Part 3

Anselm’s enduring courage and desire for truth are conspicuous all his life. He fought single-handed against both William and Henry, and no weight of numbers, no world-wise talk from other prelates could make him budge. If he withstood the Red King and his court at Rockingham, equally firm was he in withstanding the Norman barons who were inclined to break away from their sworn allegiance to Henry. No Englishman by birth or blood was Anselm, for he was born at Aosta, and spent the greater part of his life on the Continent, but he brought to England the finest gifts of life, and gave them freely in service to England’s liberty. He withstood an absolutism that threatened the total enslavement of the nation, and the witness he bore to liberty was taken up and renewed in the centuries that followed. “Anselm was truly a great man. So good that he was held a saint in his very lifetime, so meek that even his enemies honoured him, so wise that he was the foremost thinker of his day, and the forerunner of the greatest philosophers of ours.” (F. York Powell.)

Thomas of Canterbury

The Defender of the Poor

1162–1170

AUTHORITIES: Benedict of Peterborough; Garnier; William FitzStephen; John of Salisbury; Herbert of Bosham; Alan of Tewkesbury; Edward Grim; Roger of Pontigny; William of Canterbury; Robert of Cricklade--_Materials for the History of Thomas Becket_, 7 vols.; _Thomas Saga_ (Icelandic), translated by Magnusson; Giraldus Cambrensis; Gervase of Canterbury; William of Newburgh; Roger of Hoveden, III.; Ralph Diceto (Rolls Series); Froude, R. H.--_Remains_, Vol. 3; _Life of Becket_, by Canon J. C. Robertson; _Life of St. Thomas Becket_, by John Morris, S.J.; Stubbs--_Constitutional History_, Vol. I; Freeman--_Historical Essays_, 1st Series; W. H. Hutton--_English History by Contemporary Writers_--_St. Thomas of Canterbury_.

THOMAS OF CANTERBURY THE DEFENDER OF THE POOR

1162–1170

Fifty years after the death of Anselm the struggle with absolute monarchy had to be renewed in England, and again the Archbishop of Canterbury was the antagonist of the crown, standing alone for the most part, as Anselm stood, in his resistance to autocracy.

The contrast is great between the upbringing and character of Anselm and of Thomas; but both men gave valiant service in the cause of liberty in England, and both are placed in the calendar of the saints. For Thomas and Anselm alike the choice was between the favour of the King of England, the safe broad road of passive obedience, and the following of the call of conscience on the craggy way of royal displeasure; and to the everlasting honour of these two men, and of the religion they professed, they chose the steep and narrow path with no faltering step, and followed the gleam, heedless of this world’s glory, heedless of life itself.

Thomas was no monk as Anselm was, when the king nominated him for the archbishopric of Canterbury. His early life was not spent in the cloister but in the employment of a wealthy London sheriff, in the office of Archbishop Theobald, at Lambeth, and as Chancellor of England.

The son of gentle parents--his father Gilbert sometime sheriff--“London citizens of the middle class, not usurers nor engaged in business, but living well on their own income,” according to FitzStephen, Thomas was the first Englishman to be made archbishop. His gifts marked him out for high office. Theobald had sent him abroad to study law at the great school at Bologna, and at the age of 36 made him archdeacon of Canterbury, at that time “the dignity in the Church of England next after the bishops and abbots, and which brought him an hundred pounds of silver.” A year later, 1155, the young newly crowned king, Henry II., on the advice of old Archbishop Theobald, made Thomas the Chancellor. Theobald, anxious about the present, and apprehensive for the future--for the king was very young, and those about him were known to be hostile to the freedom of the Church and willing to treat England as a conquered land--sought to prevent the evils which seemed to be at hand by making Thomas a partner of the King’s counsels. He could say, after ten years’ experience, that Thomas was high-principled and prudent, wisely zealous for justice, and whole-hearted for the freedom of the Church, and he held forth to the king on the wisdom, the courage and the faithfulness of his archdeacon, “and the admirable sweetness of his manners.”

