the streets of Canterbury, and knelt while the monks flogged him on
the pavement in the Chapter-house, doing penance for Becket's murder. The
clergy had won the battle in the twelfth century because they deserved to
win it. They were not free from fault and weakness, but they felt the
meaning of their profession. Their hearts were in their vows, their
authority was exercised more justly, more nobly, than the authority of the
crown; and therefore, with inevitable justice, the crown was compelled to
stoop before them. The victory was great; but, like many victories, it was
fatal to the conquerors. It filled them full with the vanity of power; they
forgot their duties in their privileges; and when, a century later, the
conflict recommenced, the altering issue proved the altering nature of the
conditions under which it was fought. The laity were sustained in vigour by
the practical obligations of life; the clergy sunk under the influence of a
waning religion, the administration of the forms of which had become their
sole occupation; and as character forsook them, the Mortmain Act,[82] the
Acts of Premunire, and the repeatedly recurring Statutes of Provisors mark
the successive defeats that drove them back from the high post of command
which character alone had earned for them. If the Black Prince had lived,
or if Richard II. had inherited the temper of the Plantagenets, the
ecclesiastical system would have been spared the misfortune of a longer
reprieve. Its worst abuses would have then terminated, and the reformation
of _doctrine_ in the sixteenth century would have been left to fight its
independent way unsupported by the moral corruption of the church from
which it received its most powerful impetus. The nation was ready for
sweeping remedies. The people felt little loyalty to the pope, as the
language of the Statutes of Provisors[83] conclusively proves, and they
were prepared to risk the sacrilege of confiscating the estates of the
religious houses--a complete measure of secularisation being then, as I
have already said,[84] the expressed desire of the House of Commons.[85]
With an Edward III. on the throne such a measure would very likely have
been executed, and the course of English history would have been changed.
It was ordered otherwise, and doubtless wisely. The church was allowed a
hundred and fifty more years to fill full the measure of her offences, that
she might fall only when time had laid bare the root of her