§ 4. The Council of Rockingham.
December, 1094–March, 1095.

Notices of the year 1095. The year to which the last Christmas feast introduces us brings strongly home to us the singular way in which our general chroniclers follow one line of events, while the special biographer of the Archbishop follows another. There is no contradiction; but the gaps which have to be filled up in each narrative are remarkable. It is not perhaps wonderful that the biographer of Anselm should, even in a work which bears a general title, pass by events which in no way affected the history of Anselm. It is more remarkable that one of the most striking scenes in Anselm’s history should not have been thought worthy of notice by the more general annalists of our land. But so it is. Councils of the year. The year 1095 is a year of very stirring events, and it is preeminently a year of councils. But, with a single exception, our two authorities do not record the same events and the same councils. Both tell us of the pallium being brought to Anselm; but, while one tells us nothing of the most striking of the assemblies in which Anselm bore a part, the other tells us nothing of the conspiracy, the revolt, the war, which specially mark this year in the general story of England.

Alleged Welsh campaign. January 9, 1095? If our story is rightly told, the Christmas meeting of William and Henry, followed before long by a Norman campaign on the part of Henry, was followed yet more immediately by a Welsh campaign on the part of William. The King took the affairs of his own island into his own hands, and, for the present, he left those of the mainland to the Count of Coutances. A winter campaign in Wales does not sound very promising, and we are not surprised to hear that it did not add much to the glory of the Red King’s arms.[1308] At all events it must have been short, for, in the course of January and February we find him at points at a considerable distance from the Welsh border. Movements of William. January-February, 1095. In January he was at Cricklade in Wiltshire; in February he was at Gillingham in Dorset, near to Ælfred’s monastery of Shaftesbury, and itself the scene of the election of the Confessor.[1309] In both cases we hear of the King’s movements through incidental notices in our ecclesiastical story. The second is part of the story of Anselm; the first does not concern Anselm himself; it forms part of the tale of the holiest of his suffragans.

Death of Wulfstan. In this month of January the soul of the last surviving English bishop, the sainted Wulfstan of Worcester, passed away. In the eyes of one annalist his death was the great event of the year, and was announced by signs and wonders in the heavens. “There was a stir among the stars, and Wulfstan Bishop of Worcester died!”[1310] Sickness of Wulfstan. The health of the good old man had been for some time ailing; we have seen that he had latterly been unable to show himself in assemblies and ceremonies. At the Easter, 1094. Easter of the year before his death, while the King was in Normandy, he told his steward that on the day of the feast he meant to dine in state with “good men.” He dines with “good men.” The steward, mistaking the meaning of a phrase which is ambiguous in several languages and which was specially so in the English of his day,[1311] got together many of the rich men of the neighbourhood—​we are not told whether the Sheriff Urse was among them. The day came; the Bishop entered the hall with a large company of the poor, and ordered seats to be set for them among the other guests. The steward was displeased;[1312] but Wulfstan explained that those whom he brought with him were the men who had the true riches; he had rather sit down with such a company than sit down, as he had often done, with the King of the English.[1313] For Rufus, we are told, always received Wulfstan with honour; General respect for Wulfstan. we may doubt whether either knew enough of the other’s language for rebukes to be met by repartees. The great men of the realm did the like. Foreign princes, prelates, and potentates honoured him with gifts and asked for his prayers.[1314] His correspondence. Among his correspondents were the Pope—​doubtless Urban—​Malcolm and Margaret of Scotland, and the kings of Ireland. His increased sickness. Whitsuntide, 1094.To this list are added the Archbishop of Bari and the Patriarch of Jerusalem, which last name suggests correspondence on the common needs of Christendom. At Pentecost Wulfstan was very sick; he sent for his special friend Bishop Robert of Hereford, him whose skill had foretold that Remigius would never dedicate his minster.[1315] Wulfstan and Robert of Hereford. Robert came; the humble Wulfstan made his confession and submitted to the discipline.[1316] But he lived on during the rest of that year. Shortly after the beginning of the new year, he had another visit from Bishop Robert and two abbots of his diocese, Serlo of Gloucester and Gerald, abbot of the still unfinished house which Robert Fitz-hamon was raising at Tewkesbury.[1317] Wulfstan again confessed; he foretold his own death; he comforted his friends; he gave himself to religious exercises, causing his seat in his chamber to be so placed that he could see the altar in his chapel.[1318] Death of Wulfstan. January 18, 1095.
His appearance to Bishop Robert. At last, not many days after Robert’s visit, the one remaining bishop of the old stock passed away from his church and from the world. Men believed that he appeared in transitu to his friend Bishop Robert, who, as one who reconciled his episcopal virtues with skill in the affairs of the world, was now with the King at Cricklade.[1319] The vision bade Robert come to his friend’s burial; he came, and the ceremony took place four days after Wulfstan’s death, among a mighty gathering of those who had honoured His burial. Jan. 22.him in life. A generation later it was made a subject of complaint, a subject of rebuke to an age which, we are told, was loath to believe in signs and wonders, that so holy a man was not formally enrolled on the list of saints.[1320] Aftertimes made up for this neglect. Wulfstan became the chief object of local devotion, and no small object of devotion throughout the land. The saint whom Rufus had honoured in life became after death the special object of the devotion of King John, who hoped to be safer in the next world if his body lay in Wulfstan’s church under the shadow of Wulfstan’s shrine.

