Henry’s attitude towards the barons during these years had been of necessity a somewhat inconsistent one. He never lost sight of the main thread of policy which he had inherited from his grandfather: a policy which may be defined as the consolidation of kingly power in his own hands, through the repression of the feudal nobles and the raising of the people at large into a condition of greater security and prosperity, and of closer connexion with and dependence upon the Crown, as a check and counterpoise to the territorial influence of the feudataries. On the other hand, his quarrel with the primate had driven him to throw himself on the support of those very feudataries whom it was his true policy to repress, and had brought him into hostility with the ecclesiastical interest which ought to have been, and which actually had been until now, his surest and most powerful aid. If it was what we may perhaps venture to call the feudal side of the ecclesiastical movement--its introduction of a separate system of law and jurisdiction, traversing and impeding the course of his own uniform regal administration--which roused the suspicions of the king, it was its anti-feudal side, its championship of the universal rights and liberties of men in the highest and widest sense, that provoked the jealousy of the nobles. This was a point which Henry, blinded for the moment by his natural instinct of imperiousness, seems to have overlooked when at the council of Northampton he stooped to avail himself of the assistance of the barons to crush the primate. They doubtless saw what he failed to see, that he was crushing not so much his own rival as theirs. The cause of the Church was bound up with that of the people, and both alike were closely knit to that of the Crown. Sceptre and crozier once parted, the barons might strive with the former at an advantage such as they had never had while Lanfranc stood beside William and Anselm beside Henry I., such as they never could have had if Thomas had remained standing by the side of Henry II.[583] [583] “The government party was made up of two elements--the higher order of the Clergy, who joined the king out of cowardice, having more at stake than they could make up their minds to lose; and the higher order of the Laity, who in this instance sided with the king against the Church, that when they had removed this obstacle they might afterwards fight him single-handed.” (R. H. Froude, _Remains_, vol. iv. p. 30). Which is just what Arnulf of Lisieux saw from the first (Ep. clxii., Robertson, _Becket_, vol. v. pp. 309, 310), and what Henry learned to his cost in 1173.