He is a John the Baptist for sanctity, a Cato for wisdom, a Tully for eloquence, a Moses for meekness, a Phinees for zeal, an Abraham for faith. Elect him only, and he is all that you can desire. You ask what he has done to recommend him. Granted that he has done nothing, God can raise sons to Abraham out of the stones. He is a boy, you say, and too young for such an office-Daniel was a boy when he saved Susannah from the elders. He is of low birth-you are choosing a successor to a fisherman, not an heir to Cæsar. He is a dwarf-Jeremiah was not large. He is illiterate-Peter and Andrew were not philosophers when they were called to be apostles. He can speak no English-Augustine could speak no English, yet Augustine converted Britain. He is married and has a wife-the apostles ordered such to be promoted. He has divorced his wife-Christ separated St. John from his bride. He is immoral-so was St. Boniface. He is a fool-God has chosen the foolish things of this world to confound the wise. He is a coward--St. Joseph was a coward. He is a glutton and a wine-bibber-so Christ was said to be. He is a sluggard-St. Peter could not remain for an hour awake. He is a strikerPeter struck Malchus. He is quarrelsome-Paul quarrelled with Barnabas. He is disobedient to his superiors-Paul withstood Peter. He is a man of blood-Moses killed the Egyptian. He is blind-so was Paul before he was converted. He is dumb-Zacharias was dumb. He is all faults, and possesses not a single virtue— God will make his grace so much more to abound in him.

Such eloquence and such advocates were generally irresistible. If, as sometimes happened, the Crown had named a person exceptionally infamous, or if the chapter was exceptionally obdurate, other measures lay behind. Government officers would come down and talk of enemies to the commonwealth. A bishop of an adjoining see would hint at excommunication. The canons were worked on separately, bribed, coaxed, or threatened. The younger of them were promised the places of the seniors. The seniors were promised fresh offices for themselves, and promotion for their relations. If there were two candidates and two parties, both sides bribed, and the longest purse gained the day. Finally the field was won. Decent members of the chapter sighed over the disgrace, but reflected that miracles could not be looked for. The see could not remain vacant till a saint could be found to fill it. They gave their voices as desired. The choice was declared, the bells rang, the organ pealed, and the choir chanted Te Deum.

6

The one touch necessary to complete the farce was then added :—

The bishop elect, all in tears for joy, exclaims, 'Depart from me, for I am a sinful man. Depart from me, for I am unworthy. I cannot bear the burden which you lay upon me. Alas for my calamity! Let me alone, my beloved brethrenlet me alone in my humble state. You know not what you do.'. . He falls back and affects to swoon. He is borne to the archbishop to be consecrated. Other bishops are summoned to assist, and all is finished."

The scene now changed. The object was gained, the mask was

Non sunt hæc miraculorum tempora.'

Now and then it happened that bishops refused to attend on these occasions, when the person to be consecrated was notoriously infamous. Nigellus says that one bishop at least declined to assist at the consecration of Roger, Archbishop of York.

dropped, and the bishop, having reached the goal of his ambition, could afford to show himself in his true colours.

He has bound himself (goes on Nigellus) to be a teacher of his flock. How can he teach those whom he sees but once a year, and not a hundredth part of whom he even sees at all? If anyone in the diocese wants the bishop, he is told the bishop is at court on affairs of state. He hears a hasty mass once a day, non sine tædio (not without being bored). The rest of his time he gives to business or pleasure, and is not bored. The rich get justice from him; the poor get no justice. If his metropolitan interferes with him, he appeals to Rome, and Rome protects him if he is willing to pay for it. At Rome the abbot buys his freedom from the control of the bishop; the bishop buys his freedom from the control of the archbishop. The bishop dresses as the knights dress. When his cap is on you cannot distinguish him at council from a peer. The layman swears, the bishop swears, and the bishop swears the hardest. The layman hunts, the bishop hunts. The layman hawks, the bishop hawks. Bishop and layman sit side by side at council and Treasury boards. Bishop and layman ride side by side into battle. What will not bishops do? Was ever crime more atrocious than that which was lately committed in the church at Coventry? 9 When did pagan ever deal with Christian as the bishop did with the monks? I, Nigellus, saw with my own eyes, after the monks were ejected, harlots openly introduced into the cloister and chapter house to lie all night there, as in a brothel, with their paramours.10 Such are the works of bishops in these days of ours. This is what they do, or permit to be done; and so cheap has grown the dignity of the ecclesiastical order that you will easier find a cowherd well educated than a presbyter, and an industrious duck than a literate parson.

