The Eighteen Christian Centuries

But the Church towards the middle of this century found that the countenance she had given to liberty in other places was used as an argument against herself in the central seat of her power. Rome, the city of consuls and tribunes, was carried away by the great idea; and under the guidance of Arnold of Brescia, a monk who believed himself a Brutus, the standard was again hoisted on the Capitol, displaying the magic letters S. P. Q. R., (Senatus Populus que Romanus.) The Pope was expelled by the population, the freedom of the city proclaimed, the separation of the spiritual and temporal powers pronounced by the unanimous voice, the government of priests abolished, and measures taken to maintain the authority the citizens had assumed. The banished Pope had died while these things were going on, and his successor was hunted down the steps of the Capitol, and the revolution was accomplished. “Throughout the peninsula,” says a German historian, “except in the kingdom of Naples, from Rome to the smallest city, the republican form prevailed.” Every thing had concurred to this result,—the force of arms, the rise of commerce, and the glorious remembrance of the past. St. Bernard himself acquiesced in the position now occupied by the Pope, and he wrote to his scholar Eugenius the Third, to “leave the Romans alone, and to exchange the city against the world,” (“urbem pro orbe mutatam.”) But the effervescence of the popular will was soon at an end. The fear of republicanism made common cause between the Pope and Emperor. Frederick Barbarossa revenged the indignities cast on the chair of St. Peter by burning the rebellious Arnold and re-establishing the ancient form of government by force. Yet the spirit of equality which was thus repressed by violence fermented in secret; nor was equality all that was aimed at amid some of the swarming seats of population and commerce. We find indeed, from this time, that in a great number of instances the original relations between the town and baron were reversed: the noble put himself under the protection of the municipality, and received its guarantee against the assaults or injuries of the prouder and less politic members of his class. It was a strange thing to see a feudal lord receive his orders from the municipal officers of a country town, and still stranger to perceive the low opinion which the courageous and high-fed burghers entertained of the pomp and circumstance of the mailed knights of whom they had been accustomed to stand in awe. Their ramparts were strong, their granaries well filled, their companions stoutly armed; and they used to lean over the wall, when a hostile champion summoned them to submit to the exactions of a great proprietor, and watch the clumsy charger staggering under his heavy armour, with shouts of derision. Men who had thus thrown off their hereditary veneration for the lords of the soil, and contentedly saw the deposition of the Roman Pope by a Roman Senate and People, were not likely to pay a blind submission to the spiritual dictation of their priests. In the towns, accordingly, a spirit of free inquiry into the mysteries of the faith began; and, while country districts still heard with awe the impossible wonders of the monkish legends, there were rash and daring scholars in several countries, who threw doubt upon the plainest statements of Revelation. Of these the best-known is the still famous Abelard, whose exertions as a religious inquirer have been thrown into the shade by his more interesting character of the hero of a love-story. The letters of Eloisa, and the unfortunate issue of their affection, have kept their names from the oblivion which has fallen upon their metaphysical triumphs. And yet during their lives the glory of Abelard did not depend on the passionate eloquence of his pupil, but arose from the unequalled sharpness of his intellect and his skill in argumentation. Of noble family, the handsomest man of his time, wonderfully gifted with talent and accomplishment, he was the first instance of a man professing the science of theology without being a priest. Wherever he went, thousands of enthusiastic scholars surrounded his chair. His eloquence was so fascinating that the listener found himself irresistibly carried away by the stream; and if an opponent was hardy enough to stand up against him, the acuteness of his logic was as infallible as the torrent of his oratory had been, and in every combat he carried away the prize. He doubted about original sin, and by implication about the atonement, and many other articles of the Christian belief. The power and constitution