HISTORY of the CHRISTIAN CHURCH*

 

 

CHAPTER IV.

 

THE PAPACY FROM THE CONCORDAT OF WORMS TO INNOCENT III. a.d. 1122–1198.

 

On the historical sources for this period down to the middle of the thirteenth century, see Wattenbach: Deutschlands Geschichtsquellen im Mittelalter, II. 217–442.

 

 § 25. Innocent II., 1130–1143, and Eugene III., 1145–1153.

 

Innocent II.: Epistolae et Privilegia, in Migne, Patrol., Tom. 179, fol. 54636; his biographies in Muratori (Rer. Ital., Tom. II. and III.) and Watterich (Pontif. Rom. Vitae, II. 174 sq.).—Anacletus (antipapa): Epistolae et Privil., in Migne, Tom. 179, fol. 687–732.—Eugenius III.: Epistolae, etc., in Migne, 180, 1013–1614.—The Works of St. Bernard, edited by Mabillon, and reprinted in Migne’s Patrol. (Tom. 182–185, Paris, 1855); Ordericus Vitalis, Eccl. Hist., XII. 11, etc.; Bohn’s Trans. IV.

Jaffé: Geschichte des deutschen Reichs unter Lothar von Sachsen. Berlin, 1843.—Mirbt, art. Innocent II. in Herzog, IX. 108 sqq.—E. Mühlbacher: Die streitige Papstwahl d. J. 1130. Innsbruck, 1876.—W. Bernhardi: Konrad III. Leipzig, 1883, 2 vols.—Hefele-Knöpfler, Bd. V. 385–532.—Giesebrecht, Bd. IV. 54 sqq.—Gregorovius, IV. 403 sqq. Hauck, IV. 130 sqq.—The Biographies of St. Bernard.

 

Calixtus II. was followed by Honorius II., whose rule of six years, 1124–1130, was an uneventful one. After his death a dangerous schism broke out between Innocent II., 1130–1143, and Anacletus II., 1130–1138, who represented two powerful Roman families, the Frangipani, or Breadmakers,117 and the Pierleoni.

Innocent, formerly cardinal-legate of Urban II. and mediator of the Concordat of Worms, enjoyed the reputation of superior learning and piety, which even his opponents could not dispute. He had also the advantage of a prior election, but of doubtful legal validity, since it was effected only by a minority of cardinals, who met in great hurry in an unknown place to anticipate the rival candidate.118

Anacletus was a son of Pierleone, Petrus Leonis, and a grandson of Leo, a baptized Jewish banker, who had acquired great financial, social, and political influence under the Hildebrandian popes. A Jewish community with a few hundred members were tolerated in Trastevere and around the island of the Tiber as a monumental proof of the truth of Christianity, and furnished some of the best physicians and richest bankers, who helped the nobility and the popes in their financial troubles. Anacletus betrayed his Semitic origin in his physiognomy, and was inferior to Innocent in moral character; but he secured an election by a majority of cardinals and the support of the principal noble families and the Roman community. With the help of the Normans, he took possession of Rome, banished his opponent, deposed the hostile cardinals, and filled the college with his friends.

Innocent was obliged to flee to France, and received there the powerful support of Peter of Cluny and Bernard of Clairvaux, the greatest monks and oracles of their age. He was acknowledged as the legitimate pope by all the monastic orders and by the kings of France and England.

Lothaire II. (III.) of Saxony, 1125–1137, to whom both parties appealed, decided for Innocent, led him and St. Bernard to Rome by armed force, and received in turn from the pope the imperial crown, June 4, 1133.

But after Lothaire’s departure, Anacletus regained possession of Rome, with the help of the Norman duke, Roger, and the party of the rival emperor, Conrad III. He made Roger II. king of Sicily, and thus helped to found a kingdom which lasted seven hundred and thirty years, till it was absorbed in the kingdom of Italy, 1860. Innocent retired to Pisa (1135). Lothaire made a second expedition to Italy and defeated Roger II. Bernard again appeared at Rome and succeeded in strengthening Innocent’s position. At this juncture Anacletus died, 1138. The healing of the schism was solemnly announced at the Second Lateran Council, 1139. War soon after broke out between Innocent and Roger, and Innocent was taken prisoner. On his release he confirmed Roger as king of Sicily. Lothaire had returned to Germany to die, 1137. Innocent had granted to him the territories of Matilda for an annual payment. On this transaction later popes based the claim that the emperor was a papal vassal.

After the short pontificates of Coelestin II., 1143–1144, and Lucius II., 1144–1145, Eugene III., a pupil and friend of St. Bernard, was elected, Feb. 15, 1145, and ruled till July 8, 1153. He wore the rough shirt of the monks of Citeaux under the purple. He had to flee from Rome, owing to the disturbances of Arnold of Brescia, and spent most of his time in exile. During his pontificate, Edessa was lost and the second crusade undertaken. Eugene has his chief interest from his connection with St. Bernard, his wise and loyal counsellor, who addressed to him his famous treatise on the papacy, the de consideratione.119

 

 § 26. Arnold of Brescia.

 

Otto (Bishop of Freising, or Freisingen, d. 1158): De Gestis Friderici I. (lib. II. 20).—Gunther (Ligurinus): De Gestis Friderici I., an epos written 1187 (lib. III. vers. 262 sqq.).—Gerhoh (provost of Reichersberg, d. 1169): De investigatione Antichristi, edited by Scheibelberger. Lincii, 1875.—John of Salisbury: Historia Pontificalis (written c. 1162, recently discovered), in Mon. Germ. Script., XX. c. 31, p. 537.—St. Bernard: Epist., Migne, 195, 196, 198.—Walter Map (archdeacon of Oxford, 1196): De Nugis Curialium, ed. Wright, pp. 41 and 43. The sources are all hostile to Arnold and the Arnoldists.

J. D. Köler: De Arnoldo Brixiensi dissert. Göttingen, 1742.—Guadagnini: Apologia di Arnaldo da Brescia. Pavia, 1790, 2 vols.—K. Beck: A. v. Brescia. Basel, 1824.—H. Francke: Arnold von Brescia und seine Zeit. Zürich, 1825 (eulogistic).—Bent: Essay sur a.d. Brescia. Genève, 1856.—Federico Odorici: Arnaldo da Brescia. 1861. Georges Guibal: Arnauld de Brescia et les Hohenstaufen ou la question du pouvoir temporel de la papauté du moyen age. Paris, 1868.—*Giesebrecht: Arnold von Brescia. München, 1873 (in the Reports of the Bavarian Academy of Sciences). Comp. his Gesch. der d. Kaiserzeit, IV. 314 sqq.—A. Di Giovanni De Castro: Arnaldo da Brescia e la revoluzione romana dell XII. secolo. Livorno, 1875.—A. Hausrath: Arnold von Brescia. Leipzig, 1891.—Deutsch, A. von Brescia, in Herzog, II. 117–122;—Gregorovius, IV. 479 sqq. The Lives of St. Bernard, especially Vacandard and Neander-Deutsch.

 

During the pontificates of Innocent II., Eugene III., and Adrian IV. occurred the interesting episode of Arnold of Brescia, an unsuccessful ecclesiastical and political agitator, who protested against the secularization of the Church, and tried to restore it to apostolic poverty and apostolic purity. These two ideas were closely connected in his mind. He proclaimed the principle that the Church and the clergy, as well as the monks, should be without any temporal possessions, like Christ and the Apostles, and live from the tithes and the voluntary offerings of the people. Their calling is purely spiritual. All the things of this earth belong to the laity and the civil government.

He practised what he taught, and begged his daily bread from house to house. He was a monk of severe ascetic piety, enthusiastic temper, popular eloquence, well versed in the Scriptures, restless, radical, and fearless.120  He agreed with the Catholic orthodoxy, except on the doctrines of the eucharist and infant baptism; but his views on these sacraments are not known.121

With this ecclesiastical scheme he combined a political one. He identified himself with the movement of the Romans to emancipate themselves from the papal authority, and to restore the ancient republic. By giving all earthly power to the laity, he secured the favor of the laity, but lost the influence of the clergy. It was the political complication which caused his ruin.

Arnold was a native of Brescia in Lombardy, and an ordained reader in the Church. He was a pupil of Abaelard, and called armor-bearer to this Goliath.122  He sympathized with his spirit of independence and hostility to Church authority, and may have been influenced also (as Neander assumes) by the ethical principles of that magnetic teacher. He certainly, at a later period, sided with him against St. Bernard, who became his bitter enemy. But with the exception of the common opposition to the hierarchy, they differed very widely. Abaelard was a philosopher, Arnold, a politician; Abaelard, a speculative thinker, Arnold, a practical preacher; Abaelard, a rationalist, Arnold, an enthusiast. The former undermined the traditional orthodoxy, the latter attacked the morals of the clergy and the temporal power of the Church. Arnold was far below Abaelard in intellectual endowment, but far more dangerous in the practical drift of his teaching, which tended to pauperize the Church and to revolutionize society. Baronius calls him "the father of political heresies."

In his ascetic zeal for the moral reform of the clergy, Arnold was in sympathy with the Hildebrandian party, but in his views of the temporal power of the pope, he went to the opposite extreme. Hildebrand aimed at the theocratic supremacy of the Church over the State; Arnold sought the welfare of the Church in her complete separation from the State and of the clerical office from secular entanglements. Pascal II., we may say, had prepared the way for this theory when he was willing to sacrifice the investiture to the emperor. The Hildebrandian reform had nearly passed away, and the old corruptions reappeared. The temporal power of the Church promoted the worldliness of the clergy. The author of the Historia Pontificalis says that Arnold’s doctrine agreed with the Gospel, but stood in crying contrast with the actual condition of things. St. Bernard, his opponent, was as much opposed as he to the splendor and luxury of bishops, the secular cares of the popes, and expressed a wish that he might see the day when "the Church, as in olden times, should cast her net for souls, and not for money."123  All the monastic orders protested against the worldliness of the Church, and realized the principle of apostolic poverty within the wall of convents. But Arnold extended it to the secular clergy as well, and even went so far as to make poverty a condition of salvation for priests and monks.124

Arnold’s sermons gained great popular applause in Lombardy, and caused bitter disputes between the people and the bishop of Brescia. He was charged before the Lateran Synod of 1139 with inciting the laity against the clergy, was deposed as a schismatic (not as a heretic), commanded to be silent, and was expelled from Italy.

He went again to France and was entangled in the controversy of Abaelard with Bernard. Pope Innocent condemned both Abaelard and Arnold to silence and seclusion in a convent, 1140. Abaelard, weary of strife and life, submitted and retired to the convent of Cluny, where two years later he died in peace.125  But Arnold began in Paris a course of public lectures against the worldliness and immorality of the clergy. He exposed especially the avarice of the bishops. He also charged St. Bernard with unholy ambition and envy against scholars. Bernard called him a man whose speech was honey, whose doctrine was poison. At his request the king expelled Arnold from France.

Arnold fled to Zürich and was kindly received and protected by the papal legate, Cardinal Guido, his former fellow-student in Paris.126  But Bernard pursued him even there and denounced him to the bishop of Constance.

