of the province were threatened, that they and all their relations should be banished, if they refused to elect him, and this had been done certainly with Becket's knowledge, probably with his consent. The conduct which cannot be justified, may thus be explained: it admits of no palliation; . . . and indeed, next to the guilt of those who commit wicked actions, is that of the historian who glosses them over or excuses them.

This inhumanity, which on other occasions would only have excited the compassion of a few obscure individuals, called forth an outcry of indignation, and produced a display of ostentatious charity toward the sufferers. Some of them made their way to Pontigny; others were absolved from the observance of their oath; and they were liberally maintained by those powerful persons who supported the papal cause, especially the King of France: some were even invited by the Queen of Sicily, and went to partake her bounty, so widely did the interest which was excited by this dispute extend. Nor was this the only unworthy act into which Henry was hurried by his anger. He had resolved, with the advice of his Barons, and the consent of his clergy, to send ambassadors to the Pope, requiring him so to rid him of the traitor Becket, as that he might establish another Primate in his stead, and to engage that he and his successors would, as far as in them lay, maintain to the Kings of England the customs of Henry I., otherwise he and his clergy would no longer obey Pope Alexander, . . . so near was the Church of England to a separation at that time! The resolution was becoming, if it had been adhered to steadily, and Henry's ambassadors at the Diet of Wittemberg so far pledged him, that the Emperor in his letters-patent announced the adherence of England to the Ghibelline Pope. But their act was disavowed in a manner which evinced a want of firmness in the King, . . perhaps of veracity. His own mind appears to have been subdued by the superstition of the age, and he stood in awe both of the Pope, and of the man whom he hated.

A conference between Henry and the Pope had been proposed, to which the King consented, upon the reasonable condition that Becket should not be present. But Becket dreaded the effect of such an interview, and entreated Alexander not to agree to it on that condition, saying, that without the assistance of an inter

preter as competent as himself, he would be in danger of being deceived by the King's subtlety. Circumstances at this time enabled Alexander to return to Rome; and this good fortune encouraged him to answer the King in a manner which might justly be deemed dignified, if it were justified by the occasion. It had never, he said, been heard that the Roman Church had driven any person out of her train at the command of Princes, especially one who was banished for the cause of justice. To succour the exiled and oppressed of all nations against the violence of their sovereigns, was a privilege and authority granted from above to the apostolic see. In the same temper he appointed Becket his legate for England, thus arming him with full powers for proceeding to extremities against his sovereign, an act not less flagrantly improper than it was gratuitously offensive to the King.

With such powers in his own cause no man ought to have been invested, least of all men, one so vehement as Becket. Already, from his retirement at Pontigny, he had addressed epistles monitory and comminatory to the King, wherein he bade him remember that Sovereigns received their authority from the Church, and that Priests were the fathers and masters of Kings, Princes, and of all the faithful: it was madness, then, if a son should attempt to hold his father in subjection, or a pupil his master, and reduce under his power that person by whom he may be bound or loosed, not only on earth, but in heaven. To pass sentence upon a priest was not within the sphere of human laws: it was not for Kings to judge Bishops, but to bow their heads before them; and he reminded Henry that Kings and Emperors had been excommunicated. To the Clergy he said that in his person Christ had been judged again before an earthly tribunal. "Arise! why sleep ye? unsheathe the sword of Peter! Avenge the injuries of the Church! cry aloud! cease not!" That he was preparing to draw that sword himself was apparent from these preliminaries, and from his suspending the Bishop of Salisbury for having admitted a Dean into that cathedral, during the absence of certain canons who had followed him into exile. And so apprehensive was Henry of what was to ensue, that summoning his counsellors, he complained to them with tears and violent emotion, saying, Becket tore his body and soul, and they were all

traitors for using no endeavours to deliver him from that man's annoyance! One of the Norman Bishops advised him to appeal to the Pope, as the sole means which could avert the impending sentence; and to this, inconsistent as it was with the dignity of the Crown, and with the very principles for which he was contending, he consented. The truth is, that at heart he was a superstitious man: in times of vexation or low spirits he used to talk of retiring into a convent; and the course of his private life made absolution so convenient and necessary to his comfort, that the thought of lying under the censures of the Church was more than he could bear. Accordingly two Bishops were deputed to notify the appeal to Becket.