Another link with the past was thus snapped, and, what the King at least thought more of, another bishopric passed into the hands of Flambard. About a month after the shade of Wulfstan had appeared to Bishop Robert in the King’s court at Cricklade, the living Anselm showed himself to the King in person in his court at Gillingham.[1321] Notwithstanding the hatred which William had expressed towards him at Hastings, the Archbishop had reasons which urged him to seek another interview. Anselm and Urban. The errand on which he came was one at which he had hinted before he had been invested with the archbishopric. He had then fairly warned the King that, if he became archbishop, he must acknowledge Urban as Pope.[1322] He had as yet done nothing towards acknowledging him; he had taken no step which involved the acknowledgement of Urban or of any other pope. With Anselm moral questions came first. The points on which he had first striven to awaken the conscience of the King had been the moral corruption of his court and kingdom, and the synod which, in Anselm’s eyes at least, was the best means for its reformation. But William had so utterly refused his consent to the holding of a synod, he had so utterly refused to give Anselm any help in his schemes of moral reform, that Anselm perhaps thought it useless to press those subjects again upon him. The point which he still thought it his duty to press was one which to us seems of infinitely less importance than either, but with regard to which we must look at matters with the eyes of Anselm’s day and not with the eyes of our own. Anselm was full archbishop in all points spiritual and temporal, as far as the spiritual and temporal powers of England could make him so. Need of the pallium. But he still lacked one badge of metropolitan authority, without which his position would certainly be deemed imperfect anywhere out of England. He had not received the archiepiscopal pallium from Rome. He naturally wished for this final stage of his promotion, this sign of recognition, as he would deem it, on the part of the Universal Church and her chief pastor. Elder usage as to the pallium. Now this supposed need of the pallium was not, like some of the claims of the Roman see, anything new. English archbishops had gone to receive the pallium at Rome, or they had had the pallium sent to them from Rome, in the days of the elder William, in the days of Eadward, in the days of kings long before then.[1323] Lanfranc had gone to Rome for his pallium with the full good will of the Conqueror,[1324] and one of the chief ecclesiastical difficulties of the time immediately before the Conqueror’s coming was the belief that Stigand had received his pallium in an irregular way.[1325] The amount of dependence on the Roman see which was implied in the receipt of this badge of honour may perhaps be questioned. It would be differently understood at Rome and at Canterbury. It would be differently understood at Canterbury, according to the temper of different archbishops, or according to their English or foreign birth. The pallium not needful for the validity of archiepiscopal acts. But it is at least plain that the possession of the pallium was not at this time looked on as at all needful for the validity of any archiepiscopal act. Anselm, as yet unclothed with it, had consecrated a bishop and had proposed to hold a synod. Still for the new archbishop to go to Rome to receive that badge of his office which was still lacking was a simple matter of course. Doubtless the journey needed the formal leave of the king; but no king but William Rufus would have thought of refusing his leave for the purpose. William had indeed not acknowledged Urban; but Anselm had warned William that, if he became archbishop, he must continue to acknowledge Urban, and William had allowed him to become archbishop on those terms. The earlier conduct of William in such matters could not have led Anselm to think that he attached much real importance to the matter. William of Saint-Calais had put forth the loftiest views of papal authority in the hearing of William and Lanfranc, and they had been objected to on quite other grounds. King and Primate had rightly objected when the Bishop of Durham appealed from the King and his Witan to the Pope of Rome; they had not quarrelled with the Bishop of Durham simply because he had implied that there was a Pope of Rome. Character of William’s refusal. The refusal to allow Anselm to go for the pallium could have come only from a king who was determined to raise every point which could annoy the archbishop, above all to raise every point which could by any chance drive him to a resignation of the archbishopric. Or better still than all in the Red King’s eyes would it be to find some point which could anyhow lead to Anselm’s being deprived of the archbishopric. If such an end could be gained, it would matter not by what power or by what process it was done; it would matter not if it involved the forsaking on William’s own part of every position which he had taken up.

