CHAP. V.

ELECTION OF PRIMATE.

83

borne by royal authority, or by the power of the prelates, never renounced or abandoned their sole and exclusive pretensions.

A.D. 1205.

Immediately on the death of Hubert, the younger monks, without waiting for the royal licence, in the narrow corporate spirit of monkhood, hastily elected their Sub-prior Reginald to the See. In order to surprise the Papal sanction, under which they might defy the resentment of the King without whose licence they had acted, and baffle the bishops who claimed the concurrent right, they had the precaution to take an oath from Reginald to maintain inviolable secrecy till he should arrive at Rome. The vanity of Reginald induced him, directly he reached Flanders, to assume the title, and to travel with the pomp of an Archbishop Elect. On his arrival at Rome, Innocent neither rejected nor admitted his pretensions. Among the monks of Christchurch, in the mean time, the older and more prudent had resumed their ascendancy; they declared the election of Reginald void, obtained the royal permission, and proceeded under the royal influence to elect in all due form John de Gray, Bishop of Norwich, a martial prelate and the great leader in the councils of the King." The suffragan bishops acquiesced in this election. The Bishop of Norwich was enthroned in the presence of the King, and invested in all the temporalities of the see by the King himself.

A.D. 1206.

On the appeal to Rome, upon this question of strict ecclesiastical jurisdiction, all agreed. Reginald the Subprior and his partisans were already there; twelve monks of Christchurch appeared on the part of the King and the Bishop of Norwich; the suffragan bishops had their delegates to maintain their right to concurrent election. The Pope, in the first place, took into consideration the right of election. He decided in favour of the monks. Against their prescriptive, immemorial usage, appeared only pretensions established in irregular and violent times, under the protection of arbitrary monarchs.P Many decisions of the Papal See had been in favour of elections made by the monks alone; none recognised the

Wendover, p. 194. R. de Coggeshal.

P Wendover, p. 188.

necessary concurrence of the bishops. Policy no doubt commingled in this decree with reverence for ancient custom; the monks were more likely to choose a prelate of high churchmanlike views-views acceptable to Rome; the bishops to comply with the commands, or at least not to be insensible to the favour of the King.

Stephen

The Court of Rome proceeded to examine the validity of the late election. It determined at once to annul both that of Reginald the Sub-prior and that of John de Gray: of Reginald, because it was irregularly made, and by a small number of the electors; of de Gray, because the former election had not been declared invalid by competent authority. The twelve monks were ordered to proceed to a new election at Rome. John had anticipated this event, and taken an oath of the monks to elect no one but John de Gray. They were menaced with excommunication if they persisted in the maintenance of their oath ; they were commanded to elect Stephen Langton, Langton. Cardinal of St. Chrysogonus. Innocent could not have found a Churchman more unexceptionable, or of more commanding qualifications for the primacy of England. Stephen Langton was an Englishman by birth, of irreproachable morals, profound theologic learning, of a lofty, firm, yet prudent character, which unfolded itself at a later period in a manner not anticipated by Pope Innocent. Langton had studied at Paris, and attained surpassing fame and honourable distinctions. Of all the high-minded, wise, and generous prelates who have filled the see of Canterbury, none have been superior to Stephen Langton; and him the Church of England owes to Innocent III. And if in himself Langton was so signally fit for the station, he was more so in contrast with his rivals-Reginald, who emerged from his obscurity to fall back immediately into the same obscurity; the Bishop of Norwich, a man of warlike rather than of priestly fame, immersed in temporal affairs, the justiciary of the realm, in whom John could little fear or Innocent hope to find a second Becket. The monks murmured, but proceeded to the election of Langton. Elias of Brantfield alone stood aloof unconsenting; he tried the effect of English gold,

A.D. 1207.

СПАР. У.

CONSECRATION OF LANGTON.

85

with which he had been lavishly supplied. Innocent, it is said, disdainfully rejected a bribe amounting to three thousand marks.

Innocent, aware that this assumption of the nomination to the archbishopric by the Pope, this intrusion of a prelate almost a stranger, would be offensive to the pride of the English King, had endeavoured to propitiate John by a suitable present. Among the weaknesses of this vain man was a passion for precious stones. He sent him a ring of great splendour, with many gems, accompanied with a letter explaining their symbolic religious signification. The letter was followed by another, recommending strongly Stephen Langton, Archbishop elect of Canterbury, as a man incomparable for theologic learning as for his character and manners; a person who would be of the greatest use to the King in temporal or in spiritual affairs. But the messengers of the Pope were stopped at Dover. At Viterbo, the Pope proceeded to the consecration of the Primate of England. The fury of John knew no bounds: he accused the monks of Canterbury of having Rage of taken his money in order to travel to Rome, and King John. of having there betrayed him. He threatened to burn their cloister over their heads; they fled in the utmost precipitation to Flanders; the church of Canterbury was committed to the monks of St. Augustine; the lands of the monks of Christchurch lay an uncultivated wilderness. To the Pope he wrote in indignation that he was not only insulted by the rejection of the Bishop of Norwich, but by the election of Langton, a man utterly unknown to him, and bred in France among his deadly enemies. The Pope should remember how necessary to him was the alliance of England; from England he drew more wealth than from any kingdom beyond the Alps. He declared that he would cut off at once all communication between his realm and Rome. Innocent's tone rose with that of John, but he maintained calmer dignity. He enlarged on the writings of Langton: so far from Langton being