The appointment was made, nor could anyone say that it was ill done, or that Theobald in his recommendation, or Henry II. in his acceptance, of Thomas for the chancellorship could have done better for England.

The chancellor was magnificent, and his dignity was accounted second from the king. Nobles sent their children to Thomas to be trained in his service. The king commended to him his son, the heir to the throne. Barons and knights did homage to him. On his embassy to the French king never had been seen such a retinue of followers, and such a lavish display of the wealth and grandeur of England. The proud and mighty he treated with harshness and violence. Yet it was said, by those who knew him intimately, that he was lowly in his own eyes, and gentle and meek to those who were humble in heart. And in the courts of kings, where chastity is never commonly extolled, or purity of life the fashion, Thomas, the chancellor, was known for his cleanness of living and his unblemished honour. Many enemies he had, many who hated him for his power; but never was breath of scandal uttered against the chancellor’s private life, or suggestion made that the carnal lusts and appetites which, unbridled, play havoc with men great and small, could claim Thomas for their subject.

He might be reproached by a monk for that he, being an archdeacon, lived so secular a life, wearing the dress of a courtier, and charging on the field with knights in France, but it could not be alleged that church or realm suffered neglect from the chancellor. “By divine inspiration and the counsel of Thomas, the lord king did not long retain vacant bishoprics and abbacies, so that the patrimony of the Crucified might be brought into the treasury, as was afterwards done, but bestowed them with little delay on honourable persons, and according to God’s law.” (W. FitzStephen.)

The close friendship and warm affection of the king for his chancellor were known to all. When the day’s business was done “they would play together like boys of the same age.” They sat together in church and hall and rode out together. “Never in Christian times were there two men more of one mind or better friends.” It was natural on the death of Archbishop Theobald, in 1161, that people should point to Thomas as his successor, though the chancellor shrank, as Anselm had done, from the post.

“I know three poor priests in England any one of whom I would rather see advanced to the archbishopric than myself,” he declared earnestly, when his friend the prior of Leicester (who also remonstrated with him for his unclerical dress) told him the rumours of the court. “For as for me, if I was appointed, I know the king so through and through that I should be forced either to lose his favour or, which God forbid, to lay aside the service of God.”

Thomas uttered the same warning to Henry when the king proposed the primacy to him. “I know certainly,” he said, “that if God should so dispose that this happen, you would soon turn away your love, and the favour which is now between us would be changed into bitterest hate. I know that you would demand many things in Church matters, for already you have demanded them, which I could never bear quietly, and the envious would take occasion to provoke an endless strife between us.”

But Henry’s mind was made up. Residing largely in France, he would have Thomas, Archbishop of Canterbury and Chancellor, to rule England as his vice-regent. Six years had Thomas been the king’s friend and chancellor, but the king did not know at all the real character of his man, or rather it was inconceivable to the royal mind that Thomas, whom the king had raised from a mere nobody, from Archdeacon of Canterbury, an important ecclesiastic at best, to the chief man in the realm, should ever dare set himself at variance with the king’s will. Henry, with his untiring energy, was earnest enough for good government in Church and State under an absolute monarchy, and he counted on greater co-operation with Thomas in carrying out his plans, were the latter archbishop. Hitherto, more than once the chancellor had succeeded in moderating the king’s outbursts of wrath against some hapless offender, but he had never shown himself a partisan of the clergy at the expense of the commonwealth,[11] and his lack of pride in his order had even incurred rebuke, so little of the ecclesiastic did this statesman appear.

Thomas understood the king better than the king understood his chancellor. But his protests were in vain. He was as surely marked for the archbishopric as Anselm had been. Bishops of the province approved and the monks of Canterbury duly voted for the king’s chancellor in common consent, Gilbert Foliot, the Bishop of Hereford, and afterwards of London, and the archbishop’s enemy to the end, alone opposing the election.

