The English Church in the Middle Ages Part 5

Unlike Henry of Winchester, Theobald was guided by the new ideas which were born of the Cistercian revival. While desire for the secular greatness of the Church, her splendour and her wealth, led Henry to scheme and change sides according as he found Stephen or the Empress acting against her interests, Theobald sought a higher power for her, and attached himself to Bernard, who ruled Christendom by his sanct.i.ty and his intellectual gifts. Theobald's household was the home of a little society of men of like mind with himself. One of them was a young clerk of London, named Thomas, who soon became his chief adviser; another was John of Salisbury, who held a new office, that of the archbishop's secretary, or, as he would be called now, his chancellor; for Theobald saw that the archdeacons were by no means trustworthy officers, and appointed a secretary to control the administration of ecclesiastical law. This was a matter in which he took a deep interest, and the frequent appeals that were now made to Rome gave it a special importance. In 1149 he brought over from Italy a doctor named Vacarius, and set him to give lectures at Oxford on the civil law, which supplied the method of procedure in ecclesiastical cases. In the next reign the study of the canon law, which was first systematized by Gratian of Bologna, was introduced into England, and then the clergy had a code as well as a method of procedure of their own. Stephen sent Vacarius out of the country, probably because he hated new things; but the study of the civil law could not be stopped so easily.

With aims and interests such as these, Theobald had no desire to see the anarchy which is generally called Stephen's reign prolonged. How terrible in some parts that anarchy was, when men "said openly that Christ and His saints slept," need not be described here. Some of the bishops rode to war and behaved like lay barons; others were held back by fear from censuring the unG.o.dly. Nevertheless the Church still exhibited a pattern of order, and strove to restore peace to the kingdom. Although Theobald entered into no schemes for dethroning Stephen, he was fully convinced of the importance of securing the succession for Henry of Anjou. His counsellor, Thomas, now archdeacon of Canterbury, was urgent on the same side, and they were at last joined in their efforts after peace by Henry of Winchester. The chief obstacle was removed by the death of Eustace, and the Treaty of Wallingford soon followed. Henry II. owed his throne in no small degree to the support of the clergy.

[Sidenote: Thomas the Chancellor.]

[Sidenote: Taxation of ecclesiastical knights' fees.]

The young king chose for his chancellor Thomas, the archdeacon, to whose good offices he was much indebted. Thomas's father, Gilbert Becket, a wealthy trader, had been port-reeve of London. Thomas was sent to school at Merton priory, and was taken away from the school there while still young because his parents suffered serious losses. Nevertheless he was able to study at Paris, and after his return to England was often the companion of a rich n.o.ble named Richer de l'Aigle, who took him out hunting and hawking. As his father was now badly off, he became clerk to a merchant, whose name in English was Eightpenny, and after a while was introduced to the archbishop, entered his household, and soon became his most trusted adviser. He took orders, and received many rich preferments.

As chancellor, he held one of the most important offices in the kingdom, and his duties brought him into constant companions.h.i.+p with the king, who treated him as an intimate friend. He was diligent in his secular work; he loved magnificence, and lived with grace and splendour. No chancellor had been so great a man before. He probably had a large share in the reorganization of the administrative machinery. One change was certainly due to him--the commutation of military service for a money payment. A step in this direction was made in 1156, when Henry laid a tax called scutage on Church lands held by knight's service. Theobald objected to this imposition, but his objections were fruitless. Three years later, when the king was undertaking a war in Toulouse, the chancellor advised him to take money from all who owed him military service, instead of calling upon them to go to the war. The general importance of this measure does not belong to our subject; the scutage of Toulouse concerns us here simply because it was levied on church-lands. It excited far more indignation among the clergy than the earlier tax, because they saw that it was the beginning of a system, not an isolated expedient. The chancellor was held to have done the Church a grievous injury, and even his friends traced his later troubles to his sin against her.

[Sidenote: Thomas, archbishop of Canterbury, 1162-1170.]

When, in 1162, Henry bade his chancellor accept the primacy, he hoped to find him a powerful ally in carrying out the reforms he contemplated.

Thomas a.s.sented unwillingly, for he was resolved, if he took the office, to maintain the claims of the Church to the utmost, and he knew that this would bring him into collision with the king. Although his life had been pure, it had not been clerical, and he had not even taken priest's orders when he was elected archbishop. He now entered on a new life. Everything that was then held becoming in a churchman and an archbishop he practised to the utmost. With the whole-heartedness with which he had thrown himself into his work as chancellor, he now, in a post that must have been less congenial to his nature, set himself to live up to the highest ideal then current of what an archbishop ought to be as regards both life and policy.

