the principal ground on which he had applied for, and obtained from the pope, the letters of excommunication against the Archbishop of York and the other prelates who had assisted him at the coronation, his display and threatened employment of which had probably been the occasion of his murder. But all the circumstances seem to show that Henry was principally actuated by affection for his son, and a desire to place him in a position of honour and of splendour, although his age, only fourteen, of course precluded him from being as yet entrusted with any share in the government. The young prince, however, or, as he was now called, the young king, or sometimes Henry III., made no creditable return, whether it was fondness or policy that had chiefly moved his father thus to advance him. He appears to have been rather weak than ill-disposed; his new title probably made him giddy; and, easily led in any direction, he was much more likely, in his position, to be led wrong than right. All cordiality between Henry and Queen Eleanor had long been at an end; his infidelities and her jealous temper had completely divided and alienated them; and Eleanor's natural resource was to endeavour to gain over her sons to make common cause with her against their father. About the end of the year 1172, the young king Henry, who was married to the daughter of the French king, Louis VII., and had just been crowned a second time along with his wife, startled his father by a sudden demand, that he should immediately resign to him either the dukedom of Normandy or the sovereignty of England. At this time the boy was not yet sixteen, and his father was himself still under forty. The preposterous proposal is believed to have been prompted by Queen Eleanor and King Louis; from the day on which it was made, and of course instantly rejected, the young king, we are told, spoke not one word more of peace to his father; a few months after, while he was with his father at Chinon, on their way back to Normandy from Limoges, he arose during the night and secretly withdrew himself to the court of his father-in-law; his flight was speedily followed by that of his two younger brothers Richard and Geoffrey, upon the former of whom their father had conferred the earldom of Poictiers, upon the latter the dukedom of Bretagne, and, who had been left with their mother in Guienne; and lastly their mother set out to join her sons, but, being caught as she travelled in man's attire, was by her husband's orders put into immediate confinement, nor was she afterwards released, except once for a short space, while Henry lived.

The war that followed between Henry and his sons, aided by King Louis, did not last long. Attacked as he was on every side at once—in Brittany, in Normandy, in Anjou, in Guienne, in England; from France, from Toulouse, from Scotland—the vigour of the old king, as he was called, carried everything before it; and a peace and reconciliation were arranged after a few months. It was during this contest that Henry performed his famous penance at the tomb of Becket. The desire to see, in the quarrel between Becket and Henry, a struggle between the old Anglo-Saxon population and their Norman conquerors has probably been carried much too far by the eminent living French historian Augustin Thierry: the controversy was in the main and essentially, there can be no doubt, a trial of strength between the church and the state, between the temporal and the spiritual powers, between the crown and the pope, between the laity and the clergy; nor do we believe that the accident of Becket being of Anglo-Saxon lineage went for anything in the case. There is no good evidence that the circumstance ever was appealed to or taken notice of either on the one side or the other. It may be conceded, however, that both parties would naturally wish to secure whatever support could be derived from the sympathy of the great body of the people, and that in this way the native English, who had been already for some time rising again from the state of prostration to which they were struck down by the Conquest, would both be led to take the greater interest in the dispute, and may have been benefited by it. Their devotional and superstitious feelings also were, no doubt, strongly excited by many of the proceedings to which the clergy resorted; and we may well conceive that they would be transported to a state of the highest enthusiasm, first, by horror at the barbarous and sacrilegious murder of Becket, and afterwards, by the miracles with which the kingdom resounded as having been performed at his tomb. But these were feelings which there is every reason to believe were shared in an equal degree by the generality of their Norman masters. The king himself was probably by no means exempt from them. With all the licence that he allowed himself in some respects, he was neither without the piety nor above the superstition of his age; and the circumstances in which he now stood, with troubles gathering around him, and the consciousness pressing upon him that he had, by his hasty and passionate words, materially contributed to Becket's death, were very likely to awaken his devotion and penitence. It seems impossible to regard him as merely acting a part, assuming the outward appearance of a reverence and contrition which he did not feel, in this penitential pilgrimage, when the whole proceeding and his demeanour throughout are fairly considered. He set sail from Barfleur early on the morning of the 8th of July, 1174. It blew fresh at the time, and, the gale increasing after the ship had got under way, some apprehension began to be felt, upon which Henry, coming forward so as to be seen by all, exclaimed, with eyes uplifted to heaven, "If what I have in my mind be for the peace of my clergy and my people, if God have determined to restore such peace by my arrival, then may he in his mercy bring me safe into port; but, if he have resolved still further to scourge my kingdom in his wrath, may it never be given me again to set my foot on land." He landed at Southampton on the morning of the 10th, and instantly getting on horseback, set out for Canterbury, pursuing his journey all night, and taking no other sustenance than a little bread and water. He came within sight of the metropolitan church at the dawn of the next day, Friday the 11th, and then dismounting, and throwing off both his silk apparel and his boots, he walked in the garb of a pilgrim, and barefoot, over the flinty road for the three remaining miles of the way. When he entered the city, his footsteps were observed to leave their marks in blood upon the pavement. Proceeding forthwith to the cathedral, he entered it along with the thronging inhabitants of the city, collected by the ringing of the bells, and, prostrating himself with his face to the ground, wept and sobbed aloud, while the Bishop of London announced from the pulpit that Henry King of England was here come to invoke God and the holy martyr for the salvation of his soul; to protest that he never either ordered or desired the death of the martyr; and to submit his naked flesh to be scourged for the hasty and imprudent words uttered by him, by which the murderers might pretend that they had been excited to the act. After this the king descended to the crypt where the archbishop's body was interred, and there, stripping off his clothes and kneeling down on the tombstone, he submitted his bare back to be scourged with a knotted cord by all the bishops and monks that were present, each giving him three, four, or five strokes, while he pronounced the words, "As the Redeemer was scourged for the sins of men, so be thou for thy own sin." He spent all the rest of the day and the following night in the crypt in prayer and fasting; and the next morning, after hearing mass, he left Canterbury without tasting anything save a draught of the holy water kept at the martyr's tomb. He rode to London; but when he had