That Becket had still to learn the self-denying virtues of the clerical character is plain from his own confession; that his conduct had always defied the reproach of immorality was confidently asserted by his friends, and is equivalently acknowledged by the silence of his enemies.  The ostentatious parade and worldly pursuits of the chancellor were instantly renounced by the Archbishop, who in the fervor of his conversion prescribed to himself, as a punishment for the luxury and vanity of his former life, a daily course of secret mortification.  His conduct was now marked by the strictest attention to the decencies of his station.  To the train of knights and noblemen, who had been accustomed to wait on him, succeeded a few companions selected from the most virtuous and learned of his clergy.  His diet was abstemious; his charities were abundant; his time was divided into certain portions allotted to prayer and study and the episcopal functions.  These he found it difficult to unite with those of the chancellor; and, therefore, as at his consecration he had been declared free from all secular engagements, he resigned that office into the hands of the King.

This total change of conduct has been viewed with admiration or censure according to the candor or prejudices of the beholders.  By his contemporaries it was universally attributed to a conscientious sense of duty:  modern writers have frequently described it as a mere affectation of piety, under which he sought to conceal projects of immeasurable ambition.  But how came this hypocrisy, if it existed, to elude, during a long and bitter contest, the keen eyes of his adversaries?  A more certain path would surely have offered itself to ambition.  By continuing to flatter the King’s wishes, and by uniting in himself the offices of chancellor and archbishop, he might in all probability have ruled without control both in church and state.

For more than twelve months the primate appeared to enjoy his wonted ascendency in the royal favor.  But during his absence the warmth of Henry’s affection insensibly evaporated.  The sycophants of the court, who observed the change, industriously misrepresented the actions of the Archbishop, and declaimed in exaggerated terms against the loftiness of his views, the superiority of his talents, and the decision of his character.  Such hints made a deep impression on the suspicious and irritable mind of the King, who now began to pursue his late favorite with a hatred as vehement as had been the friendship with which he had formerly honored him.

Amidst a number of discordant statements it is difficult to fix on the original ground of the dissension between them; whether it were the Archbishop’s resignation of the chancellorship, or his resumption of the lands alienated from his see, or his attempt to reform the clergymen who attended the court, or his opposition to the revival of the odious tax known by the name of the danegelt.[28] But that which brought them into immediate collision was a controversy respecting the jurisdiction of the ecclesiastical courts.  A rapid view of the origin and progress of these courts, and of their authority in civil and criminal causes, may not prove uninteresting to the reader.