BECKET : MARTYR, PATRIOT.*
PERHAPS the best proof of Becket's real greatness is the enduring interest that surrounds him. He has had biographers by the score, French and German as well as English. The Master of the Rolls has published seven bulky volumes of materials for his life. Lord Tennyson has made him the hero of one play, and Mr. Aubrey de Vere of another well worthy to rank beside it : and still the interest of his career is not exhausted, and there is even room for a fresh view regarding him. Such a view Mr. Archer Thompson puts forward in the volume before us, and is at great pains to prove. But, like so many other views of this celebrated man, it reflects the feelings of the writer rather than the truth of history. Mr. Thompson has, in fact, conceived a sympathy for the heroic side of Thomas's nature, and sought to justify it by reasons satisfactory to his own mind. The struggle for ecclesiastical rights and privileges does not seem to him quite worthy of so great a man as he discerns Thomas to have been, and he seeks to find evidence that these rights and privileges were not the main thing for which the Archbishop was contending, and that his real object was the assertion of English liberties against the tyranny of the Crown. Similarly, and with as little founda- tion, Thierry saw in Thomas a Saxon champion against _Norman oppression. Now, both the extreme Catholic and the exteme Protestant views are more reasonable than these, for they have at least the merit of attributing to Thomas the only object which he ever avowed,—the defence of the rights of the Church. Single-minded as he was, and outspoken even to a fault, it is impossible to believe that he should never once have given expression to the real motive that was actuating him. Yet Mr. Thompson has gone through the whole of his bulky correspondence without finding anything stronger in his favour than the following passage in a letter to the Pope :— "If the Roman Church thus fails those that contend for her, there will be none to restrain the enormities of tyrants who are now directing all their efforts against the clerical people, and will reduce them to the same slavery into -which they have brought all others." Thomas's real policy and aims cannot be gathered from an incidental expression in a letter, even if that expression bore out Mr. Thomp- son's view, which in this case it does not. There is even less force in the argument that no Archbishop in the Roman obedience could have addressed the Pope and Cardinals in such language as Thomas used merely because he found them less careful of ecclesiastical interests than himself. With an embarrassed Pope, driven to use every expedient to prevent Henry from joining the ranks of his enemies, and with Cardinals whom he believed to have been bribed, it is only natural that Thomas should have used strong language to retain them on his side. That he often showed himself violent and unreasonable, is the most plausible criticism his admirers have to meet. There is just one fact in Mr. Thompson's favour, although it will not carry his conclusion, and that is, that Thomas's first serious conflict with Henry at Woodstock arose over his resistance to a novel imposition on people and clergy alike, and had nothing distinctively ecclesiastical about it.
As to the Constitutions of Clarendon, there is no reason to
• Thomas Becket : Martyr, Patriot. By Robert Archer Thompson, M.A. London: Regan Paul, Trench, and 0o. 1888.
suppose that Thomas had any ulterior motive in resisting them. It is impossible to look through his correspondence without seeing that, in his eyes at any rate, the rights of the Church for which he was contending were sacred, and to be asserted primarily- and solely for their own sake, and at any cost. In this he may have been wrong, but he must be judged according to the notions of the twelfth rather than of the nineteenth century. It may also have been that his struggle for ecclesiastical liberty did, in the long-run, make for civil liberty, and set a bracing example to those who came after him ; but to discuss these questions is to enter on the old and inexhaustible controversy.
One thing Mr.-Thompson sees very clearly, and that is, that our judgment of Thomas must largely depend on our judgment of his adversary. He protests against our being told in the same breath that Thomas's conduct was insincere and un- Christian, and that Henry's motives must be left to a Higher Power. Bishop Stubbs may be said to have discovered Henry II.; and writers who follow him, such as Mrs. Green in her recent monograph, and Miss Norgate in her Angevin Kings, appreciating Henry's work as they do, are inclined to look impatiently on any one who thwarted him. Mr. Thompson boldly joins issue with this view. Henry's English policy, he argues, was dictated by no single-minded desire for good government ; his first object was to make himself supreme, and so provide resources for his Continental undertakings. Most of his reforms, while they ultimately proved of immense benefit, were designed primarily to replenish his coffers. His attack on the Clerical Courts was prompted, Mr. Thompson suggests, with great show of reason, quite as much by his desire to get hold of their fees, as by his desire to bring clerical murderers to justice. As regards murderers, the change might have been a good one ; but as regards other offences, the code of punishments in the Bishop's Court was much more in accordance with modern ideas, if they have any- thing to do with it, than that which prevailed in the King's Courts. Nor did the people show any desire to have clerics submitted to the same barbarous punishments as themselves. On the contrary, their sympathies were all with the Arch- bishop. This and many other of the customs which Thomas was asked to accept, were possibly reforms, but certainly innovations. In his view of what was right, he resisted them, and Henry met his resistance with a brutal tyranny which nothing can justify. Nearly all Mr. Thompson's account of what he styles "Law-making under Terror, commonly called the Council of Clarendon," and "The Northampton Plot, known as the Council of Northampton," is excellent ; but we think he is mistaken in accepting Foliot's account of the Archbishop's conduct at Clarendon.
After Thomas had been forced to fly the country, and his kinsmen and dependants barbarously driven after him into exile, a sense of personal wrong and a desire to bring the tyrant to submission must have mixed themselves up with his zeal for the privileges of his Church. The Pope approved his action, but could do little to help him. It was in vain that Thomas called on him to draw the sword of Peter, that the overweening presumption of tyrants might be quelled. The Pope had the Emperor and an Antipope on his hands already, and not being in a position to add Henry to the list of his enemies, was forced to temporise. But Thomas, with his uncompromising nature and fierce hatred of injustice, was not the man to abate anything of his principles in deference to Royal threats or Papal weakness. Supported and unsupported, he fought on to the death. His claim to the title of martyr has been denied, but on what grounds it is difficult to understand, seeing that he died for refusing, as he was bound to refuse, to revoke a duly pronounced sentence under threats of personal violence. In holding that Henry deliberately designed to bring about his murder, Mr. Thompson goes further than is either necessary or justifiable. Mr. Thompson, indeed, often writes in the spirit of a partisan, . though not a Catholic partisan, for he is always ready to go out of his way to denounce the Pope and all his works. He has, however, the merit of having gone carefully through the correspondence and the early biographies, and it is no small proof of the worth and integrity of Thomas's nature that he should have succeeded, as so often in life, in inspiring in Mr. Thompson the reverence and affection which make themselves felt in every page of his book.
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