He had enemies, for some were jealous of him, and some were honestly scandalized at his appointment. Ever regardless of the fear or favour of men, he added to their number by prosecuting the rights of his see to lands that had been alienated from it. In acting thus, his conduct, though perhaps injudicious, certainly became his office. His position as the head of the nation first brought him into opposition to the Crown. Henry wished that a certain tax, probably a survival of the Danegeld, which was paid to the sheriffs, should be brought into the royal revenue. The archbishop objected, no doubt because he thought that this would revive the old tax.

"Saving your pleasure, lord king, we will not give it as revenue; but if the sheriffs and officers of the counties do their duty by us, we will never refuse it them by way of aid." The king was wroth. "By the eyes of G.o.d!" he cried, "it shall be given as revenue, and entered in the king's books; and you ought not to oppose me, for I am not oppressing any man of yours against your will." The archbishop answered, "By the eyes you have sworn by, my lord king, it shall not be levied from any of my lands, and from the lands of the Church not a penny!" He seems to have carried his point, and thus the first successful opposition to the will of the Crown in a financial matter proceeded from the Church of England. Nor was the archbishop slack in a.s.serting the spiritual rights of his office; for he excommunicated one of the king's tenants-in-chief, and when Henry bade him absolve him, answered that it was not the king's business to say who should be bound and who unbound. In this matter the king demanded no more than the observance of one of the Conqueror's rules; the archbishop a.s.serted no more than one of the eternal rights of the Church, which she had now become strong enough to claim.

[Sidenote: Ecclesiastical discipline.]

A greater conflict between the claims of the Crown and of the Church was at hand. The Conqueror had strengthened himself by increasing the power of the clergy; Henry could only establish the strong and orderly government he aimed at by lessening it. We have seen how rapidly clerical influence had grown during the anarchy owing to the suspension of the royal authority, the multiplication of appeals, the attention paid by Theobald to ecclesiastical law, and other causes. Clergy guilty of secular offences were tried solely by ecclesiastical courts; and as the spiritual judges, after inflicting an ecclesiastical penalty, refused to give up the clerical offender to a secular court, many gross crimes met with wholly inadequate punishments. For the number of persons in orders of different degrees was very large, and all alike claimed immunity from civil jurisdiction; and it is evident, though this was a matter of less consequence, that all offences against the clergy were also claimed as belonging to the province of the ecclesiastical courts.

[Sidenote: Const.i.tutions of Clarendon, 1164.]

At a great council, held at Westminster in 1163, Henry asked if the bishops would obey the "customs of his grandfather," if they would agree that clerks convicted of secular crimes should, after degradation, be punished as laymen. The primate declared that clerks were not subject to the jurisdiction of an earthly king, and would only agree that a clerk already degraded should for another offence be punished by a lay judge.

Henry asked the bishops if they would obey the "customs," and their reply, "Saving our order," was virtually a refusal. At a later interview he persuaded Archbishop Thomas to promise obedience to the customs unreservedly. He then summoned a council at Clarendon, and there, under strong pressure, the primate and his suffragans took the required pledge.

The council then proceeded to inquire what the customs were, and a body of rules was drawn up called the "Const.i.tutions of Clarendon." By these Const.i.tutions all cases touching advowsons and presentations were to be tried in the king's court. The convicted clerk was no longer to be protected by the Church. Appeals from the archbishop were to be heard by the king, and were not to be carried further without his leave. Bishops and all who held of the Crown as by barony were to take part in the proceedings of the king's court until it came to sentence touching life or limb. Elections to bishoprics and royal abbeys were to be made by the higher clergy of the church in the king's chapel and with his a.s.sent, and the elect was to do homage and fealty to the king as his liege lord before he was consecrated. And the son of a villein was not to be ordained without his lord's leave. When the primate heard the Const.i.tutions he refused to set his seal to them, declared he would not a.s.sent to them as long as he had breath in his body, and suspended himself from his sacred office until he had received the Pope's absolution from his hasty promise.

The Const.i.tutions, which were founded on the relations existing between the Church and the State in the reign of Henry I., were an attempt to bring matters back to a stage which had now been pa.s.sed, to define relations that had hitherto been continually changing, and to establish a system which, however generally excellent, was contrary to the spirit of the age.

