But though Thomas, canonised by the pope on the prayers of the people of England, could be struck out of the calendar of the Church of England by the arbitrary will of King Henry VIII., as an enemy of princes, and his shrine destroyed, it is beyond the power of a king to reverse the sentence of history or to blast for ever the fame of a great and courageous champion of the poor of this land. Time makes little of the insults of Henry VIII. Thomas of Canterbury died for the religion that in his day protected the people against the despotism of the crown. “He was always a hater of liars and slanderers and a kind friend to dumb beasts (hence his rage with De Broc for mutilating a horse) and all poor and helpless folk.” (F. York Powell.) That Henry II. strove to make law predominant in the spirit of a great statesman is as true as that Thomas strove to mitigate the harshness of the law. As a writer of the twelfth century put it: “Nothing is more certain than that both strove earnestly to do the will of God, one for the sake of his realm, the other on behalf of his Church. But whether of the two was zealous in wisdom is not plain to man, who is so easily mistaken, but to the Lord, who will judge between them at the last day.” William FitzOsbert, called Longbeard The First English Agitator 1196 AUTHORITIES: Roger of Hoveden; William of Newburgh; Gervase of Canterbury; Matthew Paris; Ralph Diceto; (Rolls Series); _Rotuli Curiæ Regis_ (Sir F. Palgrave. Vol. I.). WILLIAM FITZOSBERT CALLED LONGBEARD, THE FIRST ENGLISH AGITATOR 1196 When Richard I., on his accession, picked out Hubert Walter, Bishop of Salisbury, to be Archbishop of Canterbury, he chose a prelate whom he could rely upon as his representative. Hubert had been a crusader; he was the nephew of Ralph Glanville--who sold the justiciarship to William Longchamp, Bishop of Ely, for £3,000, and followed Richard to Palestine, dying of the plague at Acre in 1191--and though a man of little learning he was a capital lawyer, a strong administrator and expert at raising money for the king.[21] Hubert was no champion of the poor as St. Thomas had been, no preacher of righteousness like St. Anselm, no stickler for the rights of the Church or the liberties of the people; he was “the king’s man,” and “forasmuch as he was neither gifted with a knowledge of letters nor endued with the grace of lively religion, so in his days the Church of England was stifled under the yoke of bondage.” (Geraldus Cambrensis.)