Part 13 (1/2)

Our knowledge of the treasury accounts of this period is not sufficient to enable us to explain every detail of this taxation, but it is sufficient to enable us to say that the statement of the abbot is in general accurate. The tax on the English knight's fee was heavier than that on the Norman; payment does not seem to have been actually required from all persons outside the strict feudal bond, nor within it for that matter; and the exact relations.h.i.+p between payment and service in the field we cannot determine. Two things, however, of interest in the history of taxation in relation both to earlier and later times seem clear. In the first place a new form of land-tax had been discovered of special application to the feudal community, capable of transforming a limited and somewhat uncertain personal service into a far more satisfactory money payment, capable also of considerable extension and, in the hands of an absolute king, of an arbitrary development which apparently some forms of feudal finance had already undergone. This was something new,--that is, it was as new as anything ever is in const.i.tutional history. It was the application of an old process to a new use. In the second place large sums of money were raised, in a purely arbitrary way, it would seem, both as to persons paying and sums paid, from members of the non-feudal community and also from some tenants in chief who at the same time paid scutage. These payments appear to have rested on the feudal principle of the gracious or voluntary aid and to have been called ”dona,” though the people of that time were in general more accurate in the distinctions they made between things than in the use of the terms applied to them. There was nothing new about this form of taxation. Glimpses which we get here and there of feudalism in operation lead us to suspect that, in small matters and with much irregularity of application to persons, it was in not infrequent use.

These particular payments, pressing as they did heavily on the Church and exciting its vigorous objection, carry us back with some interest to the beginning of troubles between Anselm and the Red King over a point of the same kind.

In theory and in strict law these ”gifts” were voluntary, both as to whether they should be made at all and as to their amount, but under a sovereign so strong as Henry II or William Rufus, the king must be satisfied. Church writers complained, with much if not entire justice, that this tax was ”contrary to ancient custom and due liberty,” and they accused Thomas the chancellor of suggesting it. As a matter of fact this tax was less important in the history of taxation than the extension of the principle of scutage which accompanied it. The contribution which it made to the future was not so much in the form of the tax as in the precedent of arbitrary taxation, established in an important instance of taxation at the will of the king. This precedent carried over and applied to scutage in its new form becomes in the reign of Henry's son one of the chief causes of revolutionary changes, and thus const.i.tutes ”the scutage of Toulouse” of 1159, if we include under that term the double taxation of the year, one of the great steps forward of the reign of Henry.

At the close of the Toulouse campaign an incident of some interest occurred in the death of Stephen's son William and the ending of the male line of Stephen's succession. His Norman county of Mortain was at once taken in hand by Henry as an escheated fief, and was not filled again until it was given years afterwards to his youngest son. To Boulogne Henry had no right, but he could not afford to allow his influence in the county to decline, though the danger of its pa.s.sing under the influence of Louis VII was slight. Stephen's only living descendant was his daughter Mary, now Abbess of Romsey. The pope consented to her marriage to a son of the Count of Flanders, and Boulogne remained in the circle of influence in which it had been fixed by Henry I. The wide personal possessions of William in England were apparently added to the royal domain which had already increased so greatly since the death of Stephen.

A year later the other branch of Stephen's family came into a new relations.h.i.+p to the politics of France and England. At the beginning of October, 1160, Louis's second wife died, leaving him still without a male heir. Without waiting till the end of any period of mourning, within a fortnight, he married the daughter of Stephen's brother, Theobald of Blois, sister of the counts Henry of Champagne and Theobald of Blois, who were already betrothed to the two daughters of his marriage with Eleanor.

This opened for the house of Blois a new prospect of influence and gain, and for the king of England of trouble which was in part fulfilled. Henry saw the probable results, and at once responded with an effort to improve his frontier defences. The marriage of the young Henry and Margaret of France was immediately celebrated, though the elder of the two was still a mere infant. This marriage gave Henry the right to take possession of the Norman Vexin and its strong castles, and this he did. The war which threatened for a moment did not break out, but there was much fortifying of castles on both sides of the frontier.

