Oct. 18, 1164 Most of them told him that the only hope of peace lay in his ceasing to be primate. Rising from a bed of pain, he arrayed himself in the splendid robes of his office, and rode, cross in hand, to the palace gate. With the signal of defiance in his hand, he strode on to the foot of the throne. The king, followed by barons and bishops, went into another room, leaving the archbishop in the midst of a few humble priests. Becket sat down on a bench, waiting for the result of a conference, the echoes of which reached him from the inner chamber. When the barons came out to pronounce sentence of imprisonment, he haughtily refused to acknowledge their right to judge him, and appealed to the Pope. Shouts and curses thundered in his ears as he rose to go, still clutching firmly in his grasp the crosier which was at once his banner of rebellion, his weapon, and his shield. Cries of "Traitor" and "Perjured one" followed him to the door. His calmness now gave way, and he turned on the threshold, like a lion at bay. Hurling back names fiercer and fouler than any uttered by the angry crowd within, he cried to the foremost knight, "If I might bear arms, De Broc, I would soon prove you a liar in single combat." The breach was now complete. In the darkness he stole away from Northampton with a single attendant. Travelling by night and hiding by day, he reached Sandwich,* whence he put off in a little boat, and struggled over to Gravelines on the Flemish coast. † Becket spent the six years of his exile in France. Louis, jealous of a vassal whose vast French dominions caused his own to dwindle into seeming insignificance, welcomed one who had dared to beard this mighty Henry on the very steps of his throne. Though the Pope (Alexander the Third) sympathized with and sheltered Becket, he did not finally break with the * Sandwich, a cinque-port and borough in Kent, on the Stour, twelve miles east of Canterbury. Under the Norman kings it was the chief Continental port of England, but the harbour afterwards became choked with sand. + Gravelines, a sea-port of France, twelve miles west of Dunkirk. English king. Indeed through the entire transaction it was the policy of the Pope not to uplift Becket too much, lest the mitre of Canterbury should grow into a rival of the Roman tiara. Henry's extreme measures of revenge on the exiled prelate disgusted all classes of the English people, except a few who stood next the throne. The seizure of Becket's possessions might have passed as a natural addition to his exile; but the blotting of his name from the Liturgy, and the cruel edict which drove four hundred of his kinsmen and friends into exile, sickened the English heart. After two years of prayer and fasting at Pontigny, Becket took the bold step of mounting the pulpit at Vezelai,* and there uttered the most terrible curses of the Church against those who upheld the Constitutions of Clarendon and usurped the estates of Canterbury. Henry, not far off at Chinon † in Anjou, was beside himself with rage when he heard of this daring move. A reconciliation was, 1170 however, patched up in a pleasant meadow near Freteval on the borders of Touraine. There was much to make up. Only the month before, the Archbishop of York had crowned young Prince Henry without administering any oath regarding the liberties of the Church. Henry, however, smoothed over this and other wrinkles in the quarrel, and promised to give the kiss of peace when they met in England. He afterwards showed his new-born respect for the Church by holding the archbishop's stirrup as he climbed into the saddle. Becket knew that the peace was hollow. Yet in less than six months after the interview at Freteval he landed on the English shore at Sandwich (December 1, 1170), having heralded his approach by sending forward to the Archbishop of York and the Bishops of London and Salisbury letters of excommunication which he had obtained from the Pope. * Vezelai, a town of Nievre, one hundred and seventeen miles south-east of Paris. ↑ Chinon, on the Vienne, twenty-eight miles south-west of Tours. The ruins of the castle in which Henry II. died, and Joan of Arc had her first meeting with Charles VII., stand on a hill above the town. From the cathedral pulpit on Christmas-day he preached on the text, "I am come to die among you ;" and then with flashing eyes and voice of thunder he uttered sentence of excommunication against the De Brocs and the Rector of Harrow, When the three prelates who had received letters of