Anselm asks leave to go to Urban for the pallium.
William will acknowledge no pope. Anselm then came to Gillingham, and asked the King’s leave to go to the Pope to ask for his pallium. William at once asked to which Pope he meant to go.[1326] Anselm of course answered, To Urban. The King said that he had not yet acknowledged Urban as Pope, that it was neither his custom nor that of his father to allow any one in his kingdom so much as to call any one Pope without his leave. So precious was this right to him that to seek to take it from him was the same thing as to seek to take away his crown.[1327] Anselm’s argument. Anselm then set forth the case of the two contending Popes, and his own personal case in the matter. He reminded the King of what he had told him at Rochester before he took the archbishopric, that, as Abbot of Bec, he had acknowledged Urban, and that he could not withdraw from the obedience which he had pledged to him. William’s answer. The King, in great wrath, said that Anselm could not at once keep his faith towards himself and the obedience which without his leave he had promised to Urban.[1328] Position of Anselm towards Urban. Now, when Anselm pledged his obedience to Urban, he was not an English subject, and he needed no leave from the King of England for anything. He acknowledged Urban, as all the rest of Normandy acknowledged him. The obedience which he had thus pledged Anselm looked on as still personally binding on him, though his temporal allegiance was transferred to a kingdom where Urban was not acknowledged. William, not unnaturally, took no heed of Anselm’s personal obligations. Whatever the Abbot of Bec might have done, neither the Archbishop of Canterbury nor any other English subject could acknowledge any Pope without the King’s leave. After all, Anselm’s acknowledgement of Urban had not yet gone further than speaking of him as Pope. He had had no dealings with him of any kind. He indeed proposed to do an act which would have been the fullest acknowledgement of Urban’s claims. But he had proposed to do it only with the King’s leave. What he should do in case the King refused to give him leave to go, he had not said, very likely he had not settled in his own mind. He would do nothing contrary to his obedience to Urban; but as yet his obedience to Urban was wholly in theory. The King’s words now made it a practical question; any kind of adhesion to Urban was declared by the King’s own mouth to be inconsistent with the duties of one who was the man of the King of England.

