not so ready; if my estimate of his character is right, it was impossible that he should be. Mr. Robertson has gone through the matter at some length, and comes to this conclusion :-"Nothing, as appears to us, can be plainer than that the Archbishop's cause was decidedly wrong." I have nothing to gainsay in Mr. Robertson's arguments; I have nothing to gainsay in his conclusion, if it simply means that the Archbishop's cause was wrong in the sense that we, seven hundred years later, can clearly see that it was wrong. A privilege which was thoroughly mischievous in itself was defended by arguments, scriptural, historical, and legal, all of which were thoroughly fallacious. But if Mr. Robertson means that the Archbishop's cause was wrong in the sense that he was morally blameworthy for supporting it—that is, that it was so clearly wrong that he was morally bound to see that it was wrong-I am hardly prepared to go that length. It is certain that many wise and good men supported the same cause, some of them men who thoroughly took in all that could be said on the other side. It was not left for the nineteenth century to weigh the actions of Henry and Thomas in the balance of a perfectly fair judgement. Ages before either Froude arose, William of Newburgh, the father of historical criticism, as Giraldus is the father of comparative philology, held his court on King and Primate, and, while ruling that the zeal of both was praiseworthy, gave sentence that the zeal of both had sadly outrun discretion.† The same line is taken by others from whom we might have looked for less impartiality than from a critic far away in another province. The King's case is stated with all fulness and fairness by more than one of the Archbishop's own biographers.‡ No one does more thorough justice to Henry than Herbert of Bosham, the Primate's most fiery admirer, the man who did not scruple to reprove King Henry to his face for setting a bad example to a long string of followers who have not known how an Emperor of the Romans ought to be described. § Herbert pours forth all his rhetoric *Becket, p. 80. The two chapters of this writer which are given to this subject, the sixteenth and the twenty-fifth of his second book, should be most carefully studied, as a wonderfully fair contemporary judgement on both sides. He says of the King (ii. 130): "Acri motu turbatus, in spiritu vehementi contra malefactores clericos posuit leges, in quibus utique zelum justitiæ publicæ habuit, sed fervor immoderatior modum excessit. Sane hujus immoderationis regiæ nostri temporis episcopos tantum respicit culpa, quantum ab eis processit et causa.' In speaking of the Archbishop (ii. 154), he was tied by the reverence due to a canonized saint; yet he ventures to say: Itaque quod a venerabili pontifice tunc actum est, nec laudandum esse judico, nec vituperare præsumo; sed dico quod si vel modice in hujus modi a sancto viro per zeli laudabilis paulo immoderatiorem impetum est excessum, hoc ipsum est sacræ, quæ consecuta noscitur, igne passionis excoctum." He argues that Gregory the Great, in his wise condescension to human weakness, would have acted otherwise than Thomas did. Henry's case is well put by the anonymous Lambeth writer, Giles ii. 85. And in the other accounts, as in Roger of Pontigny, 120, if Henry's case is not stated in the same formal way, yet the facts which were his justification are plainly set forth. § See the most remarkable conversation between the King and Herbert of Bosham, reported by William Fitz-Stephen, Giles, i. 266; Robertson, iii. 99. (On coming to England, I find Mr. Robertson's edition of William Fitz-Stephen and Herbert of to set forth the righteous motives of both disputants. King and Primate alike had a zeal for God; which zeal was according to knowledge, he will leave God himself to judge.* Now when men could so fairly and favourably judge what was to be said on the other side, we must allow that a cause which they accepted, though it may rightly seem monstrous now, must have had something about it which hindered it from seeming utterly monstrous then. Again, nothing is plainer than that, while statesmen and great churchmen were divided, popular feeling everywhere, in his own province and out of it, in his own country and out of it, went enthusiastically along with Thomas and his cause. From his first struggle at Northampton to his last struggle at Canterbury, an admiring multitude is always ready to welcome, to applaud, to wait upon his steps. We may with advantage stop to think what this fact proves and what it does not prove. We need not discuss the meaning put upon it by Thierry, though the fact is valuable the other way, as showing how well a man of Norman descent could win the love of all classes of Englishmen. Nor is the importance of the fact put aside by Mr. Froude's easy process of talking about a "mob." Let it be that it was only the "mob" which followed Thomas from the gate of Northampton castle to the gate of St. Andrew's priory, and that it was only the "mob" which came forth from every town and village of Kent, from Southwark, from his own London, to welcome him on his last return. Mobs often go wrong in their judgements, but they hardly shower their applause on men who are known only as unscrupulous and tyrannical ministers. The popular admiration for Thomas in no way proves his cause to have been a cause in itself wise and righteous, a cause which we could wish to have triumphed in the long run; but it does prove that his cause was not at the