The interest of Henry's reign now shifts round to another point--the question of the relations between State and Church, which we have already seen cropping up in the reigns of Rufus and Henry I. In 1162 he appointed Thomas Becket Archbishop of Canterbury, and rued the choice ever after, for now his troubles began. Thomas, the son of a wealthy merchant of London, had been the king's chief secretary or _Chancellor_ for the last eight years. He was a clever, versatile, not very scrupulous man, with a devouring ambition: hitherto he had been a devoted servant, and a genial companion to the king, and had lived much more like a layman than a cleric. In spite of his priesthood, he had borne arms in the war of Toulouse, and even distinguished himself in a single combat with a French champion. Henry thought that Thomas would be no less obliging and useful as archbishop than he had been as Chancellor. He was woefully deceived. No sooner was Thomas consecrated, than his whole conduct and manner of life suddenly changed. His ambition--now that he had become a great prelate--was to win the reputation of a saint. Casting away all his old habits, he began to practise the most rigid austerity, wearing a hair shirt next his skin, stinting himself in food and drink, and washing the feet of lepers and mendicants; from a supple courtier he had become the most angular and impracticable of saints. But it was not merely to mortify his own body that Becket had accepted the archbishopric; his real object was to claim for the head of the Church in England what the Popes of his day were claiming for themselves in Western Christendom--complete freedom from the control of the State. His dream was to make the English Church _imperium in imperio_, and to rule it himself as an absolute master. Without the reputation of a saint, he could not dare to compass this monstrous end, so a saint he had to become. The moment that he was consecrated, he opened his campaign against the king; he threw up the Chancellorship, which Henry had asked him to retain, and commenced at once to "vindicate the rights of the see of Canterbury," that is, to lay claim to a number of estates now in the hands of various lay owners, as being Church land. When his demands were withstood, he in some cases went to law with the owners, but in others used the arbitrary clerical punishment of excommunicating his adversaries. But this was only the beginning of troubles; in 1163 he began to oppose the king in the Great Council, taking up the ever-popular cry that the taxes were over-heavy. Henry, surprised at meeting opposition from such an unexpected quarter, withdrew his proposals, which seem indeed to have been intended rather to limit the profits of the sheriffs than to raise more money. [Sidenote: =Claims of the Ecclesiastical Courts.=]