Convocation of Canterbury

“ Since then the Convocation of York has been regularly summoned, met, adjourned, and been prorogued, without even the dutiful address to the crown, which is regularly discussed and adopted in Canterbury. In the year 1847, a spasmodic attempt at life was manifested in this venerable and ill-used institution. Archbishop Harcourt had consented that an address to the crown should be adopted, and himself procured a draft to be approved by the bishops. ”

“ On all these subjects the House of Lords heard from him an able and eloquent presentation of the church's view of the matter in hand, while his frequent exposition of current business in his diocesan charges did much to instruct the country clergy in affairs of state. But the public act with which he is most identified was the reform of convocation. Since 1717, when the two houses of the Canterbury province entangled themselves in hopeless controversy over Bishop Hoadly's attack on the nonjurors, no license from the crown to debate had been given to them. ”

“ In 1668 he was admitted archdeacon of Canterbury upon the king's presentation, but he resigned the post in 1670. In 1677, being now prolocutor of the Convocation, he was unexpectedly advanced to the archbishopric of Canterbury. ”

“ The fact that the Convocations of Canterbury and York have taken in hand and carried through a revision of the rubrics of the Prayer Book will seem to those who hold that our Church ought to advance pari passu with the Church of England, and no faster, another evidence of the timeliness of the American movement. Under the title of The Convocation Prayer Book there has lately appeared in England an edition of the Prayer Book so printed as to show how the book would read were the recommendations of York and Canterbury to go into effect. ”

“ The passers-by of to-day are not those whom we should see, for we should bend our mind’s eye on monk, priest and pilgrim, on knight, dame and squire, or king, queen and prince; it needs no vivid imagination to call up these shades of the past. But above all and through all the pageantry of old days looms the church; Canterbury is a city of churches, of priories, monasteries, hospitals. There is St Dunstan’s, where in the Roper vault they say is the head of Sir Thomas More ”

“ As Chancellor, his magnificence had outshone that of the King, he himself was gay and debonnair, clothed in purple and fine linen, feasting royally, and with hundreds of knights in his train. Nothing that the world could give had he denied himself. He was not only impressed personally with his unfitness, but the monks of Canterbury themselves, in conclave, desired to elect one of their own choice. ”

“ FIRST VIEW As we stand upon the summit of Bell Harry Tower—more happily called the Angel Steeple—of Canterbury Cathedral, looking down upon city and countryside, much of the history of England lies spread beneath our feet: the Britons were at work here before the Romans came marching with their stolid legions; here to Ethelbert, Saxon King of Kent, St Augustine preached the gospel of Christ; in the church below, Becket was murdered and the Black Prince buried; to this city, to the shrine of St Thomas, came innumerable pilgrims, one of them our first great English poet ”

“ He persistently styled himself knight of Malta, and sometimes king of Jerusalem. The Canterbury people of all classes were won over by his handsome face and figure, his strange oriental garb, and his apparent generosity, which was really derived from loans raised out of his credulous followers. At the general election of December 1832 he was nominated for Canterbury, and polled 375 votes; standing for East Kent a few days later he polled only four. In March 1833 he started a paper at Canterbury, called ‘The Lion,’ which ran to eight numbers. ”

“ Defeat never made him idle or despondent, and his noblest triumphs, the conversion of the last heathen people of English race, were won in exile. At the same time, he was hasty, impolitic, and perhaps over-jealous for his own honour. In the part that the two archbishops took against him it is hard not to see some fear lest the magnificence of the northern prelate should endanger the authority of Canterbury in Northumbria, though they certainly acted for the good of the Church in insisting on the division of his vast diocese. ”

“ But it is not history—not the story of dead events—that chiefly fascinates us in Canterbury, or, indeed, in any such city; it is the lives of the men who made that history, who took part in those events. Here, as we walk the streets, we think of Augustine, of Thomas, of the Black Prince, of many another; and of many great men of letters—Chaucer, Erasmus, Marlowe, Thackeray, Dickens, Stanley: the first painting for us the Canterbury of his own days, the last that of past times. ”

“ This splendid church, representing the finest achievement of Norman master-builders and workmen, rising high above the domestic quarters of the monastery and standing forth conspicuously from every part of the little walled city, then consisting, to a considerable extent, of low wooden houses, had now reached the stage in its development when it was to be the scene of the murder which was to make Canterbury the most famous resort of pilgrims in Europe. ”

“ Indeed, Canterbury is a city of great memories.
Augustine was, of course, the monastery’s chief treasure, and next came the body of St Mildred which was given to the house by Canute. It must never be forgotten by those who would look at things mediæval with mediæval eyes, that in those days the dead were more powerful than the living; even kings humbled themselves before the bones of dead saints. ”

“ He then summoned the clergy to the election to Canterbury. Probably both himself and the chancellor had had their eyes on the see, and each regarded the other as a rival. There is a letter of John to the convent of Canterbury mentioning a report that they intended to elect the chancellor, warning them that they were bound to consult the Archbishop of Rouen, who was sent for this purpose by the king, and one from himself to the same effect (Epist. Cant. pp. 346, 347) ; the Bishop of Ely, on the other hand, forbade him to go to Canterbury till they had met (Diceto, ii. 92) . ”

“ Since these mediæval days Canterbury has seen many changes. The splendours of which Camden and Leland wrote have passed away, the countless number of its churches has been reduced, and their magnificence no longer strikes the eye of the stranger. The lofty walls and their twenty-one watch-towers, which encircled the city in a complete ring when Chaucer’s knight, after paying his devotion at the shrine of St. Thomas, went out to see their strength, and “pointed to his son both the perill and the doubt,” are all gone, and the Conqueror’s mighty castle is turned into a coal-pit. ”

