SPECTATOR'S LIBRARY.

BIOGRAPHY,

The Lite and Letters of Thomas A' Becket, now first gathered from the Contemporary Historians. By the Rev. J. A. Giles, D.C.L., late Fellow of Corpus Christi Col- lege, Oxford. In two volumes Whittaker. Nerdcasr.,

- On Disorders of the Cerebral Circulation ; and on the Connexion between Affections

_ of the Brain and Diseases of the Heart. By neorge Burrows, M.D., Sce. ece., Phy- sician and Lecturer on the Principles and Practice of Medicine at St. Bartholo- mew's Hospital Longman and Co.

POETRY,

The Poems of Thomas Davis. Now first collected. With Notes and Historical Illustrations. (Duffy's Library of Ireland.) Simpkin and Marshall; Deg, Dublin.

DR. GILES'S LIFE AND LETTERS OF THOMAS A' BE CK ET.

A PRETENSION to saintship is the easiest way to distinction. Not that even this distinction is easy ; for it requires a good deal of personal sacri- fice, or what the mass of men would deem such ; and, like other great- ness, it must be favoured by circumstances, the most essential of which is an ignorant and superstitious age, adapted to imposture and delusion : but what we mean is, that fewer great or useful qualities will suffice to make a saint than is the case with any other candidate for eminence ; that the qualities, such as they are, will go a great deal further in this line than in any other ; and that he will inspire a much larger amount of admira- tion or even veneration, and exercise a far greater influence over the minds of mankind, (though it must be admitted to very little useful pur- pose,) than men of far greater merit and far greater practical virtue.

The cause of this is on the surface. In the first place, a saint is a party man ; and if it be the fact that secular parties, even in our more critical and sceptical times, monstrously exaggerate their geese into swans, there is nothing surprising at the still more giant-like production which fanati- cism and faction propagate together. Then, religion naturally induces a congregational feeling analagous to that which prevails amongst cliques _ and clans ; and the narrower and less enlightened the body, the stronger the feeling,—as we may see in the numerous nonconformist parties in this country. Then, too, the more conspicuous of the canonized were men of resolute will and great bodily self-denial ; carrying privation and mortification to an extent which is rather revolting to modern tastes, though it seems to have been a sure card in a dark and dirty age. A saint, moreover, has always a spice of the demagogue. It is true, his

• advice is seldom right, in the narrowest-view ; for the nature of the de- magogue prevents him from seeing far or wisely : but he urges the exist- ing wrongs or sufferings of the people, and panders to the prejudices or passions of his followers ; so that be is a pseudo-patriot as well as a saint.

• - As nothing comes of nothing or is made in vain, it is probable that the sanctimonious ascetic was a natural production of the times in which he lived ; and that, directly or indirectly, lie contributed to the advance- _ ment of mankind. It is quite certain that he gave rise to a very singular .class of literature, in the Lives of the Saints ; which not only contain re- : markable pictures of individuals, and exhibit in a striking light the super- stition and credulity of the human mind, but also paint the manners of the age and preserve incidental notices of its history. From the final destruction of the Western Empire at the close of the fifth, to the revival of learning in the fifteenth century, how little of solid (as opposed to ima-

', ginative) original writing would remain, if we struck out the Saints and their devotees ! The chronicler, who professed to write history, was moved to take up his pen by his feeling for the holy brotherhood, and made them very often his leading theme ; and, however bitterly we may smile at the folly of superstition, we must acknowledge its force. Of Chaucer we know nothing save what is preserved in legal or official re- cords ; of Shakspere, little beyond what is recorded of him as a "Christian man" or a housekeeper and citizen, in common with any of the rest of us. He lived in an age as active intellectually, though not mechanically, as ours; he was surrounded and succeeded by a galaxy of genius to

