Such were the depraved spirits, and such the ignoble tyranny, which oppressed the Holy See on the demise of Eugenius III.; an oppression which, if its violence seemed to slumber during the short career of Anastasius IV., whose patriarchal age and paternal goodness to the poor in a famine which desolated the country under his pontificate, commanded respect and won all hearts, yet woke up again with fresh vigour on the accession of his successor, the English Pope Adrian IV.

Adrian, however, was as well by nature as by the experience of his past life, a character not likely to be daunted by the threatening prospect before him; and behaved with such courage and decision, as for the time to confound his rebellious subjects, and reduce them to obedience. For when, on his assumption of the tiara, the senate,—which by this time seems to have arrived at the last pitch of insolence, under the training of Arnold of Brescia,—made a formal proposition to the new pope, to renounce once for all his right to the government of the state; he no sooner heard it than he sternly rejected it, and drove the deputation through whom it came with ignominy out of his presence. Hereupon the mob, worked upon by the orators and other agents of the republic, flew to arms, and led by Arnold of Brescia himself,—who had been fetched out of the country on purpose,—gave in to every disorder; and, among other excesses, murdered Cardinal Gerard, a well known adherent of the pope, as he was passing along the Via Sacra to an audience. Adrian declared this atrocity tantamount to high treason, and at once resolved to punish it by striking a blow such as till his time had not been struck at Rome at all. This was to lay the city under an interdict. No calamity in the middle ages was more dreaded, more cruelly felt by society, than an interdict. This naturally arose out of that profound religious faith, which in those times pervaded all classes of men alike, in the midst of the greatest crimes and disorders. The interdict, which Pope Adrian thus fulminated against Rome, lasted from Palm Sunday till Maunday Thursday. It will not be uninteresting here to briefly describe an interdict. It was usually announced at midnight by the funeral toll of the church bells; whereupon the entire clergy might presently be seen issuing forth, in silent procession, by torch light, to put up a last prayer of deprecation before the altars for the guilty community. Then the consecrated bread, that remained over, was burnt; the crucifixes and other sacred images were veiled up; the relics of the saints carried down into the crypts. Every memento of holy cheerfulness and peace was withdrawn from view. Lastly, a papal legate ascended the steps of the high altar, arrayed in penitential vestment, and formally proclaimed the interdict. From that moment divine service ceased in all the churches; their doors were locked up; and only in the bare porch might the priest, dressed in mourning, exhort his flock to repentance. Rites in their nature joyful, which could not be dispensed with, were invested in sorrowful attributes: so that baptism could only be administered in secret; and marriage celebrated before a tomb instead of an altar. The administration of confession and communion was forbidden. To the dying man alone might the viaticum, which the priest had first consecrated in the gloom and solitude of the morning dawn, be given; but extreme unction and burial in holy ground were denied him. Moreover, the interdict, as may naturally be supposed, seriously affected the worldly, as well as religious cares of society: so that trade suffered, and even the proprieties of men's personal appearance fell into neglect.

At first, the Romans seemed as if they would not flinch under the novel and terrible blow dealt at them. But this was a passing bravado. They soon began to feel uneasy, and then horrified at the cessation of the divine offices, and the refusal of the sacraments in Holy Week,—a season of all others when the most lukewarm piety bestirs itself. The consequence was, that they assembled tumultuously before the Capitol, where the seriate was sitting; and demanded that measures should be directly taken to bring about such an arrangement with the pope as would relieve the city from the interdict.

Negotiations were accordingly entered upon by that body with Adrian at Viterbo; whither he had retired to wait the issue of events. To the overtures made, he answered that he was ready to come into them, provided the senate would first banish Arnold of Brescia out of Rome, abolish the republic, and, together with the citizens, return to their duty. After much hesitation, and some attempts to procure a modification of such sweeping terms,—attempts which the inflexibility of the pope entirely frustrated,—those terms were accepted. On their completion, Adrian revoked the interdict, held his triumphant entry into Rome, and celebrated in the church of St. John Lateran, with great pomp and jubilee, his coronation.

In the meantime Frederic Barbarossa, who had succeeded his uncle Conrad III. on the German throne two years before, and had lately undertaken his first expedition into Italy to restore his fallen power in that country, and suppress its newly roused spirit of freedom, was advancing, flushed with his conquest of Tortona, and his coronation as king of Lombardy, at Pavia, with his army towards Rome, where he proposed to give the last finish to his brilliant successes, by receiving the crown of empire from the pope. Frederic and Adrian had both sent forward ambassadors to each other, who crossed on the road without knowing it: the king, to treat about the imperial crown; the pope, to sound the intentions of a visitor, who was approaching in such warlike array. The papal envoys encountered Frederic at St. Quirico, in Tuscany; and, on being told that he meant nothing hostile to the rights of the Church,—but, on the contrary, that he was ready to act as her champion, and, therefore, came simply to ask the imperial crown,—they promised the pope's acquiescence in his views, provided, among other services required of him, he would procure the delivery of Arnold of Brescia into the hands of justice.