[Sidenote: Council of Northampton.]

Archbishop Thomas twice tried to flee to the Pope, and failed through stress of weather or because the sailors were afraid of the king's anger.

In October he was summoned to appear before the king's council at Northampton, and there an effort was made to crush him by multiplied suits. At last the king demanded an account of all the sums that had pa.s.sed through his hands during his chancellors.h.i.+p, though he had already received a quittance. At Westminster and at Clarendon the bishops had sided, though timidly, with their primate, for the nature of the dispute forced them to do so. Now, when the whole business was reduced to a personal attack upon him, they sided with the king, just as their predecessors had done when Rufus attacked Anselm and Henry disputed with him. For though the pretensions of the Church limited the power of the Crown, and though Anselm and Becket each in his own day struggled for those pretensions, the bishops as a body were always on the king's side, for he had given them their office either because they had served him well, or because he expected them to be useful to himself. Accordingly Gilbert Foliot, bishop of London, a churchman of considerable worldly wisdom, who held that a quarrel with the king would injure the interests of the Church, advised the archbishop to submit to Henry, and other bishops said much the same. Thomas forbade them to sit in judgment on him, and appealed from his lay judges to the Pope. Before long he escaped from England, sorely against the king's will, and went to Pope Alexander III.

at Sens, who at once condemned the Const.i.tutions.

[Sidenote: The archbishop in exile.]

Alexander III. was in exile in France, for his rival, Victor, who was upheld by the Emperor Frederic I., was powerful in Italy, and he naturally held that it was more important to secure his own position than to uphold the English primate. He could not afford to offend Henry, lest he should take the side of the Emperor and his schismatical Pope. Accordingly he bade the archbishop keep silence for a while; and as Thomas did not think it seemly to stay in the dominions of Lewis of France, who was at enmity with Henry, he took up his abode in the Cistercian abbey of Pontigny, in Burgundy. When Victor died, in 1165, the Emperor set up another Pope, and made alliance with Henry, who was, perhaps, only saved from actively espousing the cause of the imperialist antipope by the wisdom of his justiciar, the earl of Leicester. Indeed, the amba.s.sador he sent to the Emperor's council at Wurzburg renounced the Pope in his master's name and promised that Henry would help Frederic's antipope. That year, however, Alexander returned to Rome, and felt himself strong enough to send the exiled primate a legatine commission. In virtue of this commission, Thomas in 1166 went to Vezelay, and there, in the abbey church, in the presence of a large congregation, excommunicated all the king's party, both clergy and laymen. He had heard that Henry was ill, and therefore did not excommunicate him. Nevertheless, with a voice choked with tears, he threatened him by name with a like sentence. In return, Henry so frightened the Cistercians that Thomas was virtually forced to leave Pontigny. This retaliation was as foolish as it was tyrannical; for the archbishop took shelter in France, and so gave Lewis a fresh means of annoying the English king. The details of the quarrel are intricate and somewhat wearisome. None of those concerned acted with dignity. Henry weakened his own position by appealing to the Pope to judge between him and one of his own subjects; he a.s.sented to the Pope's decrees when they were in his own favour, and resisted them when they were against him.

Thomas was violent, and multiplied excommunications. Several efforts were made to bring about a reconciliation between him and Henry, and a meeting took place between them at Montmirail in 1169. The archbishop, however, would not be content with anything less than a complete surrender on the king's part, and the conference ended fruitlessly. Alexander sometimes upheld, and sometimes thwarted Thomas, just as his own interests dictated, and pursued a course that seemed to the stout-hearted archbishop mean and pusillanimous. "In the Roman court," he indignantly wrote, "Barabbas escapes and Christ is put to death." Lewis simply used the quarrel to his own advantage, and supported the archbishop just as he supported the lords of Henry's va.s.sal states against him.

[Sidenote: The archbishop's martyrdom, 1170.]

A new phase of the dispute arose from Henry's wish to have his eldest son crowned. The archbishop of Canterbury alone had the right to perform the ceremony; and when Thomas insisted on this right he was not contending for an empty honour; for coronation was held to be necessary to kings.h.i.+p, and it was the archbishop's duty to receive a pledge of good government from the king he crowned. Alexander first agreed to allow Roger of York to crown the young king, and, later, sent to prohibit him from doing so.