“Then the archbishop-elect was by the king’s authority declared free of all debts to the crown and given free to the Church of England, and in that freedom he was received by the Church with the customary hymns and words of praise.” (Herbert of Bosham.)

On June 2nd, 1162, the Saturday after Whit Sunday, Thomas was ordained priest and on the following day consecrated bishop. (The new archbishop instituted the festival of Trinity Sunday to commemorate his consecration, and some 200 years later the festival was made of general observance in the Catholic Church.) The king realised the mistake he had made within a year of the consecration. The brilliant chancellor was no sooner archbishop than he turned from all the gaieties of the world, and while no less a statesman, adopted the life of his monks--though never himself a monk--at Canterbury. Henceforth Archbishop Thomas was the unflinching champion of the poor and them that had no helper, the resolute defender of the liberties of the Church against all who would make religion subject to the autocracy of the king of England.

Thomas was forty-four years old, in the full strength of his manhood, when he was made archbishop, and for eight years he did battle with the crown, only laying down his charge at the call of martyrdom.

The first disappointment to Henry was the resignation of the chancellor’s seal.[12] It was clear to Thomas that he could no longer serve the crown and do the work of a Christian bishop at the same time, and he had accepted with full sense of responsibility the see of Canterbury. There was no room for the egotism that loves power, the vaulting ambition that o’erleaps itself, or even the self-deception that persuades a man holding to high position at sacrifice of principle that his motive is disinterested, in St. Thomas of Canterbury. More than once England was to see in later years men who strove vainly to serve with equal respect the Christian religion and the royal will--the service always ended in the triumph of the latter. Thomas was far too clearly-sighted to imagine such joint service possible, and for him, elected and consecrated to the primacy of the English Church, there was no longer any choice. As chancellor, keeping his conscience clear, he had done the best he could for law and order as the king’s right hand man. As Archbishop of Canterbury his duty, first and foremost, was to maintain the Christian religion and defend the cause of the poor and needy.

But to Henry the resignation of the chancellorship was an act of desertion, a declared challenge to the royal supremacy. Henry II. was no more the man than his grandfather Henry I. had been to brook anything that threatened resistance to the king’s rule.

Courtiers who hated Thomas were always at hand to poison the ears of the king by defaming the archbishop, and this, says William FitzStephen, was the first cause of the trouble. Another cause was the hatred of the king for the clergy of England, hatred provoked by the notoriously disreputable lives of more than one clerk in holy orders. The battle between Henry and Thomas began on this matter of criminous clerks.

William the Conqueror and Lanfranc recognizing that the Church, strong and well ordered, made for national well-being, had set up ecclesiastical courts wherein all matters affecting church law and discipline were to be dealt with by the clergy, to the end that the clergy should not be mixed up in lawsuits and should be excluded from the lay courts. Henry II. was not satisfied that criminous clerks were adequately dealt with in these ecclesiastical courts, where no penalty involving bloodshed might be inflicted, and where the savage punishments of mutilation had no place. Thomas was as anxious as the king for the Church to be purged of abuses, but he was resolved not to hand over offenders to the secular arm. The archbishop was an ardent reformer. “He plucked up, pulled down, scattered and rooted out whatever he found amiss in the vineyard of the Lord,” wrote a contemporary; but he would shelter his flock as far as he could by the canon law from the hideous cruelties of the King’s Courts.[13] It was not for the protection of the clergy alone the archbishop was fighting in the councils summoned by the king at Westminster in 1163, and at Clarendon in 1164.

“Ecclesiastical privileges were not so exclusively priestly privileges as we sometimes fancy. They sheltered not only ordained ministers, but all ecclesiastical officers of every kind; the Church Courts also claimed jurisdiction in the causes of widows and orphans. In short, the privileges for which Thomas contended transferred a large part of the people, and that the most helpless part, from the bloody grasp of the King’s Courts to the milder jurisdiction of the bishop.” (Freeman, _Historical Essay_, First Series.)

