[In the following essay, Lloyd presents an overview of John's life and career.]

I

No student of twelfth century history can long remain unaware of John of Salisbury. The books abound in references to him, and when almost any of the great scholars cross their pages, one may be sure that John is not far away. When the writers are dealing with Church Councils, with the Popes and the Curia, with the diplomacy of kings, or political theory, John is still lurking round the corner. He touched the life of his time at so many points, and he travelled so widely, that in retrospect he seems to be ubiquitous. His whole life was passed in the company of great men, and he was present at most of the exciting and important scenes of his day. Yet it cannot be said that he exercised an influence over his friends so deep that it is noticeable after seven hundred years, or that his share in shaping great events was in any sense epoch-making.

So it is that the books of our time are fuller of references to him than of descriptions of him or estimates of the precise nature of his historic importance. His evidence is called to settle a knotty point in connection with, say, the trial of Guibert de la Porée; or his letters to S. Thomas of Canterbury are quoted. Not John, however, but Guibert, Bernard, or Thomas fill the stage. He had none of the spectacular virtues—not, of course, that virtue is any the less virtuous because it is spectacular—and, perhaps because of that, he just missed the first greatness. It may well be that his essential detachment is responsible, for while his body and a part of his mind moved in the twelfth century, his heart was for ever ranging among his beloved classics. That love brought him a Latin style unrivalled among all mediaeval writers, and a superb sense of realism, and it was to him a joy for ever. But though a wide and understanding knowledge of literature will keep a man in inward peace and happiness all his days, it is not the kind of occupation which, taken alone, will get him into the history books, and keep him in the company of the giants.

Modern historians naturally concentrate most on his classical scholarship, and next on his political theory. That will arise in its place in this essay, but on the former point no writer has summed up the general verdict quite so charmingly as Miss Helen Waddell in her really splendid book, The Wandering Scholars:

“What says our Arbiter,” says John of Salisbury affectionately every few pages; it is as though an archdeacon has the Arbiter of Excellence by the arm. Those who come to John for information on contemporary manners do so warily; he may so easily be thinking of the court of Augustus, not of Henry II. Not many knew the classics as John did.

Again, in commenting on his Metalogicus:

The experience of literature, the critical appreciation of it, is evident on every page. No man of his age had the same grace of quotation, the same clean structure of thought, the sense of the perfect period: and when an enquiry into the root of the Greek heroic merges into a delicate meditation on the truth of things as the only constancy, and thence, because his imagination is haunted by its loveliness through the paradox that that which is, may be the symbol of that which is not yet, to a line from the Georgics,

“A crimson sky at dawn, and rain: at evening light,” one knows oneself in the power of a great master of prose. The submerged city of the poets is always in John's consciousness and in the strongest tides of controversy he hears the sound of its bells.

In an age in which learning was prized, John could hardly have escaped notice, even if his political associations had not been of the kind that would bring him into public notice. Thus references to him are to be found in all the original authorities. He flowed through their writings in much the same way as he does through ours; and the chief impression he made on them was also that of a classical scholar of the first greatness. When he was banished from England, the Abbot of S. Remy received him as “a great friend,” and wrote letters to influential people to enlist their intervention on behalf of “a man of great literary attainment. The more one knows him the better one likes him.” And he writes of him as being “so well known on both sides of the water.”

But it was the not very intelligent Herbert de Bosham who, with an unexpected flair for the values of posterity, placed John in much the same position as do our own historians, fitly in the company of the greatest, but contentedly lagging behind them. In 1185 Herbert composed a list giving in order of merit the names and achievements of the learned men in the court of his hero, S. Thomas of Canterbury. For all its devotion one cannot help being reminded of the usual end of term article in the School Magazine on “Characters of the Cricket XI.” He begins with the Saint: “First and foremost was he the most learned of them all, Thomas himself (which manifestly he was not!) And as more learned, so was he more distinguished than they, washing in red wine his robe, and in the blood of the purple grape his mantle.” The Archbishop of Beneventum comes second, and then John.

