Theodore I of Canterbury

“ But now all England was divided into bishoprics, which all paid obedience to the metropolitan see of Canterbury; and in each bishopric the countryside was furnished with clergy to work under the bishop. Some have said that Theodore cut up England into parishes, each served by a resident priest, but things had not advanced quite so far by his day. Under Theodore and his successors the bishops and clergy of all the kingdoms frequently met in councils and synods, so that England was united into a spiritual whole long before she gained political unity. ”

“ Oswiu's assent to the vigorous measures of organization undertaken by a Greek monk, Theodore of Tarsus, whom Rome despatched in 668 to secure England to her sway as Archbishop of Canterbury, marked a yet more decisive step in the new policy. The work of Theodore lay mainly in the organization of the episcopate, and thus the Church of England, as we know it to-day, is the work, so far as its outer form is concerned, of Theodore. ”

“ Anxious to learn fully the duties of the priesthood and of the monastic life, he made a journey to Kent, for the coming of Archbishop Theodore and Hadrian in 669 had made Canterbury the seat of learning and ecclesiastical order. ”

“ Colman, Bishop of Lindisfarne, the leader of the Celtic party, withdrew, and Wilfrid, afterward bishop of York, took the lead under the influence of the Roman tradition. The Church of the Anglo-Saxon kingdoms, now in agreement as to custom, was organized by Theodore of Canterbury (668-690) , and developed a remarkable intellectual life, becoming, in fact, for the first part at least of the eighth century, the centre of Western theological and literary culture. ”

“ Augustine, first Archbishop of Canterbury, to the time of Archbishop Lanfranc of blessed memory, there was no archdeacon in the city and diocese of Canterbury. But from the time of Archbishop Theodore, who was sixth from St. Augustine, to the time of the aforesaid Lanfranc, there was in the church of St. Martin's, a suburb of Canterbury, a bishop ordained by Theodore, under the authority of Pope Vitalian, who in all [35] the city and diocese of Canterbury undertook duties in the place of the archbishop, conferring holy orders, consecrating churches, and confirming children during his absence. ”

“ 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 ”

“ A charter issued at Westminster, evidently soon after the coronation, is witnessed by “N. Epọ de Ely et Canc.” Eyton, Itin. Hen. II., p. 2, note 2. [1279] Dial. de Scacc., l. i. c. 8 (Stubbs, Select Charters, p. 199) .
Under the old English constitutional system, alike in its native purity and in the modified form which it assumed under the Conqueror and his sons, the archbishop of Canterbury was the official keeper of the royal conscience and the first adviser of the sovereign. Theobald had contributed more than any other one man to secure Henry’s succession ”

“ In the year of grace 1157, being the third year of the reign of King Henry, son of the Empress Matilda, the said King, by the advice and entreaty of Theobald, Archbishop of Canterbury, conferred the Chancellorship upon Thomas, Archdeacon of Canterbury, and bestowed upon him many revenues, both ecclesiastical and of a secular nature, and received him so much into his esteem and familiarity, that throughout the kingdom there was no one his equal, save the King alone. ”

“ 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 ”

“ 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. ”

“ He swore that he had not desired the death of Thomas, but to make satisfaction for the anger he had shown, he promised to take the cross, to give funds to the Knights Templars for the defence of Jerusalem, and to found three religious houses. He renounced the Constitutions of Clarendon. He swore allegiance to Alexander against the anti-Pope. He promised that the possessions of Canterbury should be given back as they were a year before the flight of Thomas, and that his exiled friends should be restored to their possessions. No king of England had ever suffered so deep a humiliation. ”

“ But though Thomas, canonised by the pope on the prayers of the people of England, could be struck out of the calendar of the Church of England by the arbitrary will of King Henry VIII., as an enemy of princes, and his shrine destroyed, it is beyond the power of a king to reverse the sentence of history or to blast for ever the fame of a great and courageous champion of the poor of this land. Time makes little of the insults of Henry VIII. Thomas of Canterbury died for the religion that in his day protected the people against the despotism of the crown. ”

“ His father, a London merchant, was a friend of Theobald, archbishop of Canterbury, who thus became acquainted with the young man, helped him in his education, and induced him to enter the church, also bringing him to the notice of King Henry II, who soon after appointed him lord chancellor of England. ”