This was all the more insisted upon, as that indefatigable demagogue, having, after his banishment, obtained the protection of certain counts of the Campagna, still continued to exercise from his place of refuge the most pernicious influence over the popular mind in Rome.

Frederic readily undertook to do a service, which agreed as well with his personal feeling as with his policy. For Arnold of Brescia, on the election of the Duke of Swabia to the German throne, had written him a letter, inviting him to come and receive the imperial crown from the senate in contempt of the pope, but couched in such arrogant and fanatical terms, as highly to incense the king, who refused to listen to it; whereupon, Arnold aggravated his offence, by announcing that he would persuade the Romans to choose an emperor of their own, and throw up their allegiance to foreign ones.

The plan which Frederic took to seize Arnold, was, first of all, to send a body of troops to waylay and capture one of the chiefs of the lawless counts of the Campagna, who had been mainly instrumental in liberating the arch-republican out of the hands of the papal officers, into which he had shortly fallen before at Oriculum; and then to threaten the speedy execution of the prisoner, unless Arnold were given up as a ransom. This plan succeeded. The other Campagnian counts, frightened at the resolute conduct of Frederic, and trembling at the consequences of his further anger, if the ransom demanded were not given, soon brought their client, whose revolutionary doctrines so much promoted those disorders by which they thrived, to the feet of the king, and received back their brother in exchange. Arnold was forthwith remanded in chains to Rome, there to await the arrival of Frederic, who intended to have the culprit tried before his own tribunal.

But Peter, the prefect of Rome, and commandant of the Castle of St. Angelo, a devoted servant of the pope, into whose custody Arnold was delivered, fearful lest his prisoner should escape by means of a popular riot,—as he had once done before in the same circumstances,—resolved to execute him on his own account; and, without waiting for further instructions either from Frederic or Adrian, but secretly abetted by several cardinals on the spot, had the unhappy man led out early on the morning of the 18th of June, 1155, before the popular or people's gate; where he was fastened to a cross projecting from the midst of a pile of faggots, which, being fired, soon enveloped their victim in the flames. His cries and the tumult of the execution roused the citizens, dwelling hard by, from their beds, who presently ran up lamenting and furious to the rescue; but, in vain; as they were thrust back on all sides by the soldiers who kept the ground. Nevertheless, such was the infatuated reverence which the people manifested for their late tribune, that it was found expedient after his execution to throw his ashes into the Tiber, to prevent them being enshrined as holy relics. Arnold of Brescia was about fifty years old, when he thus met his fate.

However shocking such cruel executions as he suffered may be to the more enlightened benevolence, or more sensual refinement of the present day; yet, from the point of view of the middle ages,—that the visible punishment of a crime should be commensurate with, and, as it were, symbolise its moral enormity,—there can be no doubt but that in the present case the criminal received only what he deserved. Few men ever did worse mischief to society in their day, than Arnold of Brescia. Private ambition was his ruling passion, and his hopes of gratifying it were set on the realization of dreams and fancies, engendered of an unbridled imagination, which an admixture of mysticism further distempered. A false scandal which he took at the discrepancy between the lives and doctrines of the clergy, in his time widely corrupted, heightened by his Pharisaical pride,—which a bodily temperament, naturally disinclined to sensual excess, inflated all the more—as, by means of such bodily temperament, he was enabled with so little merit of his own, to keep up an exterior severity of demeanour closely resembling a holy asceticism,—led him at last to confound the abuse of religion with religion itself; and, under the further influence of his insatiable thirst for notoriety, to broach schismatical views, and then a plan of ecclesiastical as well as political reform for the world, of which, he persuaded himself, he was marked out to be the apostle.

That reform, as we have seen, was simply the return of society, politically, under the republican institutions of pagan Rome; and, spiritually under the religious government of the apostolic ages. A fanatic of this description, endowed in an extraordinary manner with eloquence to announce his views, and with boldness and energy to pursue the career of carrying them out,—as was Arnold of Brescia's case,—may well be imagined to have seduced the multitude, at all times giddy,—but in his day oppressed and shocked by many gross abuses,—in the way he did; and so to have elicited the stern hostility of the constituted authorities in church and state, who, naturally perceiving in the progress of such a man only "confusion worse confounded," and ruin to the temporal and eternal interests of society, were in duty bound to eradicate the evil before it was too late, and, in doing so, not to shun harsh means where gentle ones failed; but, if words proved fruitless, to use the sword. The obstinacy, the infatuated obstinacy of Arnold of Brescia in the face of so many warnings, as from time to time were given to him, plainly proved that he was incorrigible; and that, therefore, as it was no more possible for society to prosper, as it should do, while he continued to infect it with his wild theories, than for the bodily health to nourish while eaten into by a cancer, to extirpate him, like it, was the only course left,—a course which thus became morally as much a duty in his case, as it would physically become so in that.