• which previous or succeeding times furnish no parallel ; his greatest con- temporary, Ben Jonson, pronounced that "lie was not for an age but for all time". and his greatest successor, Milton, declared that his Shakspere needed no "pled stones" or" star-ypointing pyramid" for a monument—his "Del- phic lines" were so sufficient, that "kings for such a tomb would wish to die": yet nearly a century elapsed before any one thought of writing his bio- graphy, and nothing then remained but the uncertain reflections of tradi- tion. "Saint" Thomas of Canterbury lived near the darkest period of the darkest ages (which, though not wholly so stagnant as we may think, were generally stagnant enough,) yet no fewer than seventeen lives of Becket exist, that were composed by persons who if not contemporary • with him belonged to what may be called the same sera of opinion. Of these, five were written by men who were his personal followers ; a sixth is anonymous but the writer states that he was an eye-witness of what he records; die author of a seventh wrote about the year 1200, and may therefore be considered a contemporary of Becket, who was killed in 1170; and two more have the same contemporaneous pretension, though of a somewhat later date. Of these, the best, like that of Fitz Stephen, have been published ; the others are still in manuscript. In addition, there are the letters of Becket and his friends ; whose preservation and publi- cation are partly, perhaps, owing to his eminence as a prelate and states- . man.

It is from these original sources that Dr. Giles has drawn his Life and Letters of' Thomas a Becket; doing little more in the life than compare the narratives with each other when more than one biographer dwells upon the same incidept, and allow the best recorder to speak in his own • words, or, if the case requires it, to enlarge or correct the principal writer by extracts from some other. The occupation of Dr. Giles is chiefly to connect and comment. He condenses an elaborate story, fills up interstices, and sometimes criticises the original biographer—sometimes remarks upon the conduct of Becket in reference to the circumstances of his age, and the allowance that should be made for him. When he f reaches a point of pause in the action, he introduces the best letters be- longing to the period ; and as these are mostly by Becket and his agents, men of affairs and diplomacy, who "delivered themselves like men of this world," they are often more interesting than the diffuse and wonder- mongering stories of the martyr's devotees. • It might seem that such a mode of composition would lead to confusion or crudity : but it does not ; though it no doubt prevents a striking and picturesque exhibition of the story, and does not very well develop the philosophy it contains, these essential parts being overlaid by details. Still the narrative is not without interest, and it is readable from the cir- cumstance of the author having followed the bent of his genius. Dr. Giles himself has much in common with the chroniclers, which not even the nineteenth century, can altogether overcome. He possesses their faithful reliance on what is told him, even when his reason whispers that it is a strange tale ; and if he cannot altogether believe it, he thinks there must be something in it, and that it may as well be narrated. With their garrulous diffuseness he has much of their bonhommie and their turn for minute but often picturesque description. The seven centuries that have passed since the haughty Prelate escaped from his difficulties by some- thing like a voluntary suicide before the high altar at Canterbury, with all their changes in opinion' have not been without influence upon the mind of Dr. Giles; and be admits that any churchman in the nineteenth century who should imitate Becket would be very wrong, but that the struggles of the clergy in the twelfth century to escape from the civil power rested on more justifiable grounds. He is also an evident be- liever in the sudden conversion of the courtly and knightly Chancellor, metamorphosed into a Prelate ; and had his fate east him upon times prior to the Statute of Henry the Eighth, he would have wended his way to Canterbury,

"The holy blissful martyr for to seke,"*

among the most devout of devotees. All these things contribute to give consistency of character and even a sort of life to what would have otherwise been a species of disjointed compilation, at the same time that the reader is presented with something like a collection of original materials.

