a man who carried the Church of England
with him, as St. Thomas, living, never did; but Hugh had small favour
with the king at this time. By these successive battles the Bishop of
Lincoln had come to be looked upon as the leader of the Church and the
champion of her liberties. To us those "liberties" seem a strange claim,
beyond our faith and our ken, too. It seems obvious to us that men,
whether clerks or laymen, who eat, drink, wear, build, and possess on
the temporal plane, should requite those who safeguard them in these
things with tribute, honour, and obedience; and freedom from State
control in things temporal seems like freedom to eat buns without paying
the baker. Free bilking, free burgling, and so on, sound no less
contradictory. But the best minds of England seven centuries ago dreamed
of another citizenship and a higher, of which the Church was the city--a
city not future only and invisible, but manifest in their midst, which
they loved with passion and were jealous over, too exclusively perhaps,
but in the event not unwisely. It is less difficult for us to see that
any cause which would set the unselfish and lofty-minded men of that
time against the preponderating power of the Crown made for the welfare
and peace of the country in the future. The anarchy of Stephen's reign,
Henry's mastery, and Richard's might, with Hubert Walter's genius,
resulted in a dangerous accumulation of power that did actually prove
almost disastrous to the State. Consequently Bishop Hugh's greatest
contest with the Crown demands the sympathy both of men who still dream
of the spiritual city in (but unsoiled by) hands of mortals, and also of
those who value constitutional liberties in modern politics. The war
with France kept Richard active abroad. The flow of money from England
was too thin to enable him to strike the final blow he wished to strike.
Hubert Walter's power was so hampered he could do little beyond
scutages, but in December, 1197, he called together a Council at Oxford.
He told this universal assembly of the barons of all England that the
king was in straits. He was outclassed and outmanned and like to be even
dispossessed by a most powerful and determined enemy. He asked their
deliberations as to help for the king in his difficulties. Oxford was
the king's birthplace and was also in Lincoln diocese.{9} The Court
party, who advocated abject submission to the king's becks, at once
proposed that the barons of England,