By God's grace he implanted in himself the two eyes of the church, wisdom and learning, which were abundantly given him by the Spirit. He remained with our late martyr in all his temptations even to the end; and for his high merits, not his own, but those of the illustrious martyr, as he fancied, was called out of his native land by the Lord, to preside over the diocese of Chartres.

II

For the details of his own life as a boy and a young man, John is his own authority. The result is that we have very full information of his student days, for it was to that period of his life that his memory perpetually returned, but practically no information of his boyhood. Not even the researches of Dr. Lane Poole have been able to fix the date of his birth more exactly than as occurring between 1115 and 1120 at Old Sarum. Of his childhood in England we have one glimpse and one only, though that glimpse is fairly significant. He was sent to a priest to learn his Psalms. The priest, however, not content with probing the mysteries of his own Faith, was also dabbling in various forms of magic, and employed John as an instrument for necromantic experiments. But John's mind was too independent and his sense of realities too strong. He could not cast himself into trances, and he could see no ghosts, so that he was useless for the priest's purposes.

That is as it were the prologue of the play. The curtain falls on it, and remains lowered until John himself raises it in “the next year after that the glorious King of the English, Henry the Lion of Righteousness, departed from human things,” and the scene is a Paris lecture room.

His life as a student in Paris and Chartres, from 1136 to 1146, has been admirably outlined by himself in his Metalogicus.

When, as a lad, I first went into Gaul for the cause of study, I addressed myself to the Peripatetic of Palais (Abelard), who then presided upon Mount Saint Genovefa, an illustrious teacher and admired of all men. There at his feet I acquired the first rudiments of the dialectical art, and snatched according to the scant measure of my wits whatever passed his lips with entire greediness of mind. Then, when he had departed, all too hastily as it seemed to me, I joined myself to Master Alberic (of Rheims) who stood forth among the rest as a greatly esteemed dialectician and verily was the bitterest opponent of the whole nominal sect.

By this time much of the glory had departed from Abelard. He was fifty-seven. He had parted from his beloved Heloise, and the picture of her presiding uneasily over her nunnery never left him. The personal shame of the horrible revenge of Canon Fulbert, the uncle of Heloise, could hardly be forgotten even for a moment. No mind not entirely insensitive could fail to be thrilled at being taught by one of the two or three greatest dialecticians the world has seen. But by John's own choice his education was directed along precisely opposite lines from those in which Abelard had been eminent, and for which the University of Paris was to stand. John was a classical scholar first and last, and so he turned his face to the Cathedral School at Chartres, which was then the chief home of classical culture in Europe.

Chartres was the centre of the literary and humanist ideals of the twelfth century. Its name had been made a century before by Fulbert, but it was Bernard of Chartres (who, in Dr. Lane Poole's view, is to be distinguished from Bernard Sylvestris, though the point is not established) who gathered in himself the essential attributes for which Chartres stood, and gave expression to them in the world through the generations of scholars he taught there. Those attributes might well be epitomised in the two phrases: Intelligent Conservatism, and a steady Grasp of Temporalities. The attitude of both Bernard and John to the terrific controversy over Nominalism and Realism which raged all around them illustrates this. Bernard tried to show that Nominalism was unnecessary because the philosophies of Plato and Aristotle could be harmonised. It is as though he was sick and tired of the warfare and was seeking a formula which would bring peace and quiet into the intellectual world. John, a true child of Chartres, commented that the proof was unconvincing, and there left the matter. He allowed the tides of controversy to flow over him, took little notice, but simply and quietly pursued his classical studies. From Cicero and his circle could wisdom most easily be drawn, and John quoted approvingly the words of Bernard: “We are as dwarfs mounted on the shoulders of giants; so that we can see more and further than they; yet not by virtue of the keenness of our eyesight, nor through the tallness of our stature, but because we are raised and born aloft on that giant mass.” By holding firmly to the discipline of Grammar, and by refusing to take sides in the controversy, the school of Chartres lost many pupils who preferred the more exciting and less exacting atmosphere of Paris. But the loss in quantity was more than balanced by the gain in quality.

