and yet he may, which is what John of Salisbury really says that he did, have withstood acts of oppression, whether directed against churchmen or against laymen. The beasts of the court had to be withstood on behalf of both-" pro necessitate ecclesiæ et provincialium.”* Mr. Froude's evil genius again kept him from seeing this last word. It might be a curious question for guessing what word that evil genius made him see when he quoted John of Salisbury as making Thomas given to "scurrilous jesting at laymen's parties." There is nothing answering to "laymen's parties" in the Latin; but it may be that the look of the word "potentioribus" suggested the thought of "potationibus."

But most amazing of all is the way in which Mr. Froude winds up this strange paragraph:-" At any rate, except in the arbitrariness of character, he showed no features of the Becket of Catholic tradition."

If by the vague phrase "the Becket of Catholic tradition" is meant Archbishop Thomas as described by his biographers, it is certain that many of the features of his later character had already shown themselves in the days of his chancellorship. Strictness of moral conduct, abundance of almsdeeds, severe religious mortifications, generally the main features of a personally devout life, are seemingly no part of the "Becket of Catholic tradition," as conceived by Mr. Froude. Yet Mr. Froude, in some of his less controversial moods, would have been just the man to tell how Thomas, after despising the blandishments of Avice of Stafford, was found by the host who spied out his goings so uncharitably, sleeping, worn out with his austerities, on the hard floor of his chamber. Perhaps "an atmosphere of legend renders the tale suspicious;" yet it is told by contemporary writers with names of persons and places. It can hardly be sheer invention; if true, it certainly shows that Thomas the Chancellor did already forestall several of the features of "the Becket of Catholic tradition."

If we chose to be very exact in counting up the number of marked changes in the conduct and character of Thomas, we might begin with the time when he entered the service of Theobald. A distinct increase of seriousness of purpose and demeanour is marked by his biographers at this point. But this is no more than naturally takes place in any man at the time when he first devotes himself to any serious calling, especially

* Giles, i. 321: "Quotidie hinc pro domini sui regis salute et honore, inde pro necessi tate ecclesiæ et provincialium, tam contra regem ipsum quam contra inimicos ejus contendere cogebatur et variis artibus varios eludere dolos. Sed hoc præcipue perurgebat quod indesinenter oportebat eum pugnare ad bestias curiæ, et velut cum Proteo ut dici solet, negotium gerere, et quasi in palæstra exercitari." The phrase of "bestia curiæ seems to be borrowed from a phrase of Boetius with regard to his enemies at the court of Theodoric, but I have not the consolation of his company, so as to be able to quote his exact words.

+ Edward Grim (9): "Ubi ludis et levitate postposita seniorum sapientumque sermonibus ad meliora semper animum informabat." Herbert (i. 12) makes him dissatisfied with his secular life: "Cernens itaque hic noster Thomas professionem professioni et sic conversationem conversationi contrariam, cogitavit a curiis secularium ad aliquem grandem virum ecclesiasticum se transferre."

if that calling is of a religious kind. Up to this time the young citizen of London was an ordinary layman, who had set himself down to no special line of life. In entering Theobald's service, he entered on an ecclesiastical line of life, and, though he did not take on himself the priesthood, he did take on himself the lower orders of the ecclesiastical ministry. As a deacon, in the Archbishop's service and high in his confidence, the atmosphere in which he lived was ecclesiastical; he accordingly became a zealous advocate of ecclesiastical claims. Presently, by the act and at the bidding of his ecclesiastical master, he was removed from this purely ecclesiastical sphere to the purely temporal sphere of the King's court. He became suddenly the most powerful man in the kingdom, the most intimate and trusted counsellor of the King in his great work of doing justice and making peace. Whatever was done in the land, he was emphatically the doer of it. And, while he filled so pre-eminent a position in public affairs, he was further admitted by his young sovereign to a measure of personal familiarity some of the recorded instances of which approach the grotesque. When the King's son was of an age to need a governor, it was to the care of Thomas that he was entrusted; when a wife was sought for him in his childhood, it was Thomas who was sent to seek for her. With the whole work of the kingdom on his hands, it is not wonderful if he thought even less than before of his ecclesiastical duties at Canterbury, Beverley, and Otford. He seems to have held that, when the Archbishop handed him over to a temporal master for the discharge of a temporal office, he was in effect dispensed from the special duties and proprieties of the ecclesiastical character. He lived in short as a layman and a courtier; as his biographers say, he put off the deacon and put on the Chancellor.* We can understand that a man of his temperament, raised suddenly to so great a height, would take a real delight in making the most of his position, that he would magnify his office, and rejoice to dazzle men's minds by a display of hospitality and magnificence such as the noblest by birth could not surpass. The commonest history-books preserve some scraps of William FitzStephen's picture of his master's splendour; every child must have heard of the Chancellor's journey to Paris, with the horses, the dogs, and the monkeys, and the men who sang in English fashion as they went along. Nay, as we have seen, he not only lived as layman and courtier, but was led by zeal for his lord so far to transgress ecclesiastical rule as to appear in camps and to take a personal share in the storm of battle. Grave men were scandalized at the secular life of the Archdeacon of Canterbury and Provost of Beverley ; but it was

*This is the phrase used by Herbert, who heads the ninth chapter of his second book (ii. 17), “Qualiter pro tempore Levitam exuit." So, William of Canterbury (Giles, ii. 3) : "Archilevita . . levitam pro tempore exuit, et cancellarium induit."

