Kate Norgate

“ John turns with eager hope from the picture of decaying discipline and declining morality, which he paints with firm hand but with averted face, to the prospect of a reformation which is to be the spontaneous work of the clergy and the “religious” themselves; Walter has seen this dream of reform buried in the grave of S. Thomas—perhaps we should rather say of Theobald—and now sees no way of dealing with the mass of corruption but to fling it bodily into the furnace of public criticism and popular hatred. ”

“ The wind which thwarted the designs of his foes was equally unfavourable to him; it was not till July 7 that he himself embarked at Barfleur, and even then the peril of crossing seemed so great that the sailors were inclined to put back. Henry raised his eyes to heaven: “If I seek the peace of my realm—if the heavenly King wills that my return should restore its peace—He will bring me safe into port. If He has turned away His Face from me and determined to scourge my realm, may I never reach its shores!” ”

“ One man alone still remained among the higher clergy who under more favourable circumstances might have taken up the work with a far more skilful hand than that of Thomas himself; but the leadership of Gilbert Foliot was made impossible by the subsequent course of events, which ranged all the religious opinion and all the popular sympathies of England on the side of the persecuted and martyred primate, and set Gilbert, as the primate’s most conspicuous adversary, in the light of an enemy to the Church, a rebel against her divine authority, and almost a denier of her faith. ”

“ As were the bishops, so, and even worse, were the lower clergy. The cry against the extortion and tyranny of the diocesan officials which rang at the opening of Henry’s reign through the Polycraticus of John of Salisbury rang yet more loudly and bitterly at its close through the pages of Walter Map and Gerald de Barri; the immorality which had once stirred the indignant zeal of Henry himself grew more wide-spread and more frightful year by year, as a direct result of his own shortsighted and selfish ecclesiastical policy. ”

“ Guy of Lusignan, with a fearlessness which speaks volumes in his favour as well as in Richard’s, had thrown himself unreservedly on the generosity and justice of the prince against whom all his race had for so many years been struggling in Aquitaine; his confidence was met as it deserved, and from the hour of their meeting in Cyprus to the break-up of the crusade, Richard and Guy stood firmly side by side. But they stood alone amid the ring of selfish politicians who supported Conrad, and whose intrigues brought ruin upon the expedition. ”

“ His father, William de Barri, the lord of Manorbeer, represented one of those Norman families of knightly rank who had made for themselves a home in South Wales, half as conquerors, half as settlers, in the days of Henry I. His mother, Angareth, was a granddaughter of Rees Ap-Tewdor, prince of South Wales—a child of his daughter Nest by her marriage with Gerald the constable of Pembroke; and the fiery Celtic spirit as well as the quick Celtic wit which the boy inherited from her shews itself alike in every act of his life and in every page of his writings. ”

“ Within twenty years of his death, no less than ten different biographies of S. Thomas were composed by writers of the most diverse characters—his old comrade John of Salisbury, three of his own confidential clerks, a Benedictine abbot of Peterborough, an Augustinian prior of Oxford, a monk of Canterbury who was probably an Irishman by blood, a French poet who had seen the primate in his chancellor-days, a Cambridge clerk who had joined him on the eve of his martyrdom. But meanwhile a new school of English history was springing up in the court instead of the cloister. ”

“ If he was to head a crusade, he must head it not merely as count of Anjou but as king of England, with all England’s powers and resources, material and moral, at his back; and this could only be if England sanctioned his undertaking. The “faithful men of the land”—the bishops and barons, the constitutional representatives of the nation—were therefore gathered together in council at Clerkenwell on March 18; Henry bade them advise him as they thought best for his soul’s health, and promised to abide by their decision. ”

“ He intrusted its command indeed to a far braver man than himself, but a man who was better fitted for action in the light of day than for such deeds of darkness as John delighted in. William the Marshal, the favourite comrade-in-arms of the younger King Henry, the faithful friend and servant of the elder one even unto death, the honoured minister of Richard, still clave to the last survivor of the house which he had loved so long and so well. ”

“ When scarcely more than a boy in years, Richard was already one of the most serious and determined of men. His sternness to those who “withstood his will” matched that of the Conqueror himself; and Richard’s will, even at the age of seventeen, was no mere caprice, but a fixed determination which overrode all obstacles between itself and its object as unhesitatingly as the old wiking-keels overrode the billows of the northern sea. He went down into Aquitaine fully resolved that the country should be at once, and once for all, reduced to submission and order. ”

“ Henry’s policy in Gaul was essentially the same as Fulk’s—a policy of consolidation, rather than of conquest. He clearly never dreamed, as a man of less cautious ambition might well have done in his place, of pitting the whole strength of his continental and insular dominions against that of the French Crown in a struggle for the mastery of Gaul; he seems never to have dreamed even of trying to free himself from his feudal obedience to a sovereign far inferior to him in territorial wealth and power ”

“ The young king himself was in natural temper as gallant a knight as ever sprang from the blood of Anjou; but he was crippled physically, socially and politically by a disease which made his life a burthen—he was a leper; his kingdom was torn by the mutual jealousies of the kinsmen on whom he was compelled to rely for its government and defence; while the political and military power of the Turks was growing to a height such as it had never before attained, under their famous leader Saladin. ”

“ At the close of the summer William of Scotland had gathered his motley host of Lowland knights and wild Galloway Highlanders, marched unhindered through the territories of the see of Durham, and was just beginning to ravage Yorkshire after the manner of his forefathers when Richard de Lucy and Humfrey de Bohun hastily reassembled their forces and marched against him with such promptitude and vigour that he was compelled to retreat not merely into Lothian but into the safer shelter of the Celtic Scotland beyond it. ”