Henry prevented the prohibition from being brought into England, and Roger performed the ceremony. Lewis now threatened war, and the Pope's advisers urged him to vindicate the rights of Canterbury. Henry was thus driven to a reconciliation, and Thomas returned to his see. He at once suspended the bishops who had taken part in the coronation, renewed the excommunications he had already p.r.o.nounced against some of them, and excommunicated some of his personal enemies who had annoyed him by violent and brutal acts. The consciousness that he was endangering his own life had no weight with him, for he constantly antic.i.p.ated and even aspired to martyrdom. When the king, who was still in Normandy, heard of his proceedings he was furiously angry, and thoughtlessly exclaimed to his courtiers, "Of the cowards who eat my bread, is there none that will rid me of this troublesome priest?"

Moved by these hasty words, four knights crossed the Channel, proceeded to Canterbury, and after insulting the archbishop in his palace, broke into the church where the monks had compelled him to take shelter. One bade him flee, for else he was a dead man. "I welcome death," he said, "for G.o.d and for the liberty of the Church." They tried to lay hands on him, and then the feelings of his younger days, long kept down by self-mortification, a.s.serted themselves. He struggled with the armed men, and threw one to the ground. He cried to another not to dare to touch him, and called him by a foul name. The knights shouted, "Strike! strike!" Then he commended his "soul and the Church's cause to G.o.d, to St. Denys of France, to St.

Elphege and all the Saints." His murderers attacked him with their swords, and he died with holy words upon his lips. He fell a martyr to the privileges or "liberty" of the Church. That these privileges were not really beneficial to her is not to the purpose. Men and causes are to be judged by the standard of their own age, and neither then nor for centuries later did any doubt that he laid down his life for the cause of G.o.d and His Church.

[Sidenote: Henry's bishops.]

The murder of the archbishop seemed likely to ruin the king. Miracles were worked at the tomb of the martyr, and he was at once accepted as a saint.

Although his murder did not cause the revolt that followed it, the disorganization it produced made revolt opportune. The only bishop concerned in this movement was Hugh Puiset of Durham, a crafty and powerful prelate, who had some underhand dealings with the Scots, and whose castles were in consequence seized by the king. Henry renounced the Const.i.tutions, promised not to hinder appeals, and submitted to a scourging from the monks of Christ Church. Yet the Church lost much; for the quarrel put an end to the effort to attain to a higher ecclesiastical standard that had been made by Theobald and the clerks of his household, and a fresh wave of secularity swept over the Church. This was largely due to Henry's policy. He kept sees vacant and took their revenues. "Is it not better," he would say, "that the money should be spent on the necessary affairs of the kingdom than on the luxuries of bishops? For the bishops of our time are not like what bishops used to be; they are careless and slothful about their office, and embrace the world with all their arms."

He might have made bishops of another stamp, but when, after his absolution, six vacant sees were filled up, he took care that they should go to men who belonged to his own party. Lincoln he gave to his natural son, Geoffrey, who was then a mere lad. The Pope ordered that his consecration should be deferred; yet he held the see, though he was not even a priest, for eight years, until Alexander III. commanded him either to take episcopal orders or to give it up. Then he gave it up, became chancellor, and on his father's death was elected to York. Towards the end of his reign Henry insisted on the election of a bishop of n.o.bler character to the see of Lincoln. This was Hugh of Avalon, the bravest and n.o.blest churchman of his day, whom the king had brought over from Burgundy to govern the little monastery he had founded at Witham, and whom, to his honour, he liked and reverenced. The Lincoln chapter would have preferred a more worldly bishop, and elected several ministers of state and courtiers, one after another. Henry would have none of them; he would not, he said, "for the future, give a bishopric to any one for favour, or relations.h.i.+p, or counsel, or begging, or buying, but only to those whom the Lord should choose for Himself." Canterbury remained vacant for five years after the death of Archbishop Thomas, for some difficulties arose about the election. At last Richard, prior of Dover, was elected. The young King Henry, a worthless man and a rebellious son, affected to be scandalized at his father's interference in episcopal elections, and declared that he managed matters by saying, "I charge you to hold a free election, yet I forbid you to elect any one but my clerk Richard." The archbishop was an easy-going man, and did not please Becket's party.

Neither he nor the bishops caused the king any trouble during the remainder of his reign.

[Sidenote: His general relations to the Church.]