After a few years of unknown exile, Arnold appeared in Rome as the leader of a political movement. Innocent II. had allowed him to return to Italy; Eugene III. had pardoned him on condition of his doing penance in the holy places of Rome. But after the flight of this pope to France, Arnold preached again the doctrine of apostolic poverty, called the popes and cardinals Pharisees and scribes, and their church a house of merchandise and den of robbers. He was protected by the Roman senate, and idolized by the people. The Romans had renounced the papal authority, expelled the pope, substituted a purely secular government after the ancient model, and invited Conrad III. to assume the rôle of Constantine I. or Justinian. They lost themselves in dreams of government. The tradition of the old Roman rule controlled the Middle Ages in various forms: it lived as a universal monarchy in the German Empire, as a universal theocracy in the papacy; as a short-lived republic in the Roman people. The modern Italians who oppose the temporal power of the pope are more sensible: they simply claim the natural right of the Italian people to govern themselves, and they confine the dominion of Rome to Italy.

Arnold stepped out of the ecclesiastical into the political sphere, and surrounded the new republic with the halo of religion. He preached in his monastic gown, on the ruins of the Capitol, to the patres conscripti, and advised them to rebuild the Capitol, and to restore the old order of senators and knights. His emaciated face gave him a ghost-like appearance and deepened the effect of his eloquence.

But the republican experiment failed. The people were at last forced into submission by the interdict of Pope Adrian IV. Arnold was banished from Rome, 1154, and soon afterwards hanged by order of Emperor Frederick I., who hated democracy and republicanism. His body was burnt and his ashes were thrown into the Tiber, 1155, lest his admirers should worship his bones.127

Arnold’s was a voice of protest against the secular aims of the papacy and the worldliness of the clergy which still has its hearers. "So obstinate is the ban of the Middle Ages under which Rome is still held," says Gregorovius, "that the soul of a heretic of the twelfth century has not yet found rest, but must still haunt Rome." The Catholic Bishop Hefele refused to class him among "real heretics."128  In 1883 Brescia raised a monument to its distinguished son.

The Arnoldists continued for some time to defend the doctrines of their master, and were declared heretics by a council of Verona, 1184, after which they disappeared.

But the idea of apostolic poverty and the opposition to the temporal power of the papacy reappeared among the Spirituals of the Franciscan order. Arnold’s political scheme of restoring the Roman republic was revived two hundred years later by Cola di Rienzi (1347), but with no better success; for Rienzi was murdered, his body burnt, and the ashes were scattered to the winds (1354).

 

 § 27. The Popes and the Hohenstaufen.

 

I. Principal Sources:

(1) The Regesta of the popes from Anastasius IV. to Innocent III. (1153–1198) by Jaffé-Wattenbach (ed. 1886).—The Opera of these popes in Migne’s Patrol. Lat.—The Vitae of the popes by Platina, Watterich, etc.

(2) Otto (half-brother of King Conrad III. and uncle of Frederick Barbarossa, and partial to him, bishop of Freising, or Freisingen, in Upper Bavaria, d. 1158): De Gestis Friderici I., finished by his pupil Rahewin or Reguin. Best ed. by Waitz, 1884. Also his Chronicle (De duabus Civitatibus, after the model of Augustin’s De Civitate Dei), continued by Otto of St. Blasien (in the Black Forest) till 1209. First critical ed. by R. Wilmans in Mon. Ger. Scr., XX. 83–493.—Gunther Ligurinus wrote in 1187 a Latin epic of 6576 verses on the deeds of the Emperor Frederick I. till 1160. See Wattenbach’s Geschichtsquellen, II. 241 sqq

 

II. Works on the Hohenstaufen Period:

Jaffé: Geschichte des deutschen Reichs unter Konrad III., Hanover, 1845.—Fr. von Raumer: Geschichte der Hohenstaufen. Leipzig, 1823. 4th ed. 1871. —W. Zimmermann: Die Hohenstaufen oder der Kampf der Monarchie gegen den Papst und die republ. Freiheit. Stuttgart, 1838. 2d ed. 1865, 2 vols.—G. De Cherrier: Histoire de la lutte des papes et des empereurs de la maison de Souabe. Paris, 1841, 4 vols.—*Hermann Reuter (Professor of Church History in Göttingen, d. 1888): Alexander III. und die Kirche seiner Zeit. 1845. 2d ed. thoroughly rewritten, Leipzig, 1860–1864; 3 vols. (A work of fifteen years’ study.)—Schirrmacher Kaiser Friedrich II. Göttingen, 1859–1864, 4 vols.; Die letzten Hohenstaufen. Göttingen, 1871.—P. Scheffer-Boichorst: K. Friedrichs I. letzter Streit mit der Kurie. Berlin, 1866.—H. Prutz: K. Friedrich I. Danzig, 1871–1874, 3 vols.—Del Guidice: Il guidizio e la condanna di Corradino. Naples, 1876.—Ribbeck: Friedr. I. und die römische Kurie. Leipzig, 1881.—Ugo Balzani: The Popes and the Hohenstaufen. London and New York, 1888 (pp. 261).—Giesebrecht, Bryce, 167 sqq.; Gregorovius, IV. 424 sqq.; Hauck, IV.;— Hefele-Knöpfler, V. 533 sqq.

 

With Conrad III. the powerful family of the Hohenstaufen ascended the imperial throne and occupied it from 1138 till 1254. They derive the name from the family castle Hohenstaufen, on a hill in the Rough Alp near Göppingen in Swabia.129  They were descended from a knight, Friedrich von Büren, in the eleventh century, and his son Friedrich von Staufen, a faithful adherent of Emperor Henry IV., who made him duke of Swabia (1079), and gave him his daughter Agnes in marriage. They were thus connected by blood with the antagonist of Pope Hildebrand, and identified with the cause of the Ghibellines against the Guelphs in their bloody feuds in Germany and Italy. Henry VI., 1190–1197, acquired by marriage the kingdom of Naples and Sicily. His son, Frederick II., raised his house to the top of its prosperity, but was in his culture and taste more an Italian than German prince, and spent most of his time in Italy.

The Hohenstaufen or Swabian emperors maintained the principle of imperialism, that is, the dignity and independence of the monarchy, as a divine institution, against papal sacerdotalism on the one hand, and against popular liberty on the other.

They made common cause with the popes, and served their purposes in the crusades: three of them, Conrad III., Frederick I., and Frederick II., undertook crusades against the Saracens; Conrad III. engaged in the second, which was a failure; Frederick I. perished in Syria; Frederick II. captured Jerusalem. The Hohenstaufen made also common cause with the popes against political and doctrinal dissent: Barbarossa sacrificed and punished by death Arnold of Brescia as a dangerous demagogue; and Frederick II., though probably himself an unbeliever, persecuted heretics.

But on the question of supremacy of power, the Hohenstaufen were always in secret or open war with the popes, and in the end were defeated. The conflict broke out under Frederick Barbarossa, who after long years of contention died at peace with the Church. It was continued by his grandson Frederick II. who died excommunicated and deposed from his throne by the papacy. The dynasty went out in tragic weakness in Conradin, the last male representative, who was beheaded on the charge of high treason, 1268. This conflict of the imperial house of the Hohenstaufen was more imposing than the conflict waged by Henry IV. with Gregory and his successors because of the higher plane on which it was fought and the greater ability of the secular antagonists engaged. Lasting more than one hundred years, it forms one of the most august spectacles of the Middle Ages, and furnishes some of the most dramatic scenes in which kings have ever figured. The historian Gregorovius has felt justified in saying that "this Titanic war of the Middle Ages filled and connected the centuries and formed the greatest spectacle of all ages."

After the fall of the Hohenstaufen, the German Empire maintained, till its death in 1806, a nominal connection with the papacy, but ceased to be the central political power of Europe, except in the period of the Reformation under Charles V., 1519–1558, when it was connected with the crowns of Austria, the Low Countries, and Spain, and the newly discovered lands of America, and when that mighty monarch, true to his Austrian and Spanish descent, retarded the Protestant movement for national independence and religious freedom. The new German Empire, founded on the ruins of the old and the defeat of France (1870), is ruled by a hereditary Protestant emperor.

 

CHRONOLOGICAL TABLE.

 

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A.D.

POPES

THE HOHENSTAUFEN

A.D.

 

1130–1143

Innocent II.

Conrad III.

1138–1152

 

1143–1144

Coelestine II.

  Crowned emperor at Aix la Chapelle by the papal legates.

 

 

1144–1145

Lucius II.

 

 

 

1145–1153

Eugene III.

Frederick I. (Barbarossa).

1152–1190

 

1153–1154

Anastasius IV.

  (Nephew of Conrad.)

 

 

1154–1159

Adrian IV.

Crowned emperor by Adrian IV.

1155

 

1159–1181

Alexander III.

 

 

 

1181–1185

Lucius III.

 

 

 

1185–1187

Urban III.

 

 

 

1187

Gregory VIII.

 

 

 

1187–1191

Clement III.

Henry VI.

1190–1197

 

1191–1198

Coelestine III.

(Son of Barbarossa.)

 

 

 

 

  Crowned emperor by  Coelestine III

1191

 

 

 

  King of Sicily.

1194

 

1198–1216

Innocent III.

Otto IV

1209–1215

 

 

 

  Crowned by Innocent III

1209

 

 

 

  Deposed by the Lateran Council

1215

 

1216–1227

Honorius III.

Frederick II

 

 

1227–1241

Gregory IX.

  (Son of Henry VI and Constance of Sicily)

 

 

1241

Coelestine IV.

  Crowned emperor by Honorius III

1220

 

1241–1254

Innocent IV.

Conrad IV

1250–1254

 

 

 

  (Second son of Frederick II)

 

 

 

 

  Crowned king of the Romans

1237

 

 

 

  Excommunicated, 1252, and again 1254

 

 

 

1254–1261

Alexander IV.

  Interregnum

1254–1273

 

1261–1264

Urban IV.

Conradin

 

 

1265–1268

Clement IV.

  (Son of Conrad, the last of the Hohenstaufen, b. 1252)

 

 

 

Beheaded.

1268

 

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 § 28. Adrian IV. and Frederick Barbarossa.

 

Lives of Hadrian in Muratori, Script. Rer. Ital. I. III.—Migne, vol. 188.—Otto of Freising.—William of Newburgh, 2 vols. London, 1856.—R. Raby: Pope Hadrian IV. London, 1849.—Tarleton: Nicolas Breakspear, Englishman And Pope, 1896.—L. Ginnell: The Doubtful Grant of Ireland of Pope Adrian IV. to Henry II., 1899.—O. J. Thatcher: Studies  conc. Adrian IV. Chicago, 1903. pp. 88.—Reuter: Alex. III., vol. I. 1–48, 479–487.

 

Eugene III. was followed by Anastasius IV., whose rule lasted only sixteen months.

His successor was Nicolas Breakspear, the first and the only Englishman that has (thus far) worn the tiara. He was the son of a poor priest of St. Albans. He went to France in pursuit of bread and learning, became a monk, prior, and abbot of the convent of St. Rufus, between Arles and Avignon. He studied theology and canon law. Eugene III. made him cardinal-bishop of Albano, and sent him as legate to Norway and Sweden, where he organized the Church and brought it into closer contact with Rome.

He occupied the papal chair as Adrian IV., from 1154 to 1159, with great ability and energy. A beggar raised to the highest dignity in Christendom!  The extremes of fortune met in this Englishman. Yet he felt happier in his poverty than in his power. He declared soon after his consecration that "the papal chair was full of thorns and the papal mantle full of holes and so heavy as to load down the strongest man." And after some experience in that high office, he said: "Is there a man in the world so miserable as a pope?  I have found so much trouble in St. Peter’s chair that all the bitterness of my former life appears sweet in comparison."130

The Romans, under the lead of Arnold, requested him to resign all claim to temporal rule; but he refused, and after a bloody attack made by an Arnoldist upon one of the cardinals in the open street, he laid—for the first time in history—the interdict on the city. By this unbloody, yet awful and most effective, weapon, he enforced the submission of the people. He abolished the republican government, expelled Arnold and his adherents, and took possession of the Lateran.