“ The primacy of Canterbury had long carried with it an authority second only to that of the Pope himself, and it was impossible to carry out the intended reform unless a man devoted to the royal authority, and careless [190] of the interests of the Church, were seated in the archiepiscopal chair. It was evident that for this purpose no fitter man could be found than Becket; and on the death of Theobald, the Archbishop of Canterbury (1161) , the king recommended his chancellor to the bishops as the person to succeed to the primacy. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Canterbury is so situated that ever since England has been and as long as England shall be, this city has been and will be a centre of the nation’s life.
At first entrance to it, Canterbury does not impress with its antiquity; there are, indeed, the ancient Cathedral, ancient gates and ancient houses. But as the sights of the city grow familiar, as its atmosphere enters into our souls, as its story becomes known, gradually and surely we realise that most of what we see now is but youthful compared with the great age of the place ”

“ We seem to be in a world of poetry." (I protest, No.) "Edward is four centuries later than Ethelbert and Augustine; but the origin of Canterbury is commonplace and prosaic compared with the origin of Westminster." (Yes, that's true.) "We can hardly imagine a figure more incongruous to the soberness of later times than the quaint, irresolute, wayward prince whose chief characteristics have just been described. His titles of Confessor and Saint belong not to the general instincts of Christendom but to the most transitory feelings of the age." ”

“ When great Rome broke into England lost in mist, here certainly she established a city that was as it were the focus of all the ports of the Straits whence most easily a man might come into England from the continent. Canterbury grew because she was almost equally near to the ports we know as Lympne, Dover, Richborough and Reculvers, so that a man setting out from the continent and doubtful in which port he would land, wholly at the mercy of wind and tide as he was, would name Canterbury to his correspondent in England as a place of meeting. ”

“ Stern, Cameron, Rosenthal, and their followers, is without precedent in modern history. Theodore at last took no trouble to hide his contempt for Europeans and their governments.
He knew in August, 1864, that before a month an answer to his letter to the Queen had arrived at Massowah. "Let them wait my good pleasure," was the only observation he made on the subject. It is probable that he would never have taken any notice of her Majesty's letter or of the mission sent to him, if his rapid fall—at that time beginning—had not influenced his conduct. ”

“ And there is a foolish monument to him, where once stood the butter-market, outside Christ Church gate. Of the man’s manner and appearance we know not anything; his works live, but the man is dead even to our mind’s eye. Yet there are some of us who would rather meet his shadow here than even those of Chaucer and of Dickens; perchance because we know him not.
Canterbury is yet in many ways a mediæval city, despite railways and electric lights. We can enter it by the fourteenth century West Gate, built by Archbishop Simon of Sudbury, the one gateway mercifully spared to us out of six ”

“ PILGRIMS TO CANTERBURY (A.D. 1179) .
In 1179 Louis VII., King of France, in the disguise of a [Pg 193] common pilgrim visited Canterbury as a humble supplicant at the tomb of À Becket, for the restoration of sanity to the Dauphin, a prayer that was instantly complied with. Louis proved his sincerity by offering a rich cup of gold and the famous stone called Regal of France, which Henry VIII. appropriated to his own use for a thumb ring. The great St. Thomas not only attended to the prayers of mankind and restored eyes, limbs, and even life to hundreds ”

“ A man of intellect and learning was required at the head of them. “King Henry loved a man,” it was said. He knew Cranmer and valued him. The appointment was made known in the first month of the new year. Before the new Primate could be installed a Bull of Confirmation was still legally necessary from Rome. The King was in haste. The annates due on the vacancy of the see of Canterbury were despatched at once, the King himself advancing the money and taking no advantage of the late Act. ”

“ 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 ”

“ After certain robberies, rapes, and murders, committed in the king's wars at the siege of Toulouse in Languedoc, and in other places else, as he was come home again into England, he gave himself to great study, not of the holy scriptures, but of the bishop of Rome's lousy laws, whereby he first of all obtained to be archdeacon of Canterbury, under Theobald the archbishop; then high chancellor of England; metropolitan, archbishop, primate; pope of England, and great legate from antichrist's own right side. ”

“ In some of these gifts, too, we see clearly a desire to atone for past wrongs. Canterbury, which had suffered heavy losses at the hands of Thurkil and his wild comrades, was assured of its liberties and immunities early in the reign. [243] Another act of expiation was the visit and gift to Glastonbury, the famous monastery that had received the bones of Edmund Ironside. A century after Canute's time Edmund's grave was covered with a "pall of rich materials, embroidered with figures of peacocks." Legend ascribes the gift to Canute, and may in this case be trustworthy. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Henry, however, seems to have felt that he had gone too far, for he hurried back to France, and met Thomas at Fréteval on 22 July. Not a word passed between them about the customs; the king promised complete restitution to the archbishop and his friends, and, after a long argument, declared himself willing ‘to be guided by the archbishop's counsel’ as to the amends due to the see of Canterbury for the violation of its rights in the matter of the coronation. ”