story is, I think, subtly contrary to Carlyle's vision of a stormy
strong man to hammer and weld the state like a smith. Our strong men
were too strong for us, and too strong for themselves. They were too
strong for their own aim of a just and equal monarchy. The smith broke
upon the anvil the sword of state that he was hammering for himself.
Whether or no this will serve as a key to the very complicated story of
our kings and barons, it is the exact posture of Henry II. to his rival.
He became lawless out of sheer love of law. He also stood, though in a
colder and more remote manner, for the whole people against feudal
oppression; and if his policy had succeeded in its purity, it would at
least have made impossible the privilege and capitalism of later times.
But that bodily restlessness which stamped and spurned the furniture was
a symbol of him; it was some such thing that prevented him and his heirs
from sitting as quietly on their throne as the heirs of St. Louis. He
thrust again and again at the tough intangibility of the priests'
Utopianism like a man fighting a ghost; he answered transcendental
defiances with baser material persecutions; and at last, on a dark and,
I think, decisive day in English history, his word sent four feudal
murderers into the cloisters of Canterbury, who went there to destroy a
traitor and who created a saint.

At the grave of the dead man broke forth what can only be called an
epidemic of healing. For miracles so narrated there is the same evidence
as for half the facts of history; and any one denying them must deny
them upon a dogma. But something followed which would seem to modern
civilization even more monstrous than a miracle. If the reader can
imagine Mr. Cecil Rhodes submitting to be horsewhipped by a Boer in St.
Paul's Cathedral, as an apology for some indefensible death incidental
to the Jameson Raid, he will form but a faint idea of what was meant
when Henry II. was beaten by monks at the tomb of his vassal and enemy.
The modern parallel called up is comic, but the truth is that mediaeval
actualities have a violence that does seem comic to our conventions. The
Catholics of that age were driven by two dominant thoughts: the
all-importance of penitence as an answer to sin, and the all-importance
of vivid and evident external acts as a proof of penitence. Extravagant
humiliation after extravagant pride for them restored the balance of
sanity. The point is worth stressing, because