For the conservatism of Chartres extended to the course of study. Grammar, in Bernard's view, was the basis of literary understanding, and his successors to the third generation, of which was John, held that opinion as firmly as he. Writing later, in 1159, John said:

Since then (i.e., his days at Chartres) less time and less care have been bestowed upon grammar, and persons who profess all arts, liberal and mechanical, are ignorant of the primary art, without which a man proceeds in vain to the rest. For albeit the other studies assist literature, yet this has the sole privilege of making one lettered.

Grammar, in an admirable definition written three hundred years earlier was “the knowledge which interprets poets and historians; the correct method of writing and speech; the source and the basis of the liberal arts.” With it went Rhetoric, which might be called Grammar in practice, for it was the art of literary expression, and included composition. The third member of the family of Grammar was Dialectic, which was variously interpreted in different schools. At Chartres it was taken to mean a science whereby Greek philosophy and Christian doctrine might be synthesised.

Bernard's methods of teaching Grammar were thorough, and were still used in John's day, though he himself seems not to have been taught by Bernard. Cicero, Virgil, Horace, Ovid, Seneca were the chief Latin authors studied. Students at Chartres had to make their daily exercise in prose or verse imitations of the best models, or of none; and their compositions must observe and repeat meticulously the particular idiosyncracies of the author they were studying at the time, and which had been carefully explained to them. Repetition was also required of them. Virgil and Ovid had to be learned by rote, a practice which brought forth abundant fruit in the case of John, for no mediaeval writer had quite his grace of quotation. And when they began the day's work they had to write down all they could remember of what they had learned the previous day.

John left Paris and came to Chartres in 1137 or 1138, deserting Alberic of Rheims for Bernard's pupil, Robert of Melun, who, twenty-five years later, as Bishop of Hereford, was to take Henry II's side against the Archbishop. The one of them, wrote John, was

in questions subtle and large, the other in responses lucid, short, and agreeable. They were both men of sharp intellect and study unconquerable. Thus much for the time that I was conversant with them: for afterwards the one went to Bologna and unlearned that which he had taught; yea, and returned and untaught the same; whether for the better or no let them judge who heard him before and since. Moreover the other went on to the study of divine letters, and aspired to the glory of a nobler philosophy and a more illustrious name.

It does not require much discernment to discover John's preference. The one was Parisian and the other of Chartres, and, for John, that was enough. At Chartres he applied himself

for the full space of two years to practice in the commonplaces and rules and other rudimentary elements which are instilled into the minds of boys and wherein the aforesaid doctors were most able and ready; so that methought I knew all these things as well as my nails and fingers. This at least I had learned in the lightness of youth to account my knowledge of more worth than it was. I seemed to myself a young scholar, because I was quick in that which I had heard. Then returning unto myself and measuring my powers, I advisedly resorted, by the good favour of my preceptors to the Grammarian of Conches and heard his teaching by the space of three years, the while teaching much: nor shall I ever regret that time … I read also again Rhetoric, which aforetime I had scarce understood when it was treated of meagrely by Master Theodoric. The same I afterwards received more plenteously at the hand of Peter Helias.

From this account it is clear that William, the Grammarian of Conches exercised a great influence over the young scholar's mind. As his title denotes he followed Bernard in holding the absolute necessity of Grammar as the basis of knowledge. But he went further than Bernard had done and included Theology in his philosophy and in his system of education. But in his view, to judge by the use he made of it, Theology was far from being the Queen of Sciences and the potential synthesis of divine learning and human experience. He made use of it, as Dr. Lane Poole has said, “in so far as it was necessary to elucidate his philosophical ideas. His main business was with the tangible.” The famous sentence, “By a knowledge of the creature we attain to a knowledge of the Creator” is the essential germ of his thought. Here again Chartres speaks. This seemed to S. Bernard of Clairvaux to be inverting the proper order, and to be putting last things first. With that unlovely eagerness which characterised all S. Bernard's dealings with the indiscretions of scholars, he promptly charged William with heresy, and William was obliged to take refuge under the wing of Geoffrey of Anjou.