At this time, Frederick I., called Barbarossa (Redbeard) by the Italians from the color of his beard, one of the bravest, strongest, and most despotic of German emperors,—the sleeper in Kyffhäuser,131— made, with a powerful army, his first expedition to Italy to receive the iron crown of royalty from the Lombards and the golden crown of empire from the pope (1154).

The pope demanded, as the first condition of his coronation, the surrender of Arnold. With this Barbarossa willingly complied and ordered the execution of the popular agitator. In his first interview with Adrian, he kissed the pope’s toe, but neglected the ceremony of holding the stirrup on descending from his palfrey. Adrian felt indignant and refused to give him the kiss of peace. When informed that this was an old custom, Barbarossa on the following day complied with it, but in an ambiguous way by holding the left stirrup instead of the right. He took forcible possession of Trastevere, and was solemnly invested, anointed, and crowned, according to the prescribed ritual, in St. Peter’s, amid the acclamations of the curia, the clergy, and the army (June 13, 1155). An insurrection of the Roman people was speedily suppressed, the emperor leading the charge into the rebel ranks. But on the next morning he retired with the pope to the Tiburtine hills. He was reluctantly compelled by the want of supplies and by rumors of rebellion in Lombardy to return with his army. The pope, shut out from Rome, without foreign or domestic ally, retired to Benevento, was besieged there by King William of Sicily (son and successor of Roger II.) and forced by desertion and famine to submit to the terms of the conqueror by investing him with the kingdom of Sicily, the duchy of Apulia, and the principality of Capua. This involved him in a controversy with the emperor, who regarded Apulia and Capua as parts of the empire. He protested against the divorce from his first, and the marriage to his second, wife, 1156.

To these occasions of offence Adrian added another which Frederick would not bear. It was evoked by the ill-treatment done by robbers to the archbishop of Lund on his way from Rome through Germany to his Scandinavian diocese.132  Adrian spoke of Frederick’s empire as a benefice, beneficium, a word which meant either a fief or a gift. In either case the implication was offensive to the Germans, and they chose to interpret it as a claim that the emperor held his empire as a fief of the apostolic see. Two legates, rent by Adrian, attempted to soften down the meaning of the imprudent expression.

The pope was too much of a hierarch and Frederick too much of an emperor to live in peace. In 1158 Frederick led his army across the Alps to reduce Milan and other refractory Lombard cities to submission. Having accomplished this, he assembled a diet on the plain of Roncaglia, near Piacenza, which is memorable for the decision rendered by Bologna jurists, that the emperor held his empire by independent divine right and not by the will of the pope. This was the most decisive triumph the empire had won since the opening of the conflict with Henry IV. But the decision of professors of law did not change the policy of the papacy.

Adrian again gave offence by denying the emperor’s right to levy a tax for military purposes, fodrum, on estates claimed by the papacy and demanded that he should recognize the papal claim of feudal rights over the Matilda grant, Sardinia, Corsica, Ferrara, and the duchy of Spoleto. Frederick proudly retorted that instead of owing fealty to the pope, the popes owed fealty to the emperor, inasmuch as it was by the gift of the emperor Constantine that Pope Sylvester secured possession of Rome. A war of letters followed. Adrian was intending to punish his imperial foe with excommunication when he was struck down by death at Anagni. He was buried in St. Peter’s in an antique sarcophagus of red granite which is still shown. So ended the career of a man who by his moral character and personal attractions had lifted himself up from the condition of a child of a poor cleric to the supreme dignity of Christendom, and ventured to face the proudest monarch as his superior and to call the imperial crown a papal beneficium.133

This English pope, who laid the city of Rome under the interdict, which no Italian or German pope had dared to do, presented Ireland to the crown of England, on the ground that all the islands of the Christian world belong to the pope by virtue of Constantine’s donation. The curious bull Laudabiliter, encouraging Henry II. to invade and subjugate the land and giving it to him and to his heirs for a possession, may not be genuine, but the authorization was certainly made by Adrian as John of Salisbury, writing about 1159, attests, and it was renewed by Alexander III. and carried out, 1171.134  The loyal sons of Ireland will hardly want to have a second trial of an English pope.

 

 § 29. Alexander III. in Conflict with Barbarossa.

 

See the literature in § 27, especially Reuter’s Alex. III.—Vita Alexandri auctore Bosone Card., in Watterich, II. 377 sqq.—Migne, Tom. 200.—The Regesta of Alexander III. in Jaffé-Wattenbach’s Reg. Pont. Rom., pp. 145–418; and of the anti-popes, Victor IV., Pascal III., Calixtus III., and Innocent III., ibid., pp. 418–430.—Milman, bk. VIII. chs. VIII. and IX.—Greenwood, bk. XII. chs. III.–VII.—Gregorovius, IV. 525 sqq.; Hefele-Knöpfler, V. 570–720.—Moritz Meyer: Die Wahl Alex. III. und Victors IV. Göttingen, 1871.—Edw. A. Freeman: Frederick the First, King of Italy, in his "Historical Essays," London, 1871, pp. 252–282.—P. Scheffer-Boichorst; Friedrich I. letzte Streit mit der Kurie, 1866.—Wattenbach, 167 sqq.; Hauck, IV. 227–311.—Gietl: Die Sentenzen Rolands, nachmals Alexander III. Freib., 1891.

 

With Alexander III. (1159–1181) the conflict between Caesarism and sacerdotalism, which had begun under Adrian, assumed a more serious character. It was not a war for destruction, but for supremacy on the one hand and submission on the other. "Who shall be the greater?" that was the question. It was the old contention between Church and State under a new phase. Caesar and pope were alike Catholic Christians as far as they had any religion at all. They were indispensable to each other. The emperor or king needed a pope, as a kind of chief chaplain and father confessor for the control of the consciences of his subjects; the pope needed the secular arm of an emperor for the protection of the property and rights of the Church and the prosecution of heretics. The emperors elected anti-popes, and the popes supported rival emperors. It was the ambition of the Hohenstaufen to keep Germany and Italy united; it was the interest of the popes to keep them separated, and to foment division in Germany and in Italy, according to the maxim. "Divide et impera."

On the 7th of September, 1159, Cardinal Roland, the chancellor of the Roman curia and a distinguished canonist, ascended the papal chair as Alexander III. He had previously been professor at Bologna, and written the first work on the Decretum Gratiani. He had been created cardinal by Eugene III. He had once offended Barbarossa by the question: "From whom does the emperor receive his dignity if not from the pope?"  He had also advised Adrian to excommunicate the emperor. He was a scholar, a statesman, and a vigorous champion of the Hildebrandian theocracy. He had an unusually long pontificate of twenty-one years, and is the most conspicuous pope between Gregory VII. and Innocent III. He had a checkered career of fortune and misfortune in a conflict with the emperor and four anti-popes; but he consistently adhered to his principles, and at last triumphed over his enemies by moral force and the material aid of the Normans in the south and the Lombards in the north.

The election of Roland by fourteen cardinals was immediately followed by the election of Cardinal Octavian of St. Cecilia, the imperial anti-pope, who called himself Victor IV., and at once took possession of the Vatican. Roland was consecrated at Ninfa, Octavian in the convent of Farfa. They were quartered in the Campagna, a few miles distant from each other, and published contradictory reports with charges of disgraceful violence at the election.135

The emperor, who was then besieging the city of Cremona, being appealed to by both parties (though with different feelings), and using a right exercised by Constantine, Theodosius, Justinian, Charlemagne, and Otto, summoned a council at Pavia to investigate and decide the case, 1160.136  The rival popes were invited by messengers to appear in person. Octavian, who was always an imperialist, accepted the invitation. Roland distrusted the emperor, and protested against his right to call a council without his permission. He said that he honored him as a special defender of the Church above all other princes, but that God had placed the pope above kings.

The partisan council, which consisted chiefly of bishops from Germany and North Italy, after a grave debate, unanimously decided in favor of Octavian, and excommunicated Roland, Feb. 11, 1160. The emperor paid the customary honors to Victor IV., held his stirrup and kissed his toe. Alexander issued from Anagni a counter-excommunication against the anti-pope and the emperor, March 24, 1160. He thereby encouraged revolt in Lombardy and division in Germany. Another schism rent the Church.

The rival popes dispatched legates to all the courts of Europe. France, Spain, and England sided with Alexander. He took refuge in France for three years (1162–1165), and was received with enthusiasm. The kings of France and England, Louis VII. and Henry II., walked on either side of his horse, holding the bridle, and conducting him into the town of Courcy on the Loire. Germany, Hungary, Bohemia, Norway, and Sweden supported Victor. Italy was divided: Rome and Tuscany were under the power of the emperor; Sicily favored the Gregorian pope; the flourishing commercial and manufacturing cities of Lombardy were discontented with the despotic rule of Barbarossa, who was called the destroyer of cities. He put down the revolt with an iron hand; he razed Milan to the ground after a long and atrocious siege, scattered the population, and sent the venerated relics of the Magi to the cathedral of Cologne, March, 1162.

Victor IV. died in April, 1164. Pascal III. was elected his successor without regard to the canonical rules. At the request of the emperor, he canonized Charles the Great (1165).

Alexander III. put himself at the head of the Lombard league against the emperor; city after city declared itself for him. In September, 1165, he returned to Italy with the help of Sicily, and French and English gold, and took possession of Rome.

In November, 1166, Frederick crossed the Alps a fourth time, with a strong army, marched to Rome, captured the Leonine city, put Pascal III. in possession of St. Peter’s, and was crowned again, with Beatrice, Aug. 1, 1167. Alexander defended the city on the other side of the Tiber, but soon withdrew to Benevento. The emperor, victorious over armies, found a more formidable enemy in the Roman fever, which made fearful ravages among his bishops, noblemen, and soldiers. He lost in a few weeks his bravest knights and two thousand men by the plague. He broke up his camp in great haste, and marched to Pavia (September, 1167).137  He found all Lombardy in league against him, and recrossed the Alps for safety, alone and almost a fugitive, but with unbroken spirit and a determination to return.

The second anti-pope died, Sept. 20, 1168, and with him the power of the schism collapsed. Calixtus III. was elected his successor, but he was a mere shadow, 1168–1178.138

Barbarossa undertook a fifth campaign to Italy in 1174. He destroyed Susa, and, descending through Piedmont, besieged the new city of Alessandria, which was named in honor of Alexander III., and strongly fortified. Here he found determined resistance. His forces were weakened by a severe winter. He was forsaken by his strongest ally, the Saxon duke, Henry the Lion. He fought a pitched battle against the Lombards, near Legnano, May 29, 1176. He rushed, as usual, into the thickest of the fight, but was defeated after terrible slaughter, and lost his shield, banner, cross, lance, and coffers of silver and gold. He retired with the remnant of his army to Pavia. He was left without a single ally, and threatened in Germany by the dangerous rivalry of Henry the Lion. He now took serious steps towards a reconciliation with Alexander, the spiritual head of his enemies.