time palpably the cause of wrong and oppression. Thomas was the champion of clerical immunities; if clerical immunities had been felt by the mass of the people as a wrong to themselves, they would not have applauded the champion of those immunities. Besides the religious-if it will please Mr. Froude, we will call it the superstitious-feeling which would draw the "mob" to the Primate's side, the mob would contain comparatively few who had suffered heavy and unpunished wrongs from priestly offenders; it would contain many who had been themselves, who had seen their friends and neighbours, rescued from the bloody sentences of the King's courts by the interposition of the milder jurisdiction of Bosham. I have therefore thought it right to verify my references to Dr. Giles' edition by the new, and doubtless more correct, text.) * Herbert has a whole chapter on this head, beginning at p. 102 (iii. 264, Robertson). At p. 108 (272) he bursts into a torrent of declamation in joint honour of both disputants: "O rex et O pontifex, quorum utrumque Dei apprehendit æmulatio." He winds up more gravely: "Certo enim certius quod uterque habuerit æmulationem, unus pro populo, alter vero pro clero; utrius tamen eorum fuerit cum scientia zelus, non hominis, qui cito fallitur, sed scientiarum Domini qui in fine declarabit judicium." + Nineteenth Century, July, 1877, p. 855. Elsewhere there are "crowds," "swarms," and the like. the bishop. A cause which was strongly supported by many of the highest minds of the age, and which was no less strongly supported by the mass of the people, must have had more to be said for it than Mr. Froude, and even than Mr. Robertson, seems to see. The arguments from Scripture, the Civil Law, and other sources, by which it was sought to defend the ecclesiastical privileges, may be fairly left to Mr. Robertson's refutation.* They are much on a level with most other such arguments in those ages. When we read Robert Grosseteste's dispute with his refractory canons, we decide that the bishop was right and the canons wrong; but we are in no way helped to that decision by the bishop's arguments about the sun, moon, and stars. When we read the great dispute about the relations between the crowns of England and Scotland, whatever conclusion we may come to, we are not led to it by the statements made on both sides about the children and the contemporaries of Brutus. Those ages were quite capable of arguments purely legal or purely logical. But in attempting disputation of a wider kind, they seem always to have mistaken mere illustrations-illustrations, some of them, which we should very likely make now, but which we should not make without a smile for serious arguments which proved something, But one special fallacy ran through all arguments on this subject. The course of affairs for several centuries in Western Europe, while it had been such as to throw much temporal power into the hands of the clergy, had also been such as at once to extend the class of clergy more widely, and to draw the line between them and the laity more broadly, than in any other time or country. It is not too much to say, with a keener observer than either Mr. Froude or Mr. Robertson, that "the clerical order in the middle ages extended far beyond the priesthood; it included in Henry's day the whole of the professional and educated classes." There is nothing like this in our own time; there never was anything like it in Eastern Christendom, where such learning as there was never died out among the laity. In the West the clergytaking that word in the widest sense-formed so distinct a class, and a class in many respects so superior to all other classes, that it is not wonderful if there grew up among them the very strongest form of that corporate or quasi-corporate spirit, that esprit de corps as it is called, which is found in a greater or less degree in all marked classes and professions. Considering again many features of the society in which they lived, it is not wonderful if the clergy sometimes fancied that they, the ministers of the Church, were themselves the Church, and if they applied to the clergy, as distinguished from the laity, much which Scripture says, or was interpreted to say, of the Church as distinguished from the world. This way of looking at things almost naturally led, on the part of the more zealous members of the order, into a way of looking at the civil power which is quite unintel* Becket, pp. 77-85. + Green History of the English People, i. 164. : ligible in modern times, and which would always have been unintelligible in the East. It is of course, in all times and places, an easy figure of speech to compare a prince whose policy is disliked to all the persecutors and royal sinners in Scripture and ecclesiastical history. But the language of ecclesiastical writers sometimes goes far beyond this. It sometimes almost puts on a tone of Manichæan dualism, as if that one of the two swords which was wielded by Cæsar had been put into Cæsar's hand, not by God, but by his enemy.