the absence of any royal or national authority by convening synods of bishops, and by asserting the moral right of the Church to declare sovereigns unworthy of the throne.  The compact between king and people which became a part of constitutional law in the Charter of Henry had gathered new force in the Charter of Stephen, but its legitimate consequence in the responsibility of the crown for the execution of the compact was first drawn out by these ecclesiastical councils.  From their alternate depositions of Stephen and Matilda flowed the after depositions of Edward and Richard, and the solemn act by which the succession was changed in the case of James.  Extravagant and unauthorized as their expression of it may appear, they expressed the right of a nation to good government.  Henry of Winchester however, “half monk, half soldier,” as he was called, possessed too little religious influence to wield a really spiritual power, and it was only at the close of Stephen’s reign that the nation really found a moral leader in Theobald, the Archbishop of Canterbury.  Theobald’s ablest agent and adviser was Thomas, the son of Gilbert Beket, a leading citizen and, it is said, Portreeve of London, the site of whose house is still marked by the Mercers’ chapel in Cheapside.  His mother Rohese was a type of the devout woman of her day; she weighed her boy every year on his birthday against money, clothes, and provisions which she gave to the poor.  Thomas grew up amidst the Norman barons and clerks who frequented his father’s house with a genial freedom of character tempered by the Norman refinement; he passed from the school of Merton to the University of Paris, and returned to fling himself into the life of the young nobles of the time.  Tall, handsome, bright-eyed, ready of wit and speech, his firmness of temper showed itself in his very sports; to rescue his hawk which had fallen into the water he once plunged into a millrace and was all but crushed by the wheel.  The loss of his father’s wealth drove him to the court of Archbishop Theobald, and he soon became the Primate’s confidant in his plans for the rescue of England.

[Illustration:  The Dominions of the Angevins (v1-map-4t.jpg)]

[Sidenote:  Treaty of Wallingford]

The natural influence which the Primate would have exerted was long held in suspense by the superior position of Bishop Henry of Winchester as Papal Legate; but this office ceased with the Pope who granted it, and when in 1150 it was transferred to the Archbishop himself Theobald soon made his weight felt.  The long disorder of the realm was producing its natural reaction in exhaustion and disgust, as well as in a general craving for return to the line of hereditary succession whose breaking seemed the cause of the nation’s woes.  But the growth of their son Henry to manhood set naturally aside the pretensions both of Count Geoffry and Matilda.  Young as he was Henry already showed the cool long-sighted temper