So far Nigellus. We are not to suppose that the state of the Church had changed unfavourably in the twenty years which followed Becket's martyrdom, or we should have to conclude that the spiritual enthusiasm which the martyrdom undoubtedly excited had injured, and not improved, public morality.

The prelates and clergy with whom Henry the Second contended, if different at all from those of the next generation, must have been rather worse than better, and we cease to be surprised at the language in which the king spoke of them at Montmiraux.

Speaking generally, at the time when Becket declared war against the State, the Church, from the Vatican to the smallest archdeaconry, was saturated with venality. The bishops were mere

8 Even in the discharge of their special functions the spiritual character was scarcely more apparent. When they went on visitation, and children were brought to them to be confirmed, they gave a general blessing and did not so much as alight from their horses. Becket was the only prelate who observed common decency on these occasions. Non enim erat ei ut plerisque, immo ut fere omnibus episcopis moris est, ministerium confirmationis equo insidendo peragere, sed ob sicramenti venerationem equo desilire et stando pueris manum imponere.' (Materials for the History of Thomas Becket, vol. ii. p. 164.)

9 In the year 1191, Hugh, Bishop of Coventry, violently expelled the monks from the cathedral there, and instituted canons in their places.

10 Testis mihi Deus est quod dolens et tristis admodum refero quod in ecclesia Coventrensi oculis propriis aspexi. In claustro et capitulo vidi ego et alii nonnulli ejectis monachis meretrices publice introductas et totâ nocte cum lenonibus decubare sicut in lupanari.'

men of the world. The Church benefices were publicly bought and sold, given away as a provision to children, or held in indefinite numbers by ambitious men who cared only for wealth and power. The mass of the common clergy were ignorant, dissolute, and lawless, unable to be legally married, and living with concubines in contempt or evasion of their own rules. In character and conduct the laity were superior to the clergy. They had wives, and were therefore less profligate. They made no pretensions to mysterious power and responsibilities, and therefore they were not hypocrites. They were violent, they were vicious, yet they had the kind of belief in the truth of religion which bound the rope about young Henry's neck and dragged him from his bed to die upon the ashes, which sent them in tens of thousands to perish on the Syrian sands to recover the sepulchre of Christ from the infidel. The life beyond the grave was as assured to them as the life upon earth. In the sacraments and in the priest's absolution lay the one hope of escaping eternal destruction. And while they could feel no respect for the clergy as men, they feared their powers and reverenced their office. Both of laity and clergy the religion was a superstition, but in the laity the superstition was combined with reverence, and implied a real belief in the divine authority which it symbolised. The clergy, the supposed depositaries of the supernatural qualities assigned to them, found it probably more difficult to believe in themselves, and the unreality revenged itself upon their natures.

Bearing in mind these qualities in the two orders, we proceed to the history of Becket.

Thomas Becket was born in London in the year 1118.11 His father, Gilbert Becket, was a citizen in moderate circumstances.12 His name denotes Saxon extraction. Few Normans as yet were to be found in the English towns condescending to trade. Of his mother nothing authentic is known,13 except that she was a religious woman who brought up her children in the fear of God. Many anecdotes are related of his early years, but the atmosphere of legend in which his history was so early enveloped renders them all suspicious. His parents, at any rate, both died when he was still very young, leaving him, ill provided for, to the care of his father's friends. One of them, a man of wealth, Richard de l'Aigle, took charge of the tall, hand

" Or 1119. The exact date is uncertain.

12. Nec omnino infimi' are Becket's words as to the rank of his parents.

13 The story that she was a Saracen is a late legend. Becket was afterwards taunted with the lowness of his birth. The absence of any allusion to a fact so curious if it was true, either in the taunt or in Becket's reply to it, may be taken as conclusive.