This minuteness, however, does not produce much difference in the general impression of Becket's story or character. Perhaps Hume's epic sketch of the career, conduct, and character of the man, will leave a stronger and even a clearer impression than all the stories Dr. Giles has collected and strung together : the additional images Will chiefly relate to the manners of the age, or some prosaic corrections of the picture. The infirrination will be fuller and more important. • In the first place, Di. Giles, we think fairly, puts aside the notion that part of Becket's popu- larity was owing to his having been of Saxon family, and the first of the race that rose to station and power under the Norman rule. The anony- mous but contemporary author of the manuscript Life at Lambeth Palace states that the father of the Saint was born at Rotten"; and was distin- guished among the citizens, "genere, strenuitate, facultatumque possibi- litate." Engaged in commerce, he removed to London, with other citi- zens of Caen and Rouen, "because it was larger and better stored with the merchandise in which they used to traffic' : the original family name, too, was Bequet. The "beautiful legend"—that Gilbert h Becket joined the Crusades, was taken prisoner by the Infidels, attracted the love of his master's daughter, but leaving her behind when he made his escape, was followed by the lady, knowing but two words, "Gilbert" and "London," with which she succeeded in finding him out—is so strip- ped of all its grosser incongruities when told by the literary artist, that the reader, like the critic of an epic, is balancing between the probable and the marvellous. In the original chronicle, one sees that the whole is a " beautiful " fiction. The manner in which the two words, whether Saxon or Anglo-Norman, were made to do duty through so many na- tions and languages, comes out in full force ; and we see that the man- ners are not Mahometan, but Western or Scriptural. There is the best of authority, that of Becket himself, as told to his friend John of Saha- bury, that his mother was a religious woman ; and if this story be not altogether true, it is a touching picture of olden charity. "The fond parent of Thomas Becket used to connect her little boy in a singu- lar and somewhat whimsical manner with her deeds of charity to the poor. She weighed him at stated times, placing in the opposite scale, bread, meat, and cloth- ing, until they equalled the weight of the child; all these were then given to the poor; and the mother, in unison with the belief of the times, commended her son to the protection of the blessed Virgin in requital of her bounty to the needy."

Maternal dreams are said to have foreshown the coming greatness of young Thomas ; which, if real, might probably have fired parental am- bition. At all events, the boy appears to have received the best education that the times afforded, and to have been indebted to his father's respeat- able connexion for the means of advantageously starting in life ; though the policy of the Romish Church, at that time holding in its hands the entire education of Christendom, was not likely to overlook a youth-of such genius. Be this as it may, the original narratives and stories more firmly sustain the respectable standing of the father and the advantages of that family respectability.

Nothing occurs to shake the general conclusion that Beeket's pretended conversion was a piece of hypocrisy; and that pride, not piety, was his motive of action. Perhaps he appears even worse than in the more con- densed exhibitions, because more of meanness mingles with the prose reality. His boasted firmness seems to have shrunk from encounterieg danger he could avoid, even at the risk of character. He yielded to the King and Barons at Clarendon, when the other Bishops seemed inclined to firmness ; lie fled when no immediate danger seemed to threaten ; and —but the points against him are so well put by his opponent, Gilbert Bishop of London, in a species of official reply to a pastoral letter of Becket, that we will jet him speak for himself. Seven hundred years have not improved us in "drawing mild" the bitters of controversy.

"You call on us to tum to you to save ourselves, to encounter death with yea in the muse of Christ's Church. Truly, if we consider what treasures am in • _

• Canterbury Talti.

store for us in heaven, we shall have no regard for the things of earth. For tongue cannot. tell, nor intellect comprehend the joys of the heavenly city, to join the company of the angels, and with the blessed spirits to sing the praises of the Creator; to look upon his countenance, and free from the fear of death, to glory for ever in immortality. The sufferings of this world are nothing in comparison to the future glory which shall be revealed in the saints. Our momentary tribu- lations here will work out for us hereafter an exceeding weight of glory. All this my father, I have long cherished in my bosom; all this has long been the 'subject of my aspirations. This head, which still rests upon my shoulders, should long have fallen by the sword of the executioner, to insure the favour of God upon my earthly pilgrimage. But it is the cause and not the stroke which makes the martyr: to suffer persecution for holiness is glorious, for obstinacy or i perverseness it is ignominious. It s victorious to die for Christ, but to provoke death is madness; and if we weigh your deeds as well as your words, my father, we shall not hastily provoke martyrdom. For you bent the knee at Clarendon, and took to flight at Northampton; you clothed yourself in the dress of disguise, and escaped beyond the frontiers of the land. What did you gain by this? Why, you showed your anxiety to escape that death with which no one condescended to threaten you. With what effrontery, then, father, do you invite us to meet death, which you, by such palpable means, so studiously avoided? What charity is it to place on us a burden which you threw off from your own shoulders? The sword hangs over us, from which you escaped, and which you try to repulse with mis- siles, never daring to advance to close encounter. Perhaps you wish us to flee also. Alas! the sea is closed against us since your escape, and every point blockaded. Islands are a king's safest prisons, from which it is difficult to depart, and almost impossible to do so privily. If we fight, it must be hand to hand; if we join battle with the King, his sword will cross our own in the fight; and if we give a wound, we may expect another in return. Are your revenues so dear to you, that you would, spill the blood of us who are your brethren to recover them? Yet even the Jews spurned the money which Jades brought back, because it was the price of blood. Bat you have another motive. Pause we here, then, and consider what are your motives for counselling us to die."