Although the Const.i.tutions of Clarendon were nominally abandoned, they had considerable effect on the future relations between Church and State, and indeed determined their development. Even in Henry's reign the privileges which Archbishop Thomas had claimed for the Church were slightly curtailed. With the papal sanction, clerks were made amenable to the forest laws; for what business had they to hunt? And the murderers of clerks were given up to the civil courts; for the claim of the Church to punish them was reduced to an absurdity when it sheltered Becket's murderers from justice, and they were simply punished by such penalties as the Pope, the supreme spiritual judge, could inflict. As Henry caused the lands of the Church, which had hitherto escaped taxation, to bear their share of scutage, so when, for the first time, he introduced a tax on movables the clergy were taxed equally with the laity. This tax, called the Saladine tenth, was granted the king by a great council, and the property both of clerks and laymen was a.s.sessed by a jury.

[Sidenote: Legates.]

After Becket's death Henry took care to keep on good terms with Rome. At his request a legate named Hugh visited this country, partly, at least, to settle a new dispute between Canterbury and York, and from him the king obtained leave to bring the clergy under the forest laws. So far had the martyrdom of St. Thomas injured the independence of the kingdom that even a matter of domestic law was submitted to the papal judgment. Hugh's mission was not successful. At a council held at Westminster in 1176, Roger of York tried to squeeze himself into a more honourable seat than the archbishop of Canterbury. This led to a disturbance in which sticks and fists were freely used. Hugh ran about the chapel in terror, and finding "that he had no authority in England," soon went his way. A few months later Henry showed that, in spite of his late humiliation, he was not prepared to be the Pope's humble servant; for when another legate landed on his way to Scotland, he sent two bishops, who asked him "by whose authority he dared to enter his kingdom without his leave," and exacted a promise from him that he would do nothing here without his will.

[Sidenote: Heresy.]

Early in the reign we find the spiritual and the secular power acting together in a case that was wholly new to Englishmen. Some thirty German-speaking heretics, probably natives of Flanders, landed here, and made one disciple--a woman. No Christian heretics had ever appeared in England before. Henry summoned a council of bishops to meet at Oxford in 1166; the heretics were found guilty, and were handed over to the "Catholic king." They were condemned to be branded, flogged out of the city, and then to be shunned by all men. Left without food or shelter in the midst of winter, they soon perished. The special action taken with regard to these heretics ill.u.s.trates the uncertainty of the law as to the punishment of heresy. Here as elsewhere the Church kept itself free from the pollution of blood, and handed the heretic over to the secular power.

Although in the reign of John a clerk who apostatized to Judaism was burnt at Oxford, burning for heresy had no place in the common law of England, except such as was given it by writers of law-books, who were under the influence of the Roman jurisprudence. England was generally free from heresy until the time of Wyclif; the papal Inquisition, though used to some extent for the suppression of the Templars, was not introduced into the kingdom, and the subject of heresy and its punishment is of no practical importance until the appearance of the Lollards.

[Sidenote: Conquest of Ireland.]

While the Scottish bishops were, as we have seen, released by the Pope from dependence on the see of York, the influence of the Church of England was extended both in Ireland and Wales. The Church in Ireland seems to have done little to civilize the people: it had lost the early glories of its missionary days, while it retained its lack of order and its inability to rule itself or others. Almost to the eve of the Conquest it had no archbishops, and had a crowd of bishops without a regular diocesan system.

These and other irregularities caused some of the bishops of the Ostmen's towns to seek consecration from Lanfranc and Anselm. St. Bernard and Eugenius III. tried hard to introduce some order into the Church, and their efforts were seconded by the Irish bishop, Malachi. Four sees were raised to metropolitan rank, and some steps were taken towards establis.h.i.+ng an orderly system. Still, much remained to be done, and Hadrian IV. (Nicolas Brakespear), the only English Pope, willingly sanctioned Henry's proposal to invade Ireland, and in 1155 sent him the bull "Laudabiliter," bidding him conquer the land for the increase of the Church, together with a ring conveying invest.i.ture of the country. He did this in virtue of the forged donation of Constantine, which purported to put all islands under the lords.h.i.+p of the Pope. Hadrian's answer to Henry's request was, therefore, a repet.i.tion of the answer that Alexander II. made to the request of William. Both Popes alike sanctioned the invasion of a Christian land by a foreign enemy in order to spread the power of the Roman Church. Henry did not take advantage of Hadrian's bull until after the death of Becket. Ireland was conquered by private adventurers, and it only remained for him to receive its submission. He held the land by the Pope's gift, and he was not unmindful of the benefit he had received, for he called together a synod at Cashel, which pa.s.sed decrees bringing the Church of Ireland into conformity with the Roman order. By far the larger part of the country, however, was virtually unaffected by the Conquest, and equally unaffected by the Council of Cashel. Nor did it become thoroughly papal until Henry VIII. quarrelled with the papacy. Then he disowned the Roman suzerainty by causing himself to be proclaimed king of Ireland, and the papacy appeared as the champion of a country which it had given over to foreign invasion. Unfortunately the bishops that Ireland received from the English kings were often mere ministerial officials, and sometimes little better than the fierce lords of the English Pale.

