countenance she had given to liberty in other places was used as an
argument against herself in the central seat of her power. Rome, the
city of consuls and tribunes, was carried away by the great idea; and
under the guidance of Arnold of Brescia, a monk who believed himself
a Brutus, the standard was again hoisted on the Capitol, displaying
the magic letters S. P. Q. R., (Senatus Populus que Romanus.) The Pope
was expelled by the population, the freedom of the city proclaimed,
the separation of the spiritual and temporal powers pronounced by the
unanimous voice, the government of priests abolished, and measures
taken to maintain the authority the citizens had assumed. The banished
Pope had died while these things were going on, and his successor
was hunted down the steps of the Capitol, and the revolution was
accomplished. "Throughout the peninsula," says a German historian,
"except in the kingdom of Naples, from Rome to the smallest city,
the republican form prevailed." Every thing had concurred to this
result,--the force of arms, the rise of commerce, and the glorious
remembrance of the past. St. Bernard himself acquiesced in the position
now occupied by the Pope, and he wrote to his scholar Eugenius the
Third, to "leave the Romans alone, and to exchange the city against
the world," ("urbem pro orbe mutatam.") But the effervescence of the
popular will was soon at an end. The fear of republicanism made common
cause between the Pope and Emperor. Frederick Barbarossa revenged the
indignities cast on the chair of St. Peter by burning the rebellious
Arnold and re-establishing the ancient form of government by force. Yet
the spirit of equality which was thus repressed by violence fermented
in secret; nor was equality all that was aimed at amid some of the
swarming seats of population and commerce. We find indeed, from this
time, that in a great number of instances the original relations
between the town and baron were reversed: the noble put himself under
the protection of the municipality, and received its guarantee against
the assaults or injuries of the prouder and less politic members of his
class. It was a strange thing to see a feudal lord receive his orders
from the municipal officers of a country town, and still stranger to
perceive the low opinion which the courageous and high-fed burghers
entertained of the pomp and circumstance of the mailed knights of
whom they had been accustomed to stand in awe. Their ramparts were
strong, their granaries well filled, their companions stoutly armed;
and they used to lean over the wall, when a hostile champion summoned
them to submit to the exactions of a great proprietor, and watch
the clumsy charger staggering under his heavy armour, with shouts of
derision. Men who had thus thrown off their hereditary veneration
for the lords of the soil, and contentedly saw the deposition of
the Roman Pope by a Roman Senate and People, were not likely to pay
a blind submission to the spiritual dictation of their priests. In
the towns, accordingly, a spirit of free inquiry into the mysteries
of the faith began; and, while country districts still heard with
awe the impossible wonders of the monkish legends, there were rash
and daring scholars in several countries, who threw doubt upon the
plainest statements of Revelation. Of these the best-known is the
still famous Abelard, whose exertions as a religious inquirer have
been thrown into the shade by his more interesting character of the
hero of a love-story. The letters of Eloisa, and the unfortunate issue
of their affection, have kept their names from the oblivion which has
fallen upon their metaphysical triumphs. And yet during their lives
the glory of Abelard did not depend on the passionate eloquence of
his pupil, but arose from the unequalled sharpness of his intellect
and his skill in argumentation. Of noble family, the handsomest man
of his time, wonderfully gifted with talent and accomplishment, he
was the first instance of a man professing the science of theology
without being a priest. Wherever he went, thousands of enthusiastic
scholars surrounded his chair. His eloquence was so fascinating that
the listener found himself irresistibly carried away by the stream;
and if an opponent was hardy enough to stand up against him, the
acuteness of his logic was as infallible as the torrent of his oratory
had been, and in every combat he carried away the prize. He doubted
about original sin, and by implication about the atonement, and many
other articles of the Christian belief. The power and constitution
of the Church were endangered by the same weapons which assailed the
groundworks of the faith; and yet in all Europe no sufficient champion
for truth and orthodoxy could be found. Abelard was triumphant over
all his gainsayers, till at length Bernard of Clairvaux, who even in
his lifetime was looked on with the veneration due to a saint, who
refused an archbishopric, and the popedom itself, took up the gauntlet
thrown down by the lover of Eloisa, and reduced him to silence by the
superiority of his reasonings and the threats of a general council. It
is sufficient to remark the appearance of Abelard in this century, as
the commencement of a reaction against the dogmatic authority of the
Church. It was henceforth possible to reason and to inquire; and there
can be no doubt that Protestantism even in this modified and isolated
form had a beneficial effect on the establishment it assailed. A new
armory was required to meet the assaults of dialectic and scholarship.
