Becket himself had protected some notorious and heinous offenders. A clerk of the diocese of Worcester had debauched a maiden and murdered her father. Becket ordered the man to be kept in prison, and refused to surrender him to the king's justice.[47] Another in London, guilty of stealing a silver goblet, was claimed as only amenable to the ecclesiastical court. Philip de Brois, a canon of Bedford, had been guilty of homicide. The cause was tried in the bishop's court; he was condemned to pay a fine to the kindred of the slain man. Some time after, Fitz-Peter, the king's justiciary, whether from private enmity or offence, or dissatisfied with the ecclesiastical verdict, in the open court at Dunstable, called De Brois a murderer. De Brois broke out into angry and contumelious language against the judge. The insult to the justiciary was held to be insult to the king, who sought justice, where alone he could obtain it, in the bishop's court. Philip de Brois this time incurred a sentence, to our notions almost as disproportionate as that for his former offence. He was condemned to be publicly whipped, and degraded for two years from the honors and emoluments of his canonry. But to the king the verdict appeared far too lenient; the spiritual jurisdiction was accused as shielding the criminal from his due penalty. [SN: Character of the King.] Such were the questions on which Becket was prepared to confront and to wage war to the death with the king; and all this with a deliberate knowledge both of the power and the character of Henry, his power as undisputed sovereign of England and of continental territories more extensive and flourishing than those of the king of France. These dominions included those of the Conqueror and his descendants, of the Counts of Anjou, and the great inheritance of his wife, Queen Eleanor, the old kingdom of Aquitaine; they reached from the borders of Flanders round to the foot of the Pyrenees. This almost unrivaled power could not but have worked with the strong natural passions of Henry to form the character drawn by a churchman of great ability, who would warn Becket as to the formidable adversary whom he had undertaken to oppose,--"You have to deal with one on whose policy the most distant sovereigns of Europe, on whose power his neighbors, on whose severity his subjects look with awe; whom constant successes and prosperous fortune have rendered so sensitive, that every act of disobedience is a personal outrage; whom it is as easy to provoke as difficult to appease; who encourages no rash offence by impunity, but whose vengeance is instant and summary. He will sometimes be softened by humility and patience, but will never submit to compulsion; everything must seem to be conceded by his own free will, nothing wrested from his weakness. He is more covetous of glory than of gain, a commendable quality in a prince, if virtue and truth, not the vanity and soft flattery of courtiers, awarded that glory.