It is said that the suggestion of this defensive move came from Thomas Becket. However this may be, Thomas was now near the end of his career of service to the state as chancellor, and was about to enter a field which promised even greater usefulness and wider possibilities of service.

Archbishop Theobald of Canterbury died on April 18, 1161. For some months the king gave no sign of his intentions as to his successor. Then he declared his purpose. Thomas, the chancellor, was about to cross to England to carry out another plan of Henry's. The barons were to be asked to swear fealty to the young Henry as the direct heir to the crown. Born in February, 1155, Henry was in his eighth year when this ceremony was performed. Some little time before he had been committed by his father to the chancellor to be trained in his courtly and brilliant household, and there he became deeply attached to his father's future enemy. The swearing of fealty to the heir, to which the barons were now accustomed, was performed without objection, Thomas himself setting the example by first taking the oath.

This was his last service of importance as chancellor. Before his departure from Normandy on this errand, the king announced to him his intention to promote him to the vacant primacy. The appointment would be a very natural one. Archbishop Theobald is said to have hoped and prayed that Thomas might succeed him, and the abilities which the chancellor had abundantly displayed would account for a general expectation of such a step, but Thomas himself hesitated. We are dependent for our knowledge of the details of what happened at this time on the accounts of Thomas's friends and admirers, but there is no reason to doubt their substantial accuracy. It is clear that there were better grounds in fact for the hesitation of Thomas than for the insistence of Henry, but they were apparently concealed from the king. His mother is said to have tried to dissuade him, and the able Bishop of Hereford, Gilbert Foliot, records his own opposition. But the complete devotion to the king's will and the zealous services of Thomas as chancellor might well make Henry believe, if not that he would be entirely subservient to his policy when made archbishop, at least that Church and State might be ruled by them together in full harmony and co-operation, and the days of William and Lanfranc be brought back. Becket read his own character better and knew that the days of Henry I and Anselm were more likely to return, and that not because he recognized in himself the narrowness of Anselm, but because he knew his tendency to identify himself to the uttermost with whatever cause he adopted.

Thomas had come to the chancellors.h.i.+p at the age of thirty-seven. He had been a student, attached to the household of Archbishop Theobald, and he must long have looked forward to promotion in the Church as the natural field of his ambition, and in this he had just taken the first step in his appointment to the rich archdeaconry of Canterbury by his patron. As chancellor, however, he seems to have faced entirely about. He threw himself into the elegant and luxurious life of the court with an abandon and delight which, we are tempted to believe, reveal his natural bent. The family of a wealthy burgher of London in the last part of the reign of Henry I may easily have been a better school of manners and taste than the court of Anjou. Certainly in refinement, and in the order and elegance of his household as it is described, the chancellor surpa.s.sed the king. Provided with an ample income both from benefices which he held in the Church and from the perquisites of his office, he indulged in a profusion of expenditure and display which the king probably did not care for and certainly did not equal, and collected about himself such a company of clerks and laymen as made his household a better place for the training of the children of the n.o.bles than the king's. In the king's service he spent his money with as lavish a hand as for himself, in his emba.s.sy to the French court or in the war against Toulouse. He had the skill to avoid the envy of either king or courtier, and no scandal or hint of vice was breathed against him. The way to the highest which one could hope for in the service of the state seemed open before him, and he felt himself peculiarly adapted to enjoy and render useful such a career. One cannot help speculating on the interesting but hopeless problem of what the result would have been if Becket had remained in the line of secular promotion and the primacy had gone to the next most likely candidate, Gilbert Foliot, whose type of mind would have led him to sympathize more naturally with the king's views and purposes in the questions that were so soon to arise between Church and State in England.