Twofold duty of the Archbishop. Anselm, it is plain, was most anxious to do his duty alike as churchman and as subject. He saw no kind of inconsistency between the two. No such questions had been raised in the days of Lanfranc, and he had not done, or proposed to do, anything but what Lanfranc had done before him. Reasonably enough, he was not prepared to admit the King’s interpretation of the law which declared that he could not be the friend at once of Urban and of William. He asks for an assembly to discuss the question. And, in a thoroughly constitutional spirit, he demanded that the question should be referred to a lawful assembly of the kingdom. Let the bishops, abbots, and lay nobles come together, and let them decide whether the two duties were so inconsistent with each other as the King said they were.[1329] By their judgement on the point of law he would abide. Anselm’s purposes. If they ruled that it was as the King said, that obedience to Urban was inconsistent with allegiance to William, then he would shape his own course accordingly. He will leave the realm if he may not acknowledge Urban. If such should be their verdict, he could not abide in the land without either openly throwing off the obedience of Urban or else openly breaking his duty as subject and liegeman to William. He would do neither. In such a case he would leave the realm till such time as the King should acknowledge Urban.[1330] By that means he would avoid all breach of either duty. The case might well have been argued on another ground, whether it was not being righteous overmuch to bring back again, for the sake of a technical scruple of any kind, all the evils which would at once follow if the land were again left without an archbishop. Anselm’s answer would doubtless have been that he could not do evil that good might come. And it would be much clearer to the mind of Anselm than it would have been to the mind of any native Englishman that a withdrawal of obedience from Urban was the doing of evil. The feelings of Aosta, even the feelings of Bec, were not quite at home in the air of Gillingham. But the bringing in of foreign ideas, feelings, and scruples, was one of the necessary consequences of foreign conquest. Anselm obeyed his own conscience, and his conscience taught him as a conscience schooled at Aosta and Bec could not fail to teach him.

Frequency of assemblies under Rufus. To Anselm’s proposal for referring the matter to the Witan of the kingdom William made no objection. The Red King seems never to have had any objection to meeting either his great men or the general mass of his subjects. He was in truth so strong that every gathering of the kind became little more than a display of his power. But it is not easy to see why the question could not have been kept open till the ordinary Easter Gemót. Easter Gemót. March 25, 1095. That Gemót was held this year at Winchester, and, as we shall see in another chapter, matters of no small moment had to be treated in it. The King’s authority was beginning to be defied in northern England, and at this Easter it had to be asserted. A special meeting summoned. But, for whatever reason, it was determined that a special assembly should be summoned a fortnight before the regular meeting at Winchester, for the discussion of the particular point which had been raised between the King and the Archbishop. It illustrates the way in which the kings and great men of that time were always moving from place to place that a spot was chosen for the special meeting, far away from the spot where William and Anselm then were, far away from the place where the regular assembly was to be held so soon after. Gillingham and Winchester were comparatively near to each other; Assembly of Rockingham. March 11, 1095. but the assembly which was to give a legal judgement as to Anselm’s conflicting duties was summoned to meet on the second Sunday before Easter at the royal castle of Rockingham on the borders of Northamptonshire and Leicestershire, a place which had at least the merit of being one of the most central in England.

In the question which was now to be argued, there can be little doubt that the King was technically in the right, as the law was understood in his father’s time. The King technically right. By the custom of the Conqueror’s reign, no Pope could be acknowledged without the King’s leave; and, though Anselm had not taken any active or public step in acknowledgement of Urban, he had acknowledged him in words spoken to the King himself, and he had declared that he would not on any account withdraw his obedience from Urban. Moral estimate of his conduct. At the same time one can hardly conceive a more pettifogging way of interpreting the law, or a meaner way of abusing a legal power. There was no reasonable ground for refusing to acknowledge Urban, except on the theory that the deposition of Gregory and the election of Clement were valid. Urban represented the claims of Gregory; Clement still lived to assert his own claims. But though Lanfranc had used cautious language about the dispute,[1331] England and her King had never thought of acknowledging Clement or of withdrawing their allegiance from Gregory. Gregory had been the Conqueror’s Pope, as long as the two great ones both lived. Position of the rival Popes. And, if Clement’s election was void from the beginning, Gregory’s death could not make his right any better. Victor had succeeded Gregory, and Urban had succeeded Victor. There could be no excuse for objecting to Urban, except on a ground which William Rufus might have been glad to take up, but which he could not take up with any decency. He might, not unreasonably from his own point of view, have thrown himself into the Imperial cause, as the common cause of princes. But he could not do this without throwing blame on the conduct of his father. Or again, if he had tried, in any legal or regular way, either to limit the papal power like Henry the Second, or to cast it off altogether like Henry the Eighth, we at least, as we read the story, could not have blamed him. But it was not in the nature of William Rufus to do anything in a legal or regular way. It was not in him to take up any really intelligible counter position, either by getting rid of Popes altogether or by acknowledging the Imperial Pope. It is true that he might have found it hard to carry with him even his servile prelates, still harder to carry his lay nobles, in either of those courses. But then it was just as little in him honestly to take the third course which was open to him, by frankly acknowledging Urban. William’s treatment of the question. It pleased him better to play tricks with his claim to acknowledge popes, just as he played tricks with his claim to appoint bishops and abbots. To keep the question open, to give no reason on either side, but practically to hinder the acknowledgement of any pope, was a more marked exercise of his own arbitrary will than if he had ruled the disputed question either way. But, just as he was ready to fill up a bishopric as soon as he thought it worth his while in point of money, so he was quite ready to acknowledge a pope as soon as it seemed worth his while to do so, in point either of policy or of spite. No real objection to Urban on his part. All this while he had not the slightest real objection to acknowledge Urban. Either now or very soon after, he was actually intriguing with Urban, in hopes of carrying his point against Anselm by his means.

