sat only the most
learned and holy among the monks and clergy. Forty clerks "most learned
in the law" formed his household. He visited the sick in the infirmary,
and washed the feet of thirteen poor men daily. He sat in the cloister
like one of the monks, studying the canon law and the Holy Scriptures. He
joined their prayers in the Church and took part in their secret councils.
The monks who had suffered under the heavy hand of Theobald, when their
dainty foods were curtailed and their cherished privileges sharply denied
them, hailed joyfully the unexpected attitude of their new master. "This
is the finger of God," men said, "this, indeed, is the work of the right
hand of the Most High." "As he had been accustomed to the pre-eminence
over others in worldly glory," commented another observer, "so now he
determined to be the foremost in holy living."
Rumours spread that there were to be other changes besides that of "holy
living." The see of Canterbury under the new primate was to win back all
lands and privileges lost during the civil wars, at whatever cost to the
interests of the whole court party, of barons who found their rights to
Church appointments and Church lands questioned, and of clerks of the
royal household who trembled for their posts and benefices. There was
soon no lack of enemies at court, old and new, ready to carry to Henry
whispers that would appeal most subtly to his fears,--whispers that the
royal dignity itself was in danger; that he must look to himself and his
heirs, or the story of Stephen's time would be told over again, and that
man alone would in future be king, whom the clergy should elect and the
archbishop approve. Henry's bitter anger was aroused when Thomas
resigned the chancellorship, "not now wishing to be in the royal court,
but desiring to have leisure for prayers, and to superintend the
business of the Church." The king retorted by forcing Thomas to resign
his archdeaconry with its rich fees; and at his landing in January 1163
he received the archbishop, who came to meet him, "with averted face."
Thomas, on his part, added another grievance by refusing on ecclesiastical
grounds to allow Henry to marry his brother to Stephen's daughter-in-law,
the Countess of Warenne; and on the general question of the relations of
Church and State, he hastened to define his views with sharp precision in
an eloquent sermon preached before the king. "Henry observing it word by
word, and understanding from it how greatly Thomas put the ecclesiastical
before the civil right, did not receive this doctrine with an equal mind,
for he perceived that the archbishop was far from his own view, that the
Church had neither rights nor possessions save by his favour." The
attitude of Thomas was yet further strengthened and defined when, in May
1163, he went to attend a great Council held at Tours, where he was
brought more immediately under the influence of the ecclesiastical
movement of the day. There he sought, with a meaning that Henry must
clearly have understood, to procure the canonization of Anselm from Pope
Alexander, who, however, was far too politic amid his own difficulties,
and in his need for Henry's help, to commit himself either by consent or
by refusal.
The inevitable controversy declared itself soon after the return of
Thomas from Tours. Throughout July and August one question after another
was hurried forward for settlement between king and primate. On July 1
the king proposed a change in the collection of the land tax, which
would have increased the royal revenues at the expense of the revenues
of the shire. Since the Conquest there had never been a single instance
of an attempt to resist the royal will in matters of finance, but Thomas
showed no hesitation. He flatly refused consent to an arbitrary act of
this kind. He made no objection to the payment of the tax, but he was
determined to prevent the local revenues being seized in this way by the
king. His action seems to have been wise and patriotic, and his triumph
was complete. Henry was forced to abandon the scheme. Having awakened
the anger of the king, Thomas next alienated the whole party of the
barons by pressing his demands for the recovery of lands belonging to
his see. Tunbridge, Rochester, now in the custody of the crown itself,
Hythe, Saltwood, and a number of other manors became the subjects of
sharp contention. The archbishop urged a doubtful claim, which he had
inherited from Theobald, to appoint the priest to a church on the land
of William of Eynesford, a tenant of the king. William resisted, and
Thomas made his first false move by excommunicating him. Henry at once
appealed to the "customs" of the kingdom, which forbade such sentence on
the king's barons without the royal consent, and Thomas had to withdraw
his excommunication. "I owe him no thanks for it!" cried the angry king.
A more serious strife was raised when Thomas came into direct collision
with Henry on the inevitable question of the punishment of clerks for
crime against the common law. If the king was determined to bring about
a fundamental reform in the administration of justice, the Primate was
equally resolute that as archbishop he would have nothing to do with
reforms which he might have countenanced as chancellor. He prudently
sought at first to divert attention from the real issue by increasing
the severity of judgments in the ecclesiastical courts. A clerk had
stolen a chalice; he insisted on his trial in the Church Court, but to
appease the king ordered him to be branded,--a punishment condemned by
ecclesiastical law which considered all injury to the person as defiling
the image of God. Such devices, however, were thrown away on Henry. When
another clerk, Philip de Broc, who had been accused of manslaughter, was
set free by the Church courts, the king's justiciar ordered him to be
brought to a second trial before a lay judge. Philip refused to submit.