The emperor sent Archbishop Christian of Mainz (his chancellor, ablest general, and diplomat), Archbishop Wichmann of Magdeburg, Bishop Conrad of Worms, and Protonotary Wortwin to Anagni, with full powers to treat with the pope (October, 1176). Alexander received the commissioners with marked respect, and in private conferences, lasting over a fortnight, he arranged with them the preliminary terms of peace, which were to be ratified at Venice during a personal interview between him and the emperor.

The pope, provided with a safe-conduct by the emperor, left Anagni on Christmas, 1176, in company with his cardinals and the two commissioners of the kingdom of Sicily, Archbishop Romuald of Salerno and Count Roger of Andria, and arrived at Venice, March 24, 1177. The emperor tarried at Chioggia, near Venice, till July 23. The peace negotiations between the pope and the imperial commissioners began in May and lasted till July. They were conducted on the basis of the previous negotiations in Anagni.

 

 § 30. The Peace of Venice. 1177.

 

The negotiations resulted in the Peace of Venice, which was embodied in twenty-eight articles.139  Alexander was acknowledged as legitimate pope. Calixtus, the anti-pope, was remanded to an abbey, while his cardinals were reduced to the positions they had occupied before their appointment to the curia. Beatrice was acknowledged as Frederick’s legal wife, and his son Henry as king of the Romans. Rome and the patrimonium were restored to the pope, and Spoleto, the Romagna, and Ancona were recognized as a part of the empire.

The peace was ratified by one of the most solemn congresses of the Middle Ages. Absolved from the ban, and after eighteen years of conflict, the emperor met the pope in front of St. Mark’s, July 24, 1177. A vast multitude filled the public square. The pope in his pontifical dress sitting upon a throne in front of the portal of the cathedral must have had mingled with his feelings of satisfaction reminiscences of his painful fortunes since the time he was elected to the tiara. Cardinals, archbishops, bishops, and other dignitaries occupied lower seats according to their rank.

The emperor, on arriving in the magnificent gondola of the doge, with a train of prelates and nobles, was received by a procession of priests with banners and crosses, and the shouts of the people. He slowly proceeded to the cathedral. Overcome with feelings of reverence for the venerable pope, he cast off his mantle, bowed, and fell at his feet.140  Alexander, in tears, raised him up,141 and gave him the kiss of peace and his benediction. Thousands of voices responded by singing the Te Deum.142

Then the emperor, taking the hand of the pope, walked with him and the doge into the church, made rich offerings at the altar, bent his knees, and received again the apostolic benediction.

On the next day (the 25th), being the feast of St. James, the pope, at the emperor’s request, celebrated high mass, and preached a sermon which he ordered the patriarch of Aquileia to translate at once into German. The emperor accompanied him from the altar to the door, and paid him the customary homage of holding the stirrup.143  He offered to conduct his palfrey by the bridle across the piazza to the bark; but the pope dispensed with this menial service of a groom, taking the will for the deed, and gave him again his benediction.

This is the authentic account of contemporary writers and eye-witnesses. They make no mention of the story that the emperor said to the pope, "I do this homage to Peter, not to thee," and that the pope quickly replied, "To Peter and to me."

 The hierarchical imagination has represented this interview as a second Canossa. In Venetian pictures the pope is seen seated on a throne, and planting his foot on the neck of the prostrate emperor, with the words of Ps. 91:13: —

"Thou shalt tread upon the lion and the adder:

The young lion and the serpent shalt thou trample under feet."144

There is as much difference between the scenes of Venice and Canossa as there is between the characters of Barbarossa and Henry IV. Barbarossa was far superior, morally as well as intellectually, to his Salian predecessor, and commanded the respect of his enemies, even in his defeat. He maintained his dignity and honorably kept his word.

Delegates and letters were sent to all parts of Christendom with the glad tidings of peace. The emperor left Venice toward the end of September for Germany by a roundabout way, and the pope for Anagni on the 15th of October. After an exile of ten years, Alexander made a triumphal entry into Rome, March 12, 1178.

He convened, according to previous agreement with the emperor, a synod to ratify the pacification of Christendom, and to remove certain evils which had multiplied during the schism. The Third Lateran or the Eleventh Oecumenical Council was held in the Constantinian Basilica at Rome during Lent, 1179. It numbered about three hundred bishops, besides many abbots and other dignitaries,145 and exhibited the Roman hierarchy in its glory, though it was eclipsed afterwards by the Fourth Lateran Council of 1215. The details of the transactions are unknown, except twenty-seven chapters which were adopted in the third and last session.

The council, in order to prevent rival elections, placed the election of popes exclusively in the hands of cardinals, to be decided by a majority of two-thirds, and threatened with excommunication and deposition any one who should dare to accept an election by a smaller number of votes.146  The ordinations of the anti-popes (Octavian, Guido, and John of Struma) were declared invalid. No one was to be elected bishop who was not at least thirty years of age and of legitimate birth. To check the extravagance of prelates on their visitation journeys, the archbishops were limited to forty or fifty horses on those occasions, the cardinals to twenty-five, the bishops to twenty or thirty, the archdeacons to five or seven. Ordained clergymen must dismiss their concubines, or forfeit their benefices. Unnatural licentiousness was to be punished by expulsion from the priesthood and confinement in a convent. The council prepared the way for a crusade against the heretics in the South of France, and promised to those who should engage in it the same plenary indulgence for two years as had been granted to the crusaders against the Moslems.

Soon after the synod, Alexander was again driven into exile by the Roman republic. He died at Cività Castellana, Aug. 30, 1181, having reigned longer than any pope before or after him, except Sylvester I., 314–385, Adrian I., 772–795, Pius VII., 1800–1823, Pius IX., 1846–1878, and Leo XIII., 1878–1903. When Alexander’s remains were being carried to Rome for burial, the populace insulted his memory by pelting the coffin with stones and mud.147  Alexander had with signal constancy and devotion to the Gregorian principles maintained the conflict with Barbarossa. He supported Thomas à Becket in his memorable conflict with Henry II. In 1181 he laid the interdict upon Scotland because of the refusal of its king, William, to acknowledge the canonical election of John to the see of St. Andrews. Upon Louis VII. of France he conferred the Red Rose for the support he had received from that sovereign in the days of his early exile. He presided over the Third Lateran Council and prepared the way for the crusade against the Cathari and Albigenses.

His aged and feeble successor, Lucius III., was elected, Sept. 1, 1181, by the cardinals alone. The Romans, deprived of their former share in the election, treated him with barbarous cruelty; they captured twenty or twenty-six of his partisans at Tusculum, blinded them, except one, crowned them with paper mitres inscribed with the names of cardinals, mounted them on asses, and forced the priest whom they had spared to lead them in this condition to "Lucius, the wicked simoniac." He died in exile at Verona where he held an important synod.

It is a remarkable fact that some of the greatest popes—as Gregory VII., Urban II., Innocent II., Eugene III., Adrian IV., Alexander III., and three of his successors—could not secure the loyalty of their own subjects, and were besieged in Rome or compelled to flee. Adrian IV. said to his countryman and friend, John of Salisbury, "Rome is not the mother, but the stepmother of the Churches." The Romans were always fluctuating between memories of the old republic and memories of the empire; now setting up a consul, a senator, a tribune; now welcoming the German emperor as the true Augustus Caesar; now loyal to the pope, now driving him into exile, and ever selling themselves to the highest bidder. The papal court was very consistent in its principles and aims, but as to the choice of means for its end it was subject to the same charge of avarice and venality, whether at Rome or in exile. Even Thomas Becket, the staunchest adherent of Alexander III., indignantly rebuked the cardinals for their love of gold.

Emperor Frederick survived his great rival nearly ten years, and died by drowning in a little river of Asia Minor, 1190, while marching on the third crusade.

Barbarossa was a man of middle size, bright countenance, fair complexion, yellow hair and reddish beard, a kind friend and placable enemy, strictly just, though often too severe, liberal in almsgiving, attentive to his religious duties, happy in his second marriage, of the noblest type of mediaeval chivalry, the greatest sovereign of the twelfth century, a hero in fact and a hero in romance.148  He came into Italy with the sword of Germany in one hand and the Justinian code in the other, but failed in subduing the political independence of the Lombard cities, and in his contest with the spiritual power of Alexander. The German imagination has cherished his memory in song and story, placing him next in rank to Charles the Great among the Roman emperors, exaggerating his virtues, condoning his faults, which were those of his age, and hoping for his return to restore the unity and power of Germany.

 

 § 31. Thomas Becket and Henry II of England.

 

For the extensive Becket literature, see Robertson, in "The Contemporary Review," 1866, I. (Jan.) 270–278, and Ulysse Chevalier, in his Répertoire des sources historiques du Moyen Age (Paris, 1886), s. v. "Thomas," fol. 2207–2209.

 

I. Sources: —

*Materials for the History of Thomas `a Becket, Archbishop of Canterbury. Edited by James Craigie Robertson (Canon of Canterbury, d. 1882) and J. Brigstocke Sheppard, LL. D. London, 1875–1885, 7 vols. This magnificent work is part of a series of Rerum Britannic. Medii Aevi Scriptores, or "Chronicles and Memorials of Great Britain and Ireland during the Middle Ages," published under direction of the Master of the Rolls and popularly known as the "Rolls Series." It embraces all the important contemporary materials for the history of Thomas. Vols. I.-IV. contain the contemporary Vitae (by William of Canterbury, Benedict of Peterborough, Edward Grim, Roger of Pontigny, William Fitz-Stephen, John of Salisbury, Alan of Tewkesbury, and Herbert of Bosham, etc.); vols. V.-VII., the Epistolae, i.e. the whole correspondence relating to Thomas.

This collection is much more accurate, complete, and better arranged (especially in the Epistles) than the older collection of Dr. Giles (Sanctus Thomas Cantuariensis, London, 1845–1846, 8 vols., reprinted in Migne’s Patrologia, Tom. 190), and the Quadrilogus or Historia Quadripartita (Lives by four contemporary writers, composed by order of Pope Gregory XI., first published, 1495, then by L. Christian Lupus or Wolf, Brussels, 1682, and Venice, 1728).

Thómas Saga Erkibyskups. A Life of Archb. Th. Becket in Icelandic, with Engl. transl., notes, and glossary, ed. by Eiríkr Magnússon. London, 1875, and 1883, 2 vols. Part of the "Chronicles and Memorials," above quoted.

Garnier of Pont Sainte-Maxence: La Vie de St. Thomas le martir. A metrical life, in old French, written between 1172 and 1174, published by Hippeau, and more recently by Professor Bekker, Berlin, 1844, and Paris, 1859.

The Life And Martyrdom Of Thomas Becket by Robert of Gloucester. Ed. By W. H. Black. London, 1845 (p. 141). A Biography In Alexandrine verse, written in the thirteenth century.

 

II. Modern Works: —

Richard Hurrell Froude (one of the originators of the Oxford Anglo-Catholic movement, d. 1836): Remains. London, 1838, 4 vols. The second vol., part II., contains a history of the contest between Thomas à Becket and Henry II., in vindication of the former. He was assisted by J. H. (late Cardinal) Newman.

A. F. Ozanam: Deux Chanceliers d’Angleterre, Bacon de Verulam et Saint Thomas de Cantorbéry. Paris, 1836.

J. A. Giles: The Life And Letters Of Thomas à Becket. London, 1846, 2 vols.

F. J. Buss (Rom. Cath.): Der heil. Thomas und sein Kampf für die Freiheit der Kirche. Mainz, 1856.

John Morris (Rom. Cath. Canon of Northampton): The Life and Martyrdom of Saint Thomas Becket. London, 1859.

