With the accession of Henry II, in 1154, England, after years of strife, once more passed into the hands of a strong and capable ruler. Without being a whit less selfish or more patriotic than other princes of that age, Henry had the sense to see that good government meant stable government. His legal reforms and the new machinery of justice which he brought into being are of the highest possible importance to the jurist and to the student of constitutional history, but they do not specially concern us here. Henry at the beginning of his reign seems to have been well viewed in Rome, and believing, as the present writer does, that the Bull "Laudabiliter" is unquestionably genuine (see Pope Adrian IV. and cf. "The Month", May and June, 1906), the religious mission entrusted to the king, no doubt upon his own representations, in the proposed conquest of Ireland, bears a close resemblance to the pretext advanced for William the Conqueror's invasion of Great Britain. In both cases, also, the Roman pontiff seems to have claimed dominion, granting the land to the invader as a fief upon payment of a certain tribute. The fact, that, according to the Bull "Laudabiliter", Henry himself had admitted (quod tua etiam nobilitas recognoscit) that "Ireland and all other islands upon which Christ, the Sun of Justice, has shone belong to the prerogative of St. Peter and the Holy Roman Church", deserves to be borne in mind in connection with King John's formal surrender of his kingdom to the Holy See at a later date.
But what specially interests us here in the reign of Henry II is the disputes between the king and Thomas, his archbishop, culminating, in 1170, in the martyrdom of the latter. Thomas Becket, a clerk in the household of Theobald, Archbishop of Canterbury, having been strongly recommended to Henry, had been taken into his intimate friendship and made Chancellor of the Kingdom, an office which he had discharged with splendid ability for seven years. After the death of Theobald, Thomas, at the instance of the king himself, was elected Archbishop of Canterbury. He vainly tried to escape from the proposed dignity, but, once appointed, his consecration marked the beginning of a complete change of life. He renounced the chancellorship and all secular pursuits, while he devoted himself to the practice of rigorous asceticism. It was not long before he found himself in conflict with the king, as indeed he had foreseen from the first. The first question which caused an open breach between them was a purely secular one. Henry demanded that a certain tax called "the sheriff's aid" should be paid directly into the Exchequer. Thomas, in a Great Council, declared that he was willing to make his contribution to the sheriffs, as had been customary, but absolutely refused to pay if the money was to be added to the revenue of the Crown. Whether this tax was really the Danegeld, as Bishop Stubbs supposes, is very questionable, but in any case we may share his admiration for this, "the first instance of any opposition to the King's will in the matter of taxation which is recorded in our national history", and, as he adds, "it would seem to have been, formally at least, successful" (Const. Hist., I, 463). This incident, however, was soon thrown into the shade by the more serious quarrel over the Constitutions of Clarendon. What was put by the king in the forefront of the dispute was the alleged inadequacy of the punishment meted out to clerics who were guilty of criminal offenses. The statement then made that a hundred homicides had been committed by clerics within ten years rests on no adequate evidence, neither are the cases of which we have definite particulars much more satisfactory (see Morris, "Life of St. Thomas", pp. 114 sqq.). It may be that the king was honestly intent on a scheme of judicial reform, and that he found that the growing jurisdiction of the ecclesiastical courts (the publication of the "Decretum Gratiani" and the increased study of the canon law had made them very popular) was an obstacle in his way. But Becket, who knew him well, suspected that Henry was deliberately striking at the privileges of the Church, and the manner in which a promise was extorted from the bishops to observe the "avitae consuetudines" before anyone knew what these were, as well as the pretense that the Constitutions of Clarendon represented nothing but the customs said to have been observed in the time of Henry I, do not leave the impression of straightforward dealing. The general purport of the Constitutions, when they were at last made known, was to transfer certain causes—for example, those regarding presentations to benefices—from the jurisdiction of the ecclesiastical to that of the King's Courts, to restrain appeals to Rome, to prevent the excommunication of the king's officers and great vassals, and to sanction the king's appropriation of the revenues of bishoprics and abbacies. On one clause, that dealing with criminous clerks, much misapprehension has prevailed. It was formerly supposed that Henry wanted all clerks accused of crimes to be tried in the King's Courts. But this impression, as F. W. Maitland has shown (Roman Canon Law, pp. 132-147), is certainly wrong. A rather complicated arrangement was proposed by which cognizance of the case was first to be taken in the King's Court; if the culprit proved to be a clerk, the case was to be tried in the ecclesiastical court, but an officer of the King's Court was to be present, who, if the accused were found guilty, was to conduct him back to the King's Court after degradation, where he would be dealt with as an ordinary criminal and adequately punished. The king's contention was that flogging, fines, degradation, and excommunication, beyond which the spiritual courts could not go, were insufficient as punishment. The archbishop urged that, apart from the principle of clerical privilege, to degrade a man first and to hang him afterwards was to punish him twice for the same offense. Once degraded, he lost all his rights, and if he committed another crime he might then be punished with death like any other felon. And here also it must not be forgotten that "the forces at the back of St. Thomas represented not only the respect which men feel for a bold fight for principle, but also that blind struggle against the hideous punishments of the age, of which the assertion of ecclesiastical privilege, covering widows and orphans as well as clerks and those that injured them, was a natural expression" (W. H. Hutton in "Social England", I, 394). After a moment of weakness in the earlier stage of the discussion, St. Thomas, in spite of Henry's fury, refused to have anything to say to the Constitutions. Among the rest of the bishops he met with little help, but the pope, Alexander III, loyally supported him. The rest of the story is well known. The archbishop soon found himself compelled to leave the kingdom. For nearly six years he remained abroad, an exile and bereft of his revenues. In 1170 a hollow reconciliation was patched up with the king, and Becket returned to Canterbury. But in a few weeks fresh cause of offense was given, and the king in a fit of passion uttered the rash words which led to the terrible tragedy of the martyrdom. St. Thomas fell in the transept of his cathedral, close beside the steps leading to the high altar, in the late afternoon of December 29, 1170. All Christendom was horrified, and Henry II, whether from policy or genuine remorse, surrendered his former pretensions while, in 1174, he performed humiliating penance at the martyr's tomb. Within a very few years Canterbury had become a place of pilgrimage celebrated throughout Europe. No one who studies carefully the history of the times can fail to see the immense moral force which such an example lent to the cause of the weak and to the liberties both of the Church and the people, against all forms of absolutism and tyranny. The precise quarrel for which St. Thomas gave his life was relatively a small matter.