Dialecticians and scholars were therefore, henceforth, as much valued
in the Church as self-flagellating friars and miracle-performing
saints. The faith was now guarded by a noble array of highly-polished
intellects, and the very dogma of the total abnegation of the
understanding at the bidding of the priest was supported by a show
of reasoning which few other questions had called forth. With the
enlargement of the clerical sphere of knowledge, refinement in taste
and sentiment took place. And at this time, as philosophic discussion
took its rise with Abelard, the ennobling and idealization of woman
took its birth contemporaneously with the sufferings of Eloisa. Up
to this period the Church had avowedly looked with disdain on woman,
as inheriting in a peculiar degree the curse of our first parents,
because she had been the first to break the law Knightly gallantry,
indeed, had thought proper to elevate the feminine ideal and clothe
with imaginary virtues the heroines of its fictitious idolatry. It made
her the aim and arbiter of all its achievements. The principal seat
in hall and festival was reserved for the softer sex, which hitherto
had been considered scarcely worthy of reverence or companionship.
Perhaps this courtesy to the ladies on the part of knights and nobles
began in an opposition to the wife-secluding habits of the Orientals
against whom they fought, as at an earlier date the worship of images
was certainly maintained by Rome as a protest against the unadorned
worship of the Saracens. Perhaps it arose from the gradual expansion
of wealth and the security of life and property, which left time and
opportunity for the cultivation of the female character. Ladies were
constituted chiefs of societies of nuns, and were obeyed with implicit
submission. Large communities of young maidens were presided over by
widows who were still in the bloom of youth; and so holy and pure
were these sisterhoods considered, that brotherhoods and monks were
allowed to occupy the same house, and the sexes were only separated
from each other, even at night, by an aged abbot sleeping on the
floor between them. Though this experiment failed, the fact of its
being tried proved the confidence inspired by the spotlessness of the
female character. Other things conspired to give a greater dignity to
what had been called the inferior sex. The death of whole families in
the Crusade had left the daughters heiresses of immense possessions.
In every country but France the Crown itself was open to female
succession, and it was henceforth impossible to affect a superiority
over a person merely because she was corporeally weak and beautiful,
who was lady of strong castles and could summon a thousand retainers
beneath the banners of her house. The very elevation of the women
with whom they were surrounded--the peeresses, and princesses, and
even the ladies of lower rank, to whom the voice of the troubadours
attributed all the virtues under heaven--necessitated in the mind of
the clergy a corresponding elevation in the character of the queen and
representative of the female sex, whom they had already worshipped as
personally without sin and endowed with superhuman power. At this time
the immaculate conception of the Holy Virgin was first broached as an
article of belief,--a doctrine which, after being dormant at intervals
and occasionally blossoming into declaration, has finally received
its full ratification by the authority of the present Pope,--Pius the
Ninth. In the twelfth century it was acknowledged and propagated as a
fresh increase to the glory of the mother of God; but it is now fixed
forever as indispensable to the salvation of every Christian.
