Becket, who, as keeper of the seals, had been the most magnificent of courtiers, affected as archbishop to be the most venerable of saints. He sent back the seals to the king, assumed the robe of a monk, wore sackcloth filled with vermin, lived on the plainest food, every day knelt down to wash the feet of the poor, paced the cloisters of his cathedral with tearful eyes, and spent hours in prayer before the altar. As champion of the priests, even in their crimes, he took under his protection one who to the crime of seduction had added the murder of his victim's father. The judges having represented to Henry that during the first eight years of his reign a hundred murders had been committed by ecclesiastics, the king in 1164 summoned a council at Clarendon, in which certain regulations or _constitutions_ were drawn up, with the object of preventing the encroachments of the hierarchy. Becket at first refused to sign them, but at length consented, and then withdrew into solitary retirement to mourn over his fault. Pope Alexander III released him from his oath; and then began a fierce and long struggle between the king and the primate. Four knights of the court, catching up a hasty expression of their master's, barbarously murdered the archbishop at the foot of the altar in his own cathedral church (A. D. 1170). The people looked upon Becket as a saint: immense crowds came to pray at his tomb, at which many _miracles_ were worked.[130] "Even from his grave," said Becket's partizans, "he renders his testimony in behalf of the papacy." [130] In loco passionis et ubi sepultus est, paralytici curantur, cœci vident, surdi audiunt. (Johan. Salisb. Epp. 286.) In the place of his suffering and where he was buried, paralytics are cured, the blind see, and the deaf hear. Henry now passed from one extreme to the other. He entered Canterbury barefooted, and prostrated himself before the martyr's tomb: the bishops, priests, and monks, to the number of eighty, passed before him, each bearing a scourge, and struck three or five blows according to their rank on the naked shoulders of the king. In former ages, so the priestly fable ran, Saint Peter had scourged an archbishop of Canterbury: now Rome in sober reality scourges the back of royalty, and nothing can henceforward check her victorious career. A Plantagenet surrendered England to the pope, and the pope gave him authority to subdue Ireland.[131] [131] Significasti si quidem nobis, fili carissime, te Hiberniæ insulam ad subdendum illum populum velle intrare, nos itaque gratum et acceptum habemus ut pro dilatandis ecclesiæ terminis insulam ingrediaris. (Adrian IV., Bulla 1154 in Rymer, Acta Publica.) If indeed you have intimated, dear son, that you wish to invade Ireland to subdue that people, we are accordingly well pleased, that for the purpose of extending the bounds of the church, you should invade that island. [Sidenote: THE GREAT CHARTER.]