The view We have taken of the courage of Becket seems opposed to the boldness of his death : but we are not arguing that he was timorous, which the whole tenour of his life contradicts, but that he had no wish to encounter danger he could avoid. His death was an escape. The dignified clergy were opposed to him; - he had just excommunicated the Archbishop Of York, his old antagonist Gilbert of London, and the Bishop of Salis- bury; the Pope was weary of the trouble and the risk ; the majority of the Cardinals were in favour of Henry—bribed, according to Becket ; the King of France could only be depended on as long as it suited his politi- cal views to favour Becket; the force—the Barons and freeholders of England seem mostly to have been in favour of the Crown and the civil power ; whilst Becket's insolence, on his return, would give Henry an excise for putting aside the reconciliation, and possibly induce the Pope to withdraw his countenance. At the time of his death, the King had sent messengers to arrest him ; and imprisonment for life, with possi- ble deprivation, stared him in the face. Indeed, he must have seen his difficulties for some time past. Further he could not go, and to retreat would be worse than death. Hence the probable origin of those thoughts of martyrdom which for some time had haunted him, according to his biographers. Nor.was the martyrdom anything but a voluntary act. The murderers arrived at Canterbury in the afternoon, and presented themselves before him with threats and abuse. Their purpose was so obvious that the monks barricaded the doors, and would effectually have kept them out, had not a man who knew the way guided them to a pri- vate staircase that opened into the orchard. Even then, there was time to have escaped ; but Becket resisted all the efforts of his followers, and rather offered himself to death than met it.

The views we have here deduced must, if doubted, be sought for by a perusal of the volumes. The contemporary accounts will also show that the danger of Papal power, which Becket's case has been held to es- tablish, in reality disproves it. Had not Henry's disappointment and passion got the better of his policy, he would have triumphed in the beginning; and even in the worst stage of the dispute, we see how very averse the dignified clergymen were to quarrel with their bread and butter, or rather with those who distributed it, and how much the Pope inisliked being made by Becket to fight the battle of the clergy- This is a point which has not been properly developed ; and it will well repay a careful study by those who feel an interest in the subject. The proofs, as we have said, must be sought in the volumes ; but we will quote some passages with a bearing on the subject. The following is an extract from a communication from "Master Henry," Becket's agent at Rome, after the constitutions of Clarendon were mooted, but before the Archbishop fled the kingdom. "At length I had an audience: his Holiness, on receiving me, sighed deeply, and betrayed other signs of dejection. He had already hizid all that took place in the Council—the persecution of the Church, your Lordship's firmness, which of the Bishops stood by you, how lie went out from among you who was not of you, and the sentence passed upon the cleric; indeed, everything, even what had been done most secretly, was known before my arrival to the whole Court, and even talked of in the streets. A private interview was then granted me, in which I laid before his Holiness the several heads of our memorial. He, on his part, praised God without ceasing, for vouchsafing to the Church such a shepherd: in- the whole Court loudly extol in your Lordship that courage in which them- selves are so lamentably deficient. As for themselves, they are lost in imbecility, and fear God less than man. They have just heard of the capture of Radicofain in Tuscany, and in it of the Pope's uncle and nephews, together with several castles belonging to the fathers of certain Cardinals, which have surrendered to the Germans. Besides this, John de Cumin has now been a long time at the Emperor's Court, and Count Henry absents himself from the Pope's presence, and no messenger has of late arrived from the King of England; and other con- curring events have so terrified them, that there is no prince, whom they would dare to offend; nor would they, if they could, raise a hand in defence of the Church, which is now in danger all over the world."

