Henry the Second 12

Henry the Second 12

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,"