The election of Becket to the see of Canterbury seems to have followed closely the forms which had come into use since the compromise between Henry I and Anselm, and which were soon after described in the Const.i.tutions of Clarendon. The justiciar, Richard de Lucy, with three bishops went down to Canterbury and made known the will of the king and summoned the monks to an election. Some opposition showed itself among them, apparently because of the candidate's worldly life and the fact that he was not a monk, but they gave way to the clearly expressed will of the king. The prior and a deputation of the monks went up to London; and there the formal election took place ”with the counsel of” the bishops summoned for the purpose, and was at once confirmed by the young prince acting for his father. At the same time Henry, Bishop of Winchester, made a formal demand of those who were representing the king that the archbishop should be released from all liability for the way in which he had handled the royal revenues as chancellor and treasurer, and this was agreed to. On the next Sunday but one, June 3, 1162, Thomas was consecrated Archbishop at Canterbury by the Bishop of Winchester, as the see of London was vacant. As his first official act the new prelate ordained that the feast in honour of the Trinity should be henceforth kept on the anniversary of his consecration.

[45] See the review of the whole controversy in Thatcher, Studies Concerning Adrian IV (1903).

CHAPTER XIII

KING AND ARCHBISHOP

Thomas Becket, who thus became the head of the English Church, was probably in his forty-fourth year, for he seems to have been born on December 21, 1118. All his past had been a training in one way or another for the work which he was now to do. He had had an experience of many sides of life. During his early boyhood, in his father's house in London, he had shared the life of the prosperous burgher cla.s.s; he had been a student abroad, and though he was never a scholar, he knew something of the learned world from within; he had been taken into the household of Archbishop Theobald, and there he had been trained, with a little circle of young men of promise of his own age, in the strict ideas of the Church; he had been employed on various diplomatic missions, and had accomplished what had been intrusted to him, we are told, with skill and success; last of all, he had been given a high office in the state, and had learned to know by experience and observation the life of the court, its methods of doing or preventing business, and all its strength and weakness.

As Archbishop of Canterbury, Thomas Becket became almost the independent sovereign of a state within the state. Lanfranc had held no such place, nor had Anselm. No earlier archbishop indeed had found himself at his consecration so free from control and so strong. The organization apart from the state, the ideal liberty of the Church, to which Anselm had looked forward somewhat vaguely, had been in some degree realized since his time. The death of Henry I had removed the restraining hand which had held the Church within its old bounds. For a generation afterwards it was free--free as compared with any earlier period--to put into practice its theories and aspirations, and the new Archbishop of Canterbury inherited the results still unquestioned and undiminished. Henry II had come to the throne young and with much preliminary work to be done. Gradually, it would seem, the reforms necessary to recover the full royal power, and to put into most effective form the organization of the state, were taking shape in his mind. It is possible, it is perhaps more than possible, that he expected to have from his friend Thomas as archbishop sympathy and a.s.sistance in these plans, or at least that he would be able to carry them out with no opposition from the Church. This looks to us now like a bad reading of character. At any rate no hope was ever more completely disappointed. In character, will, and ideals, at least as these appear from this time onward, sovereign and primate furnished all the conditions of a most bitter conflict. But to understand this conflict it is also necessary to remember the strength of Becket's position, the fact that he was the ruler of an almost independent state.

What was the true and natural character of Thomas Becket, what were really the ideals on which he would have chosen to form his life if he had been entirely free to shape it as he would, is a puzzle which this is not the place to try to solve. Nor can we discuss here the critical questions, still unsettled, which the sources of our knowledge present.

Fortunately no question affects seriously the train of events, and, in regard to the character of the archbishop, we may say with some confidence that, whatever he might have chosen for himself, he threw himself with all the ardour of a great nature into whatever work he was called upon to do. As chancellor, Thomas's household had been a centre of luxurious court life. As archbishop his household was not less lavishly supplied, nor less attractive; but its elegance was of a more sober cast, and for himself Thomas became an ascetic, as he had been a courtier, and practised in secret, according to his biographers, the austerities and good works which became the future saint.