Another of John's teachers at Chartres was Richard l'Evêque, a man for whom he had considerable admiration, for his “training was deficient in almost nothing, who had more heart even than speech, more knowledge than skill, more truth than vanity, more virtue than show: and the things I learned from others I collected all again from him, and certain things, too, I learned which I had not before heard.”

At this point in his career John found himself beset by the same disability which every generation of students since the world began has encountered, lack of money. There was only one temporary occupation at which a man of his training could hope to earn enough money to see him through the rest of his education, and that was tutoring, the perennial occupation of undergraduates to-day during the Long Vacation. So “I received the children of noble persons to instruct, who furnished me with living.” This work lasted for three years; but he still found the time to study, and even to scrape acquaintance with another teacher, Master Adam du Petit Pont,

a man of exceeding sharp wits and, whatever others may think, of much learning, who applied himself above the rest to Aristotle: in such wise that, albeit I had not him to my teacher, he gave me kindly of his, and delivered himself openly enough; the which he was wont to do to none or to few others than his own scholars, for he was deemed to suffer from jealousy.

In 1140 John had earned enough money for him to finish his education. But in the meantime a new teacher had won fame at Paris, Guibert de la Porée, a pupil of Bernard of Chartres and a man whose intellect was of the first rank. Anselm said of him that he was “so ripe in liberal culture as to be surpassed by no one, rather it was believed that in all things he excelled all men.” So John went to Paris in 1140 to learn from Guibert, and for two years heard his lectures on Logic and Divinity. But in 1142 Guibert was translated to the Bishopric of Poitiers, lamented by his students. And so John ended his life as a student, having sought after learning for twelve years. He left Paris in 1146, went to Pope Eugenius III at Viterbo, and spent the next eight years of his life in his service.

III

There is, mercifully, no need for this essay to follow breathlessly in John's wake all over Western Europe. It would be a weary task indeed, a long catalogue of names of places and persons. In the phraseology of the modern newspaper, he went everywhere and knew everybody. In fifteen years, from 1146 to 1161, he was the confidential secretary to the Pope, a high official in the documents department of the Curia, the friend of S. Bernard, the valued correspondent of innumerable scholars all over Europe, and the intimate counsellor of Archbishop Theobald. While in the Pope's service he accompanied him wherever he went, and he was constantly employed both by him and Theobald on confidential diplomatic missions. Writing in 1159, he said that he had been engaged upon official business for twelve years, and that he had crossed the Alps ten times from England alone.

Thus he was a constant eye witness of history in the making. He would go to conferences and councils, listen quietly to all that was said, and, studiously preserving his detached, rather sceptical estimate of the proceedings and their value, would take notes of what passed. These notes he afterwards used as the rough draft of his Historia Pontificalis, which, written at various times, was finished in 1164, and covers the period 1148 to 1152. The book is the main historical authority for the period it covers, but while its importance in that respect is naturally great, the manner of it, and the events chosen for emphasis as being of special importance, shed a good deal of light on his own mind. One chapter, for instance, is given to the Council of Rheims (1148) at which John was present. The main business of this council was the trial of Guibert de la Porée for heresy. John gives a full account of it, and drily adds to it the story of S. Bernard's discomfiture by Guibert. It is a good story, and it will bear repetition, especially if it be told in Miss Waddell's words.

One holds Guibert dear if only for his reply to the great Bernard who had broken Abelard. Guibert was the next to engage the Saint's attention, and “Guibert is the one man whom Saint Bernard of Clairvaux charged unsuccessfully with heresy.” He stood at bay, a solid phalanx of the Fathers in folio literally behind him, for his clerks followed him thus armed into the council. Some time after the trial, comes a friendly overture from the Saint, suggesting a little informal conference on some points in the writings of St. Hilary, to which the Chancellor replies that if the Abbot wishes to come to a full understanding of the subject, it would be well for him to submit for a year or two to the ordinary processes of a liberal education.