“ But both ways we usually fall short of the fact; they were most picturesque, most uncomfortable. We have seen how once upon a time the Cathedral, now so decorously grey,{67} blazed with purple and fine linen; so too was it with all life; the very streets now so sober-minded were then a veritable kaleidoscope; all life was highly coloured, save that of the cloister. In those times in the good city of Canterbury it must have been as difficult when one took his walk abroad to avoid the sight of a hospital or of a holy house as to-day to escape from the clangour of church bells. ”

“ Her counsellors, including Bocking, Hadley, Masters, and Thwaites, were committed to the Tower, brought before the Star Chamber, and they too confessed. So the plot exploded. A scaffold was erected near to Paul’s Cross, from which the Nun and her chief aiders and abettors read their confessions; this function was repeated at Canterbury in the churchyard of the monastery of Holy Trinity. We need not here go into the political capital which Cromwell made out of the intimacy of various enemies of the King with the Maid. ”

“ The administration of the See belonged to Pole as much before his consecration as after it; but it will be seen that eighteen men and women perished at the stake in the town of Canterbury alone,—besides those who were put to death in other parts of the diocese—and five were starved to death in the gaol there after the legate's installation. He was not cruel; but he believed that, in the catalogue of human iniquities, there were none greater than the denial of the Roman Catholic Faith, or the rejection of the Roman Bishop's supremacy ”

“ Not by that way only did the vast crowds reach Canterbury, for there was scarcely a road that at some period of the year did not send its contribution to the throng which jostled through the gates into the narrow streets leading to the monastery gateway. Year after year wealth poured into the Cathedral coffers, and pilgrims went away lighter in spirits and in purse, but each carrying with them the little leaden bottle in which the infinitely diluted blood of the martyr mixed with water was distributed. ”

“ Any relic of the body itself had still greater value, its efficacy in curing the multifarious ailments of the pilgrims who began to flock to Canterbury being immeasurable. And when the neighbouring monastery of St. Augustine burned with desire to possess a relic of St. Thomas they offered Roger, the keeper of the "Altars of the Martyrdom," the position of Abbot of their own abbey if he would contrive to bring with him a portion of Becket's skull. ”

“ Most Nonconformists with an instinct for English history could see something poetic and national about the Archbishop of Canterbury as an Archbishop of Canterbury. It is when he does the rational British statesman that they very justifiably get annoyed. ”

“ Present there or coming in soon after, were the Archbishop William of Canterbury, Roger, Bishop of Salisbury, the head of King Henry's administrative system, and seemingly a few, but not many, barons. On the question of making Stephen king, the good, though not strong, Archbishop of Canterbury, was greatly troubled by the oath which had been sworn in the interest of Matilda. "There are not enough of us here," his words seem to mean, "to decide upon so important a step as recognizing this man as king, when we are bound by oath to recognize another." ”

“ With Canterbury in such feeble hands, the leadership in the Church and primacy in the councils of the crown passed to stronger men: such as John Thoresby, Archbishop of York till 1373; Thomas Brantingham, treasurer from 1369 to 1371, and Bishop of Exeter from 1370 to 1394; and above all to Edward's old servant, William of Wykeham, chancellor from 1367 to 1371, and Bishop of Winchester, in succession to Edington, from 1367 until 1404. ”

“ We, William, by Divine Providence Archbishop of Canterbury, Primate of all England, Legate of the Apostolic See, hereby publicly and expressly do protest for ourselves and for our Holy Metropolitan Church of Canterbury, that to any statute passed or hereafter to be passed in this present Parliament, began the third of November, 1529, and continued until this present time ”

“ The elder Froude doubtless belonged to what the younger calls “the sacerdotal party.” His wish undoubtedly was “to re-establish the memory of the Martyr of Canterbury.” To those with whom historic truth comes foremost, and who have no special fanaticism, sacerdotal or anti-sacerdotal, the effort of a “sacerdotal party” to re-establish the memory of Thomas of Canterbury may seem at least as worthy an object as to re-establish the memory of Flogging Fitzgerald, or of King Harry himself. ”

“ Whereupon, Canterbury collapsed, while the Northern Primate, vainly attempting to dissemble his delight, professed his utter surprise, his total unpreparedness, and straightforth hastened to improve the occasion. But before fifty words had passed the jubilant Prelate's lips, Sir John, having discovered his mistake, rose quickly in his stirrups, so to speak, and pulled up the impetuous York just then getting into his stride. Genially beaming on the slighted Canterbury, Sir John called on "The Primate of All England" (a snub this for York) to return thanks. ”

“ And indeed dead as she is and silent, Canterbury is worthy of resurrection if only because she is as it were a part of him and a part, too, of our origins, the well, though not the source from which the Faith was given us. For some thirteen hundred years when men have spoken of Canterbury, they have had in mind the metropolitan church of England, the great cathedral which still stands so finely there in the rather gloomy close behind Christ Church gate, rightly upon the foundations of its predecessors, Roman, Saxon, and Norman buildings. ”

“ Many are the pilgrims who have entered Canterbury by this gate: kings and queens of all ages, foreign emperors and princes, armed knights{194} and humble scholars, good Queen Philippa and Edward Plantagenet, Henry of Agincourt, Margaret of Anjou, Chaucer and Erasmus. Many, too, are the long processions which have wound down this hill-side: newly created archbishops followed by a brilliant train of bishops and courtiers on their way to be enthroned in the chair of St. ”

“ The ground of the quarrel was the right of the town to the appointment of bishops. The Pope had canonically appointed Stephen Langton to the see of Canterbury, and the monks of Canterbury refused to submit to any other archbishop. John, however, was determined that his favourite, John de Gray, Bishop of Norwich, should receive the appointment, and he sent two knights with a body of soldiers to Canterbury, to drive the rebellious monks out of the country. ”