to
his see, his hatred of England, his purpose soon to withdraw again to
his own sunny South, were seen in his refusal to furnish Lambeth.
Certainly he went the wrong way to stay here. The young Primate brought
with him Savoyard fashions, strange enough to English folk. His armed
retainers, foreigners to a man, plundered the City markets. His own
archiepiscopal fist felled to the ground a prior who opposed his
visitation. It was the Prior of St. Bartholomew's by Smithfield; and
London, on the King's refusal to grant redress, took the matter into her
own hands. The City bells swung out, and a noisy crowd of citizens were
soon swarming beneath the walls of the palace, shouting threats of
vengeance.

For shouts Boniface cared little. In the midst of the tumult he caused
the sentences of excommunication which he had fulminated to be legally
executed in the chapel of his house. But bravado like this soon died
before the universal resentment, and "the handsome Archbishop" fled
again to Lyons. How helpless the successor of Augustine really was was
shown by a daring outrage perpetrated in his absence. Master Eustace,
his official, had thrown into prison the Prior of St. Thomas's Hospital
for some contempt of court; and the Prior's diocesan, the Bishop of
Winchester, a prelate as foreign and lawless as Boniface himself, took
up the injury as his own. A party of his knights appeared before the
house at Lambeth, tore the gates from their hinges, set Master Eustace
on horseback, and carried him off to the episcopal prison at Farnham. At
last Boniface bowed to submission, surrendered the points at issue,
recalled his excommunications, and was suffered to return. He had learnt
his lesson well enough to remain from that time a quiet, inactive man,
with a dash of continental frugality and wit about him. Whether he built
the chapel or no, he would probably have said of it as he said of the
Great Hall at Canterbury, "My predecessors built, and I discharge the
debt for their building. It seems to me that the true builder is the man
that pays the bill."

But Boniface never learnt to be an Englishman. When under the guidance
of Earl Simon of Montfort the barons wrested the observance of their
Charter from the King the Primate of England found shelter in a fresh
exile. The Church had in fact ceased to be national. The figure of the
first Reformer, as he stands on the chapel floor, is in itself the
fittest comment on the age in which the ch