of the Church were endangered by the same weapons which assailed the groundworks of the faith; and yet in all Europe no sufficient champion for truth and orthodoxy could be found. Abelard was triumphant over all his gainsayers, till at length Bernard of Clairvaux, who even in his lifetime was looked on with the veneration due to a saint, who refused an archbishopric, and the popedom itself, took up the gauntlet thrown down by the lover of Eloisa, and reduced him to silence by the superiority of his reasonings and the threats of a general council. It is sufficient to remark the appearance of Abelard in this century, as the commencement of a reaction against the dogmatic authority of the Church. It was henceforth possible to reason and to inquire; and there can be no doubt that Protestantism even in this modified and isolated form had a beneficial effect on the establishment it assailed. A new armory was required to meet the assaults of dialectic and scholarship. Dialecticians and scholars were therefore, henceforth, as much valued in the Church as self-flagellating friars and miracle-performing saints. The faith was now guarded by a noble array of highly-polished intellects, and the very dogma of the total abnegation of the understanding at the bidding of the priest was supported by a show of reasoning which few other questions had called forth. With the enlargement of the clerical sphere of knowledge, refinement in taste and sentiment took place. And at this time, as philosophic discussion took its rise with Abelard, the ennobling and idealization of woman took its birth contemporaneously with the sufferings of Eloisa. Up to this period the Church had avowedly looked with disdain on woman, as inheriting in a peculiar degree the curse of our first parents, because she had been the first to break the law Knightly gallantry, indeed, had thought proper to elevate the feminine ideal and clothe with imaginary virtues the heroines of its fictitious idolatry. It made her the aim and arbiter of all its achievements. The principal seat in hall and festival was reserved for the softer sex, which hitherto had been considered scarcely worthy of reverence or companionship. Perhaps this courtesy to the ladies on the part of knights and nobles began in an opposition to the wife-secluding habits of the Orientals against whom they fought, as at an earlier date the worship of images was certainly maintained by Rome as a protest against the unadorned worship of the Saracens. Perhaps it arose from the gradual expansion of wealth and the security of life and property, which left time and opportunity for the cultivation of the female character. Ladies were constituted chiefs of societies of nuns, and were obeyed with implicit submission. Large communities of young maidens were presided over by widows who were still in the bloom of youth; and so holy and pure were these sisterhoods considered, that brotherhoods and monks were allowed to occupy the same house, and the sexes were only separated from each other, even at night, by an aged abbot sleeping on the floor between them. Though this experiment failed, the fact of its being tried proved the confidence inspired by the spotlessness of the female character. Other things conspired to give a greater dignity to what had been called the inferior sex. The death of whole families in the Crusade had left the daughters heiresses of immense possessions. In every country but France the Crown itself was open to female succession, and it was henceforth impossible to affect a superiority over a person merely because she was corporeally weak and beautiful, who was lady of strong castles and could summon a thousand retainers beneath the banners of her house. The very elevation of the women with whom they were surrounded—the peeresses, and princesses, and even the ladies of lower rank, to whom the voice of the troubadours attributed all the virtues under heaven—necessitated in the mind of the clergy a corresponding elevation in the character of the queen and representative of the female sex, whom they had already worshipped as personally without sin and endowed with superhuman power. At this time the immaculate conception of the Holy Virgin was first broached as an article of belief,—a doctrine which, after being dormant at intervals and occasionally blossoming into declaration, has finally received its full ratification by the authority of the present Pope,—Pius the Ninth. In the twelfth century it was acknowledged and propagated as a fresh increase to the glory of the mother of God; but it is now fixed forever as indispensable to the salvation of every Christian.

