Henry the Second 13

Henry the Second 13

No question seems to have been raised as to some of the statutes which

were certainly of recent growth, though they touched Church interests.

One of these repeated unreservedly the assertion that bishops held a

feudal position in all points the same as that of barons or direct

vassals of the king, being bound by all their obligations, and entitled

to sit with them in judgment in the Curia Regis till it came to a

question of blood. Others dealt with disorders which had grown up from

the mutual jealousy of Church and lay courts, and the difficulties thus

thrown in the way of administering laws which were not disputed; rules

were made for the securities to be taken from excommunicated persons;

for the giving up to the king of forfeited goods of felons deposited in

churches or churchyards; and forbidding the ordination of villeins

without their lord's consent,--a provision which possibly was intended

to prevent the withdrawal of an unlimited number of people from secular

jurisdiction. Two other clauses touched upon the new legal remedies, the

use of the jury in the accusation of criminals, and in the decision of

questions of property; it was decreed that laymen should not be accused

in Church courts save by lawful witness, or by the twelve legal

men of the hundred--in other words, by the newly-developed jury of

"presentation"; while the jury of "recognition" was ordered to be used

in disputed titles to ecclesiastical estates.

 

The real strife was about the seven remaining statutes, which declared

that an accused clerk must first appear before the king's court, and that

the justiciar should then send a royal officer with him to watch the trial

at the ecclesiastical court, and if he were found guilty the Church should

no longer protect him; that the chief clergy might not leave the realm

without the king's permission; that appeals might not be carried to the

Papal Court without the king's consent; that no tenant-in-chief of the

king might be excommunicated without the leave of the king; that the

revenues of vacant sees should fall to the king, until a new appointment

had been made in his court; that questions of advowsons or presentations

to livings questions which at that time represented comparatively a vast

amount of property--should be tried in the king's court; and that the

king's judges should decide in matters of debt, even where the case

included a question of perjury or broken faith, which was claimed as a

matter for ecclesiastical jurisdiction. Such laws as these were no doubt

in Henry's mind simply part of his scheme for establishing a general order

and one undivided authority in the realm. But they opened very much wider

grounds of dispute between Church and State than the mere question of how

criminal clerks were to be dealt with. They boldly attacked the whole of

the pretensions of the Church; they threatened to rob it of a mass of

financial business, to wrest from its control an enormous amount of

property, to deprive it of jurisdiction in the great majority of criminal

suits, to limit its power of irresponsible self-government, and to prevent

its absorption into the vast organization of the Church of Western

Christendom. They defined the relations of the English Church to the see

of Rome. They established its position as a national Church, and declared

that its clergy should be brought under the rule of national law.

 

The eight months which followed the Council of Clarendon were spent in a

vain attempt to solve an insoluble problem. Messengers from king and

archbishop hastened again and again to the Pope, with no result. Henry

set his face like a flint. "_Verba sunt_," he said to a mediating

bishop; "you may talk to me all the days that we both shall live, but

there shall be no peace till the archbishop wins the Pope's consent to

the customs." Fresh cases arose of clerks accused of theft and murder,

but as the personal quarrel between Henry and Thomas increased in

bitterness, questions of reform fell into the background. "I will humble

thee," the king declared, "and will restore thee to the place from

whence I took thee." Thomas, on his part, knew how to awaken all Henry's

secret fears. All Europe was concerned in the dispute of king and

archbishop. The Pope at Sens, the French king, the "eldest son of the

Church," the princes of the House of Blois, as steadfast in their

orthodoxy as in their hatred of the Angevin, the Emperor, ready to use

any quarrel for his own purposes, were all eagerly watching every turn

of the strife. In August Henry was startled by the news that Thomas

himself had fled to seek the protection of the Pope at Sens. He was,

however, recognized by sailors, and carried back to English shores.

Henry immediately dealt his counter-blow. The archbishop was summoned in

September to London to answer in a case which John, the marshal, an

officer of the Exchequer, had withdrawn from the Archbishop's to the

King's Court. Thomas pleaded illness, and protested that the marshal had

been guilty of perjury. The king retorted by calling a council for the

trial of the archbishop on a charge of contempt of the royal summons.

With the insolence of power and the bitter anger of outraged confidence,

Henry heaped humiliations on his enemy. The Primate had a right, by

ancient custom, to be summoned first among the great lords called to the

king's council; he was now merely served with an ordinary notice from

the sheriff of Kent to attend his trial. When he arrived at Northampton

there was no lodging left free for himself and his attendants. The king

had gone out hunting amid the marshes and streams, and only the next

morning met the Primate roughly after mass, and refused him the kiss of

peace.

 

In the council which opened in Northampton Castle on Wednesday, 7th

October, we see the Curia Regis in the developed form which it had taken

under Henry and his justiciar, De Lucy, carrying out an exact legal

system, and observing the forms of a very elaborate procedure. The king

and his inner council of the great lords, the prelates, and the officers

of the household, withdrew to an upper chamber of the castle; the whole

company of sheriffs and lesser barons waited in the great hall below

till they were specially summoned to the king's presence, crowding round

the fire that burned in the centre of the hall under the opening in the

roof through which the smoke escaped, or lounging in the straw and

rushes that covered the floor. For seven days the trial dragged on, as

lawyers and bishops and barons anxiously groped their way through

baffling legal problems which had grown out of legislation new and old.