And now the Assembly came together which was to declare the law of England as to the point in dispute between Anselm and the King. Position of Rockingham. It was not gathered in any of the great cities, or under the shadow of any of the great minsters, of the realm. Nor yet was it gathered, as some councils were gathered before and after, in one of those spots which were simply the seats of the King’s silvan pleasures. Rockingham, placed on the edge of the forest which bears its name, the wooded ground between the sluggish streams of Nen and Welland, was preeminently a hunting-seat; but it was not merely a hunting-seat; it was also a fortress. History of the place. As in so many cases, the Norman, in this case the Conqueror himself, had seized and adapted to his own use the home and the works of the Englishman. On a height just within the borders of Northamptonshire, looking forth across the valley of the Welland over the Danish land to the north, the Englishman Bofig had in King Eadward’s days held sac and soc in his lordship of Rockingham. His dwelling-place, like those of other English thegns, crowned a mound on a site strong by nature, and which the skill of Norman engineers was to change into a site strong by art. In the havoc which fell upon Northampton, borough and shire, when William went forth to subdue the Mercian land,[1332] the home of Bofig had become waste; and on that waste spot the King The castle. ordered a castle to be built.[1333] At Rockingham, as almost everywhere else, we find works earlier and later than the time of our story, but nothing that we can positively assign to the days of either William. There is no keep, as at Bridgenorth and at Oxford, which we can assign to any of the known actors in our tale. The mound of Bofig is yoked on to a series of buildings of various dates, from the thirteenth century to the sixteenth. But we can still trace the line of the walls and ditches which the Conqueror or his successors added as new defences to the primitive mound and its primitive ditch. Art and nature together have made the site almost peninsular; but a considerable space, occupied by the parish church and by the town which has sunk to a village, lies between the castle and the stream that flows beneath the height. Description of the site. The site is a lordly one, and is almost the more striking because it commands no other great object such as those which are commanded by those castles which were raised to protect or to keep down a city. When the forest was still a forest in every sense of the word, the aspect of the castle of Rockingham, one of the wilder retreats of English kingship, must have been at once lonelier and busier than it is now.