+ Will. Fil. Steph. "Aliquid lingua sua pro more patriæ suæ cantantes." One would hardly pick this out now as a specially English custom.

Here comes in one of William Fitz-Stephen's best stories. Thomas is sick at St.

simply at his secular life that they had any reason to be scandalized. Thomas lived as a layman and a courtier, but he lived as a layman. and a courtier who, while he left certain official duties to others, never forgot his personal moral and religious duties. Such is the portrait that we have of him, a layman, but one who, according to a layman's standard, might be looked on as already a saint. Mr. Froude, who says that he was known only as arbitrary, unscrupulous, and tyrannical, should produce some proofs. All the evidence is the other way. Such accounts as we have set Thomas before us as a man who had somehow persuaded himself that he might cast aside one set of duties, but who carefully discharged all those duties, personal and official, which he still acknowledged. Had he only been a layman instead of a deacon, we should have in him a model minister of his age. The misfortune was that, except by the path of the ecclesiastical calling, he could never have found his way to a position for which he was exactly suited, but with which the ecclesiastical calling was altogether inconsistent.

In saying this, I do not forget that up to Thomas' day and long after, the Chancellor was always a churchman. But then every Chancellor did not fill the great personal position which Thomas filled. His own ardent disposition and the boundless favour of the King combined to put power into his hands far beyond the strict official duties of the chancellorship. It was at least no part of the Chancellor's routine duties to lead troops to the war of Toulouse and to meet Engelram of Trie in single combat. As one of his biographers truly says, it was the nature of Thomas, in whatever position he was placed, to be foremost in that position. Here is the key to his whole career. Happy had it been for him, if he had never been removed from a position where all his qualities met with the most appropriate field, for a position in which the same qualities simply led him astray.

Mr. Froude's anxieties just at this stage are of a financial kind. As Thomas kept so splendid an establishment, Mr. Froude wishes to know

Gervase close to Rouen, where his biographer says, with some pride, that two kings came to visit him, the King of the French and his own lord the King of the English. When he was getting better, by which time-it marks the ceaseless activity of an Angevin King-the court was no longer in Normandy but in Gascony, Aschetin, Prior of Leicester, on his way back from Gascony, comes to see him. He finds the Chancellor playing at chess, "indutus capa manicata," doubtless some specially worldly kind of dress. The prior goes on to rally him at once on his lay garments and his ecclesiastical pluralities: "Quid est hoc quod capa manicata utimini? Hæc vestis magis illorum est, qui accipitres portant; vos vero estis persona ecclesiastica, una singularitate, sed plures dignitate; Cantuariæ archidiaconus, decanus Hastingæ, præpositus Beverlaci, canonicus ibi, et ibi; procurator etiam archiepiscopatus; et sicut rumor in curiæ frequens est, archiepiscopus eritis." It is now that Thomas says that he knows three poor priests in England he does not speak either of bishops or of royal officials-any one of whom he would rather see Archbishop than himself. He adds that he knows that, if he becomes Archbishop, he will have to choose between the service of God and the service of the King. The "capa "of the Chancellor appears in a specially splendid form in the well-known story in which the King gives it to the poor man. This story had been told by William just before.

how he paid for the cost of it. Thomas' household-book would indeed be a precious treasure; but unluckily we have not got it. Mr. Froude remarks with truth that a great part at least of the Crown revenues passed through his hands. He reckons up several of these sources of revenue, and adds, "All these Becket received, and never accounted for the whole of them." This, it is to be supposed, refers to the facts that, before Thomas was consecrated Archbishop, he was released from all temporal accounts and obligations, and that nevertheless such accounts were demanded from him at Northampton. We further see the strange hand-to-mouth way in which Mr. Froude seems to write. When he wrote this paragraph, the third on p. 560, he knew that the demand for accounts had reference to money only. But it would seem that, before he wrote the next two paragraphs, he fell in with the passage about Thomas' military exploits, that he misunderstood it in the wonderful way which I have already spoken of, and then thought that the accounts asked for at Northampton could not have referred only to money, but must have had something to do with burnings and murderings. He adds, "Whatever might be the explanation, the wealthiest peer in England did not maintain a more costly household, or appear in public with a more princely surrounding." Doubtless; but, whatever might be the explanation, it was clearly one which satisfied the King, as no demand was made on Thomas till the King had quarrelled with him on other grounds. And "the wealthiest peer," to those who have their abode in the eleventh and twelfth centuries, has the same modern sound as "Prince William" and "his Eminence." Some of us would be very glad if Mr. Froude could give us an exact definition of a "peer," even in times a good while later than the days of Henry the Second.

