Henry, however, won the day, and his friend and nominee, the good Bishop Baldwin of Worcester, singular for piety and righteousness, was set in the Primate’s chair.  Of this archbishop we read that “his power was so great and so formidable that no one was equal to him in all England, and without his pleasure no one would dare even to obey the commands of the Pope....  But,” adds the irritated chronicler, “I think that he would do nothing save at the orders of the king, even if the Apostle Peter came to England about it.”

In the opinion of anxious critics of the day, indeed, the victory which had been almost won by Thomas seemed altogether lost after his death.  Even the monasteries, where the ecclesiastical temper was most formidable, were forced to choose abbots and priors whom the king could trust.  In its subjection the Church was in Henry’s eyes an admirable engine to serve the uses of the governing power.  One of the most important steps in the conquest of Wales had been the forcing of the Welsh Church into obedience to the see of Canterbury; and Henry steadily used the Welsh clergy as instruments of his policy.  His efforts to draw the Scotch Church into a like obedience were unceasing.  In Ireland he worked hard for the same object.  On the death of an Archbishop of Dublin, the Irish clergy were summoned to Evesham, and there bidden in the king’s court, after the English fashion, to choose an Englishman, Cumin, as their archbishop.  The claims of the papacy were watched with the most jealous care.  No legate dared to land in England save at the king’s express will.  A legate in Ireland who seemed to “play the Roman over them” was curtly told by the king’s officers that he must do their bidding or leave the country.  In 1184 the Pope sent to ask aid for his necessities in Rome.  A council was called to consider the matter, and Glanville urged that if papal messengers were allowed to come through England collecting money, it might afterwards become a custom to the injury of the kingdom.  The Council decided that the only tolerable solution of the difficulty was for the king to send whatever he liked to the Pope as a gift from himself, and to accept afterwards from them compensation for what he might have given.

The questions raised by the king between Church and State in England had everywhere to be faced sooner or later.  Even so devoted a servant of the Church as St. Louis of France was forced into measures of reform as far-reaching as those which Henry had planned a century earlier.  But Henry had begun his work a hundred years too soon; he stood far before his age in his attempt to bring the clergy under a law which was not their own.  His violence had further hindered the cause of reform, and the work which he had taken in hand was not to be fully carried out till three centuries and a half had passed away.  We must remember that in raising the question of judicial reform he had no desire to quarrel with the Church