the Church obtain peace
without the protection of the king." To the fiery zeal of the archbishop,
on the other hand, the secular power was as "lead" compared to the fine
"gold" of the spiritual dignity. Henry, he cried loudly, was a "tyrant"-a
word which to medieval ears meant not an arbitrary or capricious ruler,
since that was the admitted right of every ruler, but a king who governed
without heeding the eternal maxims of the "law of nature," an idea which
theologians had borrowed from the theories of the ancient law of Rome,
and modified to mean the law of Scripture or of the Church. But in the
arguments of Thomas this law took the narrowest proportions, with no wider
interpretation than that given by the pedantic temper of a fanatical
ecclesiastical politician. He fought his battles too often by violent
and vulgar methods, and Henry reaped the profit of his errors. How far
our national solution of the problem raised between Church and State might
have been altered or delayed if the claims of the Church had at this
moment been represented by a leader of supreme moral and spiritual
authority, it is hard to say. But Thomas was far from being at the highest
level of his own day in religious thought. When some years later the holy
Hugh of Lincoln forbade his archdeacons and their officers to receive
fines instead of inflicting penance for crimes, he was met by the
objection that the blessed archbishop and martyr Thomas himself had taken
fines. "Believe me," said Hugh, "not for that was he a saint; he showed
other marks of holiness, by another title he won the martyr's palm."

In the spring of 1166 Thomas was appointed Papal Legate for England, and
he at once used his new authority to excommunicate in June all the
king's chief agents--Richard of Ilchester, John of Oxford, Richard de
Lucy, Jocelyn of Bailleul--while the king himself was only spared for
the moment that he might have a little space for repentance. Rumour
asserted too that the Primate acted as counsellor to the foreign enemies
of England, declaring that he would either restore himself to his see or
take away Henry's crown. He saw with delight the growing irritation of
England under its sufferings after the Assize of Clarendon; ancient
prophecies of Merlin's which foretold disaster were on his lips, and he
grew yet more defiant in his sense of the king's impending ruin. The
pride and temper of Henry kept pace with those of Thomas. He became more
and more fierce