The justiciar then charged him with contempt of court for his vehement
and abusive language to the officer who summoned him, but the archbishop
demanded that for this charge, too, he should be tried by ecclesiastical
law. Henry was forced to content himself with sending a detachment of
bishops and clergy to watch the trial. They returned with the news that
the court had refused to reconsider the charge of manslaughter, and had
merely condemned Philip for insolence; he was ordered to make personal
satisfaction to the sheriff, standing (clerk as he was) naked before
him, and submitting to a heavy fine; his prebend was to be forfeited to
the king for two years; for those two years he was to be exiled and his
movable goods were confiscated.
The punishment might seem severe enough, but Henry would accept no
compromise. With a burst of fury he declared that just judgment for
murder was refused because the offender was in orders. Resolute that the
question should once for all be settled, he summoned a council at
Westminster on October 1. There he demanded, "for love of him and for
safety of the kingdom," that accused clerks should be tried by the
common law, and that if proved guilty, they should be degraded by the
bishops, and given up to the executioner for punishment. He complained
of the exactions of the ecclesiastical courts, and urged that in all
matters concerning these courts or the rights of the clergy, the bishops
should return to the customs of Henry the First. Such a course would
have left them at the king's mercy, and the prelates wavered in their
sore distress. The king's friends contended that a guilty clerk deserved
punishment double that of a layman, and urged the need of submission at
this moment when the Church was torn asunder by schism; and the bishops
frankly admitted a yet more pressing consideration: "For if we do not
what the king wishes," they said, "flight will be cut off from us, and
no man will seek after our souls; but if we consent to the king, we
shall own the sanctuary of God in heredity, and shall sleep safely in
the possession of our churches." On the other hand, the archbishop had
no mind to resign without a contest all the results of the great tide of
feeling which had swept the Church onward far past its old landmarks.
For him there was no going back to a traditional past from which the
Church had shaken itself free, and in which, though king and barons
might see the freedom of the State, he saw the enslaving and degradation
of the clergy. He vehemently asserted that the "customs" of the Church
were of greater authority than any "customs" of the kingdom, that its
canon law claimed obedience as against all traditional national law
whatever; and with keen political insight he insisted on the dangers that
would follow if once they allowed the charm of prescription to be broken,
or the ecclesiastical liberties to be touched. He boldly led the way in
his answer to the king: "We will obey in all things saving our order;" and
as the bishops were asked one by one, they took courage to follow, and
"one voice was in the mouth of all of them." Such a phrase had never been
heard in England before, and Henry, with ready indignation, at once
demanded the withdrawal of the words. When Thomas refused, he broke up the
council in a burst of anger, and suddenly rode away from London, instantly
followed by the whole body of trembling bishops, who hurried after him in
abject terror, "lest before they should be able to catch him up, they
should already have lost their sees." Thomas was left alone--"there was
not one who would know him,"--while the prelates, coming up in time with
their terrible lord, agreed henceforth to guide their words by his good
pleasure.
From this moment all the elements of strife were prepared, and there was
but outer show of harmony when king and archbishop, a few days later,
joined at Westminster to celebrate with solemn pomp the translation of
the remains of the sainted Confessor. In declaring war upon local
jurisdictions, whether of clergy, or nobles, or burghers, or independent
shire courts, Henry was defying all the traditions and convictions of
his age,--an age when local feeling was a force which we are now quite
unable to measure. The nobles, the guilds, and the rising towns had
already won long before, or were now seeking to win as their most
cherished privilege, the right to their own justice without interference
from any higher power. They naturally looked with sympathy on the rights
exercised by the clergy within their own body; they felt that whatever
had been won by one class might later be won by another, and that
liberties which were enjoyed by so enormous a body as the clerical order
were a benefit in which the whole people had a share. If the king was
determined to wage war on "privilege," clergy and people were equally
resolute to defend "liberty." Moreover, in attacking the special
jurisdiction of the Church, Henry had to encounter a force to which there
is no parallel in our own time. An English king had doubtless less to fear
from the Church than had any continental ruler. Abroad the bishop-stool,
the abbey, the Church, were oases in the midst of perpetual war,--the only
spots where peace and law and justice spoke in protest against the chaos
of the world. But England was, in comparison with the rest of the western
world, a country of peace and law. There the Church was less powerful
against the State because the State had never handed over its duty of
maintaining justice and law and right to the exclusive guardianship of the
Church. None the less it was a formidable matter to rouse the hostility of
a body which included not only all the religious world, but all the
educated classes, and penetrated even to the despised villeinage and the
poor freemen whose sons pressed into its lower ranks. The Church with
which Henry had to deal was no longer the same that the Conqueror had
easily bent to his will. It had received its training and felt its
strength in political action; it had developed a close corporate spirit;
it had an admirable organization; it possessed the most advanced as well
as the most merciful legal system of the age. Its courts had strong claims
to popular regard. Their punishments were more merciful than the savage
sentences of the lay courts; and they held out great advantages to the
rich, since the penances they inflicted could be commuted for money.
Their system of law, moreover, was far in advance of the barbarous rules
of customary law; and they were backed by all the authority of the Roman
Curia and of the religious feeling of the day.
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'Evêque, 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 £300 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.