Before the climax of the dispute between Henry and Thomas was reached at Clarendon, the archbishop had resisted the king in a matter of arbitrary taxation--“the earliest recorded instance of resistance to the royal will in a matter of taxation”[14]--and had fallen still further in the king’s disfavour.

Henry was at Woodstock, on July 1st, 1163, with the archbishop and the great men of the land, and among other matters a question was raised concerning the payment of a two shillings land tax on every hide of land. This was an old tax dating from Saxon times, which William the Conqueror had increased. It was paid to the sheriffs, who in return undertook the defence of the county, and may be compared with the county rates of our own day. The king declared this tax should in future be collected for the crown, and added to the royal revenue; and no one dared to question this decision until Archbishop Thomas arose and told the king to his face that the tax was not to be exacted as revenue, but was a voluntary offering to be paid to the sheriffs only “so long as they shall serve us fitly and maintain and defend our dependants.” It was not a tax that could be enforced by law.

Henry, bursting with anger, swore, “By God’s Eyes” it should be given as revenue, and enscrolled as a king’s tax.

The archbishop replied with quiet determination, “aware lest by his sufferance a custom should come in to the hurt of his successors,” that, “by the reverence of those Eyes,” by which the king had sworn, not one penny should be paid from his lands, or from the rights of the Church. The king was silenced, no answer was forthcoming to the objector, and the tax was paid as before to the sheriffs. But “the indignation of the king was not set at rest,” and in October came the Council of Westminster.

The king at once demanded that criminous clerks should not only be punished in the Church Courts by the sentence of deprivation, but should further be handed over to the King’s Courts for greater penalties, alleging that those who were not restrained from crime by the remembrance of their holy orders would care little for the loss of such orders.

The archbishop replied quietly that this proposed new discipline was contrary to the religious liberty of the land, and that he would never agree to it. The Church was the one sanctuary against the barbarities of the law, and Thomas to the end would maintain the security it offered. More important it seemed to him that clerical offenders should escape the king’s justice, than that all petty felons who could claim the protection of the Church should be given over to mutilation by the king’s officers. The bishops silently supported the primate in this matter, though they told him plainly, “Better the liberties of the Church perish than that we perish ourselves. Much must be yielded to the malice of the times.”

Thomas answered this pitiful plea by admitting the times were bad. “But,” he added, “are we to heap sin upon sin? It is when the Church is in trouble, and not merely when the times are peaceful, that a bishop must cleave to the right. No greater merit was there to the bishops of old who gave their blood for the Church than there is now to those who die in defence of her liberties.”

But the bishops were wavering, fearful of defying the king’s will. And when Henry, defeated for the moment by the archbishop’s stand, angrily called upon them to take an oath to observe in future “the royal customs” of the realm as settled by his grandfather, Henry I., they all agreed to do so, adding the clause “saving the rights of their order.” The king objected, calling for the promise to be made “absolutely and without qualifications,” until Thomas reminded him that the fealty the bishops swore to give the crown “in life and limb and earthly honour” was sworn “_salvo ordine suo_,” and that the “earthly honour” promise, which included all the royal “customs” of Henry I., was not to be given by bishops in any other way.

It was now late at night, and the king broke up the council in anger, leaving the bishops to retire as they would.

Henry was resolved to abolish the Church Courts and destroy the protection they afforded. He would have all brought under the severity of his law, in spite of the archbishop. He knew the bishops were wavering and were fearful of the royal displeasure. Thomas Becket, and Thomas Becket alone, was the obstruction to the king’s schemes, and firm as Becket might stand, the king would break down his opposition.

The very day after Westminster the king demanded the resignation of all the fortresses and honours Thomas had held under the crown since he had been made chancellor, and these were surrendered at once.

Then Henry tried a personal appeal, and once more the two met together in a field near Northampton. Henry began by reminding Thomas of all he had done for him.

