appended, which says that "even if the letter" from which it is taken" were a forgery, the accounts of the biographers bear it out in all essential points as to the occurrences at Clarendon." Either, then, Mr. Robertson does not consider a blasphemous resolve to commit perjury "an essential point," or else he asserts that "the accounts of the biographers bear out" the statement of Gilbert Foliot in this matter; an assertion which is absolutely untrue.

Whether we agree with Mr. Morris or rather think Dr. Lingard's account more correct, we think it only right to put before our readers the impression as to an important point of history which has been left upon the mind of one who has studied the writers of the period with great care.

"If St. Thomas's own tender conscience had not judged him so hardly, we had certainly formed a gentler judgment of his fall. For the constitutions of Clarendon he was in no way responsible, though he evidently accounted himself so when the promise which he had made to observe the customs came to bear this interpretation. Still he had hitherto had nothing to lead him to anticipate so violent an exposition of the royal customs as the sixteen constitutions presented. The King's demands had been comparatively moderate. St. Thomas had resisted the infliction of a civil sentence upon an offending cleric in addition to ecclesiastical degradation, and this he might fairly expect to be included under the royal customs; but what could lead him to anticipate the iniquities of Clarendon? Of assent to those, at least, he is perfectly guiltless.

"But he doubtless committed an act of grave imprudence, en dangering he knew not how far the liberty of the Church; and for this he did noble expiation. Twice he was persuaded, against his own better judgment, that the king wanted nothing but a submission in public to leave the victory with him, and that he had no ulterior designs upon the Church. St. Thomas knew King Henry better; and here the imprudence lay. The king had never assured him so it had been but asserted for him by others who had a point to gain. Nor could St. Thomas throw the blame of his concession on the Holy See. If we may judge by the letters which have come down to us, Pope Alexander, while ever urging on St. Thomas extreme moderation and submission to the king, invariably qualifies it with the important condition, saving the honour of the ecclesiastical order." It is not probable that the letters of which the Abbot of Alms was the bearer, which were written when the danger was less striking, would be of a different

tenor.

"Such would be the judgment of a Catholic on the fall of St. Thomas. The spirit which has generally moved modern historians would, if it were consistent, find still less to blame. Some writers

find fault with the Saint for yielding when he did, others for not yielding sooner. On their own principles they are equally inconsistent. The first, in order to place the conduct of the Saint in a really blameworthy light, are obliged to rely upon singularly insufficient evidence, or to distort the facts of history, Thus some, trusting to the mendacious pamphlet afterwards written by Gilbert Foliot, accuse him of a wilful and deliberate perjury; while others assert that he signed, though he afterwards refused to seal, the constitutions of Clarendon.

"A Protestant is more consistent, who blames St. Thomas for refusing his immediate and absolute consent. In his eyes, to make an exception in favour of his order is to falter in his allegiance; and he fondly persuades himself that the constitutions of Clarendon, identical in spirit and almost in the letter with the modern statute-law of England, were in reality the ancient customs of the realm as if it were possible in those days for any thing to be the unwritten common law of the land which was contrary to the coronation oath of the sovereign, or to become law in spite of the protests of the Church, who was herself a component part of the constitution of the country. The king had no claim to exact more than the oath of fealty gave him. Now, besides the assertion of St. Thomas, which we have given above, we have a singular proof from the constitutions of Clarendon themselves what the terms of the oath were; that is, what the profession of obedience and submission was which the king had a right to exact from a prelate according to the law of the land. The twelfth constitution, after speaking of vacant sees and of elections in the manner we have already quoted, says: And there the elect, before he is consecrated, shall do homage and fealty to our lord the king, as to his liege lord, of life and limb, and his earthly honour, saving his order.' Even by those who do not see as Catholics see, St. Thomas should be regarded as the opponent of a tyrannical effort of one estate to triumph over another, and under a specious pretence really to introduce a change in the constitution."-Morris, pp. 110-113.

Canon Morris has devoted a chapter to the "Legends" of St. Thomas; and we are satisfied that he has exercised a very sound discretion in so doing; for in no way can a greater injustice be inflicted on the memory of the illustrious dead, than to endeavour to confound that which is essentially a Legend and no more, with the truth of history. At the same time it is right that the memory of what has been narrated of so great a man as our Saint, should be recorded, provided no more than its due weight is attributed to the statement. The following "Legend" will be read with interest.

"It is said that when the Saint was at Lyons he was asked to consecrate the Church on the Hill to our Blessed Lady, which has since become so famous as Notre Dame de la Fourviere. When the function was over, there was a little chapel close by, which he was asked to consecrate also. He inquired in whose honour it was to be consecrated. They told him that a titular saint had not been chosen ; but that he himself must select one. He thought for a few moments, and then said, 'No,' that he would not consecrate it; but that they must reserve it to be dedicated to the first martyr who should give his blood for Christ. The chapel was accordingly, in after years, dedicated to God in honour of St. Thomas of Canterbury."

"For a similar motive, in the want of fuller evidence, it seems necessary to reject the reason given, in the local history of Anagni, by De Magistris, for the fact, that the Canons of that Cathedral erected an altar in honour of our Saint, in the South Aisle of the lower church. It is there said that in 1169, while Alexander III. was living in the canonica of that cathedral, St. Thomas himself arrived not long after the ambassadors of King Henry; and that during his stay there he always celebrated Mass in the basilica. Such a journey would surely have been betrayed, at least in the voluminous correspondence, if not in the biographies of the same."p. 381.

