scandalously misrepresented by Mr. Froude, that I must now do something more than point out Mr. Froude's particular perversions of truth. I must attempt a picture of the kind of work which as Chancellor he had to do, and of the way in which he did it. If I feel any zeal, any partisanship in the matter, it is at this stage. I claim justice for every man, even for martyred Archbishops; I claim that the actions of every man, in whatever age and of whatever order, should be described as they happened, and not as the fancy of a man bent on running down that age or that order may find that it suits his purpose to describe them. But for Thomas the Chancellor I ask more. He is not only foully slandered in Mr. Froude's imaginary picture-I was going to write "caricature," but there is not even the likeness of caricature-but I doubt whether he has ever had full justice done to him anywhere. As I have already said, his later career has overshadowed his earlier. A fame which is partly factitious has robbed him of a fame which was truer and better deserved. I could be well pleased to leave sacerdotalists and anti-sacerdotalists to dispute over the body of the Archbishop, if I can only win his true place in English history for the man who was the most striking embodiment of the fusion of Normans and English on English ground, who in his own day brought back peace and order to a troubled realm, and who has left the personal impress of his administrative power on several of the most important institutions of our country.

The state of England at the time of the accession of Henry the Second is described by Mr. Froude in a passage of about twenty lines, of which four at the outside are devoted to the special circumstances of that particular time:—

"The state of England itself demanded his [Henry's] first attention. The usurpation of Stephen had left behind it a legacy of disorder. The authority of the Crown had been shaken. The barons, secure behind the walls of their castles, limited their obedience to their inclinations."

Then comes a discourse on the claims of the clergy to exemption from secular jurisdiction, containing very much which nobody can doubt about in the nineteenth century, but which was not exactly the thing which would first come into the head of a reformer in the middle of the twelfth century. It was doubtless needful, as Henry presently found, to bring the clergy under the full control of the temporal law; but there was something else to be done first. It was needful first of all to give back to the temporal law power enough to control anybody. The "usurpation" of Stephen is the kind of talk to which scholars have long bidden farewell;* his personal perjury does not here concern us it is a kind of thing as well known in the nineteenth century as in the twelfth. But to say that "the authority of the Crown had been shaken" is a ludicrously inadequate description of the

* I have gone fully in to the question of Stephen's claim in Appendix DD of my fifth volume.

nineteen years' anarchy. Has Mr. Froude never so much as read the picture in the Peterborough Chronicle, some scraps of which have found their way into every child's history? As for "the barons secure behind the walls of their castles," the great King and the great Chancellor were coming to put an end to all security of that kind. Instead of the authority of the Crown being merely shaken, all authority of every kind, save one, had vanished. The Church alone kept up the faintest shadow of law. It is no wonder that, in Stephen's day, ecclesiastical claims grew. It is no wonder that men endured to see appeals constantly made to Rome, and to see ecclesiastical synods at home take upon themselves to bestow the crown of England. When all was violence, when no sovereign, King or Empress, could enforce obedience, the Pontiff far away ceased to be looked on as the insatiable spoiler of England's wealth; he seemed rather the sublime and dimly seen embodiment of that reign of law which had passed away from our own shores. When the assemblies of the nation ceased to be held, when there was no power to enact or to administer the temporal law of England, men were disposed to hail something of a substitute in the synods of the Church and in the law which still kept up some measure of life in the hands of ecclesiastical judges. Whatever the spiritual powers did, they did not work the kind of horrors which were done by the "devils and evil men" who filled the castles. A great part of the history of Henry's reign is unintelligible, unless we understand how in the days when the royal power had vanished, when violent men did what was good in their own eyes, peaceable men cherished the Church and its jurisdiction as the only source whence ought like justice or mercy was to be had. Mr. Froude not only passes. all this by, but he slurs over the horrors of the anarchy; he leaves out the great work of King and Chancellor in bringing back peace and order. The one evil that he has eyes for is the claim of the clergy for exemption from temporal jurisdiction. This, I again most fully admit, was a great evil. In 1164 it might fairly be looked on as the greatest evil of the time. My present proposition is that it was not, as Mr. Froude would have his readers think, the greatest evil of the time ten years earlier.

