Sarum - Edward Rutherfurd [254]
Bishops should be men of God – named by the king, certainly; holding their vast lands with his permission too; but they should be drawn from the monasteries or put forward by their congregations, as they once had been. That was the knight’s view. He was prepared to modify it in one respect. It had long been the practice of kings to reward their greatest servants with rich bishoprics which were, of course, only held for the servant’s lifetime, and which, being church lands, cost the king nothing to bestow. This was a compromise; but he saw no great harm in it if the king’s servants were worthy men. What he had seen now, however, was nothing more than three rascals from an upstart family, making a mockery of a sacred office. And even the king seemed to accept it. He felt nothing but a sense of disgust.
Church and state were both necessary; but they should be opposite sides of the same Christian coin, in harmony with each other.
But it was no longer so. In recent generations a new conflict had been born, a conflict between State power and religious authority, regnum et sacerdotum, that was to echo through the Middle Ages and far beyond. Who was superior on earth, the pope or a monarch? Who invested bishops with their spiritual authority and their estates – the Vicar of Rome or the king? Who chose abbots and bishops? If a priest committed a criminal act, should he be tried by the king’s court or the bishop’s? At its best, this quarrel was between the king and the universal church which was determined to maintain its spiritual independence. At its worst, it was an excuse for cynical power politics between the monarch and the Church with its huge estates. It was exactly the struggle for power that was to have a bloody outcome when Thomas à Becket, Archbishop of Canterbury, was murdered in the next reign.
And now, in the months following the scene at Devizes, the dispute was to be seen at its most cynical. By his Charter of Liberties, Stephen had confirmed that the church would be free of all secular interference. Now therefore, Bishop Roger and his rascally nephews, on the grounds that they were ordained priests, claimed that the king had no right to lay hands on them. The other bishops, supported by that master of duplicity, Stephen’s brother Henry, the Bishop of Winchester, supported them. By the end of August, a council of bishops had met at Winchester and tried to summon the king to them to explain his conduct.
Fortunately, by the start of September, Stephen had won his case when the Archbishop of Rouen arrived from Normandy to remind the council at Winchester that bishops had no business to be holding fortified castles anyway. The leading bishops went to the king on their knees; and after that Roger returned to skulk at Sarisberie, where he was not much seen.
But the whole affair left Godefroi depressed.
If God’s kingdom on earth is like a great castle, he considered, then these councils were only putting plaster over the cracks. The foundations themselves were rotten.
It was at the end of September that the great blow at last fell. The Empress Matilda landed at Arundel, in the south east.
And it was then, to the stupefaction of Godefroi and almost every knight in England, that Stephen made perhaps the most foolish move of his reign. On the advice of the double-dealing Bishop of Winchester, the king cheerfully allowed