at the other, no man in the higher ranks could speak of himself as exclusively of one race or the other. But the consciousness of national unity was slow in growing, and it would hardly become a motive power in events till it had been awakened by common resistance to aggression. For the present there was local vigour putting itself gladly at the disposal of the central authority of the king. But the men who would gladly assist the royal judges in tracing out criminals, or ascertaining rights of property, put forward no pretensions to share in the political authority of the king. They were content to leave that in Henry's hands. To ask these men to send representatives to a national parliament would merely have been to establish a sham, as the StatesGeneral who were summoned in the fourteenth century by Philip IV. of France to denounce' the Pope or to plunder the Templars were a sham. It was better that the full forms of parliamentary institutions should not be there, till there was a nation behind them to inspire them with life. It was enough that the Great Council should hand down from the older Witenagemot the tradition of government by persuasion as something higher than government by compulsion. au СНАР, III. Quarrel Becket. In the very midst of the gradual promulgation of § 21. The these reforms, Henry found himself involved in a quarrel with with the Church. The time was not come when the thority of the State, even in Henry's hands, could be safely entrusted with control over the clergy. Yet not only was the State better organised under Henry II. than it had been under Henry I., but the demands of the Church were of a lower order than those which had been put forward by Anselm. Anselm had been distinctly the righteous man defending the poor and innocent against injustice and tyranny. Becket's main contention was that the clergy, whatever crimes they had committed, should not CHAP. be judged by the ordinary justice of the realm. No doubt Becket had on his side the general feeling of the clergy, and he may well have thought that to surrender the outworks of their defence would only lead to a baser and more complete surrender hereafter. As for Becket himself, the king in placing him in the archbishopric, in order that he might betray to the Crown the liberties claimed by the Church, had asked him to perform an act of treason as contemptible as that of the man who accepts the command of a fortress in order to betray it to the enemy. Yet the liberties which the new archbishop defended, even if they had still an universal aspect, were far more professional in their nature than those for which Anselm contended, and Becket himself had far more of the champion of a profession about him than was in accordance with the character of the meek and gentle opponent of William II. and of Henry I. His quarrel with Henry II. was one which could best be settled by a compromise, and Becket would hear of no compromise. His strength lay in the weakness of his adversary. The State could claim the submission of the Church when it could do justice to friend and foe alike. The king who fined Becket enormous sums on frivolous pretexts, who punished Becket's kinsmen when he could not reach Becket himself, who rolled on the floor and gnawed straw with his teeth when bad news reached him, and who, by his wrathful words, despatched the murderers on the archbishop's track, was not in a position to claim the obedience which is due to the fountain of justice. The murder of Becket completed the lesson, that the great interests of the Church and society were not as yet safe in being left entirely in the hands of the king. Popular enthusiasm hailed the new martyr; and the miracles reported to be performed at his tomb seemed to ratify the popular belief Yet even thus, the edifice erected by Henry was too firmly established to be shaken by the storm. Men who had no wish to see the clergy prostrated at his feet, had no desire to see the foundations of national order broken up. CHAP. III. land and the Cru sades. Of one great movement of this age, the historian of § 22. EngEnglish progress has little to tell. Before the end of the eleventh century, the feudal nobility of the western part of continental Europe were eagerly leaving home and lands to share in the enterprise of wresting the Holy Land from the Infidel. The crusading spirit took possession of the minds of these men just in proportion as they were without a national life to occupy their thoughts. In England, in the worst of times, a national life existed. In the days of the Conqueror and his sons, both Normans and Englishmen found enough to occupy their energies at home without turning their attention elsewhere. When, at the end of the reign of Henry II., the news arrived that Jerusalem had fallen once more into Mahometan hands, there was no widely spread feeling of horror. If Richard I. led not a few followers to the Holy War, they were animated rather by the spirit of adventure than by a deeply seated sense of duty. Richard was himself little more than a great adventurer. For England and its national development he cared nothing. Richard I. Hubert Walter. If Richard cared nothing for England, he cared much $23. for the money of Englishmen. In Archbishop Hubert and Walter he found, during the latter years of his reign, a minister who could draw wealth from his subjects without subjecting them to the miseries of an irregular and capricious tyranny. Walter's administration therefore was a time of silent growth in England. Henry's system of assessment by jury received under him a wider extension, and the representative system for judicial and financial purposes struck firm root, to be ready in time for an unexpected application to political objects. 62 СНАР. trast be tween the Twelfth and CHAPTER IV. PARLIAMENTARY ORGANISATION. THE political work of the twelfth century had been to draw closely the bonds between the king and the §1. Con- strengthened local organisations. The political work of the thirteenth century would lie in surrounding the king with a general representative organisation, which would bring before him the needs and desires of the nation as a whole, in the same way that the county courts and the county juries brought before his judges the needs and desires of the country districts. Thirteenth Centuries. § 2. King John. The first impulse to the movement was given by the misconduct of John. The system established by Henry II. could only work beneficially in the hands of an able and well-disposed king, who, if he did not care for the people for their own sake, at least understood that a well-governed people is the purest foundation upon which a ruler can build up his authority. John cared nothing for such a source of strength. For him, government meant merely the art of extorting money for his own selfish objects. Every class of his subjects was oppressed by the worst of tyrannies, a tyranny fitful and uncertain, relieved by no glorious achievements abroad, and directed to no large and far-sighted policy at home. As the strength which his father had derived from the national support slipped out of his hands, he rested more and more on the mercenary troops which he gathered on the Continent, to be paid with English money, and to extort yet more money in England for them and for himself. Three quarrels, each of them ending disastrously for John, each of them leaving traces on the development of the English nation, occupied the whole of the reignthe quarrel with the king of France, the quarrel with the Pope, and the quarrel with the English baronage. СНАР. IV. § 3. The three Quarrels of the Reign. $4. The Quarrel with the King of The result of the quarrel with the king of France was merely one more example of the weakness of extended territories without unity of sentiment and organisation. To one who judges from a glance at the map, nothing can appear more unequal than the relative strength of John and of Philip II. But the dominions which stretched from the English Channel to the Pyrenees had nothing in common but their allegiance to the same sovereign. The great division of temperament and language between the lands to the south and the north of the Loire, was far more marked than it is at the present day. The Aquitanian differed to a great extent in race and language, and quite as much in his habits and mode of life from the Norman or the Frenchman of the North; and within these large divisions smaller divisions remained uneffaced. The Angevin was not as the Norman, the Languedocian was not as the Poitevin. The cool head of Henry II. and the fierce activity of Richard I. might keep, not without a struggle, these various races together. John could not do it. He was neither feared nor respected. The provinces north of the Loire, Normandy, Maine, Anjou, and Touraine, fell easily into the hands of Philip. If the Aquitanian lands held firm to their allegiance, it was because they had no wish to be French, and because they knew that the distant rule of a king who lived in England would leave them far more to their own devices than the rule near France. |