sarcasm, there was no open breach between him and Becket. The primate acquiesced in, if he did not promote, the advancement of Foliot to the see of London;[37] and during that period letters of courtesy which borders on adulation were interchanged at least with apparent sincerity.[38] The king had indeed wrought a greater miracle than himself intended, or than Foliot thought possible. Becket became at once not merely a decent prelate, but an austere and mortified monk: he seemed determined to make up for his want of ascetic qualifications; to crowd a whole life of monkhood into a few years.[39] Under his canonical dress he wore a monk's frock, haircloth next his skin; his studies, his devotions, were long, regular, rigid. At the mass he was frequently melted into passionate tears. In his outward demeanor, indeed, though he submitted to private flagellation, and the most severe macerations, Becket was still the stately prelate: his food, though scanty to abstemiousness, was, as his constitution required, more delicate; his charities were boundless. Archbishop Theobald had doubled the usual amount of the primate's alms, Becket again doubled that; and every night in privacy, no doubt more ostentatious than the most public exhibition, with his own hands he washed the feet of thirteen beggars. His table was still hospitable and sumptuous, but instead of knights and nobles, he admitted only learned clerks, and especially the regulars, whom he courted with the most obsequious deference. For the sprightly conversation of former times were read grave books in the Latin of the Church. But the change was not alone in his habits and mode of life. The King could not have reproved, he might have admired, the most punctilious regard for the decency and the dignity of the highest ecclesiastic in the realm. But the inflexible churchman began to betray himself in more unexpected acts. While still in France Henry was startled at receiving a peremptory resignation of the chancellorship, as inconsistent with the religious functions of the primate. This act was as it were a bill of divorce from all personal intimacy with the king, a dissolution of their old familiar and friendly intercourse. It was not merely that the holy and austere prelate withdrew from the unbecoming pleasures of the court, the chase, the banquet, the tournament, even the war; they were no more to meet at the council board, and the seat of judicature. It had been said that Becket was co-sovereign with the king, he now appeared (and there were not wanting secret and invidious enemies to suggest, and to inflame the suspicion) a rival sovereign.[40] The king, when Becket met him on his landing at Southampton, did not attempt to conceal his dissatisfaction; his reception of his old friend was cold.