Such, then, are the great features by which to mark this century,—the combination of rank with rank caused by the mutual danger of lord and serf in the Crusade, the rise of freedom by the commercial activity imparted by the same cause to the towns, the elevation of the idea of woman, without which no true civilization can take place. These are the leading and general characteristics: add to them what we have slightly alluded to,—the first specimens of the joyous lays and love-sonnets of the young knights returning from Palestine and pouring forth their admiration of birth and beauty in the soft language of Italy or Languedoc,—the intercourse between distant nations, which was indispensable in the combined expeditions against the common foe, so that the rough German cavalier gathered lessons in manner or accomplishment from the more polished princes of Anjou or Aquitaine,—and it will be seen that this was the century of awakening mind and softening influences. There were scholars like Abelard, introducing the hitherto unknown treasures of the Greek and Hebrew tongues, and yet presenting the finest specimens of gay and accomplished gentlemen, unmatched in sweetness of voice and mastery of the harp; and there were at the other side of the picture saints like Bernard of Clairvaux, not relying any longer on visions and the traditionary marvels of the past, but displaying the power of an acute diplomatist and wide-minded politician in the midst of the most extraordinary self-denial and the exercises of a rigorous asceticism, which in former ages had been limited to the fanatical and insane. To this man’s influence was owing the Second Crusade, which occurred in 1147. |A.D. 1147.|Different from the first, which had been the result of popular enthusiasm and dependent for its success on undisciplined numbers and religious fury, this was a great European and Christian movement, concerted between the sovereigns and ratified by the peoples. Kings took the command, and whole nations bestowed their wealth and influence on the holy cause. Louis the Seventh of France led all the paladins of his land; and Conrad, the German Emperor, collected all the forces of the West to give the finishing-blow to the power of the Mohammedans and restore the struggling kingdom of Jerusalem. Seventy thousand horsemen and two hundred and fifty thousand foot-soldiers were the smallest part of the array. Whole districts were depopulated by the multitudes of artificers, shopmen, women, children, buffoons, mimics, priests, and conjurers who accompanied the march. It looked like one of the great movements which convulsed the Roman Empire when Goths or Burgundians poured into the land. But the results were nearly the same as in the days of Godfrey and Bohemund. Valour and discipline, national emulation and knightly skill, were of no avail against climate and disease. Again the West astonished the Turks with the impetuosity of its courage and the display of its hosts, but lay weakened and exhausted when the convulsive effort was past. A million perished in the useless struggle. Forty years scarcely sufficed to restore the nobility to sufficient power to undertake another suicidal attempt. |A.D. 1191.|But in 1191 the Third Crusade departed under the conduct of Richard of England, and earned the same glory and unsuccess. The century was weakened by those wretched but not fruitless expeditions, which, in round numbers, cost two millions of lives, and produced such memorable effects on the general state of Europe; yet it will be better remembered by us if we direct our attention to some of the incidents which have a more direct bearing on our own country. Of these the most remarkable is the commencement of the long-continued enmity between France and England, of the wars which lasted so many years, which made our most eminent politicians at one time believe that the countries were natural enemies, incapable of permanent union or even of mutual respect; and these took their rise, as most great wars have done, from the paltriest causes, and were continued on the most unfounded pretences.

Henry the First was the son of William the Conqueror. On the death of his brother William Rufus he seized the English crown, though the eldest of the family, Robert, was still alive. Robert was fond of fighting without the responsibility of command, and delighted to be religious without the troubles of a religious life. He therefore joined the First Crusade to gratify this double desire, and mortgaged his dukedom of Normandy to Henry to supply him with horses and arms and enable him to support his dignity as a Christian prince at Jerusalem. His dukedom he never could recover, for his extravagances prevented him from repayment of the loan. He tried to reconquer it by force, but was defeated at the battle of Tinchebray, and was guarded by the zealous affection of his brother all the rest of his life in the Tower of London. He left a son, who was used as an instrument of assault against Henry by the Suzerain of Normandy, Louis the Sixth, King of France. Orders were issued to the usurping feudatory to resign his possessions into the hands of the rightful heir; but, however obedient the Duke of Normandy might profess to be to his liege lord the King of France, the King of England held a very different language, and took a different estimate of his position. |A.D. 1153.