But how far did the Chancellor who kept up this splendid household, who had such a train of vassals, and whose magnificence set all France wondering what could be the greater magnificence of his master, do as to one of the two particular objects which Archbishop Theobald had in his eye when he recommended him to the King for the office? He was, so Theobald hoped, at once to restore public order and to see that the special claims of the Church did not suffer. On one important point Thomas seems to have done all that could have been reasonably looked for from him. During his administration, Henry abstained from an abuse into which earlier Kings had fallen, and into which he himself fell later in his reign, that of keeping bishoprics and abbeys vacant, for the sake of the profits of the vacancy.* This in truth was simple justice; it was that which would be done by any right-thinking man, whatever might be his notions about clerical exemption from secular jurisdiction. So again we have seen that Thomas had enemies in the King's court,† just as he had enemies in the Archbishop's court,

* Will. Fil. Steph. 191.

+ Roger of Pontigny (102), that is perhaps Thomas himself, is strong on this point.

and that he had to strive against some of them on behalf of oppressed persons, clerical as well as lay. But that Thomas as Chancellor held the same notions about clerical immunities which he afterwards held as Archbishop, there is no reason to suppose for a moment. If my conception of his character is right, it was hardly possible that he should hold them. The Chancellor looked at things with the eyes of a Chancellor. In one picture of him he is described as specially severe towards ecclesiastical things and persons,* and the phrase is used in such a way that it can hardly mean anything except that he carried out the King's purposes with regard to them without flinching or scruple. Elsewhere still stronger language is used with regard to his conduct at this time. We hear of him as the destroyer of the Church,† as one who had plunged a sword into the bowels of his holy mother. Leaving aside this rhetoric, it is more certain that in the exercise of his official duties, the Chancellor showed himself by no means so ready to admit the pretensions of Rome to jurisdiction in England as he was either in the earlier or in the later stages of his life.§ In a word he had put off the deacon, and had therewith laid

At one time Thomas even thought of leaving the King's service; but he presently gained the King's complete favour. See also the Life by John of Salisbury, p. 321, where some of the expressions are the same. William Fitz-Stephen, whose account of the chancellorship is so much fuller, says nothing of all this. Most likely it applies only to a very short time after his first entrance into the King's service. See also Herbert, i. 21. * This comes from a very important passage of Roger of Pontigny (104), where he says that the King designed him for the archbishopric, "credens eum tanto honore dignissimum et ad suam utilitatem atque voluntatem in omnibus paratissimum. Thomas namque ex industria circa personas et res ecclesiasticas quasi severissimum se exhibebat; ut tali occasione omnem a se suspicionis notam excuteret, et regis voluntati, quam intime noverat, melius sub hac palliatione conveniret. Credens itaque rex propositum suum adversus ecclesiam per eum potissimum et ad voluntates suas promptissimum expertus fuerat: irrevocabiliter disposuit ut ecclesiæ Cantuariensi præficeretur antistes."

This comes in the famous letter of Gilbert Foliot to Thomas (Giles, v. 269), the genuineness of which has been doubted. "Stabat regni gladius in manu vestra, si in quem torvos oculos habebatis, terribilis in hunc et importabilis iræ quodam velut igne coruscans. Ille quidem gladius quem in sanctæ matris ecclesiæ viscera vestra manus paulo ante immerserat, cum ad trajiciendum in Tolosam exercitum tot ipsam marcarum milibus aporiastis." This is one view of the scutage. This, and some other rhetorical phrases in the same letter, would, if taken literally, have served admirably to trick out Mr. Froude's picture of the unscrupulous and tyrannical Chancellor.

So according to Garnier (17), describing the opposition made by Gilbert Foliot to the election of Thomas, "Kar de seinte iglise ad persecuturs esté," and directly after

"Destruite ad seinte Iglise; si l'at mise en despit;

Et a despersunée: à tort l'i unt eslit."

And the answer of Bishop Henry of Winchester hardly seems to deny Gilbert's facts

"Tu fus lus as veillis: or seies pastre et prestre.
De Saul persécutur, Pols serras et deiz estre."

Garnier, like some other of the biographers, makes the slip of speaking of Gilbert as already Bishop of London, which he was not till a little later.

§ On the case of Battle Abbey, see Mr. Robertson, pp. 61, 326. I unluckily have not the Chronicon de Bello at hand, nor yet the Remains of the elder Froude, though I referred to many points in them before I left England. I therefore cannot examine in detail the points raised by Mr. Robertson in p. 326. But I fully admit the truth of his comment on the reference made by Thomas to the matter in his Letter to Pope Alexander (Giles v. 54), that Thomas "seems to have fancied that, in exchanging the chancellorship for the primacy, he had not only been released from all obligations as to money, but had got rid of his former self." The whole tenor of the letter bears this out.