That is a story after John's own heart, but it shows that his heart was hardly mediaeval, for it has too sardonic a flavour for a truly mediaeval mind to relish. As for the rest of his account of the council, he does not bother to set down its decrees, and one can only suppose that it was because he thought them of small importance either way, but he does trouble to describe any little scene which caused a laugh.

And in the other matters with which he deals, his estimate of the relative historic importance of details is much the same. He writes of the Second Crusade, is sadly troubled by the victory of the Turks which he calls “an irreparable disaster,” but says very little about the defeats. Most of his account is taken up by a vigorous and sarcastic criticism of those in authority and their policies. He is, in fact, far more interested in personalities than in mere historic events. Thus there is a good deal in the book about quarrels of minor historic importance, about the Pope's attempt to heal the breach between the French King and Queen (“he left them in tears with his blessing”—is that an altogether ingenuous comment?) and between the Bishop of Beauvais and Simon Suger, or the quarrel of Theobald and the Canterbury monks. He writes, too, of the tragic career of Arnold of Brescia, and is here of first rate historic value, for he altogether supplements the only two original authorities, a chapter of Otto of Friesingen and S. Bernard's letters. The book was bound among the twenty-odd massive volumes of the Monumenta Germaniae Historica, and until 1873 was taken as being written by some unknown French clerk. The discovery of its true authorship meant that the accepted account of Arnold of Brescia had to be altogether re-cast.

But, taking the book as a whole, we may say that John wrote more for his amusement than for our instruction. He does not tell us what we want to know. But just for that reason his facts are utterly dependable, and he shows a quite un-mediaeval exactness in the matter of dates. And although the omissions are irritating to the historian they are most significant as a key to the character of the writer.

During the time when John was exiled from England by Henry II, 1157-1160, for giving rein to his churchmanship rather too definitely during the Siege of Toulouse, he wrote his two great works, Metalogicus, and Policraticus.

The Metalogicus is partly autobiographical, for into the midst of its philosophic argument is inserted the long passage describing his days at Paris and Chartres, from which, in Dr Lane Poole's translation, I quoted above. Its value is thus great, for it has led historians to appreciate more and more deeply the importance of Chartres as the true home of twelfth century humanism. But it is in the main an account of John's philosophical views. The fact that he was at bottom a churchman in the mediaeval sense of the term, as his dealings with Henry II and Thomas à Becket showed, makes them the more remarkable. For the book is virtually a defence of philosophic doubt as to the correct mental standpoint of the educated man, so long as, and the proviso is tremendous, that doubt does not extend to those matters upon which the correct belief has already been pronounced by authority. In other words, John held, and announced that he held, what was in effect a modified view of private judgment, and found no man to say him nay. “There are many questions which every man has a right to answer or leave unanswered for himself,” and among them even “those things which are reverently enquired about God himself, who surpasses the examination of all rational nature and is exalted above all that the mind can conceive.” But such an enquiry which might properly lead to the abeyance of judgment, that is, doubt, on the nature of God must plainly begin with an examination of the doctrine of the Incarnation, upon which authority had in fact pronounced. The list of the things “about which a wise man may doubt so that the doubt extend not to the multitude” is curious: Fate, Chance, Providence, Free Will, the Soul, Virtues and Vices. All of them are of such a nature that an enquiry into any one of them cannot be restricted to its subject alone, but must inevitably lead to a further enquiry into other matters which authority had already decided. Authority is therefore enlarged in its conception, and, by implication, narrowed in its range and effect. Reason is divine, but it can be exercised only by the virtuous. “The good man,” in Dr. Lane Poole's phrase, “can be trusted to know,” and freedom, which must thus extend ultimately to matters of faith, is the millenium towards which men stumble.