Meeting of the Assembly. March 11, 1095. At Rockingham then the Assembly met, a fortnight before Easter. The immediate place of meeting was the church within the castle.[1334] The church has perished, but its probable site may be traced among the buildings to the north of the mound. But it is hard to understand Place of meeting; the castle-chapel.how the narrow space of a castle-chapel could hold the great gathering which came together at Rockingham. The King and his immediate counsellors sat apart in a separate chamber, while outside were a numerous body, The King’s inner council. which is also spoken of as a vast crowd of monks, clerks, and laymen.[1335] It may be that, according to an arrangement which is sometimes found elsewhere, but of which there is no present trace at Rockingham, the great hall opened into the chapel, so that, while the church was formally the place of meeting, the greater space of the hall would be open to receive the overflowing crowd.[1336] Early hours of the assembly. The time of meeting was the early morning; a midnight sitting of the Wise Men was an unknown thing in those days. The King sat within in the outer space, whatever was its nature, Anselm’s opening speech. Anselm addressed the assembly, calling forth the bishops and lords from the presence-chamber to hear him. We must remember that, in the absence of the King, he was the first man in the Assembly and its natural leader. He laid his case before his hearers. He had asked leave of the King to go to Pope Urban for his pallium. The King had told him that to acknowledge Urban or any one else as Pope without his leave was the same thing as trying to take his crown from him. The King had added that faith to him and obedience to Urban were two things which could not go together; Anselm could not practise both at once. It was this point which the Assembly had come together to decide; it was on this point that their counsel was needed. He states his case. He bade his hearers remember that he had not sought the archbishopric, that in truth he would gladly have been burned alive rather than take it.[1337] They had themselves forced him into the office—​the bishops certainly had in a literal and even physical sense. It was for them now to help him with their counsel, to lessen thereby the burthen which they themselves had laid on his shoulder.[1338] He appealed to all, he specially appealed to his brother bishops, to weigh the matter carefully, and to decide. Could he at once keep his plighted faith to the King and his plighted obedience to the Pope? It was a grave matter to sin against either duty. Could not both duties be observed without any breach of either?

The real point avoided on the King’s side. This was indeed the question which the Assembly was brought together to consider and to decide. The meeting had been called, at Anselm’s own request, to inform him on the point of law, whether he could acknowledge Urban without disloyalty to William. But during a long debate of two days, that real issue is never touched, till Anselm himself calls back men’s minds to the real object of their coming together. Assumption of the King’s party against Anselm. It is assumed throughout by the King and the King’s party that the point of law is already settled in the sense unfavourable to Anselm, that Anselm has done something contrary to his allegiance to the King, that He is treated as an accused person. he is there as an accused man for trial, almost as a convicted man for sentence. That he is a member of the Assembly, the highest subject in the Assembly, that the whole object of the meeting is to decide a question in which the King and his highest subject understand the law in different ways, seems not to come into the head of any of the King’s immediate counsellors. Conduct of the bishops. Least of all does it come into the heads of the bishops, the class of men who play the most prominent and the least creditable part in the story.