* The doctrine of the Ghibeline came as the needful answer, and Henry, with all his Guelfic alliances, was really fighting the Ghibeline battle. A prodigious mass of talk of all these kinds is to be found in the writings of the time. It would not be hard to help Mr. Froude to a string of passages which would serve his purpose better than anything that he has either quoted or imagined. To a modern mind all this needs no refutation; my point simply is that the more reasonable forms of this teaching were accepted by good and moderate men, and that, even in its extremest form, it was no cunningly devised scheme for the enslavement of the laity, but was simply something which grew up, like other things, by the force of circumstances. But we have the further fact that the champions of ecclesiastical privilege won for themselves by such championship the admiration of the people in general, of the "mob," in the words of Mr. Froude. Why should men sympathize with the exclusive privileges of a class to which they did not belong? The great master of English history has lately taught us that there is a stage in constitutional developement at which the assertion even of exclusive privileges may be popular. The privileges gained by one class may be felt to be a kind of earnest that the same privileges may one day be gained by other classes. This would seem to be true whenever the privilege is a mere exemption, when nothing is taken from the unprivileged class, but when all that is done is to exempt a single class from some grievance common to all. I confess that, notwithstanding Mr. Robertson's judgement the other way, I do see in the struggle for ecclesiastical exemptions a struggle for the mitigation of the criminal code. I do see in Thomas' generation the beginnings of a feeling against the barbarous punishments inflicted in the King's courts, of which there is no trace in the earlier part of the same century. Herbert of Bosham, stating the case of Thomas, claims it as a clerical privilege to be exempted from branding and mutilation. But he also implies that branding and mutilation are punishments which ought not to be inflicted on any man. His reasoning indeed is as much theological as humanitarian ; Some passages go almost further than this. Edward Grim (34), in describing the King's severities towards the criminous clerks, states the facts fairly enough; but when he comes to rhetoric, he speaks of "sanctus archiepiscopus, dolens conservos suos pro quibus Christus mortuus est tantis ascribi indignitatibus." † See Stubbs : Constitutional History, iii. 562. Becket, pp. 86, 87. it is a crime to deface the image of God.* Still, in whatever shapes and by whatever arguments, the voice of humanity was making itself heard. Punishments which men accepted as the ordinary course of things in the days of Henry the First were beginning to be cavilled at in the days of Henry the Second. It was openly said that such punishments were too bad for the clergy; it was beginning to be whispered that they were too bad for the laity also. In such a case as this, the establishment of the class privilege is distinctly a step towards the general deliverance. It is idle to dispute whether Thomas was or was not "a kindred spirit to our modern reformers and mitigators of the criminal code." It is enough for my purpose that the cause which he maintained was one which tended, even if indirectly, towards the mitigation of that code, and that the people instinctively saw that it did so tend. Nor, while judging of the ecclesiastical privileges, must we leave out of sight the fact that the rule cut both ways. It is most important to insist on the fact, one which I have already tried to point out, that the privileges of the clerical order were in some cases privileges in which that word seemed to have come back to the older meaning of privilegium. Mr. Froude makes one of his most daring assertions when he says, speaking of the murderers of Thomas, "They had been excommunicated, but they had received no further molestation. It has been conjectured that they owed their impunity to Becket's own claim for the exclusive jurisdiction of the spiritual courts in cases where spiritual persons were concerned. But the wildest advocates of the immunities of the Church had never dreamed of protecting laymen who laid their hands on clerks. The explanation was that the King had acted honourably by taking the responsibility on himself, and had not condescended to shield his own reputation by the execution of men whose fault had been over-loyalty to himself."† I am afraid, as I have hinted more than once, that we must not expect to find kings, bishops, or any class of men in the twelfth century acting honourably in the sense in which Mr. Froude doubtless understands "honourably." But let this pass. I do not know whether the phrase "it has been conjectured" is meant as a rebuke to Mr. Robertson; if so, Mr. Froude has got on rather dangerous ground. Much as I differ from many of Mr. Robertson's conclusions, greatly as I dislike the tone of much of his book, there are few people who are less likely to go wrong on a mere question of fact. Nothing is more certain than that Mr. Froude is utterly wrong in the above hasty * Comparing the ecclesiastical and temporal jurisdictions (i. 105; Robertson, iii. 269), he says of the former: "Inde est quod absque membrorum multilatione et sine omni deformatione corporis est. Spiritualis est enim. Adeo etiam quod ordinis privilegium excludat cauterium, quam tamen poenam communiter inter homines etiam jus forense damnat ne videlicet in homine Dei imago deformetur." So the preachers of humanity in the eleventh and twelfth centuries denounced the crime of selling Christians into slavery; those of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries denounced the crime of selling men of any kind. Yet there is one canon of Anselm (see Eadmer, 68) which seems to denounce slavery in the abstract. + Nineteenth Century, November, 1877, p. 685. |