“ At once a scholar, a theologian and a poet, an earnest political and ecclesiastical reformer and a polished man of the world, shrewd and practical, witty and wise, he soon rose high in the king’s confidence and esteem. Henry employed him in the most varied capacities—as a justice-itinerant in England, as an ambassador to the court of France, as a representative of English orthodoxy and theological learning at the Lateran council of 1179 ”

“ The barons of Anjou, of Maine, of Britanny or of Normandy had no longer any chance of freeing themselves from the yoke of the king from over-sea who had become a stranger to them all alike, save by accepting in its stead the yoke of the king with whom they had grown familiar through years of political and personal intercourse, and whom, in theory at least, even their own rulers had always acknowledged as their superior. Anjou, Maine and Britanny had all resolved upon Richard’s death that they would not have John to rule over them ”

“ The fusion in blood between Normans and English, which we saw making rapid progress under Henry I., was before the end of his grandson’s reign so far complete that the practice of “presentment of Englishry”—that is, the privilege whereby the hundred in which a man was found slain escaped paying the murder-fine to the treasury, if it could prove that the victim was not of Norman blood—had to be given up because the two nationalities had become so intermixed in every class above that of serfs that it could hardly ever be made out to which of them any man really belonged. ”

“ Somewhat more than a year after the primate’s death, Thomas the chancellor returned to England. He came, as we have seen, at the king’s bidding, ostensibly for the purpose of securing the recognition of little Henry as heir to the crown. But this was not the sole nor even the chief object of his mission. On the eve of his departure—so the story was told by his friends in later days—Thomas had gone to take leave of the king at Falaise. Henry drew him aside: “You do not yet know to what you are going. I will have you to be archbishop of Canterbury.” ”

“ Aquitaine, as soon as Henry had left it, drifted into a state of anarchy more frightful than any that had ever been known there before; the sudden conclusion of the war had let loose all over the country a crowd of mercenaries—commonly known as “Brabantines,” but really the off-scouring of every land from Flanders to Aragon—who wrought, as a local writer says, such havoc as had never been seen since the days of the heathen northmen. [1049] The evil in some measure brought its own remedy with it, for it drove the common people to take into their own hands the maintenance of peace and order. ”

“ In Anjou itself the recent aggrandizement of the Angevin house stirred up in Henry’s early years a spirit of patriotic loyalty which led more than one of his subjects to collect the floating popular traditions of his race, as the ballads and tales of old England had been collected by Henry of Huntingdon and William of Malmesbury, and weave them into a narrative which passed for a history of the Angevin counts; and one of these writers supplemented his work with a special memoir of Henry’s father, Geoffrey duke of the Normans. But the reign of Henry himself found no historian in the Marchland ”

“ Such a threat implied a far more serious danger in the south than in the north. The Aquitanian border was guarded by no such chain of strongly-fortified, stoutly-manned ducal castles as girt in the Norman duchy from Gisors to Tillières; and Henry’s hold over his wife’s dominions was very different from his grasp of the heritage of his mother. Twenty years of Angevin rule, which for political purposes had well-nigh bridged over the channel that parted England from Gaul, seem to have done nothing towards bridging over the gulf that parted Aquitaine from France and Anjou. ”

“ In the time of Ecgberht and of Charles the Great Ireland was still, as at the very dawn of history, peopled by a number of separate tribes or septs whose sole bond of internal cohesion was formed by community of blood;—whose social and political institutions had remained purely patriarchal in character, unaffected by local and external influences such as had helped to mould the life of England or of Gaul:—who had never yet coalesced into any definite territorial organization, far less risen into national unity under a national sovereign. ”

“ The English people had been with him from the first, and was learning year by year to identify its interests more closely with his; the Church, alienated for nearly ten years, was reconciled by his penance; feudalism was beaten at last, and for ever. The Welsh princes were his obedient and serviceable vassals; the Scot king had been humbled to accept a like position; a new subject-realm was growing up on the coast of Ireland. The great external peril which had dogged Henry’s footsteps through life, the hostility of France, was for a while paralyzed by his success. ”

“ They gave their lectures how and where they could, in cloister or church-porch, or in their own wretched lodgings, their pupils sitting literally at their feet, huddled all together on the bare ground; their living depended solely on their school-fees, and these were often received with one hand only to be paid away again with the other, for many an ardent young teacher of logic or rhetoric was, like John of Salisbury and Gerald de Barri, at one and the same time giving lectures in these arts to less advanced scholars and pursuing his own studies under some great doctor of theology. ”

“ Thomas alone remained undaunted; the bishops stood “like a flock of sheep ready for slaughter,” and the king’s own ministers implored the primate to save them from the shame of having to lay violent hands upon him at their sovereign’s command. For two days he stood firm; on the third two knights of the Temple brought him a solemn assurance, on the honour of their order and the salvation of their souls, that his fears were groundless and that a verbal submission to the king’s will would end the quarrel and restore peace to the Church. ”

“ No sooner had the barefooted messenger returned with his tidings of the king’s irreconcileable wrath than Thomas hurried to Soissons on a pilgrimage to its three famous shrines:—those of the Blessed Virgin, who had been the object of his special reverence ever since he learned the Ave Maria at his mother’s knee; of S. Gregory the Great, the patron of the whole English Church and more particularly of Canterbury and its archbishops; and of S. Drausius, who was believed to have the power of rendering invincible any champion who spent a night in prayer before his relics. ”