n then, though Thomas à Becket knelt before the King, he was obstinate and immovable as to those words about his order.  King Louis of France was weak enough in his veneration for Thomas à Becket and such men, but this was a little too much for him.  He said that à Becket ‘wanted to be greater than the saints and better than St. Peter,’ and rode away from him with the King of England.  His poor French Majesty asked à Becket’s pardon for so doing, however, soon afterwards, and cut a very pitiful figure.

At last, and after a world of trouble, it came to this.  There was another meeting on French ground between King Henry and Thomas à Becket, and it was agreed that Thomas à Becket should be Archbishop of Canterbury, according to the customs of former Archbishops, and that the King should put him in possession of the revenues of that post.  And now, indeed, you might suppose the struggle at an end, and Thomas à Becket at rest.  No, not even yet.  For Thomas à Becket hearing, by some means, that King Henry, when he was in dread of his kingdom being placed under an interdict, had had his eldest son Prince Henry secretly crowned, not only persuaded the Pope to suspend the Archbishop of York who had performed that ceremony, and to excommunicate the Bishops who had assisted at it, but sent a messenger of his own into England, in spite of all the King’s precautions along the coast, who delivered the letters of excommunication into the Bishops’ own hands.  Thomas à Becket then came over to England himself, after an absence of seven years.  He was privately warned that it was dangerous to come, and that an ireful knight, named Ranulf de Broc, had threatened that he should not live to eat a loaf of bread in England; but he came.

The common people received him well, and