*James Craigie Robertson: Becket, Archbishop of Canterbury. London, 1859. Accurate, but unfavorable to Becket.

*Edw. A. Freeman: St. Thomas of Canterbury and his Biographers. A masterly article in the "National Review" for April, 1860, reprinted in his "Historical Essays," London, 1871, pp. 99–114. Comp. the summary in his History of the Norman Conquest, V. 660 sqq., and his articles against Froude, noticed below.

*James Anthony Froude: Life and Times of Thomas Becket. First published in "The Nineteenth Century" for 1877, then in book form, London and New York, 1878 (pp. 160). Against the Roman and Anglo-Catholic overestimate of St. Thomas. This book is written in brilliant style, but takes a very unfavorable view of Becket (opposite to that of his elder brother, R. H. Froude), and led to a somewhat personal controversy with Professor Freeman, who charged Froude with habitual inaccuracy, unfairness, and hostility to the English Church, in, "The Contemporary Review" for 1878 (March, April, June, and September). Froude defended himself in "The Nineteenth Century" for April, 1879, pp. 618–637, to which Freeman replied in Last Words on Mr. Froude, in "The Contemporary Review" for May, 1879, pp. 214–236.

*R. A. Thompson: Thomas Becket, Martyr, London, 1889.—A. S. Huillier: St. Thomas de Cantorbèry, 2 vols., Paris, 1892.

*Edwin A. Abbott: St. Thomas of Canterbury. His Death and Miracles, 2 vols., London, 1888. This work grew out of studies in preparation of a critical commentary of the Four Gospels. It takes the early narratives of Thomas à Becket, sets them side by side, and seeks to show which are to be accepted upon the basis of disagreements in regard to event or verbal expression. It also presents the details in which Dean Stanley and Tennyson are alleged to have been misled. The criticism is able, stimulating, and marked by self-confidence in determining what events really did occur, and how much is to be discarded as unhistoric. The discussion has all the merits and demerits of the strict critical method.

 

III. Becket is more or less fully treated by Milman: Latin Christianity, bk. VIII. ch. VIII.—Dean Stanley: Historical Memorials of Canterbury, Am. ed., 1889.—Reuter: Alexander III., I. 237 sqq., 530 sqq. Dean Hook: Lives of the Archbishops of Canterbury, II. 354–508. Greenwood: Cathedra Petri, bk. XII. ch. VII.—William Stubbs: The Constitutional Hist. of England, 6th ed., 3 vols., Oxford, 1897, and Select Charters and Other Illustrations of the English Constit. Hist., 8th ed., Oxford, 1900.—Gee and Hardy: Documents Illustrative of Engl. Ch. Hist., London, 1896.—F. W. Maitland: Rom. Canon Late in the Ch. of England, London, 1898, 134–147.—W. R. W. Stephens: The English Church (1066–1272), London, 1901, 157–190. The Histories of Lingard, Green, etc.

Lord Tennyson has made Becket the subject of a historical drama, 1884.

 

During the pontificate of Alexander III., the papal hierarchy achieved an earlier and greater triumph over the king of England than over the emperor of Germany.

Thomas Becket, or Thomas à Becket, or St. Thomas of Canterbury, is, next to Alexander and Barbarossa, the most prominent historical figure in the twelfth century, and fills a chapter of thrilling interest in the history of England. He resumed the conflict of Anselm with the crown, and by his martyrdom became the most popular saint of the later Middle Ages.

The materials for his history, from his birth in London to his murder in his own cathedral by four knights of the royal household, are abundant. We have six or seven contemporary biographies, besides fragments, legends, and "Passions," state papers, private letters, and a correspondence extending over the whole Latin Church. But his life is surrounded by a mist of romantic legends and theological controversies. He had extravagant admirers, like Herbert of Bosham, and fierce opponents, like Gilbert Foliot, in his own day; and modern biographers still differ in the estimate of his character, according to their creed and their views on the question of Church and State, some regarding him as a hero and a saint, others as a hypocrite and a traitor. We must judge him from the standpoint of the twelfth century.

Becket was born in London, Dec. 21, 1118, during the reign of Henry I. He was the son of Gilbert Becket, a merchant in Cheapside, originally from Rouen, and of Matilda or Rose, a native of Caen in Normandy.149

In the later legend his father appears as a gallant crusader and his mother as a Saracen princess, who met in the East and fell in love with each other. Matilda helped Gilbert to escape from captivity, and then followed him alone to England. Knowing only two English words, "London" and "Gilbert," she wandered through the streets of the city, till at last she found her beloved in Cheapside as by a miracle, was baptized and married to him in St. Paul’s with great splendor. She had dreams of the future greatness and elevation of her infant son to the see of Canterbury.

Becket was educated at Merton Abbey in Surrey and in the schools of London. At a later period he attended the universities of Paris, Bologna, and Auxerre, and studied there chiefly civil and canon law, without attaining to special eminence in learning. He was not a scholar, but a statesman and an ecclesiastic.

He made his mark in the world and the Church by the magnetism of his personality. He was very handsome, of tall, commanding presence, accomplished, brilliant, affable, cheerful in discourse, ready and eloquent in debate, fond of hunting and hawking, and a proficient in all the sports of a mediaeval cavalier. He could storm the strongest castle and unhorse the stoutest knight.

Archbishop Theobald of Canterbury, 1139–1161, took him into his service, 1142; sent him to Bologna, where Gratian then taught canon law; employed him in delicate missions with the papal court; made him archdeacon (1154), and bestowed upon him other profitable benefices, as the provostship of Beverly, a number of churches, and several prebends. When charged, as archbishop, with ingratitude to the king, who had raised him from "poverty," he proudly referred to this accumulation of preferments, and made no attempt to abolish the crying evil of plurality, which continued till the Reformation. Many a prosperous ecclesiastic regarded his parishes simply as sources of income, and discharged the duties by proxy through ignorant and ill-paid priests.

King Henry II., 1154–1189, in the second year of his reign, raised Becket, then only thirty-seven years of age, at Theobald’s instance, to the chancellorship of England. The chancellor was the highest civil dignitary, and held the custody of nearly all the royal grants and favors, including vacant bishoprics, abbacies, chaplaincies, and other ecclesiastical benefices.

Henry, the first of the proud Plantagenets, was an able, stirring, and energetic monarch. He kept on his feet from morning till evening, and rarely sat down. He introduced a reign of law and severe justice after the lawless violence and anarchy which had disturbed the reign of the unfortunate Stephen.150  But he was passionate, vindictive, and licentious. He had frequent fits of rage, during which he behaved like a madman. He was the most powerful sovereign in Western Europe. His continental dominions were more extensive than those of the king of France, and embraced Maine and Normandy, Anjou and Aquitaine, reaching from Flanders to the foot of the Pyrenees. He afterwards (1171) added Ireland by conquest, with the authority of Popes Adrian IV. and Alexander III. His marriage to Queen Eleanor of Aquitaine, who had been divorced for infidelity from King Louis VII. of France, enriched his realm, but involved him in protracted wars with France and in domestic troubles. Eleanor was jealous of her rivals,151 incited her sons, Geoffrey and Richard, to rebel against their father, was imprisoned in 1173, and released after Henry’s death in 1189 by his successor, Richard I., Coeur de Lion, who made her regent on his departure for the Holy Land. She afterwards retired to the abbey of Fontevrault, and died about 1203.

Becket occupied the chancellorship for seven years (1155–1162). He aided the king in the restoration of order and peace. He improved the administration of justice. He was vigorous and impartial, and preferred the interests of the crown to those of the clergy, yet without being hostile to the Church. He was thoroughly loyal to the king, and served him as faithfully as he had served Theobald, and as he afterwards served the pope. Thorough devotion to official duty characterized him in all the stations of his career.

He gave to his high office a prominence and splendor which it never had before. He was as magnificent and omnipotent as Wolsey under Henry VIII. He was king in fact, though not in name, and acted as regent during Henry’s frequent absences on the Continent. He dressed after the best fashion, surrounded himself with a brilliant retinue of a hundred and forty knights, exercised a prodigal hospitality, and spent enormous sums upon his household and public festivities, using in part the income of his various ecclesiastical benefices, which he retained without a scruple. He presided at royal banquets in Westminster Hall. His tables were adorned with vessels of gold, with the most delicate and sumptuous food, and with wine of the choicest vintage. He superintended the training of English and foreign nobles, and of the young Prince Henry. He was the favorite of the king, the army, the nobility, the clergy, and the people.

The chancellor negotiated in person a matrimonial alliance (three years before it was consummated) between the heir of the crown (then a boy of seven years) and a daughter of the king of France (a little lady of three). He took with him on that mission two hundred knights, priests, standard-bearers, all festively arrayed in new attire, twenty-four changes of raiment, all kinds of dogs and birds for field sports, eight wagons, each drawn by five horses, each horse in charge of a stout young man dressed in a new tunic. Coffers and chests contained the chancellor’s money and presents. One horse, which preceded all the rest, carried the holy vessels of his chapel, the holy books, and the ornaments of the altar. The Frenchmen, seeing this train, exclaimed, "How wonderful must be the king of England, whose chancellor travels in such state!"  In Paris he freely distributed his gold and silver plate and changes of raiment,—to one a robe, to another a furred cloak, to a third a pelisse, to a fourth a war-horse. He gained his object and universal popularity.

When, notwithstanding his efforts to maintain peace, war broke out between France and England, the chancellor was the bravest warrior at the head of seven hundred knights, whom he had enlisted at his own expense, and he offered to lead the storming party at the siege of Toulouse, where King Louis was shut up; but the scruples of Henry prevented him from offering violence to the king of France. He afterwards took three castles which were deemed impregnable, and returned triumphant to England. One of his eulogists, Edward Grim, reports to his credit: "Who can recount the carnage, the desolation, which he made at the head of a strong body of soldiers?  He attacked castles, razed towns and cities to the ground, burned down houses and farms without a touch of pity, and never showed the slightest mercy to any one who rose in insurrection against his master’s authority." Such cruelty was quite compatible with mediaeval conceptions of piety and charity, as the history of the crusades shows.

Becket was made for the court and the camp. Yet, though his life was purely secular, it was not immoral. He joined the king in his diversions, but not in his debaucheries. Being in deacon’s orders, he was debarred from marriage, but preserved his chastity at a profligate court. This point is especially mentioned to his credit; for chastity was a rare virtue in the Middle Ages.

All together, his public life as chancellor was honorable and brilliant, and secures him a place among the distinguished statesmen of England. But a still more important career awaited him.152

 

 § 32. The Archbishop and the King.

 

Compare §§ 22–24 (pp. 80 sqq.).

 

A year after the death of Theobald, April 18, 1161, Becket was appointed by the king archbishop of Canterbury. He accepted reluctantly, and warned the king, with a smile, that he would lose a servant and a friend.153  The learned and energetic Bishop Gilbert Foliot of Hereford (afterwards of London) remarked sarcastically, perhaps from disappointed ambition, that "the king had wrought a miracle in turning a layman into an archbishop, and a soldier into a saint."

Becket was ordained priest on the Saturday after Pentecost, and consecrated archbishop on the following day with great magnificence in Westminster Abbey, June 3, 1162. His first act was to appoint the Sunday after Whitsunday as a festival of the Holy Trinity in the Church of England. He acknowledged Alexander III. as the rightful pope, and received from him the pallium through his friend, John of Salisbury.