Let us compare with Mr. Froude's picture the doubtless rhetorical, almost poetical, picture of a contemporary. We may take off something from his rhetoric or poetry. We cannot expect him to be specially eloquent on the one point on which Mr. Froude is specially eloquent. But he helps us to some details of work which had to be done, and work which was done, about which Mr. Froude has not a word to say. I do not undertake literally to translate William Fitz-Stephen's account of the restoration of peace;* but I will try fairly to give its substance. In the days of Stephen then, war and all its ravages had carried

* W. Fil. S. 186, 187.

havoc everywhere throughout the kingdom. In every third township a den of robbers, called a castle, had been set up. The nobles of the land were driven from their possessions; strangers, Flemings and other mercenaries, held Kent and a great part of the land. After twenty years of warfare, confusion had become so great that no man deemed that the strangers could ever be driven out, that peace could ever be restored and the realm ever brought back to its old state of order. Such a change seemed hopeless under a new and young King. But by the counsels of the Chancellor, of the clergy, and of the good men of the realm who wished for the blessings of peace, within three months from the King's coronation, William of Ypres, who occupied Kent by force, went away weeping; all the Flemings crossed the sea, bag and baggage;† all the castles through England were overthrown, except the ancient towers and fortresses which were kept for the preservation of the peace. The Crown of England was restored to its authority and possessions, and those who had lost their lands were restored to the rights of their forefathers.

Such was the main work which the young Henry-the King whom all men loved, for he did good justice and made peace§-had to do as soon as he found himself on the throne which was secured to him by the compromise with Stephen. And in that work there is no doubt that Thomas the Chancellor was his right-hand man. Mr. Robertson, after his manner, records the fact with perfect truth, but he does not so record it as to give any lively impression. Mr. Froude, equally after his manner, leaves it out altogether. He had chosen, with that calm oblivion of fact which distinguishes him from all other men who have taken on themselves to record past events, to say that "Becket was known only to the world as an unscrupulous and tyrannical minister." He had chosen to describe him as a man stained with rapine and murder. It was convenient for his partisan purposes so to describe him. In this state of mind, Mr. Froude never sees the facts and statements which prove the opposite to what he says. They are to him as though they do not exist. The facts form no part of his picture; the statements are left out, even if they immediately follow words which he himself quotes. Thomas was, for party purposes, to be described as an unscrupulous and tyrannical minister. Facts were accordingly dealt with so as to produce that picture, or at least to produce a picture of unscrupulous tyranny of some kind.** The state

* William says "bellica undique clades desævisset." The Londoner, in giving a description which was true for the greater part of the kingdom, may have forgotten the comparative exemption of the northern shires.

+"Collectis impedimentis et armis :" they were the Circassians and Bashi-bazouks of the time.

head.

"Castella omnia per Angliam corruunt." He had perhaps the walls of Jericho in his

§ So says the Peterborough Chronicler in all but his last words. || Pp. 28, 29.

Nineteenth Century, p. 562.

** I speak thus, because Mr. Froude's picture is that of a brigand or a captain of mercenaries rather than that of a minister of state of any kind. Flambard in one age,

ment that Thomas was beloved, not only of the King but of the whole kingdom, and the facts which show how he came to win that love, find no place in the story. Mr. Froude no doubt does all this under the same kind of unhappy necessity of departing from his authorities which follows him in all matters great and small. When he leaves out a passage which tells for Thomas, when he misinterprets a passage which seems to tell against Thomas, it is doubtless by the same ill luck which makes him say William when his book says Walter, which makes him say Tuesday when his book says Monday. But those who have not studied this peculiar tendency of Mr. Froude's mind might be tempted to think that no Jesuit, as Mr. Whalley may conceive a Jesuit, could go further in prudent dealing with the facts that tell against him than a writer who takes up the history of the sixteenth century only because he has nothing else to do, and who takes up the history of the twelfth century only in order to throw scorn on a theological party in the nineteenth.

