ries with it a degree of reverence for the office, if not for the man. And again, it is doubtful whether his own age even called him Thomas Becket, much less Thomas à Becket, or Becket alone.* King Henry the Eighth's proclamation has converted his historical title of "St. Thomas of Canterbury" into a badge of party. Otherwise we might probably have called him Saint Thomas with no more offence than is incurred by speaking historically of Saint Dominic or Saint Dunstan. By way of being safe, we mean to call him, as his contemporaries called him, Thomas, which we hope will not commit us to any thing either way. Thomas of London, Thomas of Canterbury, Thomas the Archdeacon, the Chancellor, the Archbishop, and finally the Martyr, are the only descriptions by which he was commonly known in his own day.

But when we have settled his name, we come to the more important question of his character. Was he a good or a bad man? Is he worthy of honour or of dishonour? To two classes of inquirers no business can be more easy to settle. It is a very simple business to rule either that an archbishop must be right who opposes a king, or that a king must be right who opposes an archbishop. But at the tribunal of historical criticism no such sweeping general principles are admitted. Nor does it at all decide the question to say which side we should take if the same controversy were to arise now. What would be very unreasonable and inexpedient now may have been exactly the opposite seven hundred years back. If we wish fairly to judge of the right and the wrong between Henry and Thomas, we must first of all shut our eyes to all modern controversies whatever. We must not carry into that region any modern theories about Church and State, about Catholicism and Protestantism. We must not think whether the events of those times can be made to help High Church, Low Church, or Broad Church. Even whether we are right or wrong in having no spiritual dealings with the Bishop of Rome, is a question which has just nothing to do with the matter. Yet it has been with at least a sideglance to questions of this sort, that the history of Henry and

* His father was undoubtedly called Gilbert Becket; but in the twelfth century surnames were very fluctuating, and a son, especially if a churchman, did not at all necessarily bear his father's name. The most natural way of calling him would be Thomas of London, just like John of Oxford and Herbert of Bosham, and we find him actually so called by Gervase (col. 1377). We find the archbishop himself only once called "Thomas Becket," namely, by the knights at his death, according to Edward Grim (ap. Giles, i. 75), where it may be very likely an unusual expression of contempt. This remark, as far as we know, has been made by no English writer; but we find from M. Buss's work (p. 150) that German industry has forestalled us: M. Buss has found one more instance of the use of the name "Becket," which (perhaps through Dr. Giles's fault) we cannot verify.

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Thomas has been for the most part recently written. If we want to read or write it as it should be read or written, we must forget every thing of the kind. We have before us two of the foremost men of the twelfth century; it is only by the customs, the principles, the light and knowledge of the twelfth century that we can ever fairly judge them.

Cautions of this kind are more necessary with regard to the dispute between Henry and Thomas than with regard to almost any other portion of history. With regard to many other controversies of past times, it is almost impossible to avoid looking at them with the eyes of our own day. In many cases, within proper limits, it is even right that we should do so. The controversies of remote ages and countries may be closely analogous to controversies of our own day. The controversies of our own country in past times may be but the beginning of controversies still going on among ourselves. In such cases the side taken in present politics will always decide the general estimate of past politics. We only ask for the men and measures of the past, what we should ask for the men and measures of the present, that opposition and criticism be fair and honest, that particular men and particular actions be not misrepresented, and that it be never forgotten that, both then and now, wise and good men may be found on both sides. But the twelfth century stands in a peculiar position. It was a highly important period, fruitful in great men and great events; but its work was a silent one, and its controversies have, less than those of most ages, either before or after, any direct bearing upon present affairs. The events of the age which came before, and those of the age which followed it, speak at once to our hearts. The spectacle of a nation, and that the English nation, overcome by foreign enemies, made bondmen and strangers in their own land, is one which requires no explanation. The struggle of Englishman and Norman is one which awakens sympathies common to all times and all places:

εἷς οἰωνὸς ἄριστος, ἀμύνεσθαι περὶ πάτρης,

is a sentiment which speaks equally to the heart, whether it be put into the mouth of Hector, of Hereward, or of Garibaldi. The thirteenth century, again, has for every Englishman an interest of another kind. We have now entered on the England of our own time; the great struggle has begun which still continues; we have begun to walk among that goodly company of statesmen, heroes, and patriots, which leads us from Langton and Grosseteste and Winchelsea, from Fitzwalter and De Montfort and Roger Bigod, on to the Peel, the Russell, and the Gladstone of our own day. Compared with the eleventh century

and with the thirteenth, the age of Henry and Thomas seems like something with which we have nothing to do, and which we can hardly understand. The political position of England was like nothing before it or after it. In the eleventh century and in the thirteenth, there was an English king and an English people; but in the twelfth such objects are hardly discernible. There is, indeed, a king of England, the mightiest and richest prince of Europe; but he is a mere foreigner, a Frenchman living in France, devoting his energies to French objects, and holding England almost as a province of Anjou. And as with the position of the island, so with its internal controversies. We imagine that no Roman Catholic or High Churchman would claim for the clergy a freedom from secular jurisdiction in criminal cases, or would think the exclusive right of the Archbishop of Canterbury to crown the King of England a matter for which it was worth while to resist even unto death. In the twelfth century the case was much less clear. Thomas and Henry, in short, were two very remarkable men in a very remarkable age, who engaged in a controversy about which there could not be two opinions now, but about which opposite sides were then taken by the best and wisest men of the age. If a man will study the materials before him fully and fairly, he will probably rise up with very considerable respect for both disputants on the whole, mingled with strong condemnation of particular actions of both. Thomas often disgraced a good cause by violence and obstinacy; Henry disgraced a cause equally good by mean cruelty and petty personal persecution, and sometimes, which Thomas never did, he allowed momentary passion to hurry him into practically giving up his cause altogether.