Such, then, are the great features by which to mark this century,--the
combination of rank with rank caused by the mutual danger of lord and
serf in the Crusade, the rise of freedom by the commercial activity
imparted by the same cause to the towns, the elevation of the idea
of woman, without which no true civilization can take place. These
are the leading and general characteristics: add to them what we
have slightly alluded to,--the first specimens of the joyous lays
and love-sonnets of the young knights returning from Palestine and
pouring forth their admiration of birth and beauty in the soft
language of Italy or Languedoc,--the intercourse between distant
nations, which was indispensable in the combined expeditions against
the common foe, so that the rough German cavalier gathered lessons
in manner or accomplishment from the more polished princes of Anjou
or Aquitaine,--and it will be seen that this was the century of
awakening mind and softening influences. There were scholars like
Abelard, introducing the hitherto unknown treasures of the Greek and
Hebrew tongues, and yet presenting the finest specimens of gay and
accomplished gentlemen, unmatched in sweetness of voice and mastery
of the harp; and there were at the other side of the picture saints
like Bernard of Clairvaux, not relying any longer on visions and the
traditionary marvels of the past, but displaying the power of an
acute diplomatist and wide-minded politician in the midst of the most
extraordinary self-denial and the exercises of a rigorous asceticism,
which in former ages had been limited to the fanatical and insane. To
this man's influence was owing the Second Crusade, which occurred in
1147. [A.D. 1147.] Different from the first, which had been the result
of popular enthusiasm and dependent for its success on undisciplined
numbers and religious fury, this was a great European and Christian
movement, concerted between the sovereigns and ratified by the peoples.
Kings took the command, and whole nations bestowed their wealth and
influence on the holy cause. Louis the Seventh of France led all the
paladins of his land; and Conrad, the German Emperor, collected all
the forces of the West to give the finishing-blow to the power of the
Mohammedans and restore the struggling kingdom of Jerusalem. Seventy
thousand horsemen and two hundred and fifty thousand foot-soldiers were
the smallest part of the array. Whole districts were depopulated by the
multitudes of artificers, shopmen, women, children, buffoons, mimics,
priests, and conjurers who accompanied the march. It looked like one
of the great movements which convulsed the Roman Empire when Goths
or Burgundians poured into the land. But the results were nearly the
same as in the days of Godfrey and Bohemund. Valour and discipline,
national emulation and knightly skill, were of no avail against climate
and disease. Again the West astonished the Turks with the impetuosity
of its courage and the display of its hosts, but lay weakened and
exhausted when the convulsive effort was past. A million perished in
the useless struggle. Forty years scarcely sufficed to restore the
nobility to sufficient power to undertake another suicidal attempt.
[A.D. 1191.] But in 1191 the Third Crusade departed under the conduct
of Richard of England, and earned the same glory and unsuccess. The
century was weakened by those wretched but not fruitless expeditions,
which, in round numbers, cost two millions of lives, and produced such
memorable effects on the general state of Europe; yet it will be better
remembered by us if we direct our attention to some of the incidents
which have a more direct bearing on our own country. Of these the most
remarkable is the commencement of the long-continued enmity between
France and England, of the wars which lasted so many years, which made
our most eminent politicians at one time believe that the countries
were natural enemies, incapable of permanent union or even of mutual
respect; and these took their rise, as most great wars have done,
from the paltriest causes, and were continued on the most unfounded
pretences.
Henry the First was the son of William the Conqueror. On the death
of his brother William Rufus he seized the English crown, though the
eldest of the family, Robert, was still alive. Robert was fond of
fighting without the responsibility of command, and delighted to be
religious without the troubles of a religious life. He therefore joined
the First Crusade to gratify this double desire, and mortgaged his
dukedom of Normandy to Henry to supply him with horses and arms and
enable him to support his dignity as a Christian prince at Jerusalem.