[Sidenote: The English Church in Wales.]

In Wales, Henry used the Church for political ends, and ruled the country by means of its Norman bishops. The consequence of this policy was, that the bishops were worldly and greedy men, and were hated by the natives, the clergy were ignorant and debased, and the people resisted the claims of the Church. Gerald de Barri, archdeacon of Brecknock, a young man of a n.o.ble Norman house, though on his mother's side of the blood-royal of Wales, was appointed by Archbishop Richard as his commissioner to reform the abuses of the Church. He was brave and energetic, very learned and very witty, and most of his books, and especially his "Topography of Ireland" and his "Ecclesiastical Jewel," are delightful reading. While effecting many reforms in the Welsh Church, he seems to have excited the clergy to attempt to gain metropolitan rank for the see of St. David's.

This would have been wholly contrary to Henry's policy, for it would have given the Welsh a national leader, and he refused their request. Gerald spent many years of his life, partly in the pursuit of this object, and partly in trying to procure his confirmation as bishop of St. David's. He was twice elected to the bishopric, once in the reign of Henry, and again at the accession of John; he laid his case before Innocent III., and engaged in a long suit at the papal court. St. David's, however, never became a metropolitan see, and he never became its bishop.

[Sidenote: Richard's crusade.]

Among the causes that magnified the papal power here and elsewhere must be reckoned the crusades. The Pope alone could release from their vow those who had taken the cross; he became, in a certain sense, the director of the military force of Christendom, and he gained a new claim to interfere in the mutual relations of states. England took little part in the first two crusades, though in Stephen's time our seaport towns joined in a naval crusade of burghers and seamen, who took Lisbon from the Moors. In 1185 the patriarch of Jerusalem urged Henry to come to the help of the Holy city. Two or three barons went to the war, and the king thought of going in person, for he was the head of the Angevin house, to which the kings of Jerusalem belonged. He did not do so, for the same reason which, it is alleged, kept the Confessor from making his proposed pilgrimage. A great council, evidently mainly ecclesiastical in character, reminded him of his coronation oath, and told him that it was his duty to stay and look after the interests of his own kingdom. Two years later Christendom was startled by the news of the fall of Jerusalem. Henry, his son Richard, and many n.o.bles took the cross, and Archbishop Baldwin, accompanied by Gerald de Barri, preached the crusade in Wales, and gained a vast number of recruits. Henry died before he could perform his vow, and Richard immediately began to prepare for his expedition. It was important alike for the good of the kingdom and for his own success that he should decide who should go with him, and accordingly he obtained leave from Clement III. to dispense with crusading vows for money. Before he sailed he sold all the lands, jurisdictions, and offices he could find purchasers for.

[Sidenote: William Longchamp, bishop of Ely, 1189-1197.]

Richard left the administration in the hands of churchmen, and all through his reign the affairs of the kingdom were managed by bishops. William Longchamp, bishop of Ely, bought the chancellors.h.i.+p; Hugh of Puiset, the justiciars.h.i.+p, and the earldom of Northumberland; and Richard, bishop of London, was treasurer. William Longchamp was a man of low birth, lame and insignificant in person, haughty in manner, of overweening ambition, and careless of the rights of others, active, able, and faithful to his master. Hugh of Puiset, who came of a n.o.ble house, was stately and gracious, wary, and full of secular affairs--a rich and powerful prince-bishop. The two ministers soon quarrelled. Bishop William proved the stronger, and put Hugh under arrest. "By the life of my lord," he said, "you shall not go hence till you give me hostages for the surrender of your castles; for I am not a bishop arresting a bishop, but a chancellor arresting his rival." He received a legatine commission, and became sole justiciar. He used his power arrogantly, and so enabled John, the king's brother, to a.s.sume the position of a defender of the rights of others. His fall was brought about by an act of violence. Geoffrey, the elect of York, who had met with much opposition from his chapter and from the bishop of Durham, had at last been consecrated in France by the Pope's orders. He now returned to England, in spite, it is said, of having promised the king that he would not do so. An attempt was made to arrest him when he landed at Dover, and he fled to the priory church for refuge.

