without it moderns make
neither head nor tail of the period. Green gravely suggests, for
instance, of Henry's ancestor Fulk of Anjou, that his tyrannies and
frauds were further blackened by "low superstition," which led him to be
dragged in a halter round a shrine, scourged and screaming for the mercy
of God. Mediaevals would simply have said that such a man might well
scream for it, but his scream was the only logical comment he could
make. But they would have quite refused to see why the scream should be
added to the sins and not subtracted from them. They would have thought
it simply muddle-headed to have the same horror at a man for being
horribly sinful and for being horribly sorry.

But it may be suggested, I think, though with the doubt proper to
ignorance, that the Angevin ideal of the King's justice lost more by the
death of St. Thomas than was instantly apparent in the horror of
Christendom, the canonization of the victim and the public penance of
the tyrant. These things indeed were in a sense temporary; the King
recovered the power to judge clerics, and many later kings and
justiciars continued the monarchical plan. But I would suggest, as a
possible clue to puzzling after events, that here and by this murderous
stroke the crown lost what should have been the silent and massive
support of its whole policy. I mean that it lost the people.

It need not be repeated that the case for despotism is democratic. As a
rule its cruelty to the strong is kindness to the weak. An autocrat
cannot be judged as a historical character by his relations with other
historical characters. His true applause comes not from the few actors
on the lighted stage of aristocracy, but from that enormous audience
which must always sit in darkness throughout the drama. The king who
helps numberless helps nameless men, and when he flings his widest
largesse he is a Christian doing good by stealth. This sort of monarchy
was certainly a mediaeval ideal, nor need it necessarily fail as a
reality. French kings were never so merciful to the people as when they
were merciless to the peers; and it is probably true that a Czar who was
a great lord to his intimates was often a little father in innumerable
little homes. It is overwhelmingly probable that such a central power,
though it might at last have deserved destruction in England as in
France, would in England as in France have prevented the few from
seizing and holding all the wealth and pow