His dukedom he never could recover, for his extravagances prevented
him from repayment of the loan. He tried to reconquer it by force,
but was defeated at the battle of Tinchebray, and was guarded by the
zealous affection of his brother all the rest of his life in the Tower
of London. He left a son, who was used as an instrument of assault
against Henry by the Suzerain of Normandy, Louis the Sixth, King of
France. Orders were issued to the usurping feudatory to resign his
possessions into the hands of the rightful heir; but, however obedient
the Duke of Normandy might profess to be to his liege lord the King of
France, the King of England held a very different language, and took
a different estimate of his position. [A.D. 1153.] And in the time of
the second Henry a change took place in their respective situations
which seemed to justify the assumptions of the English king. That
grandson of Henry the First had opposed his liege lord of France by
arms and arts, and at last by one great master-stroke turned his own
arms upon his rival and strengthened himself on his spoils. In the
Second Crusade the scrupulous delicacy of Louis the Seventh of France
had been revolted by the indiscreet or guilty conduct of Eleanor his
wife. He repudiated her as unworthy of his throne; and Henry, who had
no delicacies of conscience when they interfered with his interest,
offered the rejected Eleanor his hand; for she continued the undoubted
mistress of Poitou and Guienne. No stain derived from her principles
or conduct was reflected in the eyes of the ambitious Henry on those
noble provinces, and from henceforth his Continental possessions far
exceeded those of his suzerain. The other feudatories, encouraged by
this example, owned a very modified submission to their nominal head;
and the inheritors of the throne of the Capets were again reduced to
the comparative weakness of their predecessors of the Carlovingian
line. Yet there was one element of vitality of which the feudal barons
had not deprived the king. A fief, when it lapsed for want of heirs,
was reattached to the Crown; and in the turmoil and adventure of those
unsettled times the extinction of a line of warriors and pilgrims was
not an uncommon event. Even while a family was numerous and healthy the
uncertain nature of their possession deprived it of half its value,
for at the end of that gallant line of knights and cavaliers, slain
as they might be in battle, carried off by the pestilences which were
usual at that period, or wasted away in journeys to the Holy Land and
sieges in the heats of Palestine, stood the feudal king, ready to enter
into undisputed possession of the dukedoms or counties which it had
cost them so much time and danger to make independent and strong. In
the case of Normandy or Guienne themselves, Louis might have looked
without much uneasiness on the building of castles and draining of
marshes, when he reflected that but a life or two lay between him and
the enriched and strengthened fief; and when those lives were such
desperadoes as Richard and such cowards as John, the prospect did
not seem hopeless of an immediate succession. But the French kings
were still more fortunate in being opposed to such unamiable rivals
as the coarse and worldly descendants of the Conqueror. The personal
characters of those men, however their energy and courage might benefit
them in actual war, made them feared and hated wherever they were
known. They were sensual, cruel, and unprincipled to a degree unusual
even in those ages of rude manners and undeveloped conscience. Their
personal appearance itself was an index of the ungovernable passions
within Fat, broad-shouldered, low-statured, red-haired, loud-voiced,
they were frightful to look upon even in their calmest moods; but
when the Conqueror stormed, no feeling of ruth or reverence stood in
his way. When he was refused the daughter of the Count of Boulogne,
he forced his way into the chamber of the countess, seized her by the
hair of her head, dragged her round the room, and stamped on her with
his feet. Robert his son was of the same uninviting exterior. William
Rufus was little and very stout. Henry the Second was gluttonous and
debauched. Richard the Lion-Heart was cruel as the animal that gave him
name; and John was the most debased and contemptible of mankind. A race
of gentle and truthful men, on the other hand, ennobled the crown of
France. The kings, from Louis the Debonnaire to Louis the Seventh, or
Young, were favourites of the Church and champions of the people. The
harsh and violent nobility despised them, but they were venerated in
the huts where poor men lie. The very scruple which induced Louis to
divorce his wife, whose conduct had stained the purity of the Crusade,
almost repaid the loss of her great estates by the increased love and
respect of his subjects. [A.D. 1180.] And when the line of pure and
honourable rulers was for a while interrupted by the appearance, upon a
throne so long established in equity, of an armed warrior in the person
of Philip Augustus, it was felt that the sword was at last in the
hands of an avenger, who was to execute the decrees of Heaven upon the
enemies whom the moderation, justice, and mercy of his predecessors had
failed to move.
But before we come to the personal relations of the French and English
kings we must take a rapid view of one of the great incidents by which
this century is marked,--an incident which for a long time attracted
the notice of all Europe, and was productive of very important
consequences within our own country. Hitherto England had played the
part of a satellite to the Court of Rome. Previous to the quarrels with
France, indeed, one great tie between her and the Continental nations
was the community of their submission to the Pope. Foreigners have at
all times found wealth and kind treatment here. Germans, Italians,
Frenchmen, any one who could make interest with the patrons of large
livings, held rank and honours in the English Church. [A.D. 1154-1159.]
Little enough, it was felt, was all that could be done in behalf
of foreign ecclesiastics to repay them for the condescension they
showed in elevating Nicholas Breakspear, an Anglo-Saxon of St.
