Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 8.djvu/323

Rh THE ANGEVIN HEIGNS.] ENGLAND 305 their path was the new doctrine of the immunity of the clergy from secular jurisdiction. These years were a time of comparative peace, broken chiefly by a war (1159) with Lewis of France for the succession of Toulouse. Tin s war was, as we shall presently see, of great importance in a constitutional point of view ; and in it the chancellor s functions, ecclesiastical and civil, did not hinder him from showing himself in the third character of a stout man-at- arms. At last, on the death of Archbishop Theobald (1162), Henry committed the fatal mistake of raising his great minister to the see of Canterbury, and the further mistake of expecting the new archbishop to remain his minister. The step was in every way new ; other bishoprics had been used as rewards for temporal services; the primacy had been reserved, if not always for saints, at least for men whose character was not prominently worldly. Most archbishops had been monks. And though, both before and after the Conquest, archbishops of Canterbury had been rulers of the realm in more characters than one, no archbishop had ever held a post in the king s service like that of chancellor. The see was forced upon Thomas ; but, once archbishop, he put on the character of his new office in all its fulness. As a mere deacon holding secular office, he had been the king s most trusty servant ; now become priest, bishop, archbishop, he threw up his secular post, and became the champion of the ecclesiastical claims in their most extravagant shape. Quarrels soon arose between him and the king, quarrels which neither king nor primate carried on in the spirit of Anselm and Henry I. Thomas showed himself violent and provoking ; Henry showed himself mean and spiteful. The first great quarrel arose out of the ecclesiastical claims ; for Thomas, in his new position, tried to shelter even the most guilty churchman from any punishment at the hands of the temporal courts. The king caused a body of ordinances, known as the Constitutions of Clarendon, to be drawn up, which professed to state the law as it stood under Henry I. before the anarchy. They were certainly not, as the ecclesiastical party called them, innovations of his own ; but it was only natural that they should seem innovations to the ecclesiastical party. There was to be no appeal to any power out of the realm without the king s special leave. As a natural consequence, the clergy were not to leave the realm without the king s licence. The ecclesiastical courts were no longer to shelter offenders against the laws of the land. Advowsons were declared to be lay fees. The baronial character of the estates of bishops and abbots was distinctly asserted, and on this followed, as a logical consequence, the rule that those estates should pass into the king s hands during a vacancy. Elections of prelates were to be made in the king s chapel, with his consent. Another provision was added, not wholly new, and which hardly touched the general question, but which still marks the growth of the new ideas. The villain was not to be admitted to holy orders without the con sent of his lord. The ecclesiastical legislation of Henry II. was, in fact, only a little more than a codification of the practice of Henry I. ; it was only a little less than a fore stalling of the legislation of Henry VIII. It contained in novations on the practice of England before the Norman Con quest; but] they were the innovations of Flambard, not of Henry himself. But the attempt was premature. Thomas, in a moment of weakness, assented to the Constitutions, and then withdrew his consent. Henry, thus far in the right, put himself in the wrong by raking up all kinds of forgotten and frivolous demands against the archbishop. Thomas fled from England and found shelter in France. It was the interest of Lewis to support any enemy of Henry. A weary time of dispute and intrigue followed, in which Thomas was but feebly supported by the pope Alexander III. Henry sometimes threatened to acknowledge the imperial antipope; sometimes he forsook his own posi tion; once, men said at the time, he went so far as himself to accept a legation from the pope. At last the first quarrel was patched up (1170). Thomas came back to England only to find a new and distinct ground of quarrel. The king had caused his eldest son Henry to be crowned by Roger archbishop of York, to the prejudice of the rights of the see of Canterbury. New excommunications, new disputes, followed. At last four His knights in the king s service, mistaking a few hasty words death, of their master, crossed from Normandy to England, and slew the archbishop in his own church. Thomas really died for the rights of the church of Can- Later terbury, not for any more general principle. But the second years of quarrel, as could not fail to happen, got mixed up in men s Henry, minds with the first ; and the murdered archbishop was looked on as a saint and as a martyr to the general privileges of the church. The dead martyr was a more dangerous enemy to the king than the living primate had been. We now enter on the third period of Henry s reign, a time of nineteen years, in which Henry had to struggle against foes on every side, but chiefly against foes that were of his own household. His overlord of France, his vassal of Scotland, his own nobles, his wife and his own children, were all arrayed against him. As far as England was concerned, Henry was successful against all. The rebellion of the earls and the Scottish invasion (1174) both failed. On the conti nent his fate was harder. The death of his eldest son, the rebellion of the youngest, the loss of the city of his birth, utterly broke down his spirit. At the age of fifty-six he died (1189) at Chinon, far away alike from England and from Normandy, a worn-out and broken-hearted man. The great lawgiver was gone, and his dominions passed Reign of to his rebellious son Richard. This king has in popular Richard belief become one of the heroes of England. That he s &quot; should ever have been looked upon as such, that he should by strangers have been so looked upon even in his own time, shows how England had come to be looked on as the head and centre of the vast dominion of her kings. Personally Richard, though born on English ground, was the least English of all our kings. Invested from his earliest years with his mother s Southern dominions, Richard of Poitou had little in him either of England or of Normandy : he was essentially the man of Southern Gaul. Twice in his reign he visited England; to be crowned on his first acces sion, to be crowned again after his German captivity. The rest of his time was spent in his crusade, and in various continental disputes which concerned England not at all, except so far as she had to pay for them. The mirror of chivalry was the meanest and most insatiable of all the spoilers of her wealth. For England, as a kingdom, all that he did was to betray her independence by a homage to the emperor, which formed a precedent for a more famous homage in the next reign. His reign is an important one in constitutional progress, but as such it was the reign of his ministers and not of himself. One event towards the end of his reign has been often misunderstood. A com- motion was raised in London (1196) by William the son of ]jam Osbert, known as William with the Long Beard, a fellow- Fitz. crusader and seemingly a personal friend of the king s. Osbert. William professed to be the champion of the poor against the rich. Out of this a romantic story grew that he was the champion of the English against the Normans. The writers of his own time show that he was deemed a martyr by his followers and a traitor by his enemies ; but they give no hint that he was the champion of one race against another. Nor do they give us any clue as to his own descent, English or Norman. There is not a word in any writer of the reisn of Henry or Richard to make us think VITI. - 39