|And in the time of the second Henry a change took place in their respective situations which seemed to justify the assumptions of the English king. That grandson of Henry the First had opposed his liege lord of France by arms and arts, and at last by one great master-stroke turned his own arms upon his rival and strengthened himself on his spoils. In the Second Crusade the scrupulous delicacy of Louis the Seventh of France had been revolted by the indiscreet or guilty conduct of Eleanor his wife. He repudiated her as unworthy of his throne; and Henry, who had no delicacies of conscience when they interfered with his interest, offered the rejected Eleanor his hand; for she continued the undoubted mistress of Poitou and Guienne. No stain derived from her principles or conduct was reflected in the eyes of the ambitious Henry on those noble provinces, and from henceforth his Continental possessions far exceeded those of his suzerain. The other feudatories, encouraged by this example, owned a very modified submission to their nominal head; and the inheritors of the throne of the Capets were again reduced to the comparative weakness of their predecessors of the Carlovingian line. Yet there was one element of vitality of which the feudal barons had not deprived the king. A fief, when it lapsed for want of heirs, was reattached to the Crown; and in the turmoil and adventure of those unsettled times the extinction of a line of warriors and pilgrims was not an uncommon event. Even while a family was numerous and healthy the uncertain nature of their possession deprived it of half its value, for at the end of that gallant line of knights and cavaliers, slain as they might be in battle, carried off by the pestilences which were usual at that period, or wasted away in journeys to the Holy Land and sieges in the heats of Palestine, stood the feudal king, ready to enter into undisputed possession of the dukedoms or counties which it had cost them so much time and danger to make independent and strong. In the case of Normandy or Guienne themselves, Louis might have looked without much uneasiness on the building of castles and draining of marshes, when he reflected that but a life or two lay between him and the enriched and strengthened fief; and when those lives were such desperadoes as Richard and such cowards as John, the prospect did not seem hopeless of an immediate succession. But the French kings were still more fortunate in being opposed to such unamiable rivals as the coarse and worldly descendants of the Conqueror. The personal characters of those men, however their energy and courage might benefit them in actual war, made them feared and hated wherever they were known. They were sensual, cruel, and unprincipled to a degree unusual even in those ages of rude manners and undeveloped conscience. Their personal appearance itself was an index of the ungovernable passions within Fat, broad-shouldered, low-statured, red-haired, loud-voiced, they were frightful to look upon even in their calmest moods; but when the Conqueror stormed, no feeling of ruth or reverence stood in his way. When he was refused the daughter of the Count of Boulogne, he forced his way into the chamber of the countess, seized her by the hair of her head, dragged her round the room, and stamped on her with his feet. Robert his son was of the same uninviting exterior. William Rufus was little and very stout. Henry the Second was gluttonous and debauched. Richard the Lion-Heart was cruel as the animal that gave him name; and John was the most debased and contemptible of mankind. A race of gentle and truthful men, on the other hand, ennobled the crown of France. The kings, from Louis the Debonnaire to Louis the Seventh, or Young, were favourites of the Church and champions of the people. The harsh and violent nobility despised them, but they were venerated in the huts where poor men lie. The very scruple which induced Louis to divorce his wife, whose conduct had stained the purity of the Crusade, almost repaid the loss of her great estates by the increased love and respect of his subjects. |A.D. 1180.|And when the line of pure and honourable rulers was for a while interrupted by the appearance, upon a throne so long established in equity, of an armed warrior in the person of Philip Augustus, it was felt that the sword was at last in the hands of an avenger, who was to execute the decrees of Heaven upon the enemies whom the moderation, justice, and mercy of his predecessors had failed to move.

