Part 14 (1/2)

He began by sending to the king three successive warnings, all based on the a.s.sumption that in such a dispute the final decision must remain with the Church and that the State must always give way. His next step was the solemn excommunication of seven supporters of the king, mostly clerks, but including Richard of Lucy, the justiciar. The king was warned to expect the same fate himself, and all obedience to the Const.i.tutions of Clarendon was forbidden. The effect of this act was not what Becket antic.i.p.ated. It led rather to a reaction of feeling against him from its unnecessary severity, and a synod of the clergy of the archbishopric entered an appeal against it. A new emba.s.sy was sent to the pope who was then at Rome to get the appeal decided, and was much more favourably received by Alexander who seems to have been displeased with Becket's action. He promised to send legates to Henry to settle the whole question with him. The occupation of Britanny by which it was brought under Henry's direct control and a short and inconclusive war with the king of France took up the interval until the legates reached Normandy in October, 1167. Their mission proved a failure. Becket, who came in person to the inquiry which they held, refused to accept any compromise or to modify in any way his extreme position. On the other side Henry was very angry because they refused to deprive the archbishop.

The year 1168 was a troubled one for Henry, with revolts in Poitou and Britanny, supported by the king of France, and with useless negotiations with Louis. Early in 1169 the pope sent new envoys to try to reconcile king and primate with instructions to bring pressure to bear on both parties. The king of France also came to the meeting and exerted his influence, but the result was a second failure. Becket had invented a new saving clause which he thought the king might be induced to accept. He would submit ”saving the honour of G.o.d,” but Henry understood the point and could see no difference between this and the old reservation. Becket finally stood firmly against the pressure of the envoys and the influence of Louis, and Henry was not moved by the threats which the pope had directed to be made if necessary. A third emba.s.sy later in the year seemed for a moment about to find a possible compromise, but ended in another failure, both parties refusing to make any real concession. The interval between these two attempts at reconciliation Becket had used to excommunicate about thirty of his opponents in England, mostly churchmen, including the Bishops of London and Salisbury.

For more than a year longer the quarrel went on, the whole Church suffering from the results, and new points arising to complicate the issue. The danger that England would be placed under an interdict Henry met by most stringent regulations against the admission of any communications from the pope, or any intercourse with pope or archbishop. On the question which arose in the constant negotiations as to the compensation which should be made to Becket for his loss of revenue since he had left England, he showed himself as unyielding as on every other point, and demanded the uttermost farthing. For some time the king had wished to have his son Henry crowned, and on June 14, 1170, that ceremony was actually performed at Westminster by the Archbishop of York, who had, as Henry believed or a.s.serted, a special permission from the pope for the purpose. Of course Becket resented this as a new invasion of his rights and determined to exact for it the proper penalties. Finally, towards the end of July, an agreement was reached which was no compromise; it simply ignored the points in dispute and omitted all the qualifying phrases. The king agreed to receive the archbishop to his favour and to restore him his possessions, and Becket accepted this. The agreement can hardly have been regarded by either side as anything more than a truce. Neither intended to abandon any right for which he had been contending, but both were exhausted by the conflict and desired an interval for recovery, perhaps with a hope of renewing the strife from a better position.

It was December 1 before Thomas actually landed in England. He then came bringing war, not peace. He had sent over, in advance of his own crossing, letters which he had solicited and obtained from the pope, suspending from their functions all the bishops who had taken part in the coronation of the young king, and reviving the excommunications of the Bishops of London and Salisbury. Then, landing at Sandwich, he went on to Canterbury, where he was received with joy. But there was little real joy for Becket or his friends in the short remainder of his life, unless it may have been the joy of conflict and of antic.i.p.ated martyrdom. To messengers who asked the removal of the sentence against the bishops, he refused any concession except on their unconditional promise to abide by the pope's decision; and the three prelates most affected--York, London, and Salisbury--went over to Normandy to the king. A plan to visit the court of the young king at London was stopped by orders to return to Canterbury. On Christmas day, at the close of a sermon from the text ”Peace on earth to men of good-will,” he issued new excommunications against some minor offenders, and bitterly denounced, in words that seemed to have the same effect, those who endangered the peace between himself and the king.