He was the first native Englishman who occupied the seat of the primate since the Norman Conquest; for Lanfranc and Anselm were Italians; Ralph of Escures, William Of Corbeuil, and Theobald of Bec were Normans or Frenchmen. There is, however, no ground for the misleading theory of Thierry that Becket asserted the cause of the Saxon against the Norman. His contest with the king was not a contest between two nationalities, but between Church and State. He took the same position on this question as his Norman predecessors, only with more zeal and energy. He was a thorough Englishman. The two nations had at that time, by intermarriage, social and commercial intercourse, pretty well coalesced, at least among the middle classes, to which he belonged.154

With the change of office, Becket underwent a radical and almost sudden transformation. The foremost champion of kingcraft became the foremost champion of priestcraft; the most devoted friend of the king, his most dangerous rival and enemy; the brilliant chancellor, an austere and squalid monk. He exchanged the showy court dress for haircloth infested with vermin, fed on roots, and drank nauseous water. He daily washed, with proud humility and ostentatious charity, the feet of thirteen dirty beggars, and gave each of them four pieces of silver. He doubled the charities of Theobald, as Theobald had doubled the charities of his predecessor. He wandered alone in his cloister, shedding tears of repentance for past sins, frequently inflicted stripes on his naked back, and spent much time in prayer and reading of the Scriptures. He successfully strove to realize the ideal of a mediaeval bishop, which combines the loftiest ecclesiastical pretensions with personal humility, profuse charity, and ascetic self-mortification. He was no hypocrite, but his sanctity, viewed from the biblical and Protestant standpoint, was artificial and unnatural.

His relation to the king was that of the pope to the emperor. Yea, we may say, as he had outkinged the king as chancellor, so he outpoped the pope as archbishop. He censured the pope for his temporizing policy. He wielded the spiritual sword against Henry with the same gallantry with which he had wielded the temporal sword for him. He took up the cause of Anselm against William Rufus, and of Gregory VII. against Henry IV., but with this great difference, that he was not zealous for a moral reformation of the Church and the clergy, like Hildebrand and Anselm, but only for the temporal power of the Church and the rights and immunities of the clergy. He made no attempt to remove the scandal of pluralities of which he had himself been guilty as archdeacon and chancellor, and did not rebuke Henry for his many sins against God, but only for his sins against the supremacy of the hierarchy.

The new archbishop was summoned by Pope Alexander III. to a council at Tours in France, and was received with unusual distinction (May, 1163). The council consisted of seventeen cardinals, a hundred and twenty-four bishops, four hundred and fourteen abbots; the pope presided in person; Becket sat at his right, Roger of York at his left. Arnolf of Lisieux in Normandy preached the opening sermon on the unity and freedom of the Church, which were the burning questions of the day. The council unanimously acknowledged the claims of Alexander, asserted the rights and privileges of the clergy, and severely condemned all encroachments on the property of the Church.

This was the point which kindled the controversy between the sceptre and the crozier in England. The dignity of the crown was the sole aim of the king; the dignity of the Church was the sole aim of the archbishop. The first rupture occurred over the question of secular taxation.

Henry determined to transfer the customary payment of two shillings on every hide of land to his own exchequer. Becket opposed the enrolment of the decree on the ground that the tax was voluntary, not of right. Henry protested, in a fit of passion, "By the eyes of God, it shall be enrolled!"  Becket replied, "By the eyes of God, by which you swear, it shall never be levied on my lands while I live!"

Another cause of dispute was the jurisdiction of the ecclesiastical courts. The king demanded that all clerics accused of gross misdemeanors be tried by the civil court. A certain clerk, Philip of Broi, had been acquitted of murder in the bishop’s court. The king was indignant, but Philip refused to plead in the civil court. The matter was taken up by the archbishop, but a light sentence imposed.

The king summoned a Parliament at Westminster, and demanded in the name of equal justice, and in accordance with "ancient customs" (of the Norman kings), that all clerks accused of heinous crimes should be immediately degraded, and be dealt with according to law, instead of being shielded by their office. This was contrary to the right of the priest to be tried only in the court of his bishop, where flagellation, imprisonment, and degradation might be awarded, but not capital punishment.

Becket and the bishops agreed that the king’s demand was an infringement of the canon law and argued the case from Scripture. Joab, and Abiathar the priest, were guilty of putting Adonijah to death. Joab was punished, but the priest suffered no other punishment than deposition from office. Nahum 1:9 was quoted as against a double tribunal for clerks. According to the Septuagint version, this passage declares that God does not give two judgments in the same case.

The king hastily broke up the Parliament, deprived Becket of the custody of the royal castles, and of the education of his son. The bishops advised the archbishop to yield; at first he refused, though an angel from heaven should counsel such weakness; but at last he made a concession to the king at Woodstock, and promised to obey in good faith the customs of the realm. He yielded at the persuasion of the pope’s almoner, Philip de Eleeomosyna, who was bribed by English gold.155

The king summoned a great council of the realm to Clarendon, a royal palace a few miles from Salisbury, for the ratification of the concession (Jan. 25, 1164). The two archbishops, twelve bishops, and thirty-nine lay-barons were present. Sixteen famous statutes were enacted, under the name of The Clarendon Constitutions, as laws of England. They are as follows:156—

 

THE CONSTITUTIONS OF CLARENDON.

 

I. Of the advowson and presentation (de advocatione et presentatione) to churches: if any dispute shall arise between laics, or between clerks and laics, or between clerks, let it be tried and decided in the court of our lord the king.

II. Churches in the king’s fee (de feudo domini Regis) shall not be given in perpetuity without his consent and license.

III. Clerks accused of any crime shall be summoned by the king’s justiciaries into the king’s court to answer there for whatever the king’s court shall determine they ought to answer there; and in the ecclesiastical court, for whatever it shall be determined that they ought to answer there; yet so that the king’s justiciaries shall send into the court of holy Church to see in what way the matter shall there be handled; and if the clerk shall confess or be convicted, the Church for the future shall not protect him.157

IV. No archbishop, bishop, or other exalted person shall leave the kingdom without the king’s license; and if they wish to leave it, the king shall be empowered, if he pleases, to take security from them, that they will do no harm to the king or kingdom, either in going or remaining, or in returning.

V. Persons excommunicated are not to give bail, ad remanentiam, nor to make oath, but only to give bail and pledge that they will stand by the judgment of the Church where they are absolved.

VI. Laics shall not be accused, save by certain and legal accusers and witnesses in presence of the bishop, so that the archdeacon may not lose his rights, or anything which accrues to him therefrom. And if those who are arraigned are such that no one is willing or dares to accuse them, the sheriff, on demand from the bishop, shall cause twelve loyal men of the village to swear before the bishop that they will declare the truth in that matter according to their conscience.

VII. No one who holds of the king in chief, nor any of his domestic servants, shall be excommunicated, nor his lands be put under an interdict, until the king shall be consulted, if he is in the kingdom; or, if he is abroad, his justiciary, that he may do what is right in that matter, and so that whatever belongs to the king’s court may therein be settled, and the same on the other hand of the ecclesiastical court.

VIII. Appeals, if they arise, must be made from the archdeacon to the bishop, and from the bishop to the archbishop; and if the archbishop shall fail in administering justice, the parties shall come before our lord the king, that by his precept the controversy may be terminated in the archbishop’s court, so that it may not proceed further without the consent of our lord the king.

IX. If a dispute shall arise between a clerk and a laic, or between a laic and a clerk, about a tenement, which the clerk wishes to claim as eleemosynary, but the laic claims as lay fee, it shall be settled by the declaration of twelve qualified men, through the agency of the king’s capital judiciary, whether the tenement is eleemosynary or lay fee, in presence of the king’s judiciaries. And if it shall be declared that it is eleemosynary, it shall be pleaded in the ecclesiastical court; but, if a lay fee, unless both shall claim the tenement of the same bishop or baron, it shall be pleaded in the king’s court; but if both shall claim of that fee from the same bishop or baron, it shall be pleaded in his court, yet so that the same declaration above-named shall not deprive of seizing him who before was seized, until he shall be divested by the pleadings.

X. If any man belonging to a city, castle, borough, or king’s royal manor shall be summoned by the archdeacon or bishop to answer for a crime, and shall not comply with the summons, it shall be lawful to place him under an interdict, but not to excommunicate him, until the king’s principal officer of that place be informed thereof, that he may justify his appearing to the summons; and if the king’s officer shall fail in that matter, he shall be at the king’s mercy, and the bishop shall forthwith coerce the party accused with ecclesiastical discipline.

XI. The archbishops, bishops, and all other persons of the kingdom, who hold of the king in chief, shall hold their possessions of the king as barony, and answer for the same to the king’s justiciaries and officers, and follow and observe all the king’s customs and rectitudes; and be bound to be present, in the judgment of the king’s court with the barons, like other barons, until the judgment proceeds to mutilation or death.

XII. When an archbishopric, bishopric, abbacy, or priory on the king’s domain shall be vacant, it shall be in his hand, and he shall receive from it all the revenues and proceeds, as of his domains. And when the time shall come for providing for that church, our lord the king shall recommend the best persons to that church, and the election shall be made in the king’s chapel, with the king’s consent, and the advice of the persons of the kingdom whom he shall have summoned for that purpose. And the person elected shall there do homage and fealty to our lord the king, as to his liege lord, of life and limb, and of his earthly honors saving his orders, before he is consecrated.

XIII. If any of the king’s nobles shall have refused to render justice to an archbishop or bishop or archdeacon, for himself or any of his men, our lord the king shall justice them. And if by chance any one shall have deforced our lord the king of his rights, the archbishops, bishops, and archdeacons shall justice him that he may render satisfaction to the king.

XIV. The chattels of those who are in forfeiture to the king shall not be detained by the Church or the cemetery, in opposition to the king’s justice, for they belong to the king, whether they are found in the Church or without.

XV. Pleas for debts which are due, whether with the interposition of a pledge of faith or not, belong to the king’s court.

XVI. The sons of rustics shall not be ordained without the consent of the lord, in whose land they are known to have been born.

These Constitutions were drawn up in the spirit and language of feudalism, under the inspiration of the king, by Archbishop Roger of York, Bishop Foliot of London (the chief enemies of Becket), Bishop Joceline of Salisbury, Richard de Luci (the king’s chief judiciary), and Joceline of Baliol. They are restrictions on the immunities of the clergy; the last is an invasion of the rights of the people, but is based on the canonical exclusion of slaves from the clerical order without the consent of their masters. They subject the clergy equally with the laity to the crown and the laws of the land. They reduce the Church to an imperium in imperio, instead of recognizing her as a distinct and independent imperium. They formulate in the shape of legal enactments certain "ancient customs" (consuetudines) which date from the time of William the Conqueror, and were conceded by Lanfranc; but they infringe at many points on the ancient privileges of the Church, and are inconsistent with the hierarchical principle of the exemption of the clergy from temporal jurisdiction. And this was the chief point of the quarrel between the king and the archbishop.

In the present state of civilization there can be no doubt that the clergy should obey the same laws and be subject to the same penalties as the laity. But we must not overlook the fact that in the Middle Ages the clerical exemption had a humanitarian as well as a hierarchical feature, and involved a protest against barbarous punishments by mutilation of the human body, man being made in the image of God. It prepared the way for a mitigation of the criminal code for the benefit of the whole people, the laity as well as the clergy. This explains the large amount of popular sympathy with the cause of Becket.

