Читать книгу The Three Edwards: The Pageant of England - Thomas B. Costain - Страница 46

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The concluding years in the life of Edward were not happy ones. He had retained most of his teeth and his eyes were filled with the same fire while his hair which had once been the color of straw was now a snowy white; but the aches of old age and many campaigns were in his bones. His temper had become shorter. He was having trouble with Robert de Winchelsey, the Archbishop of Canterbury, with his barons, with his son, and with Scotland.

Archbishop Winchelsey is less well known than he should be, considering the controversial part he played through the latter half of the reign. He had been a rather handsome man and a speaker of considerable power, but by the time he was chosen to succeed Peckham he had become corpulent and coarse of feature. His manner was open, friendly, and even jovial. He was a man of real piety and his personal life was above reproach. A spare trencherman, he refused to eat anything but the plainest food and had the best dishes given to the poor, much to the indignation of his servants, who thought they should be considered first. The archbishop never spoke to women.

This was an age when the Church struggled to maintain the supremacy of Rome over temporal power. The Pope, Boniface VIII, the most violent contender for that principle, had fallen foul of the taciturn but volcanic Philip the Fair and had issued a bull, Clericis laicos, in which the clergy were forbidden under pain of excommunication to give any part of their revenues to temporal rulers without papal consent. This was aimed at Edward as much as at France, for he had been exacting heavy subsidies from the churchmen of England.

What stand would Winchelsey take in this delicate position? He soon made it clear. At a convocation in St. Paul’s he delivered a sermon in which he said, “We have two lords over us, the king and the Pope, and though we owe obedience to both we owe greater obedience to the spiritual than to the temporal lord.”

The other bishops, who knew the temper of their temporal lord and had made a point of meeting his demands, sat in silent dismay. Edward was enraged beyond measure when he heard what had happened, and from that time on there was continuous trouble between them. At first Winchelsey refused to allow any subsidies at all. When Edward demanded a fifth of all church revenue, the archbishop compromised with an offer of a tenth. Finally the latter agreed to allow each bishop to make his own decision but flatly refused to give as much as a shilling of the Canterbury revenues. This dispute went on for years. The other bishops resented the uncompromising attitude of the primate because of the difficulties in which it involved them, and Winchelsey found himself with few friends, except among the common people, who saw a successor to the martyred Thomas à Becket in the militant but tactless archbishop. There were minor troubles as well. Winchelsey took the part of the prince in some of his disputes with his father. He never missed a chance to trample on the toes of the Archbishop of York, denying him the right to carry his episcopal cross in front of him on his visits to Canterbury territory.

Then the situation changed. Boniface died, partly as a result of the French king’s attempt to have him kidnaped and carried into France. In 1305 the choice fell on a Gascon, Bertrand de Goth, who was Archbishop of Bordeaux and who took the name of Clement V. His selection, without any doubt, had been due to French influence and gold. His first two acts of any moment were evidence of this. Instead of going at once to Rome, he had his coronation at Lyons and then returned to Bordeaux. Here he filled the cardinalate with Frenchmen. Winchelsey found himself without papal support in his struggle with the king. Edward had at an earlier stage ordered the sheriffs to confiscate the lay fees in the province of Canterbury, with the result that the archbishop had found it necessary to subsist on charity. Even his horses had been seized and he had been forced to travel on foot, which was particularly trying to one of his increasing corpulence. Two of Winchelsey’s most active enemies, Bishop Langton of Lichfield, who acted as treasurer, and the Earl of Lincoln, were sent to Lyons to represent Edward at the new Pope’s coronation, and they took full advantage of the opportunity to poison Clement’s mind against the archbishop; which, under the circumstances, was not a difficult thing to do. The new Pope lost no time in acting. On February 12 he suspended the archbishop from all his functions and summoned him to appear before the curia within two months. During Winchelsey’s last visit to London, Archbishop Greenfield of York came down and triumphantly paraded the streets of the city with his cross carried erect in front of him.

The primate’s first move on receiving the summons from the Pope was to see Edward and beg for his aid. The king received him in what contemporary writers called his torve mood. He displayed no trace of cordiality. His eyes were hot with anger, his words incisive and unfriendly. He proceeded to go over the archbishop’s record in full detail, stressing every move he had made to oppose the royal will. The archbishop is reported to have broken down and wept copiously.

Early historians gave a different reason for the bitter anger of the king. It was said he produced a letter which Winchelsey had written to one of the two earls Bigod and Bohun at the time they set themselves up in opposition to the king’s will. It was no less than a proposal to remove the king and put the young prince on the throne in his place. There was no documentary proof of this, and the story has since been ignored as too impossible to believe. If the primate had been indiscreet enough to broach such a suggestion, he would not have been so foolhardy as to put it in writing. The king’s reaction also would have been much more drastic. A charge of treason would have been laid against Winchelsey without any doubt.

The situation was taking on a dramatic resemblance to that which led to the murder of Thomas à Becket. Edward made it clear that he could no longer abide the presence of the primate in the kingdom and that he had no intention of interceding for him with the Pope. The upshot was that Winchelsey, pale and shaken from this exhibition of royal wrath, left London and made preparations to obey the papal summons.

The primate crossed the waters to Bordeaux, where the Pope was still holding his court. He refused Winchelsey an audience in curt and unfriendly manner. This reception, coming on top of everything else, affected the archbishop so adversely that he suffered a stroke.

If the quick communications of modern days had been possible then, there would have been much holding of breaths in ecclesiastical palaces and state chancelleries, for at this point the parallel with the Becket case became startlingly close. If the old archbishop had died, there would have been a general belief that he had been persecuted to death by his unfriendly king and the indifferent pontiff. The wave of horror which swept the Christian world when Becket was murdered in Canterbury Cathedral would not have been equaled, but the indignation would have been deep and lasting. Edward was so complex in character that it is impossible to say what his reaction might have been in that event. Fortunately for the king, the primate did not die: it was Edward himself who heard the call to another life while Winchelsey continued to await the Pope’s pleasure. It seems that the archbishop had told his followers that he had had a vision of the king’s death and so he was prepared for it. He recovered from the effects of the stroke rather quickly when the confirmation of his vision was received.