But before we come to the personal relations of the French and English kings we must take a rapid view of one of the great incidents by which this century is marked,—an incident which for a long time attracted the notice of all Europe, and was productive of very important consequences within our own country. Hitherto England had played the part of a satellite to the Court of Rome. Previous to the quarrels with France, indeed, one great tie between her and the Continental nations was the community of their submission to the Pope. Foreigners have at all times found wealth and kind treatment here. Germans, Italians, Frenchmen, any one who could make interest with the patrons of large livings, held rank and honours in the English Church. |A.D. 1154-1159.|Little enough, it was felt, was all that could be done in behalf of foreign ecclesiastics to repay them for the condescension they showed in elevating Nicholas Breakspear, an Anglo-Saxon of St. Alban’s, to the papal chair. But Nicholas, in taking another name, lost his English heart. As Adrian the Fourth, he preferred Rome to England, and maintained his authority with as high a hand as any of his predecessors. Knights and nobles, and even the higher orders of the clergy, were at length discontented with the continual exactions of the Holy See; and in 1162 the same battle which had agitated the world between Henry the Fourth of Germany and Gregory the Seventh was fought out in a still bitterer spirit between Henry the Second of England and Thomas à-Beckett. All the story-books of English history have told us the romantic incidents of the birth of the ambitious priest. It is possible the obscurity of his origin was concealed by his contemporaries under the interesting legend, which must have been a very early subject for the fancy of the poet and troubadour, of a love between a Red-Cross pilgrim and a Saracen emir’s daughter. It shows a remarkable softening of the ancient hatred to the infidels, that the votaress of Mohammed should have been chosen as the mother of a saint. But whatever doubt there may arise about the reality of the deserted maiden’s journey in search of her admirer, and her discovery of his abode by the mere reiteration of his name, which is beautifully said to be the only word of English she remembered, there is no doubt of the early favour which the young Anglo-Saracen attained with the king, or of the desire the sagacious Henry entertained to avail himself of the great talents which made his favourite delightful as a companion and indispensable as a chancellor, in the higher position still of Archbishop of Canterbury and Comptroller of the English Church. For high pretensions were put forward by the clergy: they insisted upon the introduction of the canon laws; they claimed exemption from trial by civil process; they were to be placed beyond the reach of the ordinary tribunals, and were to be under their own separate rulers, and directly subject in life and property to the decrees of Rome.

Henry knew but one man in his dominions able to contend in talent and acuteness with the advocates of the Church, and that was his chancellor and friend, the gay and generous and affectionate à-Beckett. So one day, without giving him much time for preparation, he persuaded him to be made a priest, and at the same moment named him Archbishop of Canterbury and Primate of all England. Now, he thought, we have a champion who will do battle in our cause and stand up for the liberties of his native land. But à-Beckett had dressed himself in a hair shirt and flogged himself with an iron scourge. He had invited the holiest of the priests to favour him with their advice, and had thrown himself on his knees on the approach of the most ascetic of the monks and friars. All his fine establishments were broken up; his horses were sent away; his silver table-services sold; and the new archbishop fasted on bread and water and lay on the hard floor. Henry was astonished and uneasy; and he had soon very good cause for his uneasiness, for his favourite orator, his boon-companion, his gallant chancellor, from whom he had expected support and victory, turned against him with the most ruthless animosity, and pushed the pretensions of Rome to a pitch they had never reached before. Nobody, however he may blame the double-dealing or the ambition of à-Beckett, can deny him the praise of personal courage in making opposition to the king. The Norman blood was as hot in him as in any of his predecessors. When he got into a passion, we are told by a contemporary chronicler, his blue eyes became filled with blood. In a fit of rage he bit a page’s shoulder. A favourite servant having contradicted him, he rushed after the man on the stair, and, not being able to catch him, gnawed the straw upon the boards. We may therefore guess with what feelings the injured Plantagenet received the behaviour of his newly-created primate. He stormed and raged, terrified the other prelates to join him in his measures for curbing the power of the Church, chafed himself for several years against the unconquerable firmness of the arrogant archbishop, and finally failed in every object he had aimed at. The violence of the king was met with the affected