Becket gave a qualified assent. On his return to Canterbury he changed his mind and imposed upon himself severe penances, and sought and obtained the pope’s absolution from his oath. But Alexander, hard pressed by Barbarossa and the anti-pope, and anxious to keep the good will of Henry, tried to please both parties. He granted, at the request of Henry, legatine commission over all England to Archbishop Roger of York, the rival of the primate of Canterbury. He also afterwards authorized the coronation of Henry’s eldest son by the archbishop of York in the Abbey of Westminster (June 18, 1170), although such coronation was the exclusive privilege of the archbishop of Canterbury. This aggravated the difficulty with the king, and brought on the final crisis.

In the meantime the Clarendon Constitutions were carried out. Clergymen convicted of crime in the king’s court were condemned and punished like laymen.

Becket attempted to flee to the pope, and sailed for the Continent, but was brought back by the sailors on account of adverse winds. This was a violation of the law which forbade bishops to leave the country without royal permission.

He was summoned before a great council of bishops and nobles at the royal castle of Northampton in the autumn of 1164, and charged with misconduct in secular affairs while chancellor and archbishop. But his courage rose with the danger. He refused to answer, and appealed to the pope. The council ordered him cited to Rome on the charges of perjury at Clarendon and of commanding his suffragans to disregard the Constitutions. The bishops he met with a haughty refusal when they advised him to resign. He was to be arrested, but he threatened the peers with excommunication if they pronounced the sentence. He took the bold course of making his escape to the Continent in the disguise of a monk, at midnight, accompanied by two monks and a servant, and provided with his episcopal pall and seal.

The king seized the revenues of the archbishop, forbade public prayers for him, and banished him from the kingdom, ordered the banishment of all his kinsmen and friends, including four hundred persons of both sexes, and suspended the payment of Peter’s pence to the pope.

Becket spent fully six years in exile, from October, 1164, to December, 1170. King Louis of France, an enemy of Henry and admirer of Becket, received him with distinction and recommended him to the pope, who, himself in exile, resided at Sens. Becket met Alexander, laid before him the Constitutions of Clarendon, and tendered his resignation. The pope condemned ten as a violation of ecclesiastical privileges, and tolerated six as less evil than the rest. He tenderly rebuked Becket for his weakness in swearing to them, but consoled him with the assurance that he had atoned for it by his sufferings. He restored to him the archiepiscopal ring, thus ratifying his primacy, promised him his protection, and committed him to the hospitable care of the abbot of Pontigny, a Cistercian monastery about twelve leagues distant from Sens. Here Becket lived till 1166, like a stern monk, on pulse and gruel, slept on a bed of straw, and submitted at midnight to the flagellation of his chaplain, but occasionally indulged in better diet, and retained some of his former magnificence in his surroundings. His sober friend, John of Salisbury, remonstrated against the profuse expenditure.

Becket proceeded to the last extremity of pronouncing, in the church of Vezelay, on Whitsuntide, 1166, the sentence of excommunication on all the authors and defenders of the Constitutions of Clarendon. He spared the king, who then was dangerously ill, but in a lower tone, half choked with tears, he threatened him with the vengeance of God, and his realm with the interdict. He announced the sentence to the pope and all the clergy of England, saying to the latter, "Who presumes to doubt that the priests of God are the fathers and masters of kings, princes, and all the faithful?"

The wrath of Henry knew no bounds. He closed the ports of England against the bearers of the instrument of excommunication, threatening them with shameful mutilation, hanging, and burning. He procured the expulsion of Becket from Pontigny, who withdrew to a monastery near the archiepiscopal city of Sens. He secured through his ambassadors several concessions from Alexander, who was then in exile at Benevento. The pope was anxious to retain the support of the king, and yet he wrote soothing letters to Becket, assuring him that the concessions were to be only temporary. Becket answered with indignation, and denounced the papal court for its venality and rapacity. "Your gold and silver," he wrote to the cardinals, "will not deliver you in the day of the wrath of the Lord."

The king now determined to use the permission received from the pope several years before, but afterwards revoked,158 and have his son crowned by Roger, archbishop of York. This humiliating infringement upon the rights of the primate stirred Becket’s blood afresh. He repeated his excommunication. Like Gregory VII., he applied the words, "Cursed is he that refraineth his sword from blood," to the spiritual weapon. He even commanded the bishops of England to lay the whole kingdom under interdict and to suspend the offices of religion (except baptism, penance, and extreme unction), unless the king should give full satisfaction before the feast of purification, Nov. 2, 1170.159

These extreme measures were not without effect. Several bishops began to waver and change from the king’s cause to that of the archbishop. The king himself was alarmed at the menace of the interdict. The pope pursued his temporizing policy, and counselled concessions by both parties.

The king and the archbishop suddenly made peace in a respectful personal interview at Fretteville (Freteval), a castle between Tours and Chartres, July 22, 1170. Henry said nothing about the Clarendon Constitutions, but made the offer that Becket should crown his daughter-in-law (the daughter of the king of France), and should on that occasion repeat the coronation of his son. Becket laid the blame on the shoulders of Henry’s counsellors, and showed moderation and prudence. The king did not offer the kiss of peace, nor did the archbishop demand it.

But while Becket was willing to pardon the king, he meant to exercise his spiritual authority over his evil counsellors, and especially over the archbishop of York and the bishops of London and Salisbury. These prelates had recently officiated at the coronation of Henry’s son. And it was this coronation, even more than the original and more important dispute about the immunity of the clergy, that led to the catastrophe.

After prolonged negotiations with the papal court and the king, Becket returned to his long-neglected flock, Dec. 1, 1170. On landing at Sandwich (instead of Dover, where he was expected), he was surprised by enemies, who searched his baggage, and demanded that he should withdraw his excommunication of the bishops who were then at Dover. He refused. On his way to Canterbury the country clergy and people met him, cast down their garments, chanting, "Blessed is he that cometh in the name of the Lord." He rode to the cathedral with a vast procession, amid the ringing of the bells, and preached on the text, "Here we have no abiding city."

The excommunicated prelates of York, London, and Salisbury sought the protection of the king, who was then at a castle near Bayeux in Normandy. He said: "If all are to be excommunicated who officiated at my son’s coronation, by the eyes of God, I am equally guilty." One of the prelates (perhaps Roger of York) remarked, "As long as Thomas lives, you will never be at peace." Henry broke out into one of his constitutional fits of passion, and dropped the fatal words: "A fellow that has eaten my bread, has lifted up his heel against me; a fellow that I loaded with benefits, dares insult the king; a fellow that came to court on a lame horse, with a cloak for a saddle, sits without hindrance on the throne itself. By the eyes of God, is there none of my thankless and cowardly courtiers who will deliver me from the insults of this low-born and turbulent priest?"  With these words he rushed out of the room.

 

 § 33. The Martyrdom of Thomas Becket. Dec. 29, 1170.

 

On the murder of Becket we have the reports of five eye-witnesses, Edward Grim (a Saxon monk of Cambridge), William Fitz-Stephen (Becket’s chaplain), John of Salisbury (his faithful friend), William of Canterbury, and the anonymous author of a Lambeth MS. Two other biographers, Herbert of Bosham and Roger of Pontigny, though absent from England at that time, were on intimate terms with Becket, and took great pains to ascertain the facts to the minutest details.

Four warlike knights of high birth and large estate, chamberlains to the king,160— Sir Reginald Fitz-Urse ("Son of the Bear," whom Becket had originally introduced to the court), Sir William. de Tracy (of royal blood), Hugh de Moreville (judiciary of Northumberland and Cumberland), and Sir Richard le Bret or Breton (commonly known as Brito161), eagerly caught at the king’s suggestion, and resolved to carry it out in the spirit of passionate loyalty, at their own risk, as best they could, by imprisonment, or exile, or, if necessary, by murder. They seem to have had no premeditated plan except that of signal vengeance. Without waiting for instructions, they at once departed on separate routes for England, and met at the castle of Saltwood, which belonged to the see of Canterbury, but was then occupied by Randulf of Broc. They collected a band of about a dozen armed men, and reached St. Augustine’s abbey outside of the walls of Canterbury, early on the 29th of December, which was a Tuesday.

On the morning of that fatal day, Becket had forebodings of his death, and advised the clergy to escape to Sandwich before daylight. He attended mass in the cathedral, confessed to two monks, and received three scourgings, as was his custom. At the banquet he drank more freely than usual, and said to the cupbearer, "He who has much blood to shed, must drink much." After dinner he retired to his private room and sat on his bed, talking to his friends, John of Salisbury, William Fitz-Stephen, and Edward Grim. He was then still in full vigor, being in the fifty-third year of his age, retaining his dignified aspect and the lustre of his large eyes.

At about four that afternoon, the knights went to the archbishop’s palace, leaving their weapons behind, and concealing their coats of mail by the ordinary cloak and gown. They demanded from him, in the name of the king, the absolution of the excommunicated bishops and courtiers. He refused, and referred them to the pope, who alone could absolve them. He declared: "I will never spare a man who violates the canons of Rome or the rights of the Church. My spirituals I hold from God and the pope; my temporals, from the king. Render unto Caesar the things that are Caesar’s, and unto God the things that are God’s." The knights said, "You speak in peril of your life." Becket replied: "Come ye to murder me in my own house?  You cannot be more ready to kill me than I am to die. You threaten me in vain; were all the swords in England hanging over my head, you could not terrify me from my obedience to God and my lord the pope. I defy you, and will meet you foot to foot in the battle of the Lord." During the altercation, Becket lost command over his fiery temper. His friend, John of Salisbury, gently censured him for his exasperating tone. The knights quitted the room and called their men to arms.

A few minutes before five the bell tolled for vespers. Urged by his friends, the archbishop, with his cross carried before him, went through the cloisters to the cathedral. The service had begun, the monks were chanting the psalms in the choir, the church was filled with people, when two boys rushed up the nave and created a panic by announcing that armed men were breaking into the cloister. The attendants of Becket, who had entered the church, shut the door and urged him to move into the choir for safety. "Away, you cowards!" he said, "by virtue of your obedience, I command you not to shut the door; the church must not be turned into a fortress." He was evidently prepared and eager for martyrdom. He himself reopened the door, and dragged the excluded monks into the building, exclaiming, "Come in, come in—faster, faster!"  The monks and priests were terror-stricken and fled in every direction, to the recesses and side-chapels, to the roof above, and the crypt below. Three only remained faithful,—Canon Robert of Merton, Chaplain William Fitz-Stephen, and the clerk Edward Grim.162  One of the monks confesses that he ran with clasped hands up the steps as fast as his feet would carry him.

Becket proceeded to the high altar and archiepiscopal chair, in which he and all his predecessors from time immemorial had been enthroned. There, no doubt, he wished to gain the crown of martyrdom. It was now about five in the winter evening; the shades of night were gathering, and the lamps on the altars shed only a dim light in the dark cathedral. The tragedy which followed was finished in a few minutes.