Alban's, to the papal chair. But Nicholas, in taking another name,
lost his English heart. As Adrian the Fourth, he preferred Rome to
England, and maintained his authority with as high a hand as any of
his predecessors. Knights and nobles, and even the higher orders of
the clergy, were at length discontented with the continual exactions
of the Holy See; and in 1162 the same battle which had agitated the
world between Henry the Fourth of Germany and Gregory the Seventh was
fought out in a still bitterer spirit between Henry the Second of
England and Thomas à-Beckett. All the story-books of English history
have told us the romantic incidents of the birth of the ambitious
priest. It is possible the obscurity of his origin was concealed by his
contemporaries under the interesting legend, which must have been a
very early subject for the fancy of the poet and troubadour, of a love
between a Red-Cross pilgrim and a Saracen emir's daughter. It shows a
remarkable softening of the ancient hatred to the infidels, that the
votaress of Mohammed should have been chosen as the mother of a saint.
But whatever doubt there may arise about the reality of the deserted
maiden's journey in search of her admirer, and her discovery of his
abode by the mere reiteration of his name, which is beautifully said
to be the only word of English she remembered, there is no doubt of
the early favour which the young Anglo-Saracen attained with the king,
or of the desire the sagacious Henry entertained to avail himself of
the great talents which made his favourite delightful as a companion
and indispensable as a chancellor, in the higher position still of
Archbishop of Canterbury and Comptroller of the English Church. For
high pretensions were put forward by the clergy: they insisted upon the
introduction of the canon laws; they claimed exemption from trial by
civil process; they were to be placed beyond the reach of the ordinary
tribunals, and were to be under their own separate rulers, and directly
subject in life and property to the decrees of Rome.
Henry knew but one man in his dominions able to contend in talent and
acuteness with the advocates of the Church, and that was his chancellor
and friend, the gay and generous and affectionate à-Beckett. So one
day, without giving him much time for preparation, he persuaded him
to be made a priest, and at the same moment named him Archbishop of
Canterbury and Primate of all England. Now, he thought, we have a
champion who will do battle in our cause and stand up for the liberties
of his native land. But à-Beckett had dressed himself in a hair shirt
and flogged himself with an iron scourge. He had invited the holiest of
the priests to favour him with their advice, and had thrown himself on
his knees on the approach of the most ascetic of the monks and friars.
All his fine establishments were broken up; his horses were sent away;
his silver table-services sold; and the new archbishop fasted on bread
and water and lay on the hard floor. Henry was astonished and uneasy;
and he had soon very good cause for his uneasiness, for his favourite
orator, his boon-companion, his gallant chancellor, from whom he had
expected support and victory, turned against him with the most ruthless
animosity, and pushed the pretensions of Rome to a pitch they had never
reached before. Nobody, however he may blame the double-dealing or the
ambition of à-Beckett, can deny him the praise of personal courage
in making opposition to the king. The Norman blood was as hot in him
as in any of his predecessors. When he got into a passion, we are
told by a contemporary chronicler, his blue eyes became filled with
blood. In a fit of rage he bit a page's shoulder. A favourite servant
having contradicted him, he rushed after the man on the stair, and,
not being able to catch him, gnawed the straw upon the boards. We may
therefore guess with what feelings the injured Plantagenet received
the behaviour of his newly-created primate. He stormed and raged,
terrified the other prelates to join him in his measures for curbing
the power of the Church, chafed himself for several years against the
unconquerable firmness of the arrogant archbishop, and finally failed
in every object he had aimed at. The violence of the king was met
with the affected resignation of the sufferer; and at last, when the
impatience of Henry gave encouragement to his followers to put the
refractory priest to death, the quarrel was lifted out of the ordinary
category of a dispute between the crown and the crozier: it became a
combat between a wilful and irreligious tyrant and a martyred saint.
It requires us to enter into the feelings of the twelfth century to
be able to understand the issue of this great conflict. In our own
day the assumptions of à-Beckett, and his claims of exemption from
the ordinary laws, have no sympathizers among the lovers of progress
or freedom. But in the time of the second Henry the only chance of
either, in England, was found under the shelter of the Church. That
great establishment was still the only protection against the lawless
violence of the king and nobles. The Norman possessors of the land
were still an army encamped on hostile soil and levying contributions
by the law of the strong hand. Disunion had not yet arisen between
the sovereign and his lords, except as to the division of the spoil.