On the modern writers on the subject we do not intend to enlarge at length. Though the history has been touched on incidentally by some very distinguished men, it has never been made the subject of any separate work of first-rate merit. We will therefore touch briefly on the most important modern writers on the subject, and then proceed to give our own estimate of Thomas himself and his contemporary biographers.

Lord Lyttelton and Mr. Berington were probably the first, among the modern "amici" and "inimici Thomæ,"* who could give any reason for their friendship or enmity. Their histories of Henry II. were both of them highly creditable to their authors at a time when historical learning was at its lowest ebb. In an age of second-hand knowledge, they had really read the contemporary writers. Each maintains his own position well, and each may be still turned to with profit, even after the accumulation

* Among the Letters is one (Giles, iv. 256) headed " Alexandro Papæ et om nibus Cardinalibus Inimici Thomæ Cantuariensis Archiepiscopi,”

of so much recent literature on the subject. Mr. Berington, we may add, though an apologist of Thomas, is by no means a blind admirer; he is not a Herbert of Bosham, but claims the higher character of a John of Salisbury.

Among more general historians, in whose pages Thomas and Henry necessarily play a considerable part, Dr. Lingard at once occurs as a Roman Catholic writer of much the same school as Mr. Berington. Both of them have the wisdom to write, not as Roman Catholics, but as ordinary men; they at all events affect impartiality, and of course are much more likely to influence Protestant judgments than if they checked them at the beginning by any ostentatious display of their peculiar dogmas. On the other hand, Southey's agreeable, but very superficial, Book of the Church contains one of the very best of what we may call the incidental biographies of Thomas. It is full, vivid, and sympathising. It is clear that the heroic grandeur of the Catholic saint appealed irresistibly to the heart of the poet, even while invested with the character of a Protestant controversialist.

Thomas also figures very prominently in Thierry's wellknown History of the Norman Conquest, where he is pressed into the service of that writer's peculiar theories. He is made to figure as an English patriot contending against Norman oppressors. Of this utterly untenable notion, and of the small nucleus of truth around which M. Thierry has gathered a mass of very attractive romance, we shall have again to speak.

The more recent literature on the subject begins with the Remains of the late Mr. R. H. Froude. Strangely enough, the first recent apologist of St. Thomas of Canterbury was brother of the apologist of King Henry VIII. The elder Froude, one of the original leaders of the Oxford Tract movement, was a man of ability and independent thought, but, as one might expect, he approached the subject from a wholly false point of view. His case was one of the most conspicuous of misconceiving history, in consequence of seeing it through an atmosphere of modern controversy. The subject attracted him from some fancied analogies between the position of the church in the twelfth century and the nineteenth. The career of Thomas occupies the whole of the third volume of Mr. Froude's Remains, but a large portion of the narrative part is from another hand, no less an one, we believe, than Dr. Newman's. Mr. Froude's own labours were chiefly given to translating and partially arranging the Epistles, a task before which any amount of energy might excusably have broken down.

After Mr. Froude came Dr. Giles. We suppose we must allow the praises of zeal and research to a man who has edited,

translated, and written more books than any other living English scholar. But really we can give him no other praise. The Epistles, as edited in his Sanctus Thomas Cantuariensis, are, as most later writers have complained, a heap of confusion, made far worse confounded by Dr. Giles himself. The principle of arrangement is an elaborate puzzle, which renders it almost hopeless to find any particular letter; the indexes are very meagre, and the mere editing is exceedingly bad.*

Dr. Giles has, indeed, also given us The Life and Letters in two volumes of English, in which there is an attempt to arrange some of the letters in the order of time. But scholars

do not want a translation-and a very bad translation tooof some of the letters, but an intelligible edition of the original text of all. Dr. Giles's attempt at original biography amounts to little more than a filling up of interstices, and is moreover as poor and superficial as may be. Nearly every thing that is good in it is copied from Mr. Froude.

The life and death of Thomas have also been taken up by two writers of a widely different stamp from either Mr. Froude or Dr. Giles. Professor Stanley, in his Historical Memorials of Canterbury, has given us a harmonised narrative of the martyrdom, written with such minuteness, life, and truth, that we deeply regret that it extends to the martyrdom alone, and does not take in the whole history. No less admirable is his treatment of what we may call the posthumous history of Thomas in the chapter on the "Shrine of Becket." The Thomaic controversy, again, occupies a large portion of the third volume of Dean Milman's Latin Christianity. With some drawbacks, this is the best English life of Thomas we know, though the narrative perhaps suffers a little from over-compression; and though we think that the Dean passes on the whole too harsh a judgment on Thomas, it is only fair to add that he sometimes bears rather hard upon Henry also. Still his narrative, allowing for some of those little slips in names and details, in which it is strange to find so really learned a man as Dr. Milman so constantly falling, is the very best history of Thomas we know, far better, considering its scale, than the more special ones which we have now to mention.

The year 1859 produced two rival biographies of our hero; the works of the Roman Catholic Canon of Northampton, and of the Protestant Canon of Canterbury. On these we might be tempted to dilate at some length, as the contrast between them is very curious and amusing. Each of the rival canons has

We thoroughly agree with Mr. Robertson's wish, that a really good edition of the whole literature on the subject should form part of the series now publishing by authority of the Master of the Rolls.