In the meantime the knights, clad in mail which covered their faces up to their eyes, and with drawn swords, followed by a motley group of ruffians, provided with hatchets, rushed into the cathedral and shouted: "Where is the traitor?  Where is the archbishop?"163  Becket replied, descending the steps of the altar and facing his enemies, "Behold me, no traitor, but a priest of God!"  They again demanded the absolution of the bishops and his surrender to the king’s justice. "I cannot do otherwise than I have done," he said, and turning to Fitz-Urse, who was armed with a sword and an axe, he added; "Reginald, you have received many favors at my hands: come you to me and into my church armed!"  The knights tried to drag him out of the sanctuary, not intending to kill him there; but he braced himself against the pillar between the altars of the Virgin, his special patroness, and St. Benedict, whose rule he followed, and said: "I am ready to die. May the Church through my blood obtain peace and liberty!  I charge you in the name of God Almighty that you hurt no one here but me." In the struggle, he grappled with De Tracy and threw him to the pavement. He called Fitz-Urse (who had seized him by the collar of his long cloak) a miserable wretch, and wrenched the cloak from his grasp, saying, "Off, thou pander, thou!"164  The soldier, maddened by the foul epithet, waving the sword over his head, struck the first blow, and dashed off his cap. Tracy, rising from the pavement, aimed at his head; but Edward Grim, standing by, interposed his arm, which was almost severed, and then he sank back against the wall. Becket received blow after blow in an attitude of prayer. As he felt the blood trickling down his face, he bowed his neck for the death-blow, clasped his hands, and said in a low voice: "I commend my cause and the cause of the Church to God, to St. Denis, the martyr of France, to St. Alfege, and to the saints of the Church.165  In the name of Christ and for the defence of his Church, I am ready to die. Lord, receive my spirit."

These were his last words. The next blow felled him to his knees, the last laid him on the floor at the foot of the altar of St. Benedict. His hands were still joined as if in prayer. Richard the Breton cut off the upper part of his skull, which had received the sacred oil. Hugh of Horsea, the subdeacon, trampled upon his neck, thrust his sword into the ghastly wound, and scattered the blood and the brains over the pavement.166  Then he said, "Let us go, let us go; the traitor is dead; he will rise no more."

The murderers rushed from the church through the cloisters into the palace for plunder; while a violent thunder-storm broke over the cathedral. They stole about two thousand marks in gold and silver, and rode off on Becket’s fine horses in the thick darkness of the night.

The body of Thomas was buried in the crypt. The remains of his blood and brains were sacredly kept. His monkish admirers discovered, to their amazement and delight, that the martyr, who had once been arrayed in purple and fine linen, wore on his skin under his many garments the coarsest haircloth abounding with vermin. This seemed to betray the perfection of ascetic sanctity according to mediaeval notions.167  The spot of his "martyrdom" is still shown close to the entrance of the cathedral from the cloister.

 

 § 34. The Effects of Becket’s Murder.

 

The atrocious murder sent a thrill of horror throughout the Christian world. The moment of Becket’s death was his triumph. His exalted station, his personal virtues, the sacrilege,—all contributed to deepen the impression. At first opinion was divided, as he had strong enemies, even at Canterbury. A monk declared that Becket paid a just penalty for his obstinacy others said, "He wished to be king and more than king; the archbishop of York dared to preach that Becket "perished, like Pharaoh, in his pride."

But the torrent of public admiration soon silenced all opposition. Miracles took place at his tomb, and sealed his claim to the worship of a saint and martyr. "The blind see, the deaf hear, the dumb speak, the lame walk, the lepers are cleansed, the devils are cast out, even the dead are raised to life." Thus wrote John of Salisbury, his friend.168  Remarkable cures, no doubt, took place; credulity and fraud exaggerated and multiplied them. Within a few years after the murder, two collections of his miracles were published, one by Benedict, prior of Canterbury (afterwards abbot of Peterborough), and one by William, monk of Canterbury.169  According to these reports, the miracles began to occur the very night of the archbishop’s death. His blood had miraculous efficacy for those who drank it.170

Two years after his death, Feb. 21, 1173, Becket was solemnly canonized by Alexander III., who had given him only a lukewarm support in his contest with the king. There is scarcely another example of such an early recognition of saintship; but public sentiment had anticipated it. At a council in Westminster the papal letters of canonization were read. All the bishops who had opposed Becket were present, begged pardon for their offence, and acquiesced in the pope’s decision. The 29th of December was set apart as the feast of "St. Thomas of Canterbury."

King Henry II., as the supposed author of the monstrous crime, was branded with a popular excommunication. On the first news, he shut himself up for three days in his chamber, rolled himself in sackcloth and ashes, and obstinately refused food and comfort. He lived secluded for five weeks, exclaiming again and again, "Alas, alas that it ever happened!"  He issued orders for the apprehension of the murderers, and despatched envoys to the pope to exculpate, himself and to avert the calamity of excommunication and, an interdict. After long delay a reconciliation took place in the cathedral of Avranches in Normandy, before the papal legates, the archbishop of Rouen, and many bishops and noblemen, May 22, 1172.171  Henry swore on the holy Gospels that he had neither commanded nor desired the death of Becket, that it caused him more grief than the death of his father or his mother, and that he was ready to make full satisfaction. He pledged himself to abrogate the Statutes of Clarendon; to restore the church of Canterbury to all its rights and possessions; to undertake, if the pope should require it, a three years’ crusade to Jerusalem or Spain, and to support two hundred knights in the Holy Land. After these pledges he said aloud: "Behold, my lord legates, my body is in your hands; be assured that whatever you order, whether to go to Jerusalem or to Rome or to St. James [at Compostella in Spain], I am ready to obey." He was led by the bishops into the church and reconciled. His son, who was present, promised Cardinal Albert to make good his father’s pledges. This penance was followed by a deepest humiliation at Canterbury.

Two years later, July 12, 1174, the king, depressed by disasters and the rebellion of his wife and his sons, even made a pilgrimage to the tomb of Becket. He dismounted from his horse as he came in sight of the towers of Canterbury, walked as a penitent pilgrim in a woollen shirt, with bare and bleeding feet, through the streets, knelt in the porch of the cathedral, kissed the sacred stone on which the archbishop had fallen, threw himself prostrate before the tomb in the crypt, and confessed to the bishops with groans and tears his deep remorse for the hasty words which had led to the murder. Gilbert Foliot, bishop of London, once Becket’s rival and enemy, announced to the monks and bystanders the king’s penitence and intention to restore the rights and property of the Church, and to bestow forty marks yearly on the monastery to keep lamps burning at the martyr’s tomb. The king, placing his head and shoulders on the tomb, submitted to the degrading punishment of scourging, and received five stripes from each bishop and abbot, and three stripes from each of the eighty monks. Fully absolved, he spent the whole night on the bare ground of the crypt in tears and prayers, imploring the forgiveness of the canonized saint in heaven whom he had persecuted on earth.

No deeper humiliation of king before priest is recorded in history. It throws into the shade the submission of Theodosius to Ambrose, of Edgar to Dunstan, of Barbarossa to Alexander, and even the scene at Canossa.

Fifty years after the martyrdom, Becket’s relics were translated with extraordinary solemnity from the tomb in the crypt to the costly shrine of Becket, which blazed with gold and jewels, in the reconstructed Canterbury cathedral (1220). And now began on the largest scale that long succession of pilgrimages, which for more than three hundred years made Canterbury the greatest sacred resort of Western Christendom, next to Jerusalem and Rome. It was more frequented than Loreto in Italy and Einsiedeln in Switzerland. No less than a hundred thousand pilgrims were registered at Canterbury in 1420. From all parts of England, Scotland, Wales, and Ireland, from France and the far north, men and women flocked to the shrine: priests, monks, princes, knights, scholars, lawyers, merchants, mechanics, peasants. There was scarcely an English king, from Henry II. to Henry VIII., who did not from motives of piety or policy pay homage to the memory of the saint. Among the last distinguished visitors were John Colet, dean of St. Paul’s, and Erasmus, who visited the shrine together between the years 1511 and 1513, and King Henry VIII. and Emperor Charles V., who attended the last jubilee in 1520. Plenary indulgences were granted to the pilgrims. Some went in December, the month of his martyrdom; a larger number in July, the month of the translation of his relics. Every fiftieth year a jubilee lasting fifteen days was celebrated in his honor. Six such jubilees were celebrated,—1270, 1320, 1370, 1420, 1470, 1520. The offerings to St. Thomas exceeded those given to any other saint, even to the holy Virgin.

Geoffrey Chaucer, the father of English poetry, who lived two centuries after Becket’ martyrdom, has immortalized these pilgrimages in his Canterbury Tales, and given us the best description of English society at that time.

The pilgrimages promoted piety, social intercourse, superstition, idleness, levity, and immorality, and aroused moral indignation among many serious and spiritually minded men.

The superstitious idolatry of St. Thomas was continued down to the time of the Reformation, when it was rudely but forever crushed out. Henry VIII. cited Becket to appear in court to answer to the charges of treason and rebellion. The case was formally argued at Westminster. His guilt was proved, and on the 10th of June, 1538, St. Thomas was condemned as a "rebel and a traitor to his prince." The rich shrine at Canterbury was pillaged; the gold and jewels were carried off in two strong coffers, and the rest of the treasure in twenty-six carts. The jewels went into the hands of Henry VIII., who wore the most precious of them, a diamond, the "Regale of France," in the ring on his thumb; afterwards it glittered in the golden, "collar" of his daughter, the bigoted Queen Mary. A royal proclamation explained the cause and mode of Becket’s death, and the reasons for his degradation. All festivals, offices, and prayers in his name were forbidden. The site of his shrine has remained vacant to this day.

The Reformation prepared the way for a more spiritual worship of God and a more just appreciation of the virtues and faults of Thomas Becket than was possible in the age in which he lived and died,—a hero and a martyr of the papal hierarchy, but not of pure Christianity, as recorded in the New Testament. To the most of his countrymen, as to the English-speaking people at large, his name has remained the synonym for priestly pride and pretension, for an arrogant invasion of the rights of the civil estate. To a certain class of English High Churchmen he remains, like Laud of a later age, the martyr of sacerdotal privilege, the unselfish champion of the dowered rights of the Church. The atrocity of his taking-off no one will choose to deny. But the haughty assumption of the high prelate had afforded pretext enough for vehement indignation and severe treatment. Priestly robes may for a time conceal and even protect pride from violence, but sooner or later it meets its just reward. The prelate’s superiority involved in Becket’s favorite expression, "saving the honor of my order," was more than a king of free blood could be expected to bear.

This dramatic chapter of English history may be fitly closed with a scene from Lord Tennyson’s tragedy which presents the personal quality that brought about Thomas à Becket’s fall.172

 

John of Salisbury.

 

Thomas, I would thou hadst returned to England

Like some wise prince of this world from his wars,

With more of olive-branch and amnesty

For foes at home—thou hast raised the world against thee.

 

Becket.

 

Why, John, my kingdom is not of this world.

 

John of Salisbury.

 

If it were more of this world it might be

More of the next. A policy of wise pardon

Wins here as well as there. To bless thine enemies —

 

Becket.

 

Ay, mine, not Heaven’s.

 

John of Salisbury.

 

And may there not be something

Of this world’s leaven in thee too, when crying

On Holy Church to thunder out her rights

And thine own wrong so piteously. Ah, Thomas,

The lightnings that we think are only Heaven’s

Flash sometimes out of earth against the heavens.

The soldier, when he lets his whole self go

Lost in the common good, the common wrong,

Strikes truest ev’n for his own self. I crave

Thy pardon—I have still thy leave to speak.

Thou hast waged God’s war against the King; and yet

We are self-uncertain creatures, and we may,

Yea, even when we know not, mix our spites

And private hates with our defence of Heaven.