4 Wendover, p. 212.

Matt. Par.

tumn of 1207 at Viterbo.-Hurter, ii. p. 39. The letter in Wendover, 216.-Matt.

⚫ Innocent passed the summer and au- Paris.

unknown to the King, he had three times written to him since his promotion to the cardinalate. He warned the King of the danger of revolting against the Church: "Remember this is a cause for which the glorious martyr St. Thomas shed his blood."

John had all the pride, in the outset of this conflict he showed some of the firm resolution, of a Norman sovereign. The Bishop of Norwich, in his disappointed ambition, inflamed the resentment and encouraged the obstinacy of the King. "Stephen Langton at his peril should set his foot on the soil of England." Innocent proceeded with slow but determinate measures. All expostulation having proved vain, he armed himself with that terrible curse which had already brought the King of France under his feet. England in her turn must suffer all the terrors of interdict. William Bishop of London, Eustace Bishop of Ely, Mainger Bishop of Worcester, had instructions to demand for the last time the royal acknowledgment of Langton; if refused, to publish the interdict throughout their dioceses." The King broke out into a paroxysm of fury; he uttered the most fearful oaths-blasphemies they were called against the Pope and the Cardinals; he swore "by the teeth of God," that if they dared to place his realm under an interdict he would drive the whole of the bishops and clergy out of the kingdom, put out the eyes and cut off the noses of all Romans in the realm, in order to mark them for hatred. He threatened the prelates themselves with violence. The prelates withdrew, in the ensuing Lent published the interdict, and then March 24,1208. fled the kingdom, and with them the Bishops of Bath and Hereford. "There they lived, says the historian, in abundance and luxury, instead of standing up as a defence for the Lord's house, abandoning their flocks to the ravening wolf."* Salisbury and Rochester took refuge in Scotland. Thus throughout England, as throughout France, without exception, without any privilege to church or monastery, ceased the divine offices of the Church.

Interdict.

"See in Rymer a letter of remonstrance by Pope Innocent. John answers the bishop that he will obey the Pope, salvâ dignitate regiâ et liberta

tibus regiis.-i. p. 99.

X

Wendover, p. 224.

Bower. Continuat. Fordun. viii.

CHAP. V.

ENGLAND UNDER INTERDICT.

87

From Berwick to the British Channel, from the Land's-end to Dover, the churches were closed, the bells silent; the only clergy who were seen stealing silently about were those who were to baptise new-born infants with a hasty ceremony; those who were to hear the confession of the dying, and to administer to them, and them alone, the holy Eucharist. The dead (no doubt the most cruel affliction) were cast out of the towns, buried like dogs in some unconsecrated place-in a ditch or a dungheap-without prayer, without the tolling bell, without funeral rite. Those only can judge the effect of this fearful malediction who consider how completely the whole life of all orders was affected by the ritual and daily ordinances of the Church. Every important act was done under the counsel of the priest or the monk. Even to the less serious, the festivals of the Church were the only holidays, the processions of the Church the only spectacles, the ceremonies of the Church the only amusements. To those of deeper religion, to those, the far greater number, of abject superstition, what was it to have the child thus almost furtively baptised, marriage unblessed, or hardly blessed; the obsequies denied; to hear neither prayer nor chant; to suppose that the world was surrendered to the unrestrained power of the devil and his evil spirits, with no saint to intercede, no sacrifice to avert the wrath of God; when no single image was exposed to view, not a cross unveiled: the intercourse between man and God utterly broken off; souls left to perish, or but reluctantly permitted absolution in the instant of death.

John might seem to encounter the public misery, not with resolute bravery, but with an insolence of disdain; to revel in his vengeance against the bishops and priests who obeyed the Pope. The Sheriffs had orders to compel all such priests and bishops to quit the realm, scornfully adding that they might seek justice with the Pope. He seized the bishoprics and abbeys, escheated their estates into the hands of laymen. Some of the monks refused to leave their monasteries; their lands and property were not the less