But that the hypothetical freedom of the future, which only virtue can confer, should proceed from the propriety and necessity of philosophic doubt in many matters of religion, to be granted now, to the learned, is indeed a remarkable view for a mediaeval churchman to take. It is surely not reading too much into the argument to say that John is trying to justify his innate scepticism. There is no evidence whatever for the view that he doubted the truth of the Christian Religion; but there is ample evidence that his was essentially the mind of a sceptic. The Metalogicus is a brilliant attempt at self explanation and self justification. What John doubted was not Christianity, but the usefulness of human effort; and the more one studies him, the more one is reminded of that most curious and interesting figure in modern politics, Lord Balfour.

IV

Above all things, however, John was a churchman with definitely mediaeval views on the relation of church and state, for which he was content to suffer a long banishment and disgrace, and which led him to uphold whole-heartedly the cause of Thomas à Becket. The exile ended in 1167, the year in which Archbishop Theobald died. In 1162 John, together with four other clergy, went to Pope Alexander III at Montpellier to bring back the new Archbishop's Pall, and in 1163, when the King returned to England and the long quarrel between him and Thomas began, John again crossed the channel. He spent the next five years travelling over Europe on Thomas' behalf, and writing a stream of letters to Thomas and other churchmen in England. He made his home with Peter, the abbot of the monastery of S. Remigius at Rheims, and he was so badly in need of money that he was driven to practise the wearisome task of writing letters for others. It was during this period that he wrote the Historia Pontificalis.

Henry II seems to have cherished a real regard for John, for he was allowed to return to England in 1161, in spite of his Policraticus, and to a monarch holding Henry's views that book must have seemed thoroughly pernicious. It is his most elaborate and ambitious work, and it lays down the principles which guided him to the uncompromising position he took as the adviser and friend of Thomas à Becket. He wrote it at the same time as the Metalogicus, but in it a very different John speaks. Henry II had, in his view, challenged the authority of the Church, and the subtleties of philosophic doubt were hardly substantial enough to serve as a basis of the defence of order against chaos. For that is how John conceives the situation. Secular power is rightly enjoyed and exercised only if it is recognised as itself derived from the will of the spiritual authority.

The book is partly satirical and partly constructive. He begins with a list of the hindrances to good government; and with penetrating, though amusing comments on each. The worst evil is hunting, not so curious a choice as it sounds, when the depredations in the New Forest and the horrible game laws are remembered. Classical always, he calls its devotees centaurs, and condemns them on the ground that they are “seldom modest or serious, seldom self-controlled, never, I believe, sober.” The taking of omens is also condemned at some length, for nothing happens without legitimate cause, and its interpretation must clearly depend on the particular bent of the beholder's mind. No phenomenon can bear a rigid interpretation, and augury is therefore a mixture of superstition and chicanery. Similarly, dicing, licentious music, conjuring, and dream interpretation are banished from his Utopia. So is acting, for John finds that the actors imitate the improprieties of Nero and not the dignities of the Augustan stage.

But these are minor ills when compared to the fundamental error of misconceiving the purpose of the State and the source and nature of its power. The end of the state is security of life, and life is secure only to those citizens who can perceive truth and practise virtue. Thus the immediate aim of the state, rather than its ultimate end, is to bring into being a type of society in which the perception of truth and practice of virtue shall be helped and not hindered by the normal environment of the citizen. The condition of this attainment is the close co-ordination and harmony of spiritual and temporal powers, which, in its turn, cannot be achieved without a true understanding of the nature of both.

The State is a functional organism, and can thus be compared to the human body. In the body the soul guides and the brain rules, but rules under that guidance. It is the same in the State, the clergy are the soul, the prince is the head, and thus divine law transcends human law, witness the part played by the clergy in the coronation of the prince. Or the metaphor may be varied to the wielder of two swords, or again, so that the Georgics may be brought in, to a hive of bees. But whatever the metaphor employed the result is the same. All authority is derived from the Church to which both swords were entrusted by God, and must be used at the Church's direction and bidding. Only on a frank recognition of that can safety and happiness be built, and all else is chaos and anarchy.

