THE POWERFUL ECCLESIASTIC.

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designs for the unity and welfare of the realm, was the thing for an able and upright chancellor to do. When the archbishopric was forced upon him he Saw at a glance that to be the King's man as Primate, would be to clothe himself with weakness, and cover himself with shame. He had been an ecclesiastic, we must remember, before he had been chancellor. He saw the position from the ecclesiastical point of view; he knew, as the King could not know, what it demanded, and in accepting it he accepted, not a splendid position, a large income, and unbounded adulation, but the part which it was becoming that the Primate of all England at that time should play. We may well believe that when this flashed on him, his generous heart was touched by the thought of all the sorrow that must grow out of his appointment to the King; and there is evidence that either in jest or earnest he warned him of it. None the less did his hand close firmly on the crosier, when Henry, taking no heed to his warning, forced it on his acceptance, and in a moment he became a new man; assumed, not a new nature, for he was the same Becket all through, but a new conception of duty, of the work which he had to do; and this conception he held with unflinching firmness till death.

There is no doubt that this power to throw himself entirely into two so opposite parts or schemes of life, detracts a good deal from his moral grandeur; saint and martyr though he was, there was a lack of that inner simplicity and highmindedness which in St. Bernard or St. Louis would have forbidden them to attempt anything but the one thing which they believed they had been set to do by a higher hand. These men who can play two such different parts with such consummate power are only in the second rank, never in the first; one thing

N

I do,' is the word of the loftiest spirits. This instant apprehension by Becket of the true rôle which it became him as Primate to assume, as a man under higher duty to God than to the King, was at any rate a far nobler thing than if he had been content to play the contemptible part of a secular churchman, letting the King have his way at will in Church as well as in State. Becket, made archbishop, was every inch an archbishop, and resolved at once that his supreme duty was to the Church and not to the King. Nothing but respect is due to that decision. In those days it would have been an unspeakable loss to civilisation had the Church as well as the State fallen helpless into the monarch's hands. Chancellors were generally rewarded with a bishopric, but then they resigned their chancellorships. The Primacy was quite another matter. The Primate was the counterweight to the Crown, and under the Conqueror and his son Rufus, he had done noble service by the strength of his restraining hand. It would have been a terrible thing for England had there been no Lanfranc or Anselm to plead the cause of righteousness and mercy, with these able but brutal monarchs on whom no other moral restraint could have been imposed. Had Becket consented to hold both offices as the King's man, he would simply have betrayed the best interests of the country as well as of the Church. Henry was a masterly ruler, but a stern one; and he had in him not only the brutality of his mother's house, but the devilish tincture of his father's. The kind of restraint under which a vigorous and high-minded prelate would place him would have been greatly for his good, and the good of his country. It is however characteristic of Becket that the work to which his sense of duty, and doubtless his ambition also, prompted him, he must do in the most arrogant, offensive, and imperious way. Through

REFORM OF CHURCH ABUSES.

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the whole controversy his faults of temper were conspicuous. He seems to have striven to make the King understand how entirely he himself had broken with the past, and how little Henry had to hope at his hands. He wielded his crook just as he had used his seals, to make them the most effective instruments of power; and by this he at once satisfied his own large but not base ambition, and sought what he honestly believed to be the public good.

Appointed to the Primacy he immediately commenced to make such order in the Church's realm as he had already made in the secular polity. There were the direst irregularities in the estate of the Church, which needed to be corrected, and usurpations demanding both the chastisement of the offender and the exaction of restitution. Becket set at once about the correction in the most imperious and uncompromising spirit. His every act whether legally right or wrong to discuss that would be a long questionwas like a challenge; a defiance to the King as from a rival throne. For reasons which have been explained we need feel no great pity for Henry. The tone of Becket and the animus of his proceedings from the first deserve however to be severely condemned. He thought only of the Church, and not at all of the realm, and acted so make a fair compromise impossible. His commanding powers and his personal influence with Henry, gave him a great opportunity of settling these vexed questions on a basis which would have been just alike to Church and State. He showed, hovever, not the faintest disposition so to settle them, but took the extreme Church ground from the first.

as to

It was the Church ground, notice, that he took. Becket was not fighting for the Pope, and the Pope did little to help him. Poor Alexander III. had an Antipope backed

by the emperor.

He was in sore straits lest he should

offend Henry, and throw all the strength of England into the cause of his rival. So he trimmed and temporised, wishing in his heart probably as devoutly as Henry, that this terrible archbishop was out of the way. Indeed he seemed to Becket to fall so far short of common Christian courage and uprightness, that he wrote, 'At Rome it is always the same. Barabbas is let go, and Christ crucified. Come what may, I will never submit; but I will trouble the Church. of Rome no more.' Thorough and hearty Englishman as he had been, the thought of what was good for England never seems to have crossed him; only what was good for Holy Church. in the long run that he should have played the part of an arrogant churchman than of a worldly-minded truckling Primate; for what England most sorely needed, not for that moment only but for coming generations, was a power which should make monarchs feel that they had a monarch, and might not dare to play the tyrant at will. But there was a nobler part than either, which Becket did not play; perhaps which he was not great enough to play, the part of the churchman who cared supremely for the best interests of the realm.

It was no doubt better

There can be no question, at any rate, that it was his firm and imperious demeanour before the King, which won the passionate admiration and devotion of of the people. The secular power pinched them in those days fearfully hard; and this man who dared to beard the King in the name of a higher King, was a champion and a hero in their sight. At Northampton they thronged around him and attended him to his monastery with wild enthusiasm ; and when he landed for the last time in England and entered it, as he may have known, to die, his progresses everywhere were triumphal processions; all the world went after him,' and his hold on the popular heart caused

THE STRUGGLE WITH THE KING.

serious alarm to those who ruled the State.

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Henry and Becket had met again and again in hope of reconciliation; but always one thing stood in the way. Becket always made open or secret reservation of the rights of the Church,' or 'the honour of his God,' and Henry felt it; when he heard the dreaded phrase, Saving the honour of my God,' he broke forth into furious imprecations. He knew that there was a rock there against which both his passion and his force might spend themselves in vain. Alas! that the rights of the Church and the rights of the State in a world which Christ came to save, should be so so constantly paraded as opposing powers! Alas! that man's pride, ambition and avarice have in all ages marred so miserably the benediction which the Saviour brought to mankind!

The history of the Constitutions of Clarendon is quite too large and intricate a matter to be treated in a brief lecture. We may simply note that in the Constitutions, the right of the King's court over criminal ecclesiastics was recognised, and Becket in some way was induced to accept them, though probably with a mental reservation, 'subject to the dispensation of the Church.' He bitterly repented his acquiescence, and the whole struggle of his life from that time was to recover for the Church the position which he felt that he had weakly betrayed. His long exile and his return in something like a popular whirlwind of triumph are familiar matters of history. He knew, probably, that he was returning to die. He was solemnly warned before he embarked that he would be certainly slain. 'It is of no consequence to me,' he answered, for if I am torn limb from limb I will go.'

He returned with a battery of suspensions and anathemas which he discharged at his enemies. It was to be war to the death; and we may conjecture that Becket saw his death might triumph where his life had failed. Warnings