resignation of the sufferer; and at last, when the impatience of Henry gave encouragement to his followers to put the refractory priest to death, the quarrel was lifted out of the ordinary category of a dispute between the crown and the crozier: it became a combat between a wilful and irreligious tyrant and a martyred saint. It requires us to enter into the feelings of the twelfth century to be able to understand the issue of this great conflict. In our own day the assumptions of à-Beckett, and his claims of exemption from the ordinary laws, have no sympathizers among the lovers of progress or freedom. But in the time of the second Henry the only chance of either, in England, was found under the shelter of the Church. That great establishment was still the only protection against the lawless violence of the king and nobles. The Norman possessors of the land were still an army encamped on hostile soil and levying contributions by the law of the strong hand. Disunion had not yet arisen between the sovereign and his lords, except as to the division of the spoil. The Crusades had not depopulated England to the same extent as some of the other countries in Europe; and the wars of the troubled days of Stephen and Matilda, though fatal to the prosperity of the land, and destructive of many of the nobles on either side, had attracted an immense number of high-born and strong-handed adventurers, who amply supplied their place. The clergy had been forced to retain their original position as leaders of the popular mind, superintendents of the interests of their flocks, and teachers and comforters of the oppressed: à-Beckett, therefore, was not in their eyes an ambitious priest, sacrificing every thing for the elevation of his order. He was a champion fighting the battles of the poor against the rich,—a ransomer of at least one powerful body in the State from the capricious cruelty of Henry and the grasping avarice of the Norman spoliation. The down-trodden Saxons received with the transports of gratified revenge any humiliation inflicted on the proud aristocracy which had thriven on the ruin of their ancestors. The date of the Conquest was not yet so distant as to hinder the feeling of personal wrong from mingling in the conflict between the races. A man of sixty remembered the story told him by his father of his dispossession of holt and field, on which the old manor-house had stood since Alfred’s days, and which now had been converted into a crenelated tower by the foreign conqueror. Nor are we to forget, in the midst of the idea of antiquity conveyed at the present time by the fact of a person’s ancestor having “come in with William,” that the bitterness of dispossession was increased in the eyes of the long-descended Saxon franklin by the lowness of his dispossessor’s birth. Half the roll-call of the Norman army was made up of the humblest names,—barbers and smiths, and tailors and valets, and handicraftsmen of all descriptions. And yet, seated in his fortified keep, supported by the sixty thousand companions of his success, enriched by the fertile harvests of his new domain, this upstart adventurer filled the wretched cottages of the land with a distressed and starving peasantry; and where were those friendless and helpless outcasts to look for succour and consolation? They found them in the Church. Their countrymen generally filled the lower offices, speaking in good Saxon, and feeling as good Saxons should; while the lordly abbot or luxurious bishop kept high state in his monastery or palace, and gave orders in Norman French with feelings as foreign as his tongue. But à-Beckett was an Englishman; à-Beckett was Archbishop of Canterbury, and chief of all the churchmen in the land. To honour à-Beckett was to protest against the Conquest; and when the crowning glory came, and the crimes of Henry against themselves attained their full consummation in the murder of the prelate at the altar,—the patriot in his resistance to oppression,—the enthusiasm of the country knew no bounds. The penitential pilgrimage which the proudest of the Plantagenets made to the tomb of his victim was but small compensation for so enormous a wickedness, and for ages the name of à-Beckett was a household word at the hearths of the English peasantry, as their great representative and deliverer,—only completing the care he took of their temporal interests while on earth by the superintendence he bestowed on their spiritual benefit now that he was a saint in heaven. Curses fell upon the head and heart of the royal murderer, as if by a visible retribution. His children rebelled and died; the survivors were false and hostile. Richard, who had the one sole virtue of animal courage, was incited by his mother to resist his father, and was joined in his unnatural rebellion by his brother John, who had no virtue at all. His mind, before he died, had lost the energy which kept the sceptre steady; and the century went down upon the glory of England, which lay like a wreck upon the water, and was stripped gradually, and one by one, of all the possessions which had made it great, and even the traditions of military power which had made it feared. John was on the throne, and the nation in discontent.