carried to the
Papal Court without the king's consent; that no tenant-in-chief of the
king might be excommunicated without the leave of the king; that the
revenues of vacant sees should fall to the king, until a new appointment
had been made in his court; that questions of advowsons or presentations
to livings questions which at that time represented comparatively a vast
amount of property--should be tried in the king's court; and that the
king's judges should decide in matters of debt, even where the case
included a question of perjury or broken faith, which was claimed as a
matter for ecclesiastical jurisdiction. Such laws as these were no doubt
in Henry's mind simply part of his scheme for establishing a general order
and one undivided authority in the realm. But they opened very much wider
grounds of dispute between Church and State than the mere question of how
criminal clerks were to be dealt with. They boldly attacked the whole of
the pretensions of the Church; they threatened to rob it of a mass of
financial business, to wrest from its control an enormous amount of
property, to deprive it of jurisdiction in the great majority of criminal
suits, to limit its power of irresponsible self-government, and to prevent
its absorption into the vast organization of the Church of Western
Christendom. They defined the relations of the English Church to the see
of Rome. They established its position as a national Church, and declared
that its clergy should be brought under the rule of national law.

The eight months which followed the Council of Clarendon were spent in a
vain attempt to solve an insoluble problem. Messengers from king and
archbishop hastened again and again to the Pope, with no result. Henry
set his face like a flint. "_Verba sunt_," he said to a mediating
bishop; "you may talk to me all the days that we both shall live, but
there shall be no peace till the archbishop wins the Pope's consent to
the customs." Fresh cases arose of clerks accused of theft and murder,
but as the personal quarrel between Henry and Thomas increased in
bitterness, questions of reform fell into the background. "I will humble
thee," the king declared, "and will restore thee to the place from
whence I took thee." Thomas, on his part, knew how to awaken all Henry's
secret fears. All Europe was concerned in the dispute of king and
archbishop. The Pope at Sens, the French king, the "eldest son of the
Church," the princes of the House of