It was on the news of this Christmas proclamation, or perhaps on the report of the bishops who had come from England, that Henry gave way to his violent temper, and in an outburst of pa.s.sion denounced those whom he had cherished and covered with favours, because they could not avenge him of this one priest. On these words four knights of his household resolved to punish the archbishop, and, leaving the court secretly, they went over to England. They were Reginald Fitz Urse, William of Tracy, Hugh of Morville, and Richard le Breton. An attempt to stop them when their departure was observed did not succeed, and, collecting supporters from the local enemies of the archbishop, they forced their way into his presence on the afternoon of December 29. Their reproaches, demands, and threats Becket met with firmness and dignity, refusing to be influenced by fear. Finding that they could gain nothing by words, they withdrew to get their arms, and Becket was hurried into the cathedral by his friends.

As they were going up the steps from the north-west transept to the choir, their enemies met them, calling loudly for ”the traitor, Thomas Becket.” The archbishop turned about and stepped down to the floor of the transept, repelling their accusations with bitter words and accusations of his own, and was there struck down by their swords and murdered; not before the altar, as is sometimes said, though within the doors of his own church.

[46] See Maitland, Henry II and the Criminous Clerks, in his Canon Law in the Church of England (1898). (Engl. Hist., Rev. vii, 224.)

CHAPTER XIV

CONQUEST AND REBELLION

The martyrdom of Thomas Becket served his cause better than his continuance in life could have done. Even if his murderers foolishly thought to serve the king by their deed, Henry himself was under no delusion as to its effect. He was thunderstruck at the news, and, in a frenzy of horror which was no doubt genuine, as well as to mark his repudiation of all share in the deed, he fasted and shut himself from communication with the court for days. But the public opinion of Europe would not acquit Henry of the guilt. Letters poured in upon the pope denouncing him and demanding his punishment. The interdict of his Norman dominions which had been threatened was proclaimed by the Archbishop of Sens, but suspended again by an appeal to the pope. Events moved slowly in the twelfth century, and before the pope could take any active steps in the case, an emba.s.sy which left Normandy almost immediately had time to reach him and to promise on the part of the king his complete submission to whatever the pope should decree after examination of the facts. Immediate punishment of any severity was thus avoided, and the emba.s.sy of two cardinals to Normandy which the pope announced could act only after some delay.

In the meanwhile in England Thomas the archbishop was being rapidly transformed into Thomas the saint. Miracles were reported almost at once, and the legend of his saints.h.i.+p took its rise and began to throw a new light over the events of his earlier life. The preparation of his body for the grave had revealed his secret asceticism,--the hair garments next his skin and long unchanged. The people believed him to be a true martyr, and his popular canonization preceded by some time the official, though this followed with unusual quickness even for the middle ages. It was p.r.o.nounced by the pope in whose reign he had died on February 21, 1173.

For generations he remained the favourite saint of England, and his popularity in foreign lands is surprising, though it must be remembered that he was a great and most conspicuous martyr of the official Church, of the new Hildebrandine Church, of the spirit and ideas which were by that date everywhere in command.

This long and bitter struggle between Church and State, unworthy of both the combatants, was now over except for the consequences which were lasting, and the interest of Henry's reign flows back into the political channel. The king did not wait in seclusion the report of the pope's mission. It may have been, as was suggested even at the time, that he was glad of an excuse to escape from Normandy before the envoys' coming and to avoid a meeting with them until time had done something to soften the feeling against him. Before his departure his hold on Britanny was strengthened by the death, in February, 1171, of Conan the candidate whom he had recognized as count. Since 1166 the administration of the country had been practically in his hands; and in that year his son Geoffrey had been betrothed to Constance, the daughter and heiress of Conan. Geoffrey would now succeed to the counts.h.i.+p, but he was still a child; and Britanny was virtually incorporated in Henry's continental empire.