Six months after the consecration of the new archbishop, King Henry crossed from Normandy to England, at the end of January, 1163, but before he did so word had come to him from Becket which was like a declaration of principles. Henry had hoped to have him at the same time primate of the Church and his own chancellor. Not merely would this add a distinction to his court, but we may believe that the king would regard it as a part of the co-operation between Church and State in the reforms he had in mind. To Thomas the retention of his old office would probably mean a pledge not to oppose the royal will in the plans which he no doubt foresaw. It would also interfere seriously with the new manner of life which he proposed for himself, and he firmly declined to continue in the old office. In other ways, unimportant as yet, the policy of the primate as it developed was coming into collision with the king's interests, in his determined pus.h.i.+ng of the rights of his Church to every piece of land to which it could lay any claim, in some cases directly against the king, and in his refusal to allow clerks in the service of the State to hold preferments in the Church, of which he had himself been guilty; but all these things were still rather signs of what might be expected than important in themselves. There was for several months no breach between the king and the archbishop.

For some time after his return to England Henry was occupied, as he had been of late on the continent, with minor details of government of no permanent importance. The treaty of alliance with Count Dietrich of Flanders was renewed. Gilbert Foliot was translated to the important bishopric of London. A campaign in South Wales brought the prince of that country to terms, and was followed by homage from him and other Welsh princes rendered at a great council held at Woodstock during the first week of July, 1163. It was at this meeting that the king first met with open and decided opposition from the archbishop, though this was still in regard to a special point and not to a general line of policy. The revenue of the state which had been left by the last reign in a disordered condition was still the subject of much concern and careful planning. Recently, as our evidence leads us to believe, the king had given up the Danegeld as a tax which had declined in value until it was no longer worth collecting. At Woodstock he made a proposition to the council for an increase in the revenue without an increase in the taxation. It was that the so-called ”sheriffs aid,” a tax said to be of two s.h.i.+llings on the hide paid to the sheriffs by their counties as a compensation for their services, should be for the future paid into the royal treasury for the use of the crown. That this demand was in the direction of advance and reform can hardly be questioned, especially if, as is at least possible, it was based on the declining importance of the sheriffs as purely local officers, and their increasing responsibilities as royal officers on account of the growing importance of the king's courts and particularly of the itinerant justice courts. So decided a change, however, in the traditional way of doing business could only be made with consent asked and obtained. There is no evidence that opposition came from any one except Becket. He flatly refused to consent to any such change, as he had a right to do so far as his own lands were concerned, and declared that this tax should never be paid from them to the public treasury. The motive of his opposition does not appear and is not easy to guess. He stood on the historical purpose of the tax and refused to consider any other use to which it might be put. Henry was angry, but apparently he had to give up his plan. At any rate unmistakable notice had been served on him that his plans for reform were likely to meet with the obstinate opposition of his former chancellor.

This first quarrel was the immediate prelude to another concerning a far more important matter and of far more lasting consequences.

Administration and jurisdiction, revenue and justice, were so closely connected in the medieval state that any attempt to increase the revenue, or to improve and centralize the administrative machinery, raised at once the question of changes in the judicial system. But Henry II was not interested in getting a larger income merely, or a closer centralization.

His whole reign goes to show that he had a high conception of the duty of the king to make justice prevail and to repress disorder and crime. But this was a duty which he could not begin to carry out without at once encountering the recognized rights and still wider claims of the Church.

Starting from the words of the apostle against going to law before unbelievers, growing at first as a process of voluntary arbitration within the Church, adding a criminal side with the growth of disciplinary powers over clergy and members, and greatly stimulated and widened by the legislation of the early Christian emperors, a body of law and a judicial organization had been developed by the Church which rivalled that of the State in its own field and surpa.s.sed it in scientific form and content. In the hundred years since William the Conqueror landed in England this system had been greatly perfected. The revival of the Roman law in the schools of Italy had furnished both model and material, but more important still the triumph of the Cluniac reformation, of the ideas of centralization and empire, had given an immense stimulus to this growth, and led to clearer conceptions than ever before of what to do and how to do it. When the state tardily awoke to the same consciousness of opportunity and method, it found a large part of what should have been its own work in the hands of a rival power.

In no state in Christendom had the line between these conflicting jurisdictions been clearly drawn. In England no attempt had as yet been made to draw it; the only legislation had been in the other direction.

