But before we come to the personal relations of the French and English kings we must take a rapid view of one of the great incidents by which this century is marked,--an incident which for a long time attracted the notice of all Europe, and was productive of very important consequences within our own country. Hitherto England had played the part of a satellite to the Court of Rome. Previous to the quarrels with France, indeed, one great tie between her and the Continental nations was the community of their submission to the Pope. Foreigners have at all times found wealth and kind treatment here. Germans, Italians, Frenchmen, any one who could make interest with the patrons of large livings, held rank and honours in the English Church. [A.D. 1154-1159.] Little enough, it was felt, was all that could be done in behalf of foreign ecclesiastics to repay them for the condescension they showed in elevating Nicholas Breakspear, an Anglo-Saxon of St. Alban's, to the papal chair. But Nicholas, in taking another name, lost his English heart. As Adrian the Fourth, he preferred Rome to England, and maintained his authority with as high a hand as any of his predecessors. Knights and nobles, and even the higher orders of the clergy, were at length discontented with the continual exactions of the Holy See; and in 1162 the same battle which had agitated the world between Henry the Fourth of Germany and Gregory the Seventh was fought out in a still bitterer spirit between Henry the Second of England and Thomas à-Beckett. All the story-books of English history have told us the romantic incidents of the birth of the ambitious priest. It is possible the obscurity of his origin was concealed by his contemporaries under the interesting legend, which must have been a very early subject for the fancy of the poet and troubadour, of a love between a Red-Cross pilgrim and a Saracen emir's daughter. It shows a remarkable softening of the ancient hatred to the infidels, that the votaress of Mohammed should have been chosen as the mother of a saint. But whatever doubt there may arise about the reality of the deserted maiden's journey in search of her admirer, and her discovery of his abode by the mere reiteration of his name, which is beautifully said to be the only word of English she remembered, there is no doubt of the early favour which the young Anglo-Saracen attained with the king, or of the desire the sagacious Henry entertained to avail himself of the great talents which made his favourite delightful as a companion and indispensable as a chancellor, in the higher position still of Archbishop of Canterbury and Comptroller of the English Church. For high pretensions were put forward by the clergy: they insisted upon the introduction of the canon laws; they claimed exemption from trial by civil process; they were to be placed beyond the reach of the ordinary tribunals, and were to be under their own separate rulers, and directly subject in life and property to the decrees of Rome.