king's monies that had passed through his hands while he was chancellor, and for one thousand marks he had lent him; demands that the king had never intended to have made, but for his refractoriness; and which he well knew he was not able to pay, having embezzled them in high living.

The archbishop resolved to stand out to extremity: he offered a most wonderful plea in a cause merely civil, that of debt, viz. that his being made archbish op of Canterbury, had discharged him of all former accounts and debts, and appealed, even in this purely civil cause, to the Pope. When reproached with contravening the constitutions of Clarendon, contrary to his oath, he broached another curious maxim, That, in every oath a clergyman could take, there was a tacit salvo for the rights of his order; he forbade the bishop to sit in judgment upon him, under pain of excommunication. He would not hear his sentence, but told the peers that he was their father, and they his children, and that children had no right to sit in judgment on their father. He then departed, in contempt of the court, and went over to France, where he was kindly received by that king; and the Pope avowed and encouraged him in all the extravagances he had advanced, received his appeal, and annulled all sentences against him.

However, as the schism was not yet ended, he kept him in for some time from proceeding to extremities ; but as soon as the danger was over, the Pope suffers ed him to thunder out his excommunications against all the ministers of the king, and all that observed the constitutions of Clarendon, The king himself, indeed, was spared, and the kingdom was not, on this

occasion, laid under an interdict; a circumstance then much apprehended. The king, on the other hand, enacted, that no appeals should be made to the archbishop, or Pope; that the lands belonging to Becket should be confiscated; that the clergy who resided abroad should return in three months, or forfeit their benefices; and that no letter of interdict should be brought into England, the penalty of which last was afterwards made the same as of treason.

The king was not a little uneasy at the apprehensions of personal excommunication, or of an interdict's issuing, as he observed the censures already passed had but too much influence on the weakness of many of his subjects. He therefore, to ward the blow, had recourse to negotiation, which the Pope readily admitted, who feared, on the other hand, from the popularity of Henry's and the unpopularity of Becket's conduct, that his ecclesiastical thunders might be slighted in England. He contrived, however, in the interim, to embroil him with the king of France, and other powers on the continent. Matters continued on this footing for some years, in a train of negotiation; in the course of which the moderation of the king, and the insolence of the archbishop, were equally remarkable, till, at length, the former, finding the Pope had trodden down all opposition, and that his own interest was on the decline, was obliged, I may say, to submit ; for he was reconciled to Becket; engaged to restore his and his adherents' effects, and to suffer him to return to England, which he did with the additional quality of legate of the Pope; and no mention was made of either side, of the subject of the dispute.

But Becket was resolved to show the world he had conquered. He began the exercise of his legatine power, by suspending and degrading the clergy, and excommunicating the laity that adhered to the laws of the kingdom. Nay, he excommunicated two of the king's tenants for cutting off the tail of his sumpter mule; so sacred was the beast become.

Soon after he was murdered at the high altar, in consequence of a rash speech of the king, in a barbarous manner, as all, any way acquainted with the history of England, must know; and now was Henry completely at the Pope's mercy. For Becket, dead, served the See of Rome more effectually than he ever could have done living. The bloodiness of the fact, the sacredness of the place where it was committed, and the resolution with which he died, filled not only all England, but all Europe, with religious horror. Miracles in abundance he immediately wrought, and he who by many was looked upon as a traitor, was now universally esteemed as a saint and a martyr; and so he was to the interest of the See of Rome,

In these circumstances Henry was obliged to submit to be judged by the Pope's legates, who, at length, absolved him, on his swearing that he had not willingly occasioned the murder, and that he felt great grief and vexation on account of it; in which, no doubt, he was sincere. But before he could obtain it, he was obliged to promise to be faithful to Alexander and his successors, not to interrupt the free course of appeals to Rome in ecclesiastical causes, and not to enforce the observance of evil customs introduced since his accession to the throne; for so

they stiled the constitutions of Clarendon, though they were only declarations of the old law. And thus ended this famous contest, in an absolute victory on the side of the Popet.

+ Hume, Carte, Lyttleton, &c.

LECTURE XXXVI.

The rebellions of Henry's sons....He is succeeded by Richard I.....The steps taken at this period towards settling the suc cession to the kingdom....The laws of Oleron....Accession of John.... His cruelty and oppressions.

HENRY's quarrel with the Pope, terminating in the manner it did, necessarily weakened the weight and influence he ever before supported, both in his own kingdom, and on the continent; nor could the unwearied pains he afterwards took, in redressing grievances, and making salutary laws, by the advice of his parliament, restore him to the consequence he had lost. The rest of his life was spent in unfortunate wars with his rebellious children, instigated thereto by the artful Philip of France. And the pretence was grounded on a step that Henry had taken in favor of his children, and I may add of his people, that of bringing the crown to a regular course of succession, and by that means preventing contests upon a vacancy. Hugh Capet, the first of the present race of French kings, who came to the throne by election, in order to perpetuate it in his family, invented that prac tice which his successors followed for near three hundred years, of associating the eldest son, by causing him to be crowned in the father's life-time.

Henry, who loved his children, and was sensible