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Trumantia Resource Directory 12
Page 05
During the Christmas festival of 1170 (December 29th) occurred an event memorable in ecclesiastical history--the murder of Thomas Becket, Archbishop of Canterbury. In 1162 Becket (who had previously been Chancellor to Henry II.) was made Archbishop, in succession to Archbishop Theobald. The King soon found that he who had served him faithfully as Chancellor would oppose him doggedly as Archbishop. Henry determined to subject the Church as well as the State to the supremacy of the law; and Becket determined to resist the King to the end, thus manifesting his desire for martyrdom in the cause of the Church. Henry had greatly offended the Archbishop by causing his eldest son to be crowned by the Archbishop of York. For this violation of the rights of Canterbury Becket threatened to lay the country under an interdict, which he had the power from the Pope to pronounce. A sort of reconciliation was effected between the King and the Archbishop at Freteval on July 21, 1170, but a further dispute arose on Becket delaying his return to England, the King being anxious to get him out of France. The Archbishop was full of complaints against Henry for the injuries he had done to his see, and the King stood upon his dignity, regardless of the threatened interdiction.
For the second, which is dissimulation; it followeth many times upon secrecy, by a necessity; so that he that will be secret, must be a dissembler in some degree. For men are too cunning, to suffer a man to keep an indifferent carriage between both, and to be secret, without swaying the balance on either side. They will so beset a man with questions, and draw him on, and pick it out of him, that, without an absurd silence, he must show an inclination one way; or if he do not, they will gather as much by his silence, as by his speech. As for equivocations, or oraculous speeches, they cannot hold out long. So that no man can be secret, except he give himself a little scope of dissimulation; which is, as it were, but the skirts or train of secrecy.
Almost never do we find a device in nature which occurs once only. The unique hardly exists: nature is a great copyist. At least two animals of wholly unlike kinds are all but sure to hit independently upon the self-same mechanism. So it is not surprising to learn that a cat-fish has invented an exactly similar mode of carrying its young to that adopted by the Surinam toad: only, here it is on the under surface, not the upper one, that the spawn is plastered. The eggs of this cat-fish, whose scientific name is Aspredo, are pressed into the skin below the body, and so borne about by the mother till they hatch. This is the second instance of which I spoke above, where the female fish herself assumes the care of her offspring, instead of leaving it entirely to her excellent partner.
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