The edict of William I, separating the ecclesiastical courts from the temporal, and giving them exclusive jurisdiction in spiritual causes, must be regarded as a beneficial regulation as things then were. The same thing can hardly be said of the clause in Stephen's charter to the Church by which he granted it jurisdiction over all the clergy; yet under this clause the Church had in fifteen years drawn into its hands, as nearly as we can judge, more business that should naturally belong to the state than in the three preceding reigns. This rapid attainment of what Anselm could only have wished for, this enlarged jurisdiction of the Church, stood directly in the way of the plans of the young king as he took up the work of restoring the government of his grandfather. He had found out this fact before the death of Archbishop Theobald and had taken some steps to bring the question to an issue at that time, but he had been obliged to cross to France and had not since been able to go on with the matter. Now the refusal of Archbishop Thomas to grant his request about the sheriff's aid probably did not make him any less ready to push what he believed to be the clear rights of the state against the usurpations of the clergy.

As the state a.s.sumed more and more the condition of settled order under the new king, and the courts were able to enforce the laws everywhere, the failures of justice which resulted from the separate position of the clergy attracted more attention. The king was told that there had been during his reign more than a hundred murders by clerks and great numbers of other crimes, for none of which had it been possible to inflict the ordinary penalties. Special cases began to be brought to his attention.

The most important of these was the case of Philip of Broi, a man of some family and a canon of Bedford, who, accused of the murder of a knight, had cleared himself by oath in the bishop's court. Afterwards the king's justice in Bedford summoned him to appear in his court and answer to the same charge, but he refused with insulting language which the justice at once repeated to the king as a contempt of the royal authority. Henry was very angry and swore ”by the eyes of G.o.d,” his favourite oath, that an insult to his minister was an insult to himself and that the canon must answer for it in his court. ”Not so,” said the archbishop, ”for laymen cannot be judges of the clergy. If the king complains of any injury, let him come or send to Canterbury, and there he shall have full justice by ecclesiastical authority.” This declaration of the archbishop was the extreme claim of the Church in its simplest form. Even the king could not obtain justice for a personal injury in his own courts, and the strength of Becket's position is shown by the fact that, in spite of all his anger, Henry was obliged to submit. He could not, even then, get the case of the murder reopened, and in the matter of the insult to his judge the penalties which he obtained must have seemed to him very inadequate.

It seems altogether probable that this case had much to do with bringing Henry to a determination to settle the question, what law and what sovereign should rule in England. So long as such things were possible, there could be no effective centralization and no supremacy of the national law. Within three months of the failure of his plan of taxation in the council at Woodstock the king made a formal demand of the Church to recognize the right of the State to punish criminous clerks. The bishops were summoned to a conference at Westminster on October 1. To them the king proposed an arrangement, essentially the same as that afterwards included in the Const.i.tutions of Clarendon, by which the question of guilt or innocence should be determined by the Church court, but once p.r.o.nounced guilty the clerk should be degraded by the Church and handed over to the lay court for punishment. The bishops were not at first united on the answer which they should make, but Becket had no doubts, and his opinion carried the day. One of his biographers, Herbert of Bosham, who was his secretary and is likely to have understood his views, though he was if possible of an even more extreme spirit than his patron, records the speech in which the archbishop made known to the king the answer of the Church. Whether actually delivered or not, the speech certainly states the principles on which Becket must have stood, and these are those of the reformers of Cluny in their most logical form. The Church is not subject to an earthly king nor to the law of the State alone: Christ also is its king and the divine law its law. This is proved by the words of our Lord concerning the ”two swords.” But those who are by ordination the clergy of the Church, set apart from the nations of men and peculiarly devoted to the work of G.o.d, are under no earthly king.

They are above kings and confer their power upon them, and far from being subject to any royal jurisdiction they are themselves the judges of kings. There can be no doubt but that Becket in his struggle with the king had consciously before him the model of Anselm; but these words, whether he spoke them to the king's face or not, forming as they did the principles of his action and accepted by the great body of the clergy, show how far the English Church had progressed along the road into which Anselm had first led it.