It was in Alexander III.'s time that the great quarrel between Henry II. of England and Archbishop Thomas Becket took place. Becket had been raised by the king's favour to be his chancellor, and afterwards to be archbishop of Canterbury and head of all the English clergy (A.D. 1162). But, although until then he had done everything just as the king wished, no sooner had he become archbishop than he turned round on Henry. He claimed that any clergyman who might be guilty of crimes should not be tried by the king's judges, but only in the Church's courts. He was willing to allow that, if a clergyman were found guilty of a great crime in these courts, he might be degraded,--that is to say, that he should be turned out of the ranks of the clergy,--and that, when he had thus become like other men, he might be tried like any other man for any fresh offences which he might commit. But for the first crime Becket would allow no other punishment than degradation at the utmost. The king said that in such matters clergy and laity ought to be alike; and about this chiefly the two quarrelled, although there were also other matters which helped to stir up the strife. In order to get out of the king's way, the archbishop secretly left England (A.D. 1164), and for six years he lived in France, where king Lewis treated him with much kindness, partly because this seemed a good way to annoy the king of England. But at length peace was made, and Becket had returned to England, when some new acts of his provoked the king to utter some hasty words against him; whereupon four knights, who thought to do Henry a service, took occasion to try to seize the archbishop, and, as he refused to go with them, murdered him in his own cathedral (A.D. 1170). But as you must have read the story of Becket in the history of England, I need not spend much time in repeating it. In 1185, when Urban III. was pope, tidings reached Europe that Jerusalem had been taken by the great Mussulman hero and conqueror, Saladin; and at once all Western Christendom was stirred up to make a grand attempt for the recovery of the Holy City. The lion-hearted Richard of England, Philip Augustus of France, and the emperor Frederick Redbeard, who had lately made his peace with the pope, were all to take part; but very little came of it. Frederick, after having successfully made his way by Constantinople into Asia Minor, was drowned in the river Cydnus, in Cilicia. Richard, Philip, and other leaders, after reaching the Holy Land, quarrelled among themselves; and the Crusaders, after a vast sacrifice of life, returned home without having effected the deliverance of Jerusalem. You will remember how Richard, in taking his way through Austria, fell into the hands of the emperor Henry VI., the son of Frederick Redbeard, and was imprisoned in Germany until his subjects were able to raise the large sum which was demanded for his ransom. CHAPTER XIII. INNOCENT THE THIRD. A.D. 1198-1216. PART I.