Notwithstanding the doubts of Canon Morris, we think that Dr. Lingard was right in considering that the death of St. Thomas was the triumph of his cause. He opposed the letter and the spirit of the Constitutions of Clarendon, and from the day of his martyrdom until the laws of Henry VIII. revived those Constitutions in the baneful form which they have ever since been allowed to assume in the Establishment, they were never again enforced or even mentioned. Nor are the facts adduced by Mr. Morris incompatible with this view, although the appointment of bishops by Henry II., to which he draws attention, is very remarkable. After such an event as the martyrdom of St. Thomas, it is startling to find all his enemies promoted to bishoprics, while the only one of his friends who was so honoured became a bishop in France, in the very province in which St. Thomas had spent the greater part of his exile.

The following is the account which is given by Canon Morris of the effect produced by the death of St. Thomas:

"It was fully expected that on Maundy Thursday the Pope would excommunicate the king, and lay the realm under an interdict. On the Saturday before Palm Sunday, King Henry's mes

sengers reached Tusculum, now called Frascati, where the Pope then was. They consisted of the Abbot of Wallace, the Archdeacons of Salisbury and Lisieux, Richard Barre, Henry Pinchun, and a Templar. They were the bearers of letters from the king, framed in very offensive terms: On his first entrance he brought not the joy of peace, but fire and the sword, while he raised a question against me touching my realm and crown. Besides, he was the aggressor upon my servants, excommunicating them without a cause. Men not being able to bear such insolence, some of those who were excommunicated, with some others from England, attacked him, and, what I cannot say without sorrow, killed him.' Henry must have had a very faint idea of the way in which the death of St. Thomas would be felt by the Church, when he wrote that letter. It is simple effrontery to write to the Pope about 'fire and sword,' when the censures for the coronation were passed by the Pope himself. Henry must have known that the excommunications were not without a cause,' for he had himself consented to them; and he must have said 'others from England,' in order to conceal from the Pope that the murderers left his own court in consequence of expressions used by himself."-pp. 340-341. "In the month of August 1171, the king crossed the Channel on his way to Ireland. During his short stay in England, he visited the venerable Henry of Blois, Bishop of Winchester, who upbraided him severely for his share in the death of St. Thomas. The Bishop died on the 27th of that month. The king gave orders, after his old fashion, that the ports on both sides of the Channel were to be diligently kept, and any one found bearing an interdict to be immediately imprisoned. He ordered that no cleric was to be permitted to leave the kingdom without an oath not to be a party to any measure against himself or the realm. He also added that no one bearing letters was to have access to him. It was shrewdly conjectured, that one motive of his invasion of Ireland, in addition to his other schemes, was to be out of the way, lest any ecclesiastical censures should be served upon him."-pp. 343-344.

"There are very few others of those who were with St. Thomas of whom there is anything to tell. Those only received promotion who had not been remarkable for their zeal in the cause of the Saint. Gerard Pucelle, who, though a friend of St. Thomas, had been dangerously near schism in the beginning of the exile, and who accepted the king's terms before its close, was made Bishop of Coventry. Hugh de Nunant, Archdeacon of Lisieux, who appeared in the Saint's train at Northampton, but who was one of the king's ambassadors to the Pope after the martyrdom, was the successor of Gerard Pucelle in that see. Gilbert de Glanville became Bishop of Rochester after the death of Walter, Archbishop Theobald's brother. He was sent by the holy Martyr to the Pope with his last letter; but he had been a very short time in his service. It is worthy of remark, that John of Salisbury is the only one of the Saint's promi

nent adherents who became a Bishop, and that his see was in France, in the very province of Sens in which they had spent their exile."-pp. 359-360.

When St. Thomas received his crown, a boy, then nine years old, was playing amidst the chestnut trees and olive yards of Segni, and was perhaps scarcely noticed by the peasants of the neighbourhood save as the son of the baron who held that Apennine rock. A few years later he was a student in the university of Paris, and was moved by the fame of our martyr to come as a pilgrim to his shrine. We know not whether he travelled along the way from Southampton which Professor Stanley has traced as the route of many pilgrims, or whether he came first to London, and journeyed along the road which Chaucer has described. But he knelt under the old arches of the venerable cathedral, and thought perhaps of the courage of St. Dunstan in earlier days, or of the exalted names of his own countrymen, Lanfranc and St. Anselm. He studied the fresh and recent memorials of St. Thomas, and meditated deeply on his generous faith and tender piety, on his ardent love of justice, and his filial affection for the Church. Affection for the Church! Would that it were felt and understood as that youth learnt from St. Thomas to feel and understand its power over the hearts of men, rendering them devoted in her work, jealous of her rights, anxiously guarding against scandals, and tenderly solicitous of the souls of her children, gentle and peaceful until wrong is to be opposed, and courageous and full of heart and energy when the cause of the poor or of the oppressed is to be upheld. Full of the spirit of the glorious martyr the youth returned to his own land, and became conspicuous amongst the most learned, most pious, and most able prelates of his day. He was only thirty-seven years of age when Celestine III. died in 1198, and only fifty-three when he followed him to the tomb, and in the sixteen years that intervened, he sat on the Chair of St. Peter, under the name, so justly honoured in the annals of the Church, of Innocent III, Against the son of Henry II. he contended for the See of Canterbury, and as successfully struggled against the fraud and violence of John Lackland, as he had done eight years before against the cunning of Philip Augustus. The example of St. Thomas was before his eyes, and he was undaunted by the power of his mighty adversaries, when he ordered first France, and afterwards