teem, that he could now confront
his stern and mighty sovereign as Archbishop 'also by the grace of
God,' for so he designates himself in his letter to the King; or he
might feel himself bound to recover the possessions of his Church,
which had been wrested from it by the Crown or the high nobility. But,
as spiritually-minded men are moved more by universal ideas than by
special interests, so for Becket the determining impulse without doubt
lay above all in the sympathy which he devoted to the hierarchic
movement in general.

Those were the times in which the attempt of the Emperor Frederic I to
call a council, and in it to decide on a contested papal election, had
created general excitement among the peoples and churches of Southern
Europe, which would only consent to be led by a pope independent of
the empire. Driven from Italy, Alexander III, the Pope rejected by the
Emperor, found a cordial reception in France; and here he now
collected on his side a papal council in opposition to the imperial
one, in which the cardinals, whose election the Emperor was trying to
annul, and the bishops of Spain and South Italy, and those of the
collective Gaulish dioceses (more than a hundred in number), and the
English bishops also, gathered around him, and laid the Pope elected
by the Emperor under the anathema. It was inevitable that the idea of
the Church, as independent of the temporal power, should here find its
strongest expression. Some canons were passed which prohibited the
usurpation of ecclesiastical property by the laity, and made it a
crime in the bishops to allow it.[23]

Thomas Becket was welcomed in this council with a seductive kindness;
but besides this, what is harder than to set oneself against the
common feeling of one's own order, when moderation already appears to
be apostasy? He returned to England filled with the ideas of
hierarchic independence; in preparing to carry it through, he
necessarily brought on the conflict which had hitherto been avoided.

The Plantagenet King, whose whole heart was in the work of securing
the obedience of the manifold provinces that had fallen to his lot;
who hastened ceaselessly from one to the other (when people thought
him far away in South France, he had already recrossed the sea to
England), ever occupied in extending his inherited power by
institutions of a legal and administrative nature, was not inclined to
give way to the Church in this attempt. He would neither make