The following from John of Salisbury has reference to the same period. .4 What can we do, needy as we are, against such powerful enemies? We have only words to offer, and the Italians will not listen to them; for they have learnt from their own poet not to buy empty promises. You tell me in your last letter to offer them two hundred marks, but the others will immediately offer three or fear.

'ils vale, for If we offer all our store,

In hopes to win, toles offers more.'

I will answer for the Italian that their respect for the King and his messengers will lead them to take a large sum from them rather than a small sum from us. Not that they do not sympathize with your Lordship, and the interests of the Church in general, but that your enemies endeavour to undermine you, and say that you are guided by obstinacy rather than a laudable is and, what is more, I have heard it whispered about, that the Pope Ls to be invited to Eng- land to crown the young King. It is even added that his Holiness will take pos- session of the see of Canterbury, and remove your Lordship's candlestick out of it: but this I do not believe, for he is certainly grateful to you for your exertions in the Church's cause. When the Bishop of Lisieux comes, he will stick at no- thing, for I have already had a specimen of his tricks; and as for the Abbat, whs can have any doubts about him? They tell me that the Bishop of Poitiers can- not succeed in the matter of Saint Augustine's, though be has tried hard in the

i business: but as your Lordship wishes t, I will go and see what I can do. If, however, I fail, it will not be my fault."

Becket himself was continually complaining of or abusing the alleged cowardice and corruption of the Papal Court, and could write the follow- ing passages to Cardinal Albert, shortly before his return, though the Pope had been at infinite trouble with him for six years, and was then negotiating his reconciliation. We quote for thefeeling ; the facts must be cautiously received. It is a specimen of the passionate insolence

of the man.

I know not how it is, but at your court Barabbas is always let go free and Christ is crucified. Oar proscription and the sufferings of the Church have now lasted nearly six years. The innocent, poor and exiled, are condemned before you; and for no other cause, I say conscientiously, than because they are Christ's poor and helpless ones, and would not recede from God's righteousness: whilst on the other hand, the sacrilegious, murderers, and robbers, are acquitted, however im- penitent; though I say on Christ's own authority, that St. Peter himself, sitting on the tribunal, would have no power to acquit them."

The following are of a more miscellaneous character—sketches of life seven hundred years ago. rAms: 1163.

"The Abbot of St. Remy to John of Salisbury. "Truly, my dear fellow, you have fixed on a most agreeable. place of exile: all kinds of pleasures, however vain, abound in Paris; rich entertainment and choice wines, such as you cannot get at home, and the most charming society. But all this is nothing new: did you ever know a man who did not like Paris ? it is a most delightful place, a perfect garden of pleasure. However, many a true

j word is spoken in est. 0. Paris, what a place art thou to beguile and fascinate L what snares hast thou to catch people with! what enticements dust thou hold out to draw men into temptation ! what shafts dost thou launch forth to pierce the hearts of the foolish ! And my own John thinks so too; and se he has made Paris the place of his exile! I hope he may find it insufferable in good earnest, and get back home again as soon as possible to his own country.'

PEERS IN DEBATE: 1170.

The King called a Council of the Barons, and laid before them the reported conduct of the Archbishop: he had returned to England like an invading foe, rather than as a subject and an ecclesiastic; he had suspended the Metropolitan of York, excommunicated several Bishops, and seemed to have in view to deprive his son Henry of the crown which had so recently been placed upon his head, added to which, he bore powers from the Pope which were inconsistent with the King's prerogatives and the peace of the kingdom. To this address of the King the Earl of Leicester was the first who made reply, "My Lord," said he "the Archbishop was my father's intimate friend; but since he gave up your Majesty's favour and left the kingdom, I have never sent a message to him; nor he to me!" Engelgere de Bohun, uncle to the excommunicated Bishop of Salisbury, then "The The only way to take vengeance on such a fellow is to plait a few withs into a rope and draw him up on a gallows." The next speaker was William Malvoism, nephew of Endes Count of Bretagne. "When I was at Rome," said he, "on my way back from Jerusalem, I asked the landlord of the house where I lodged some questions about the Popes; and he told me, among other anecdotes, that one of them had been killed for his insupportable insolence and pride." These are all the speeches which the historian has recorded as having passed on this occasion.