The refuge which the repentant Henry may have sought from the necessity of giving an answer to the pope at once, or a kind of preliminary penance for his sin, he found in Ireland. Since he received so early in his reign the sanction of Pope Hadrian IV of his plan of conquest, he had done nothing himself towards that end, but others had. The adventurous barons of the Welsh marches, who were used to the idea of carving out lords.h.i.+ps for themselves from the lands of their Celtic enemies, were easily persuaded to extend their civilizing operations to the neighbouring island, where even richer results seemed to be promised. In 1166 Dermot, the dispossessed king of Leinster, who had found King Henry too busily occupied with affairs in France to aid him, had secured with the royal permission the help he needed in Wales, and thus had connected with the future history of Ireland the names of ”Strongbow” and Fitzgerald. The native Irish, though the bravest of warriors, were without armour, and their weapons, of an earlier stage of military history, were no match for the Norman; especially had they no defence against the Norman archers.

The conquest of Leinster, from Waterford to Dublin, and including those two cities, occupied some years, but was accomplished by a few men.

”Strongbow” himself, Richard de Clare, Earl of Pembroke, did not cross over till the end of August, 1170, when the work was almost completed. He married the daughter of Dermot and was recognized as his heir, but the death of his father-in-law in the next spring was followed by a general insurrection against the new rulers, and this was hardly under control when the earl was summoned to England to meet the king.

Henry could not afford to let the dominion of Ireland, to which he had looked forward for himself, slip from his hands, nor to risk the danger that an independent state might be formed so close to England by his own va.s.sals. Already the Earl of Pembroke was out of favour; it was said that his lands had been forfeited, and he might easily become a rebel difficult to subdue in his new possessions. At the moment he certainly had no thought of rebellion, and he at once obeyed the summons to England. Henry had crossed from Normandy early in September, 1171, had paid a brief visit to Winchester, where Henry of Blois, once so powerful in Church and State, was now dying, and then advanced with his army through southern Wales into Pembrokes.h.i.+re whence he crossed to Ireland in the middle of October. As he pa.s.sed from Waterford to Cashel, and then again from Waterford to Dublin, chiefs came in from all sides, many of whom had never submitted to the Norman invaders, and acknowledged his overlords.h.i.+p. Only in the remoter parts of the west and north did they remain away, except Roderick of Connaught, the most powerful of the Irish kings, who was not yet ready to own himself a va.s.sal, but claimed the whole of Ireland for himself. The Christmas feast Henry kept in Dublin, and there entertained his new subjects who were astonished at the splendour of his court.

A few weeks later a council of the Irish Church was held at Cashel, and attended by all the prelates of the island except the Archbishop of Armagh whose age prevented his coming. The bishops swore allegiance to Henry, and each of them is said to have made a formal declaration, written and sealed, recognizing the right of Henry and his heirs to the kingdom of Ireland. The canons adopted by the council, putting into force rules of marriage and morals long established in practice in the greater part of Christendom, reveal the reasons that probably led the Church to favour the English conquest and even to consider it an especially pious act of the king. A report of Henry's acceptance by the Irish kings and of the acts of the council was sent at once to the pope, who replied in three letters under date of September 20, 1172, addressed to Henry, to the Irish bishops, and to the Irish kings, approving fully of all that had been done.

It is not clear that Henry had in mind any definite plan for the political government of the conquest which he had made. The allegiance of those princes who were outside the territories occupied by the Norman adventurers could have been no more than nominal, and no attempt seems to have been made to rule them. Meath was granted as a fief to Hugh of Lacy on the service of fifty knights. He was also made governor of Dublin and justiciar of Ireland, but this t.i.tle is the only evidence that he was to be regarded as the representative of the king. Waterford and Wexford were made domain towns, as well as Dublin, and the earl of Pembroke, who gave up the royal rights which he might inherit from King Dermot, was enfeoffed with Leinster on the service of a hundred knights. Plainly the part of Ireland which was actually occupied was not treated in practice as a separate kingdom, whatever may have been the theory, but as a transplanted part of England under a very vague relations.h.i.+p. As a matter of fact, it was a purely feudal colony, under but the slightest control by a distant overlord, and doomed both from its situation in the midst of an alien, only partly civilized, and largely unconquered race, and from its own organization or lack of organization, to speedy troubles.