The Crusades had not depopulated England to the same extent as some
of the other countries in Europe; and the wars of the troubled days
of Stephen and Matilda, though fatal to the prosperity of the land,
and destructive of many of the nobles on either side, had attracted
an immense number of high-born and strong-handed adventurers, who
amply supplied their place. The clergy had been forced to retain their
original position as leaders of the popular mind, superintendents of
the interests of their flocks, and teachers and comforters of the
oppressed: à-Beckett, therefore, was not in their eyes an ambitious
priest, sacrificing every thing for the elevation of his order. He
was a champion fighting the battles of the poor against the rich,--a
ransomer of at least one powerful body in the State from the capricious
cruelty of Henry and the grasping avarice of the Norman spoliation. The
down-trodden Saxons received with the transports of gratified revenge
any humiliation inflicted on the proud aristocracy which had thriven
on the ruin of their ancestors. The date of the Conquest was not yet
so distant as to hinder the feeling of personal wrong from mingling in
the conflict between the races. A man of sixty remembered the story
told him by his father of his dispossession of holt and field, on
which the old manor-house had stood since Alfred's days, and which now
had been converted into a crenelated tower by the foreign conqueror.
Nor are we to forget, in the midst of the idea of antiquity conveyed
at the present time by the fact of a person's ancestor having "come
in with William," that the bitterness of dispossession was increased
in the eyes of the long-descended Saxon franklin by the lowness of
his dispossessor's birth. Half the roll-call of the Norman army was
made up of the humblest names,--barbers and smiths, and tailors and
valets, and handicraftsmen of all descriptions. And yet, seated in
his fortified keep, supported by the sixty thousand companions of his
success, enriched by the fertile harvests of his new domain, this
upstart adventurer filled the wretched cottages of the land with a
distressed and starving peasantry; and where were those friendless and
helpless outcasts to look for succour and consolation? They found them
in the Church. Their countrymen generally filled the lower offices,
speaking in good Saxon, and feeling as good Saxons should; while the
lordly abbot or luxurious bishop kept high state in his monastery or
palace, and gave orders in Norman French with feelings as foreign as
his tongue. But à-Beckett was an Englishman; à-Beckett was Archbishop
of Canterbury, and chief of all the churchmen in the land. To honour
à-Beckett was to protest against the Conquest; and when the crowning
glory came, and the crimes of Henry against themselves attained their
full consummation in the murder of the prelate at the altar,--the
patriot in his resistance to oppression,--the enthusiasm of the country
knew no bounds. The penitential pilgrimage which the proudest of the
Plantagenets made to the tomb of his victim was but small compensation
for so enormous a wickedness, and for ages the name of à-Beckett was
a household word at the hearths of the English peasantry, as their
great representative and deliverer,--only completing the care he took
of their temporal interests while on earth by the superintendence he
bestowed on their spiritual benefit now that he was a saint in heaven.
Curses fell upon the head and heart of the royal murderer, as if by
a visible retribution. His children rebelled and died; the survivors
were false and hostile. Richard, who had the one sole virtue of animal
courage, was incited by his mother to resist his father, and was joined
in his unnatural rebellion by his brother John, who had no virtue at
all. His mind, before he died, had lost the energy which kept the
sceptre steady; and the century went down upon the glory of England,
which lay like a wreck upon the water, and was stripped gradually, and
one by one, of all the possessions which had made it great, and even
the traditions of military power which had made it feared. John was on
the throne, and the nation in discontent.
THIRTEENTH CENTURY.
Emperors of Germany.
A.D.
OTHO, (of Brunswick.)--(_cont._)
1212. FREDERICK II.
1247. WILLIAM, (of Holland.)
1257. RICHARD, (of Cornwall.)
1257. ALPHONSO, (of Castile.)
1273. RODOLPH, (of Hapsburg.)
1291. ADOLPH, (of Nassau.)