For myself I am persuaded and satisfied that loyal shoulders should uphold the power of the ruler; and not only do I submit to his power patiently, but with pleasure, so long as it is exercised in subjection to God and follows His ordinances. But on the other hand, if it resists and opposes the divine commandments, and wishes me to make war against God; then with unrestrained voice I answer back that God must be preferred before any man on earth.

That does not sound very formidable, until it is remembered that the Church and the Church alone was the interpreter of God's will. If for the word “God” in that sentence we read “Church” we have precisely the view for which the Archbishop was to die. There is a letter of Henry II's to the schismatical Archbishop of Cologne which puts his view of the same question as clearly and forcible as anyone could wish.

I have long wished to have a just cause for leaving Pope Alexander and his perfidious cardinals, who presume to support that traitor Thomas, formerly Archbishop of Canterbury, in his rebellion against me. Wherefore … I mean to send to Rome … to warn the Pope, from myself and my whole kingdom, no longer to support the cause of that traitor, but to release me from him altogether, and let me have another Archbishop of Canterbury in his place. They are also required to revoke all they have done in this matter and to make a public decree that the Pope for himself and his successors for ever, shall ratify my royal constitutions; and if they do not consent to this request, I and my barons and all my clergy will obey him no longer, but will do all we can against him.

And the ecclesiastical position was defined equally clearly by John in a letter to the Bishop of Exeter.

Now he who sins against his neighbour sins against God, and a man undoubtedly dishonours Christ the Bridegroom when he dishonours the Church His Bride. For Christ and His Church are one body, one spirit, and what is more, they are by Grace one God inasmuch as by a mysterious bond the Church confers that which is fleshly on the Lord, and receives from him in return the fullness of the divine nature, and abounds even to overflowing with the oil of gladness.

How was compromise possible between these views? What diplomatic formula could reconcile them?

So it was that Thomas à Becket had no more disinterested adviser or friend, and no supporter more wholehearted than this classical scholar with his essentially sceptical view of most human causes. But though in this matter John joined himself to the cause of the Church with all the definiteness of the enthusiast, and, by refusing the reconciliation offered by the King on condition of renouncing his opposition to the Constitution of Clarendon, burnt his boats, he chose his own function and exercised it with all the shrewd cautiousness of his nature. He was first a go-between for Thomas, negotiating for him with the Curia and the French King; and, more important in his eyes, he acted always as a brake on the heady and offensive impetuousness of the Archbishop.

His diplomacy was not very successful, and he knew it. It was not his fault, for no one had a more adroit command over the politer arts of courtly negotiation than he; nor was anybody more skilful at finding the right formula. But it was more a case for money than formulae, and the Church in England was comparatively poor. The Curia, for instance, as John wrote to Thomas,

was never yet proof against bribes … Now what can we do, needy as we are, against such powerful enemies? We have only words to offer, and the Italians will not listen to them: for they have learnt from their own poet not to buy empty promises. You tell me in your last letter to offer them 200 marks, but the others will immediately offer three or four.

'Tis vain, for if we offer all our store
In hopes to win, Iolas offers more.

John could enlist sympathy abroad, but could do little more. Where he was most valuable was in his personal dealings with Thomas, who offended even his adherents by his utter immoderacy. Inflamed by the knowledge of the justice of his cause he went about breathing fire and slaughter, and pronouncing wholesale excommunications, which, however just in themselves, effectively removed any slight chance there might have been of a peaceful settlement. Only John could steady him, but as they communicated mostly by letter, the mischief was done before the admonitory letter arrived. On one occasion John thought a little plain speaking might be helpful, so he repeated in a letter to Thomas the opinion of his adherent, the Archbishop of Rouen, that all his actions proceeded either from pride or passion, and commented

You must meet this opinion by a display of moderation as well in your deeds and words as in your bearing and habit: yet all this avails but little with God unless it proceed from the secret chamber of your conscience.