**

It will be a relief to glance at the description-it is almost a poem, or what it is the fashion to call an idyll-which William Fitz-Stephen gives of England while Henry ruled her by the advice of Thomas. No doubt it is William's business to put things at the very best; but it is only fair to hear counsel on both sides. When King and Chancellor then had got rid of the Flemings and had destroyed the castles-that great work which had always to be done whenever order was restored after confusion-the brigands left their dens in the woods; they came to the towns, to beat their swords into ploughshares and their spears into pruning-hooks. The lesser thieves, with the fear of the gallows before their eyes, betook themselves to honest labour, to the tilth of the ground or to mechanic trades. The land was at peace; other lands bought her peaceful wares, while weapons of war were no longer wrought in England, but had to be brought in from other lands. The King was prosperous; his people were rich; the hills were tilled ; the dales were thick with corn; the fields were full of oxen and the folds of sheep. Every man could go forth safely to his own work and labour; merchants could without fear leave the shelter of the walled towns to sell their wares at fairs and markets. So equable was the rule of those days that, what some might have thought a doubtful blessing, the Jew could go without danger to demand the money which he had lent to his debtor. The noble kingdom of England put on a new life, as in a new spring. The holy Church was honoured; bishoprics and abbeys, as they fell vacant, were given to worthy men Empson and Dudley in another, were unscrupulous and tyrannical ministers; but we do not read that they went about the country, burning houses and killing people. Even in the case of Thomas Cromwell, if he did anything of the kind, it was in Italy-perhaps in the suppression of disturbances there-certainly not in England.

* William carefully distinguishes between the "latrones," robbers on a grand scale, who had "silvarum latibula," and the mere "fures."

+"Exeunt securi ab urbibus et castris ad nundinas negotiatores, ad creditores repetendos Judæi."

unstained by any simoniacal payment. No wonder that the Chancellor, the chief adviser of the young King who had wrought all this change, enjoyed the highest favour with all classes; clergy, knighthood, commons, all agreed to look on him with equal good-will.*

Such is the poetic description given by Thomas' liveliest biographer. But a search into the more sober histories of the time will fully bear out his general facts. In the early days of Henry England was brought back from utter lawlessness to as strict an administration of the law as the state of society in the twelfth century allowed. And Thomas the Chancellor was the chief worker in the change. No doubt harsh means were needed to bring it about; more eyes and hands were doubtless sacrificed that would suit modern notions of humanity. But the statute of the elder Henry which made mutilation the punishment of wrongs done to the people by the King's followers was put forth by the advice of Anselm. If Mr. Froude had more minutely mastered the customs of the times, he might have given us a thrilling picture of the unscrupulous and tyrannical Chancellor going about the country, boring out an eye here and cutting off a hand there, as the fancy took him. But, by whatever means, with whatever degree of severity, order was brought back, and it was by Henry, acting under the advice of Thomas, that it was brought back. That fact stands out plainly in English history, though with the disadvantage that not only is the minister, as usual, overshadowed by the King, but that in this case he is further overshadowed by his own later self. But, cast away Thomas the Archbishop; think only of Thomas the Chancellor; and surely the man who was foremost in bringing back peace and law after the great anarchythat anarchy which has no later parallel-is fully entitled to one of the very highest places in the bede-roll of illustrious Englishmen.

But the chancellorship of Thomas is not memorable only for the restoration of peace after the anarchy. The administrative and legislative work of Henry's reign began while Thomas was still his chief counsellor. Henry showed in after-times that he could go on with the work by himself; but it was while Thomas was at his side that it began. One of the greatest blows to feudalism was dealt by the hand of Thomas. It was by his counsel that Henry introduced the practice of scutage, the commutation of military service for money. With this money the King hired troops for his foreign wars. Henry showed at a later time, in his Assize of Arms, that no king was more

"Cancellarii summus erat, in clero, militia, et populo regni, favor." This is one of the thousand passages which tell negatively against Thierry's notion of a long-abiding and hostile distinction between Normans and Englishmen. Had such feelings existed, had Thomas or anybody else been the representative of one race or the other, now would have been the very time to say that Thomas won the love of both "Saxons and Normans," as a man might now be said to win the love of both Greeks and Turks. But instead of distinct nations, William Fitz-Stephen only mentions ranks in the same nation. Doubtless, if their pedigrees had been gone into, the majority of the "militia" would have been found to be of Norman, the vast majority of the "populus" to have been of English descent; but it was simply as " militia" and "populus" that they appeared in his eyes, not as Norman and English.