some, clever lad. He was sent to school at Merton Abbey, in Surrey, and afterwards to Oxford. In his vacations he was thrown among young men of rank and fortune, hunting and hawking with them, cultivating his mind with the ease of conscious ability, and doubtless not inattentive to the events which were going on around him. In his nursery he must have heard of the sinking of the White Ship in the Channel with Henry the First's three children, Prince William, his brother Richard, and their sister. When he was seven years old, he may have listened to the jests of the citizens at his father's table over the misadventure in London of the cardinal legate, John of Crema. The legate had come to England to preside at a council and pass laws to part the clergy from their wives. While the council. was going forward, his Eminence was himself detected in re meretriciâ, to general astonishment and scandal. In the same year the Emperor Henry died. His widow, the English Matilda, came home, and was married again soon after to Geoffrey of Anjou. In 1134 the English barons swore fealty to her and her young son, afterwards King Henry the Second. The year following her father died. Her cousin, Stephen of Blois, broke his oath and seized the crown, and general distraction and civil war followed, while from beyond the seas the Levant ships, as they came up the river, brought news of bloody battles in Syria and slaughter of Christians and infidels. To live in stirring times is the best education of a youth of intellect. After spending three years in a house of business in the City, Becket contrived to recommend himself to Theobald, Archbishop of Canterbury. The archbishop saw his talents, sent him to Paris, and thence to Bologna to study law, and employed him afterwards in the most confidential negotiations. The description by Nigellus of the generation of a bishop might have been copied line for line from Becket's history. The question of the day was the succession to the crown. Was Stephen's son, Eustace, the heir? Or was Matilda's son, Henry of Anjou? Theobald was for Henry, so far as he dared to show himself. Becket was sent secretly to Rome to move the pope. The struggle ended with a compromise. Stephen was to reign for his life. Henry was peaceably to follow him. The arrangement might have been cut again by the sword. But Eustace immediately afterwards died. In the same year Stephen followed him, and Henry the Second became king of England. With all these intricate negotiations the future martyr was intimately connected, and by his remarkable talents especially recommended himself to the new king. No one called afterwards to an important position had better opportunities of acquainting himself with the spirit of the age, or the characters of the principal actors in it.14 If his services were valu

14 Very strange things were continually happening. In 1154 the Archbishop of York was poisoned in the Eucharist by some of his clergy. Eodem anno Wilhelmus Eboracensis archiepiscopus, proditione clericorum suorum post perceptionem

able, his reward was magnificent. He was not a priest, but, again precisely as Nigellus describes, he was loaded with lucrative Church benefices. He was Provost of Beverley, he was Archdeacon of Canterbury, he was rector of an unknown number of parishes, and had stalls in several cathedrals. It is noticeable that afterwards, in the heat of the battle in which he earned his saintship, he was so far from looking back with regret on this accumulation of preferments that he paraded them as an evidence of his early consequence.15 A greater rise lay immediately before him. Henry the Second was twenty-two years old at his accession. At this time he was the most powerful prince in Western Europe. He was Duke of Normandy and Count of Anjou. His wife Eleanor, the divorced queen of Lewis of France, had brought with her Aquitaine and Poitou. The reigning pope, Adrian the Fourth, was an Englishman, and, to the grief and perplexity of later generations of Irishmen, gave the new king permission to add the Island of the Saints to his already vast dominions. Over Scotland the English monarchs asserted a semi-feudal sovereignty, to which Stephen, at the battle of the Standard, had given a semblance of reality. Few English princes have commenced their career with fairer prospects than the second Henry.

The state of England itself demanded his first attention. The usurpation of Stephen had left behind it a legacy of disorder. The authority of the Crown had been shaken. The barons, secure behind the walls of their castles, limited their obedience by their inclinations. The Church, an imperium in imperio, however corrupt in practice, was aggressive as an institution, and was encroaching on the State with organised system. The principles asserted by Gregory the Seventh had been establishing themselves gradually for the past century, and in theory were no longer questioned. The power of the Crown, it was freely admitted, was derived from God. As little was it to be doubted that the clergy were the ministers of God in a nearer and higher sense than a layman could pretend to be, holding as they did the power of the keys, and able to punish disobedience by final exclusion from heaven. The principle was simple. The application only was intricate. The clergy, though divine as an order, were as frail in their individual aspect as common mortals, as ambitious, as worldly, as licentious, as unprincipled, as violent, as wicked, as much needing the restraint of law and the policeman as

Eucharistiæ infra ablutiones liquore lethali infectus, extinctus est.' (Hoveden, vol. i. p. 213.) Becket could not fail to have heard of this piece of villany and to have made his own reflections upon it.

15 Foliot, Bishop of London, told him that he owed his rise in life to the king. Becket replied: 'Ad tempus quo me rex ministerio suo præstitit, archidiaconatus Cantuarensis, præpositura Beverlaci, plurimæ ecclesiæ, præbendæ nonnullæ, alia etiam non pauca quæ nominis mei erant possessio tunc temporis, adeo tenuem ut dicis, quantum ad ca que mundi sunt, contradicunt me fuisse.'