The soldiers of the constable of the castle, the chancellor's brother-in-law, dragged him out of the church by his feet and arms, and he was imprisoned in the castle. There was great indignation at this act.

Hugh of Lincoln at once excommunicated the constable and all who had abetted him. Churchmen spoke of Geoffrey as a second St. Thomas, and the lay barons were wroth at the insult put on the son of the late king. All parties united against the chancellor; he was deposed from his office and compelled to leave the kingdom.

[Sidenote: Archbishop Hubert, 1193-1205.]

Richard was made prisoner as he was returning from the crusade, and his brother John raised a revolt against him. The king committed his interests to Hubert Walter, bishop of Salisbury. Hubert, as dean of York, had been one of Geoffrey's enemies; he was made bishop by Richard, and accompanied him to Acre, where, we are told, he was equally distinguished as a warrior, a commander, and a pastor. Archbishop Baldwin having died at Acre in 1190, the suffragan bishops and the monks of Christ Church, in obedience to the king's will, elected Hubert to the archbishopric in 1193, and shortly afterwards Richard appointed him chief justiciar. A relation of Ralf Glanville, the famous justiciar of Henry II., Hubert had been brought up in a good school for statesmans.h.i.+p, and he did credit to his training. He excommunicated John, took his castles, and ensured his fall by raising the money for the king's ransom. On Richard's return Hubert placed the crown on his head at his second coronation at Winchester, and the king obtained the legatine commission for him. When Richard again left England, Hubert virtually became viceroy of the kingdom. He triumphed over his old enemy, Geoffrey, sent judges to York to decide the dispute between him and his chapter, allowed them to seize the estates of the see, and upheld the cause of the canons, who obtained a papal judgment against their archbishop. Geoffrey left England, and remained abroad for the next five years. During his absence Hubert visited York both as legate and as justiciar.

[Sidenote: Bishop Hugh of Lincoln opposes an unconst.i.tutional tax, 1198.]

More honourable to Hubert than this almost personal triumph is his administrative work. Of this it will be sufficient to say here, that he had constantly to find large sums of money for the king; that he did so as far as possible by const.i.tutional methods; that in doing so he accustomed the people to make elections and act by representatives; and that he preserved internal order and developed the constructive work of Henry II.

Richard's demands for money were heavy, and though Becket had once opposed Henry on a fiscal question, no const.i.tutional resistance had ever yet been made to a tax proposed by the Crown. Now, however, the nation was to receive from the Church its first lesson in the principle that taxes should only be imposed with the consent of those who have to pay them. At an a.s.sembly held at Oxford in 1198 the archbishop, on the king's behalf, proposed to the barons and bishops that they should maintain three hundred knights for a year to serve across the sea. Then Hugh of Lincoln answered, that though he had come to England as a stranger, he would maintain the rights of his church, and that though it was bound to do military service within the kingdom, the king could not claim such service beyond the sea, and that he would not contribute to a foreign war. Herbert of Salisbury also spoke to the same effect. Their answers naturally appealed to the interests of the lay barons, and the demand was refused, greatly to the king's annoyance.

Hubert's position was not altogether pleasant. The king was always calling on him to find fresh supplies, and he was hara.s.sed by a suit brought against him at Rome by his chapter about the college he was building at Lambeth, a subject that belongs to another volume of this series. A serious trouble had also arisen in 1196. The taxes pressed heavily on the lower cla.s.ses, and a revolt was raised in London, where the richer citizens were accused of throwing the burden of taxation on the poor. The leader of the discontented citizens was a demagogue named William Fitz-Osbert, or William Longbeard, as he was commonly called. Hubert tried to arrest him, but William fled for refuge to the church of St.

Mary-le-Bow. By Hubert's order the church was set on fire, and William was smoked out, taken, and hanged. The church belonged to the convent of Christ Church, and the monks, indignant at this breach of sanctuary, complained to Pope Innocent III., who in 1198, wrote to Richard urging him to dismiss his minister, and commanding that for the future bishops and priests should not take part in civil administration. Hubert was therefore compelled to resign the justiciars.h.i.+p.

Much was lost by the absorption of the clergy in secular matters, and St.