Henry returned to England at Easter time, and went on almost at once to meet the papal legates in Normandy. By the end of May his reconciliation with the Church was completed. First, Henry purged himself by solemn oath in the cathedral at Avranches of any share in the guilt of Thomas's a.s.sa.s.sination, and then the conditions of reconciliation were sworn to by himself and by the young king. These conditions are a very fair compromise, though Becket could never have agreed to them nor probably would Henry have done so but for the murder. The Church insisted on the one thing which was most essential to its real interests, the freedom of appeals to the pope. The point most important to the State, which had led originally to the quarrel--the question of the punishment of criminous clerks by the lay courts--was pa.s.sed over in silence, a way out of the difficulty being found by requiring of the king a promise which he could readily make, that he would wholly do away with any customs which had been introduced against the churches of the land in his time. This would not be to his mind renouncing the Const.i.tution of Clarendon. The temporalities of Canterbury and the exiled friends of the archbishop were to be restored as before the quarrel, and Henry promised not to withdraw his obedience from the catholic pope or his successors. The other conditions were of the nature of penance. The king promised to a.s.sume the cross at the next Christmas for a crusade of three years, and in the meantime to provide the Templars with a sum of money which in their judgment would be sufficient to maintain 200 knights in the Holy Land for a year.

Henry no doubt felt that he had lost much, but in truth he had every reason to congratulate himself on the lightness of his punishment for the crime to which his pa.s.sionate words had led. He did not get all which he had set out to recover from the Church, but his gains were large and substantial. The agreement is a starting-point of some importance in the legal history of England. It may be taken as the beginning, with more full consciousness of field and boundaries, of the development of two long lines of law and jurisdiction, running side by side for many generations, each encroaching somewhat on the occupied or natural ground of the other, but with no other conflict of so serious a character as this. The criminal jurisdiction of the state did not recover quite all that the Const.i.tutions of Clarendon had demanded. Clerks accused of the worst offences, of felonies, except high treason, were tried and punished by the Church courts, and from this arose the privilege known as benefit of clergy with all its abuses, but in all minor offences no distinction was made between clerk and layman. In civil cases also, suits which involved the right of property, even the right of presentation to livings, the state courts had their way. Two large fields of law, on the other hand,--marriage, and wills,--the Church, much to its profit, had entirely to itself.

The interval of peace for Henry was not a long one. Hardly was he freed from one desperate struggle when he found himself by degrees involved in another from which he was never to find relief. The policy which he was to follow towards his sons had been already foreshadowed in the coronation of the young Henry in 1170, but we do not find it easy to account for it or to reconcile it with other lines of policy which he was as clearly following. The conflict of ideas, the subtle contradictions of the age in which he lived, must have been reflected in the mind of the king whose dominions themselves were an empire of contrasts. Of all the middle ages there is perhaps no period that saw the ideal which chivalry had created of the wholly ”courteous” king and prince more nearly realized in practice than the last half of the twelfth century--the brave warrior and great ruler, of course, but always also the generous giver, who considered ”largesse” one of the chiefest of virtues and first of duties, and bestowed with lavish hand on all comers money and food, robes and jewels, horses and arms, and even castles and fiefs, recognizing the natural right of each one to the gift his rank would seem to claim. That such an ideal was actually realized in any large number of cases it would be absurd to maintain. It is not likely that any one ever sought to equal in detail the extravagant squandering of wealth in gifts which figures in the poetry of the age--the rich mantles which Arthur hung about the halls at a coronation festival to be taken by any one, or the thirty bushels of silver coins tumbled in a heap on the floor from which all might help themselves. But these poems record the ideal, and probably no other age saw more men, from kings down to simple knights, who tried to pattern themselves on this model and to look on wealth as an exhaustless store of things to be given away. But in the mind of kings who reigned in a world more real than the romances of chivalry, this duty had always to contend with natural ambition and with their responsibility for the welfare of the lands they ruled. The last half of the twelfth century saw these considerations grow rapidly stronger. The age that formed and applauded the young Henry also gave birth to Philip Augustus.

