which he was accused of having embezzled during his chancellorship.  It was in vain that he pleaded a full acquittance from the king’s son, and Richard de Lucy, the guardian and justiciary of the kingdom, on his resignation of the seals; he saw it was already determined against him.  Far from yielding under these repeated blows, he raised still higher the ecclesiastical pretensions, now become necessary to his own protection.  He refused to answer to the charge, and appealed to the Pope, to whom alone he seemed to acknowledge any real subjection.  A great ferment ensued on this appeal.  The courtiers advised that he should be thrown into prison, and that his temporalities should be seized.  The bishops, willing to reduce Becket without reducing their own order, proposed to accuse him before the Pope, and to pursue him to degradation.  Some of his friends pressed him to give up his cause; others urged him to resign his dignity.  The king’s servants threw out menaces against his life.  Amidst this general confusion of passions and councils, whilst every one according to his interests expected the event with much anxiety, Becket, in the disguise of a monk, escaped out of the nation, and threw himself into the arms of the King of France.

Henry was greatly alarmed at this secession, which put the Archbishop out of his power, but left him in full possession of all his ecclesiastical weapons.  An embassy was immediately dispatched to Rome, in order to accuse Becket; but as Becket pleaded the Pope’s own cause before the Pope himself, he obtained an easy victory over the king’s ambassadors.  Henry, on the other hand, took every measure to maintain his authority:  he did everything worthy of an able politician, and of a king tenacious of his just authority.  He likewise took measures not only to humble Becket, but also to lower that chair whose exaltation had an ill influence on the throne:  for he encouraged the Bishop of London to revive a claim to the primacy; and thus, by making the rights of the see at least dubious, he hoped to render future prelates more cautious in the exercise of them.  He inhibited, under the penalty of high treason, all ecclesiastics from going out of his dominions without license, or any emissary of the Pope’s or Archbishop’s from entering them with letters of excommunication or interdict.  And that he might not supply arms against himself, the Peter-pence were collected with the former care, but detained in the royal treasury, that matter might be left to Rome both for hope and fear.  In the personal treatment of Becket all the proceedings were full of anger, and by an unnecessary and unjust severity greatly discredited both the cause and character of the king; for he stripped of their goods and banished all the Archbishop’s kindred, all who were in any sort connected with him, without the least regard to sex, age, or condition.  In the mean time, Becket, stung with these affronts, impatient of his banishment, and burning with all the fury and the same zeal which had occasioned it, continually threatened the king with the last exertions of ecclesiastical power; and all things were thereby, and by the absence and enmity of the head of the English Church, kept in great confusion.