“Have I not raised you from a mean and lowly state to height of honour and dignity? How is it after so many benefits and so many proofs of my affection, which all have seen, you have forgotten these things, and are now not only ungrateful, but my opponent in everything?”

The archbishop answered: “Far be it from me, my lord. I am not forgetful of the favours which God has conferred upon me at your hands. Far be it from me to be so ungrateful as to resist your will in anything so long as it is in accord with God’s will.” St. Thomas, enlarging on the necessity of obedience to God rather than to men, should the will of man clash with the will of God, the king at last interrupted him impatiently with the intimation that he did not want a sermon just then.

“Are you not my man, the son of one of my servants?”

“In truth,” the archbishop answered, “I am not sprung from a race of kings. Neither was blessed Peter, the prince of the apostles, to whom was committed the leadership of the Church.”

“And in truth Peter died for his Lord,” said the king.

“I too will die for my Lord when the time comes,” replied the archbishop.

“You trust too much to the ladder you have mounted by,” said the king.

But the archbishop answered: “I trust in God, for cursed is the man that putteth his trust in man.” Then the archbishop went on to remind Henry of the proofs he had given of his fidelity in the years when he was chancellor, and warned him that he would have done well to have taken counsel with his archbishop concerning spiritual things than with those who had kindled the flame of envy and vengeance against one who had done them no wrong.

The only reply the king gave was to urge that the Archbishop should drop the words “saving their order” in promising to obey the royal customs.

The archbishop refused to yield, and so they parted.[15]

At the close of the year the archbishop’s difficulties had been increased by appeals on all sides to yield to the king. The bishops were for peace at any price, and the Pope, Alexander III., threatened by an anti-pope, and anxious for the good will of the king of England, sent an abbot to Thomas urging him to give way, on the ground that Henry only wanted a formal assent to the “customs” for the sake of his dignity, and had no intention of doing anything harmful to the Church.

Under these circumstances Thomas decided to yield. He went to the king at Woodstock and declared that the obnoxious phrase, “saving our order,” should be omitted from the promise to observe the “customs.”

Without delay the king ordered his justiciar, Richard of Lucy, and his clerk, Jocelin of Balliol, to draw up a list of the old “customs” and liberties of his grandfather Henry I., and on the 29th of January, 1164, a great council was held at Clarendon to ratify the agreement between the bishops and the king.

Sixteen constitutions or articles were drawn up, and Thomas, over-persuaded by the prayers of the bishops and the desire for peace, gave his promise unconditionally to observe them. But no sooner had he done so, and the articles were placed before him in black and white, than he repented.

The very first article declared that all disputes about Church patronage were to be tried in the King’s Court, and was intolerable, because while the State held it was a question of the rights of property, the Church view was that the main point was the care of souls, a spiritual matter for churchmen, not lawyers, to decide.

The other articles which Thomas objected to, and which the pope subsequently refused to ratify, decreed: (1) That clerks were to be tried in the King’s Courts for offences of common law. (2) That neither archbishops, bishops, nor beneficed clerks were to leave the kingdom without the king’s license. (This, said St. Thomas, would stop all pilgrimages and attendance at councils at Rome, and turn England into a vast prison. “It was right enough to apply for the king’s leave before the departure, but to bind one’s-self by an oath not to go without it was against religion and was evil.”) (3) That no member of the king’s household was to be excommunicated without the king’s permission. (4) That no appeals should be taken beyond the archbishop’s court, except to be brought before the king. (This was a definite attempt to prohibit appeals to Rome, and Thomas pointed out that the archbishop on receiving the pallium swore expressly not to hinder such appeals. The acceptance of this article left the king absolute master.)

The last article, declaring that serfs or sons of villeins were not to be ordained without the consent of the lord on whose land they were born, was not opposed by the pope, and the only contemporary objection seems to have been raised by Garnier, a French monk and a biographer of Thomas Becket.[16]