Before they arrived, Becket had commenced the spiritual war in a manner not less characteristic of the man, than of the age. The body of St. Drauscio was venerated at Soissons, where he had been bishop; and there prevailed an opinion that any person about to engage in battle,' would be rendered invincible by keeping a vigil before his shrine. Persons came even from Italy, and other distant countries, under this persuasion; and the success of Robert de Montford, in a judicial combat, after performing this devotion, had recently given it great credit in England. To Soissons therefore Becket went, and watched one night before the body, as one who was prepared to enter the lists, and needed his heavenly assistance; a second vigil he kept before the shrine of St. Gregory the Great, the founder of the Anglo-Saxon Church, whose relics also were deposited at Soissons; and a third before the altar of his own patroness the Virgin. Thus armed for the conflict, he prepared on the ensuing Whitsunday to thunder out his censures against the King in the church at Vizelay, near his convent. A message from the King of France, announcing that Henry was dangerously

1 How St. Drauscio, an inoffensive man, whose life is one of the most uneventful in hagiology, should have become the Patron Saint in such cases, does not appear. The most notable thing recorded of him is, that after he had been dead and buried three years, he not only permitted his devotees to cut his hair and his nails for relics, but even allowed them to draw one of his teeth, though the operation produced an effusion of blood, as if it had been performed upon a living subject! Acta Sanctorum Mart. t. i. p. 409, 410. The blood of our Saviour (!) was shown as a relic at the little town of Wilsnach in Branbenburg. A certain vassal named Henry, having challenged Frederick, his lord, to single combat, dedicated his arms to this Blood, and killed his adversary. This brought the relic into such repute that crowds flocked to the place. To such profanation and perversion of Christianity has this evil system of blasphemous imposture given occasion. L'Enfant's Council of Constance, 1. p. 28. English translation.

ill, and on that account advising him to defer the sentence, withheld him from this last extremity; but to everything short of it he proceeded. On the appointed day a great concourse of people assembled at the Church; Becket preached, in what strain we know not, in what temper is but too plain. At the end an awful pause ensued, the bells tolled, the crosses were inverted, and the assistant priests, twelve in number, stood round him, holding torches, which were presently with dreadful execrations to be extinguished. He then pronounced the impious form of excommunication against John of Oxford, for associating with schismatics, and for what he styled his intrusion into the deanery of Salisbury; against the Archdeacon of Poitiers, for holding communion with the Archbishop of Cologne, who adhered to the Ghibelline Pope; against three persons to whom part of his sequestered goods had been granted, and against all who should dare lay hands on the property of his church: finally, against Joceline de Baliol, and the Chief Justiciary, as favourers of the King's tyranny, and contrivers of those heretical pravities, the Constitutions of Clarendon. The execrations were concluded by dashing down the torches and extinguishing them, as the prelate, in the words of this execrable ceremony, pronounced an authoritative wish, that the souls of those whom he had delivered to perdition might in like manner be quenched in Hell. This was not all: he read the Constitutions, and condemned the whole of them; excommunicated all who should abet, enforce, or observe them; annulled the statute whereby they were enacted, and absolved the bishops from the oath which they had taken to obey them. Then naming the King, and mentioning the admonitions which he had sent him, he there in public called upon him to repent and atone for the wrongs which he had offered to the Church, otherwise, a sentence, such as that which they had just heard pronounced, should fall upon his head.

Excommunication had been one means whereby the Druids maintained their hierocracy; and it has been thought, that among nations of Keltic origin, the clergy, as succeeding to their influence, established more easily the portentous tyranny which they exercised, not over the minds of men alone, but in all temporal concerns. Every community must possess the right of expelling those members who will not conform to its regulations: the

Church, therefore, must have power to excommunicate a refractory member, as the State has to outlaw a bad subject, who will not answer to the laws. But there is reason to believe that no heathen priests ever abused this power so prodigiously as the Roman clergy; nor even if the ceremonies were borrowed, as is not improbable, from heathen superstition, could they originally have been so revolting, so horrible, as when a christian minister called upon the Redeemer of mankind to fulfil execrations which the Devil himself might seem to have inspired. In the forms' of malediction appointed for this blasphemous service, a curse was pronounced against the obnoxious persons in soul and body, and in all their limbs and joints and members, every part being specified with a bitterness which seemed to delight in dwelling on the sufferings that it imprecated. They were cursed with pleonastic specification, at home and abroad, in their goings out and their comings in, in towns and in castles, in fields and in meadows, in streets and in public ways, by land and by water, sleeping and waking, standing and sitting and lying, eating and drinking, in their food and in their excrement, speaking or holding their peace, by day and by night, and every hour, in all places, and at all times, everywhere and always. The heavens were adjured to be as brass to them, and the earth as iron; the one to reject their bodies, and the other their souls. God was invoked, in this accursed service, to afflict them with hunger and thirst, with poverty and want, with cold and with fever, with scabs and ulcers and itch, with blindness and madness, . . . to eject them from their homes, and consume their substance, . to make their wives widows, and their children orphans and beggars; all things belonging to them were cursed, the dog which guarded them, and the cock which wakened them. None was to compassionate their sufferings, nor to relieve or visit them in sickness. Prayers and benedictions, instead of availing them, were to operate as farther curses. Finally, their dead bodies were to be cast aside for dogs and wolves; and their souls to be eternally tormented with Korah, Dathan, and Abiram, Judas and Pilate, Ananias and Sapphira, Nero and Decius, and Herod, and Julian, and Simon Magus, in fire everlasting.

1 Martene. De Antiquis Ecclesiæ Ritibus, pp. 903, 911. The curious in curses may find seven formularies there.