Nor did John scruple to advise and correct Thomas on all points of conduct, even admonishing him for reading the Canon Law: “You would do better to confer on moral subjects with some spiritual man.”

And so the events of the tragedy dragged their weary course to the dark December evening when Thomas was to win his case in the only way left to him, by dying for it. John had come with him to England, and was with him in the afternoon when the four knights first came to challenge him in his palace. Other followers were there, and with them a Kentish monk called Edward Grim, who, travelling on some business or other, seems to have attached himself to the company on hearing that the Archbishop was there, and to whom we owe the best account of what happened. Thomas' reply to the knights was utterly uncompromising, and he needlessly infuriated them still further by calling Fitzurse a Pander. The churchmen retired to the Archbishop's private chamber, and Abbot Benedict of Peterborough afterwards wrote down what passed.

The man of God returned to his seat, and complained to those about him of the King's message, and the abusive language of his messengers; upon which one of his clerks, Master John of Salisbury, a man of much learning, great eloquence, and, what is better than all these, one steadfast in the fear and love of God, returned this answer to his complaints. “My Lord it is a most remarkable thing that you will take advice from no one. What need was there in a man of your rank to rise up only to exasperate them still more, and to follow them out to the door? Would it not be better to have taken counsel with those who were with you, and given them a milder answer; for their malice seeks only how to do their worst against you, by provoking you to anger to catch you tripping in your talk?”

It was John's last remonstrance, and it was quite useless. Thomas merely replied in the vein of “What I have written I have written,” and the company rose to walk to the Cathedral for Evensong. There it was that the martyrdom took place. The knights appeared, and, in Grim's account,

The invincible martyr, therefore perceiving that the hour was at hand when he should exchange frail mortality for the crown of immortality which had been promised him by his Lord, bent his neck in an attitude of prayer, and raising his clasped hands to heaven, commended the cause of himself and the Church to God, the Holy Virgin Mary, and the blessed martyr Dionysius. Scarcely had he uttered these words when the bloodthirsty knight (Fitzurse), lest the people might interpose and save him alive, rushed at once on him and inflicted a blow on the lamb that was to be slain, whereby he shaved off the top of the sacred crown by which he had dedicated himself to God, and with the same stroke wounded the arm of the writer of this narrative. For he alone stuck close to the Holy Archbishop, when all the others, both monks and clerks fled, and held him in his embrace, until the arm which he interposed was wounded.

And then even Grim fled, and watched from the sanctuary of the altar, all the horrible details of the martyrdom.

John had fled among the first. He was not made of the stuff of martyrs. And when the horror was over and the reckoning had begun, he crept away, as had a greater than he on a not dissimilar occasion, and tried to assuage the pain of his grief and conscience by writing a violent and most untypical hagiographical life of S. Thomas, proposing him as a martyr.

V

All this happened in December 1170, and John had ten more years to live. But the rest of his life is an epilogue, and adds nothing to our knowledge of him. His battles were fought, and his writing done. As compared to the restlessness of all his life, and the storminess of the last ten years, the evening of his days was peace.

The reaction established him in England, and in 1174 he was appointed Treasurer of Exeter Cathedral. But in 1176, with an almost sublime fittingness he was chosen to be the Father in God of his own beloved Chartres. With a conscious echo of the scene at Canterbury he chose to be consecrated divina dignatione at meritis S. Thomae martyris. After that he was chiefly occupied in the affairs of his diocese, though he was present at Ivry where France and England concluded one of their many peace treaties, and, in the last year of his life, at the third Lateran Council. On October 25, 1180, he died, and was buried in the monastery of S. Josophat, near Chartres.

He was a many-sided man, and it is not necessary to decide precisely on the nature of his importance. Nor, perhaps, is it desirable. Touching life at many points, he lived well; and he was very typical of the twelfth century, stretching out one hand, as he did, to all that is best in mediaevalism, and with the other pointing to the coming humanism. I do not know any other man of his time whose life is more attractive than his.