Even the king himself, fiery, imperious, dictatorial, clung with a kind

of superstition to the forms of legal process. The archbishop asked

leave to appeal to the Pope. "You shall first answer in my court for the

injury done to John the marshal," said Henry. The next day, Thursday,

this matter was decided. Bishops and barons alike, lacking somewhat of

the king's daring, shrank at first from the responsibility of pronouncing

judgment. "We are laymen," said the barons; "you are his fellow-priests

and fellow-bishops, and it is for you to declare sentence." "Nay,"

answered the bishops, "this is not an ecclesiastical but a secular

judgment, and we sit here not as bishops but as barons; if you heed our

orders you should also take heed of his." The dispute was a critical one,

leading as it did directly to questions about the jurisdiction of the

Curia Regis over ecclesiastical persons, and the obligation asserted in

the Constitutions of Clarendon, that bishops should sit with barons in the

King's Court till it came to a question of blood. The king was seized with

one of his fierce fits of anger, and the discussion "immediately ended."

The unwilling Bishop of Winchester was sent to pronounce sentence of fine

for neglect of the king's summons. Matters then moved quickly. A demand

was made for £300 which Thomas had received from Eye and Berkhampstead

when he was chancellor; and in spite of his defence that it had been spent

in building the palace in London and repairing the castles, judgment went

against him. The next day a further demand was made for money spent in the

war of Toulouse, and this, too, Thomas agreed to pay, though it was now

hard to find sureties. Then the king dealt his last blow. Thomas was

required to account for the sums he had received as chancellor from vacant

sees and abbeys. "By God's eyes," the king swore, when the Primate and the

bishops threw themselves in despair at his feet, he would have the

accounts in full. He would only grant a day's delay for Thomas to take

counsel with his friends.

 

By this time there was no doubt of the king's purpose to force upon

Thomas the resignation of his archbishopric. The courtiers and lay

barons no longer thought it expedient to visit him, and the prelates

gave counsel with divided hearts. "Remembering whence the king took

you," said Foliot, "and what he has bestowed on you, and the ruin which

you prepare for the Church and for us all, not only the archbishopric

but ten times as much, if it were possible, you should yield to him. It

may be that seeing in you this humility he may yet restore all." To this

argument Thomas had curt answer. "Enough--it is well enough known how

you, being consulted, would answer!" "You know the king better than we,"

urged Hilary of Chichester; "in the chancery, in peace and war, you

served him faithfully, but not without envy. Those who then envied now

excite the king against you. Who dare answer for you? The king has said

that you can no longer both be at one time in England--he as king, you

as archbishop." Henry of Winchester took his stand on the side of

Thomas. "If the authority of the king was to prevail," he argued, "what

remains but that nothing shall henceforth be done according to law, but

all things shall be disturbed for his pleasure--and the priesthood shall

be as the people," he concluded, with a stirring of the churchman's

temper. The Bishop of Exeter added another plea to induce Thomas to

stand firm: "Surely it is better to put one head in peril than to set

the whole Church in danger." Not so, thought the Bishop of Lincoln, "a

simple man and of little discretion;" "for it is plain," he said, "that

this man must yield up either the archbishopric or his life; but what

should be the fruit of his archbishopric to him if his life should

cease, I see not." The Bishop of Worcester, son of the famous Robert of

Gloucester, and Henry's own cousin and playmate in old days took an

eminently prudent course. "I will give no counsel," he said, "for if I

say our charge of souls is to be given up at the king's threats, I

should speak against my conscience, and to my own condemnation; and if I

should advise to resist the king, there are those here who will bring

him word of it, and I shall be cast out of the synagogue, and my lot

shall be with outlaws and public enemies." At last, by the advice of the

politic Henry of Winchester, Thomas offered to pay the king 2000 marks,

but this compromise was refused. He urged that he had been freed at

his consecration from all secular obligations, but the plea was

rejected on the ground that it was done without the king's orders. An

adjournment over Sunday was again granted; but on Monday Thomas was ill,

and unable to attend the Council. Three days had now passed in fruitless

negotiations, and the rising wrath of the king made itself felt. Rumours

of danger grew on all sides, and the archbishop prostrated himself

before the altar in an agony of prayer, "trembling in his whole body,"

as he afterwards confessed, less from fear of death than from the more

terrible fear of the savage blinding and cruel punishments of those days.

 

But he showed no signs of yielding when on Tuesday morning, the last day

of the Council, the bishops again gathered round him beseeching him

to yield to the king's will. With a fierce outbreak of passionate

reproaches he solemnly forbade them to take part in any further

proceedings against him, and gave formal notice of an appeal to Rome.

Then kneeling before the altar of St. Stephen he celebrated mass, using

the service for St. Stephen's Day with its psalm, "Princes sat and spake