he greatest abilities was now on
the throne: a prelate of the most inflexible and intrepid character was
possessed of the primacy: the contending powers appeared to be armed
with their full force and it was natural to expect some extraordinary
event to result from their conflict.

Among their other inventions to obtain money, the clergy had inculcated
the necessity of penance as an atonement for sin; and having again
introduced the practice of paying them large sums as a commutation, or
species of atonement for the remission of those penances, the sins of
the people, by these means, had become a revenue to the priests; and the
king computed, that by this invention alone they levied more money upon
his subjects than flowed, by all the funds and taxes, into the royal
exchequer. That he might ease the people of so heavy and arbitrary
an imposition, Henry required that a civil officer of his appointment
should be present in all ecclesiastical courts, and should, for the
future, give his consent to every composition which was made with
sinners for their spiritual offences.

The ecclesiastics in that age had renounced all immediate subordination
to the magistrate: they openly pretended to an exemptior, in criminal
accusations, from a trial before courts of justice; and were gradually
introducing a like exemption in civil causes: spiritual penalties alone
could be inflicted on their offences; and as the clergy had extremely
multiplied in England, and many of them were consequently of very low
characters, crimes of the deepest dye--murders, robberies, adulteries,
rapes--were daily committed with impunity by the ecclesiastics. It
had been found, for instance, on inquiry, that no less than a hundred
murders had, since the king's accession, been perpetrated by men of that
profession, who had never been called to account for these offences; and
holy orders were become a full protection for all enormities. A clerk
in Worcestershire, having debauched a gentleman's daughter, had, at
this time, proceeded to murder the father; and the general indignation
against this crime moved the king to attempt the remedy of an abuse
which was become so palpable, and to require that the clerk should be
delivered up, and receive condign punishment from the magistrate. Becket
insisted on the privileges of the church; confined the criminal in
the bishop's prison, lest he should be seized by the king's officers;
maintained that no greater punishment co