The marriage with Eleanor added to the strange mixture of blood in the Norman-Angevin house a new and warmer strain. It showed itself, careless, luxurious, self-indulgent, restless at any control, in her sons. But the marriage had also its effect on the husband and father. It gave a strong impetus to the conquest, which had already begun, of the colder and slower north by the ideals of duty and manners which had blossomed out into a veritable theory of life in the more tropical south. Henry could not keep himself from the spell of these influences, though they never controlled him as they did his children. It seems impossible to doubt, however, that he really believed it to be his duly to give his sons the position that belonged to them as princes, where they could form courts of their own, surrounded by their barons and knights, and display the virtues which belonged to their station. They had a rightful claim to this, which the ruling idea of conduct befitting a king would not allow him to deny. The story of Henry's waiting on his son at table after his coronation ”as seneschal” and the reply of the young king to those who spoke of the honour done him, that it was a proper thing for one who was only the son of a count to wait on the son of a king, is significant of deeper things than mere manners. But, though he might be under the spell of these ideals, to part.i.tion his kingdom in very truth, to divest himself of power, to make his sons actually independent in the provinces which he gave them, was impossible to him. The power of his empire he could not break up. The real control of the whole, and even the greater part of the revenues, must remain in his hands. The conflict of ideas in his mind, when he tried to be true to them all in practice, led inevitably to a like conflict of facts and of physical force.

The coronation of the young Henry as king of England, considered by itself, seems an unaccountable act. Stephen had tried to secure the coronation of his son Eustace in his own lifetime, but there was a clear reason of policy in his case. The Capetian kings of France had long followed the practice, but for them also it had plainly been for many generations of the utmost importance for the security of the house. There had never been any reason in Henry's reign why extraordinary steps should seem necessary to secure the succession, and there certainly was none fifteen years after its beginning. No explanation is given us in any contemporary account of the motives which led to this coronation, and it is not likely that they were motives of policy. It is probable that it was done in imitation of the French custom, under the influence of the ideas of chivalry. But even if the king looked on this as chiefly a family matter, affecting not much more than the arrangements of the court, he could not keep it within those limits. His view of the position to which his sons were ent.i.tled was the most decisive influence shaping the latter half of his reign, and through its effect on their characters almost as decisive for another generation.

Not long after his brother's coronation Richard received his mother's inheritance, Aquitaine and Poitou; Geoffrey was to be Count of Britanny by his marriage with the heiress; Normandy, Maine, and Anjou were a.s.signed to the young king; while the little John, youngest of the children of Henry and Eleanor, received from his father only the name ”Lackland” which expresses well enough Henry's idea that his position was not what it ought to be so long as he had no lords.h.i.+p of his own. Trouble of one kind had begun with the young king's coronation, for Louis of France had been deeply offended because his daughter Margaret had not been crowned queen of England at the same time. This omission was rectified in August, 1172, at Winchester, when Henry was again crowned, and Margaret with him. But more serious troubles than this were now beginning.

Already while Henry was in Ireland, the discontent of the young king had been noticed and reported to him. It had been speedily discovered that the coronation carried with it no power, though the young Henry was of an age to rule according to the ideas of the time,--of the age, indeed, at which his father had begun the actual government of Normandy. But he found himself, as a contemporary called him, ”our new king who has nothing to reign over.” It is probable, however, that the scantiness of the revenues supplied him to support his new dignity and to maintain his court had more to do with his discontent than the lack of political power. The courtly virtue of ”largesse,” which his father followed with some restraint where money was concerned, was with him a more controlling ideal of conduct. A brilliant court, joyous and gay, given up to minstrelsy and tournaments, seemed to him a necessity of life, and it could not be had without much money. Contemporary literature shows that the young king had all those genial gifts of manner, person, and spirit, which make their possessors universally popular. He was of more than average manly beauty, warm-hearted, cordial, and generous. He won the personal love of all men, even of his enemies, and his early death seemed to many, besides the father whom he had so sorely tried, to leave the world darker. Clearly he belongs in the list of those descendants of the Norman house, with the Roberts and the Stephens, who had the gifts which attract the admiration and affection of men, but at the same time the weakness of character which makes them fatal to themselves and to their friends. To a man of that type, even without the incentive of the spirit of the time, no amount of money could be enough. It is hardly possible to doubt that the emptiness of his political t.i.tle troubled the mind of the young Henry far less than the emptiness of his purse.[47]