we,” urged Hilary of Chichester; “in the chancery, in peace and war, you served him faithfully, but not without envy.  Those who then envied now excite the king against you.  Who dare answer for you?  The king has said that you can no longer both be at one time in England—­he as king, you as archbishop.”  Henry of Winchester took his stand on the side of Thomas.  “If the authority of the king was to prevail,” he argued, “what remains but that nothing shall henceforth be done according to law, but all things shall be disturbed for his pleasure—­and the priesthood shall be as the people,” he concluded, with a stirring of the churchman’s temper.  The Bishop of Exeter added another plea to induce Thomas to stand firm:  “Surely it is better to put one head in peril than to set the whole Church in danger.”  Not so, thought the Bishop of Lincoln, “a simple man and of little discretion;” “for it is plain,” he said, “that this man must yield up either the archbishopric or his life; but what should be the fruit of his archbishopric to him if his life should cease, I see not.”  The Bishop of Worcester, son of the famous Robert of Gloucester, and Henry’s own cousin and playmate in old days took an eminently prudent course.  “I will give no counsel,” he said, “for if I say our charge of souls is to be given up at the king’s threats, I should speak against my conscience, and to my own condemnation; and if I should advise to resist the king, there are those here who will bring him word of it, and I shall be cast out of the synagogue, and my lot shall be with outlaws and public enemies.”  At last, by the advice of the politic Henry of Winchester, Thomas offered to pay the king 2000 marks, but this compromise was refused.  He urged that he had been freed at his consecration from all secular obligations, but the plea was rejected on the ground that it was done without the king’s orders.  An adjournment over Sunday was again granted; but on Monday Thomas was ill, and unable to attend the Council.  Three days had now passed in fruitless negotiations, and the rising wrath of the king made itself felt.  Rumours of danger grew on all sides, and the archbishop prostrated himself before the altar in an agony of prayer, “trembling in his whole body,” as he afterwards confessed, less from fear of death than from the more terrible fear of the savage blinding and cruel punishments of those days.

But he showed no signs of yielding when on Tuesday morning, the last day of the Council, the bishops again gathered round him beseeching him to yield to the king’s will.  With a fierce outbreak of passionate reproaches he solemnly forbade them to take part in any further proceedings against him, and gave formal notice of an appeal to Rome.  Then kneeling before the altar of St. Stephen he celebrated mass, using the service for St. Stephen’s Day with its psalm, “Princes sat and spake against me,”—­“a magical rite,” said Foliot, “and an act done in contempt of the king"-and commended himself to the care of the