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 huuts, 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 ? 2 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.3 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.1

So far Nigellus. We are not to suppose that the state

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 sacramenti venerationem equo desilire et stando pueris manum imponere.'-Materials for the History of Thomas Becket, vol. ii. p. 164.

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

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.'

* Abridged from many pages of Nigellus. Sat. Poems, vol. i. p. 203, &c.

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 Montmirail.

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 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. Very many 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 profigate. 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.

CHAPTER II.

THOMAS BECKET was born in London in the year 1118.1 His father, Gilbert Becket, was a citizen in moderate circumstances, not engaged in trade but living on property of his own. Of his mother little authentic is known, except that she was a religious woman who brought up her children in the fear of God. She lived till her son was twenty-one. The father had been impoverished by fires in the city, and was unable to give the child as expensive an education as he had desired. Nor was he perhaps wise in his own management, if an anecdote told by Fitzstephen, the most sober of the archbishop's biographers, is really true. He had sent the young Thomas to school at Merton Abbey. He went once to see him there, and when the boy was brought in, he fell on his knees before him and adored him. "What do you, foolish old man?' the prior, who was present, said.

1 Or 1119. The exact date is uncertain.

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

3 Until recently the general opinion had been that the Beckets were of Saxon extraction. An anonymous biographer, however, asserts that Gilbert Becket came from Rouen and his wife from Caen, and there is now a disposition to accept this positive statement as conclusive. It does not appear, however, who this anonymous writer was, and his authority is weakened by the name which he gives to Becket's mother. All the other biographers who were personally intimate with the archbishop call her Matilda. The anonymous writer calls her Rose, Very little is probably known about the matter. A tradition arose, and was at one time generally believed, that she was a Saracen. This is doubtless a legend; but the Norman origin is unproved also. See Materials, vol. iv. p. 81.

'Pater quippe jam senuerat nec ad filii sumptus sufficere poterat substantia quæ remansit.'-Materials, vol. ii. p. 359.

Fall at your son's feet! He should rather fall at yours.' 'Sir,' said Gilbert Becket privately to him, 'I know what I am doing this child will be great before the Lord.'1

Gilbert Becket survived his wife for several years, but appears to have left the care of his son to others, as he is mentioned no longer in connection with him. Thomas grew up tall and handsome, and was taken notice of by one of his father's friends, Richer de l'Aigle, a man of good birth and fortune. School days over, he spent some time with De l'Aigle, hawking and hunting, and amusing himself. Afterwards he studied at Paris; it is uncertain when or for how long. He then returned to London, where he was placed in a house of business in the City.

His habits during this critical period were uniformly innocent, and no moral faults are recorded as the sins of his youth.' It is likely, too, that quick and energetic as he was, he had not been inattentive to the events which had been going on around him. In his nursery he must have heard of the sinking of the White Ship in the Channel with Henry I.'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 meretricia 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 II. The year following her father

1 Fitzstephen. Materials, vol. iii. p. 14.