excommunication from Becket crossed the sea to Henry, who was living at Bur,* the king's rage burst all bounds. “How!" he cried; 66 a fellow that hath eaten of my bread dares insult his king and the royal family, and tread upon the whole kingdom, and not one of the cowards I nourish at my table will deliver me from this turbulent priest !" Some time after the utterance of this speech --on the 29th of December-four knights entered the palace of the Archbishop of Canterbury about two o'clock in the afternoon, and without word or sign sat down on the floor before the prelate. They were Reginald Fitzurse, William Tracy, Hugh de Morville, and Richard Brito. Twelve others accompanied these self-elected workers of the king's furious wish. After a long silence, Fitzurse demanded the absolution and replacement of the bishops under ban, and an acknowledgment of the king's supremacy. When furious words had burst from either side, the knights rushed out to get their swords. Shut doors met them on their return; but they climbed through a window of the hall. Becket had then gone into the northern transept of the church, but he refused to allow the house of God to be barricaded like a fort. The clash of arms and the shouts of angry men ran through the colonnades, as the knights burst fiercely into the church. Closing around the doomed archbishop, who stood erect against a pillar, they again demanded that the bishops should be freed from curse, and the emphatic "Never" had scarcely passed the primate's lips when a sword made lightning in the gloomy air, and would have cleft his head, but that it met the arm of Grim, the faithful bearer of his cross. Bur, a castle near Bayeux in Normandy. * The primate fell beneath the second blow; the third cleft his skull, so that his brain was scattered over the altar-steps. The tomb of this murdered man soon became a great centre of pilgrimage, for the English people esteemed him as a martyr, and worshipped him as a saint.* The gloom of his death lay dark on many a poor man's home, but within the palace all was horror and remorse. No one can now say whether Henry meant that Becket should be killed. If he did, it was a blunder as well as a crime; for Becket lying dead on the altarsteps was a more terrible foe than living Becket could ever have been. Vainly Henry tried, three years and a half after the murder, to cleanse the stain from his conscience and his reputation by submitting his naked shoulders to the scourge at Becket's tomb. The capture of a Scottish king at Alnwick, by the greatest of his generals, Ranulf de Glanville, happening to coincide in time nearly with this late act of humiliation, was eagerly grasped at by his uneasy mind as a proof that Heaven's mercy had not entirely withdrawn itself from the utterer of the fatal words at Bur. But the English people never forgave Henry for the blood of their favourite. *Not a trace remains of this celebrated shrine, whose name is woven inseparably with the literary glory of Chaucer. Canterbury on the Stour, fifty-five miles from London, was the Durovernum of the Romans and the Car-Cant of the early Saxons. CHAPTER IV. THE NORMAN CONQUEST OF IRELAND. Early glories of Ireland-Pope Adrian's Bull-Dermot MacMorrogh-Richard Strongbow-First landing of lances--Arrival of Strongbow-Siege of Dublin-Henry the Second in Ireland-The Wicker PalaceCouncil of Cashel-Return of Henry. W1 HILE Britain was passing through the ordeals of the Roman occupation and the Saxon conquest, Ireland enjoyed a degree of peace and prosperity unknown elsewhere in Europe. The Scots are believed to have entered the island about the beginning of the Christian era, and they gave to it the name of Scotia, by which it was known from the fourth century to the eleventh. Ireland at that time was only a "cluster of clans," and suffered the woes that naturally result from such an organism. Yet, in spite of petty feuds and other drawbacks, this land flourished into unexampled prosperity and glory. She gave Christianity to Scotland, when Columba crossed from Donegal to the gray shielings of Iona. She gave learning to England, when her monks settled at Glastonbury; and to France, when Erigena passed to the court of the Carlovingians. Students from many lands thronged her schools, and the harps of her bards filled her rich valleys with delicious music. Very slight links bound Ireland to Britain previous to the year 1169. There were intentions, indeed, of conquest on the English side of the water, but they came to nothing. It was |