Henry's first step was to send orders to the archbishop to withdraw his
appeal to Rome and his prohibition to the bishops to proceed in the
trial, and to submit to the King's Court in the matter of the chancery
accounts. Secret friends in the Council sent the archbishop strange
warnings. Henry, some said, was planning his death; according to others
the royal officers were laying plots for it secretly, "the king knowing
nothing." A new access of panic seized the bishops. "If he should be
captured or slain what remains to us but to be cast out of our offices
and honours to everlasting shame!" With faces of abject terror they
surrounded Thomas, and the Bishop of Winchester implored him to resign
his see. "The same day and the same hour," he answered, "shall end my
bishopric and my life." "Would to God," cried Hilary, "that thou wert
and shouldst remain only Thomas without any other dignity whatever!"
But Thomas refused all compromise; he had not been summoned to answer
in this cause; he had already suffered against law for men of Kent and
of the sea-border charged with the defence of the coast might be fined
only one-third as much as the inland men; at his consecration, too, he
had been freed from any responsibility incurred as chancellor; he asserted
his right of appeal; and he had meanwhile forbidden the bishops to judge
him in any charge that referred to the time before he was Primate.
Silently the king's messenger returned with his answer. "Behold, we have
heard the blasphemy of prohibition out of his mouth!" cried the barons
and officers, and courtiers turning their heads and throwing sidelong
glances at him, whispered loudly that William who had conquered England,
and even Geoffrey of Anjou, had known how to subdue clerks.
On hearing the message the king at once ordered bishops and barons to
proceed to the trial of the Primate for this new act of contempt of the
King's Court. "In a strait place you have put us," Hilary broke out
bitterly to Thomas, "by your prohibition you have set us between the
hammer and the anvil!" In vain they again entreated Thomas to yield; in
vain they begged the king's leave to sit apart from the barons. Even the
Archbishop of York and Foliot sought anxiously for some escape from
obeying Henry's orders, and at the head of the bishops prayed that they
might themselves appeal to Rome, and thus deal with their own special
grievances against Thomas, who had ordered them to swear and then to
forswear themselves. To this Henry agreed, and from this time the
prelates sat apart, no longer forced to join in the proceedings of the
lay lords; while Henry added to the Council certain sheriffs and lesser
barons "ancient in days." The assembly thus remodelled formally condemned
the archbishop as a traitor, and the earls of Leicester and of Cornwall
were sent to pronounce judgment. But the sentence was never spoken. Thomas
sprang up, cross in hand, and passionately forbade Leicester to speak.
"How can you refuse to obey," said Leicester, "seeing you are the king's
man, and hold your possessions as a fief from him?" "God forbid!" said
Thomas; "I hold nothing whatever of him in fief, for whatever the Church
holds it holds in perpetual liberty, not in subjection to any earthly
sovereignty whatever.... I am your father, you princes of the palace,
lay powers, secular persons; as gold is better than lead, so is the
spiritual better than the lay power.... By my authority I forbid you to
pronounce the sentence." As the nobles retired the archbishop raised his
cross: "I also withdraw," he said, "for the hour is past." Cries of
"Traitor!" followed him down the hall. Knights and barons rushed after him
with bundles of straw and sticks snatched up from the floor, and a clamour
rose "as if the four parts of the city had been given to flames and the
assault of enemies." He made his way slowly through the weeping crowd
outside to the monastery of St. Andrews. That night he fled from
Northampton. The darkness was "as a covering" to him, and a terrible storm
and pelting rain hid the sound of his horse's feet as he passed at
midnight through the town, and out by an unguarded gate to the north. At
dawn of day the anxious Henry of Winchester came to ask for news. "He is
doing well," Thomas's servant whispered in his ear, "for last night he
went away from us, and we do not know whither he has gone." "By the
blessing of God!" cried the bishop, weeping and sighing. When the news was
brought to the king he stood speechless for some moments, choked by his
fury, till at last catching his breath, "We have not done with him yet!"
he exclaimed.
It seemed, indeed, as though the Council of Northampton had brought
nothing but failure and disaster. The king's whole scheme of reform
depended on the ruin or the submission of the Primate, who was its open
and formidable opponent. But Thomas was free and was now more dangerous
than ever. The Church was alarmed, suspicious, perplexed. It was not ten
years since Henry had made his first journey round the kingdom with
Archbishop Theobald at his side, as the king chosen and appointed by the
spiritual power to put down violence and repress a lawless baronage. But
now he could no longer look for the aid of the Church; all dream of
orderly legislation seemed over. Amid all his violence, however, the
king's sincere attempt to maintain the outward authority of law made of
the Council of Northampton a great event in our constitutional history.
It showed that the rule of pure despotism was over. A new step was taken
too in the political education of the nation. Thrown back on the support
of his own officials and of the baronage, Henry used the nobles as he
had once used the Church. Greater and lesser barons sat together in the
King's Council for the first time when Henry summoned sheriffs and
knights from the hall of Northampton Castle to the inner council
chamber. He taught the nobles their strength when he called the whole
assembly of his barons to discuss questions of spiritual jurisdiction.
It was at Northampton that he gave them their first training in political
action--a training whose full results were seen half a century later in
the winning of Magna Charta.