Answer of the bishops. To Anselm’s question then the bishops were the first to make answer. They are spoken of throughout as acting in a body; but they must have had some spokesman. That spokesman could not have been the Bishop of Durham, who must surely have been sitting with the King in his inner council. William of Saint-Calais comes on the scene afterwards, but no bishop is mentioned by name at this stage. The answer of the episcopal body was not cheering. The Archbishop had no need of their counsel. He was a man prudent in God and a lover of goodness, and could settle such points better than they could. If he would throw himself wholly on the King’s will, then they would give him their advice;[1339] or they would, if he wished, go in and report his words to the King. The meeting adjourned till Monday. They did so; and Rufus, with a scruple which one would rather have looked for from Anselm, ordered that, as the day was Sunday, the discussion should be adjourned to the morrow. Anselm was to go to his own quarters, and to appear again in the morning. One might like to know where, not only the Archbishop, but the whole host of visitors at times like this, found quarters. Unless they were all the King’s guests in the castle, and Meeting of Monday, March 12.filled its nooks and corners how they might, it must have been much harder to find lodgings at Rockingham than it was at Gloucester. Monday morning came; Anselm, with his faithful reporter Eadmer, went to the place of meeting. Anselm and the bishops. Sitting in the midst of the whole Assembly,[1340] he told the bishops, as it would seem, that he was ready to receive the advice which he had asked for yesterday. They counsel unreserved submission. They again answered that they had nothing to say but what they had said yesterday; they had no advice to give him, unless he was ready to throw himself wholly on the King’s will. If he drew distinctions and reservations, if he pleaded any call on behalf of God to do anything against the King’s will, they would give him no help.[1341] So low had the prelacy of England fallen under the administration of Rufus and Flambard. Position of the bishops. Neither as priests of God, nor as Witan of the realm, nor simply as freemen of the land, was there any strength or counsel in them. Their answer seems almost to imply that they cast aside the common decencies, not only of prelates but of Christian men, that they fully accepted the ruling of their sovereign, that the will of God was not to be put into comparison with the will of the King. Anselm makes no exclusive claims. Anselm is not doing like some before and after him, not even like his chief enemy in the present gathering. He is not asserting any special privilege for his order; he is not appealing from a court within the realm to any foreign jurisdiction. He asks for counsel how he may reconcile his duty to God with his duty to the King; and the answer he gets is that he has nothing to do but to submit to the King’s will; the law of God, and seemingly the law of England with it, are to go for nothing. But there was at least some shame left in them; when they had given their answer, they held their peace and hung down their heads, as if waiting for what Anselm might lay upon them.[1342] His second speech. Then the Primate spoke, seemingly not rising from his seat, but with uplifted eyes, with solemn voice, with a face all alive with feeling.[1343] He looked at the chiefs of Church and State, prelates and nobles, and told them that if they, shepherds and princes,[1344] could give no counsel save according to the will of one man, he must betake him to the Shepherd and Prince of all. That Shepherd and Prince had given a charge and authority to Peter first, and after him to the other Apostles, to the Vicar of Peter first and after him to all other bishops, a charge and authority which He had not given to any temporal prince, Count, Duke, King, or Emperor.[1345] His two duties. He owed a duty to his temporal prince, for the Lord had bidden him to render to Cæsar the things that were Cæsar’s. But he was bidden also to render to God the things that were God’s. He would, to the best of his power, obey both commands. He must give obedience to the Vicar of Peter in the things of God; in those things which belonged to the earthly dignity of his lord the King, he would ever give his lord his faithful counsel and help, according to the measure of his power.

Position of England towards the Popes. The words are calm and dignified, the words of a man who, forsaken by all, had no guide left but the light within him. There is indeed a ring about some of Anselm’s sayings which is not pleasing in English ears; we may doubt whether Dunstan would have drawn the distinction which was drawn by Anselm. And yet that distinction comes to no more than the undoubted truth that we should obey God rather than man. The only question was whether obedience to Pope Urban was a necessary part of obedience to God. The foreign clergy doubtless held stronger views of papal authority than had been known of old in England; but we may be sure that every man, native or foreign, held that the Bishop of Rome had some claim on his reverence, if not on his obedience. The ancient custom that an English archbishop should go to him for the pallium shows it of itself. The craven bishops themselves would, if secretly pressed by their consciences or their confessors, have spoken in all things as Anselm spoke. And there was one hard by, if not present in that company, yet within the wall of the same castle, who had gone many steps further Romeward than Anselm went. Anselm and William of Saint-Calais. Closeted with the King, caballing with him against the man of God, was Bishop William of Durham, the man who had openly appealed to the Pope from the sentence of an English court, the man who had openly refused to Cæsar what was most truly Cæsar’s, who had denied the right of the King and Witan of England to judge a bishop, even in the most purely temporal causes.[1346] Anselm had made no such appeal; he had made no such exclusive claims; it is needless to say that he did not, like William of Saint-Calais, take to the policy of obstruction, that he did not waste the time of the assembly by raising petty points of law, or subtle questions as to the befitting dress of its members.[1347] Anselm was a poor Papist, one might almost say a poor churchman, beside that still recent phase of the bishop who had now fully learned that the will of God was not to be thought of when it clashed with the will of the King. Anselm not the first to appeal to Rome. It was not Anselm, but the man who sought to supplant Anselm, who had taken the first and greatest step towards the establishment of foreign and usurped jurisdictions within the realm.

Answer of the bishops. The bishops heard the answer of their Primate. They rose troubled and angry; they talked confusedly to one another; they seemed as if they were pronouncing Anselm to be guilty of death.[1348] They turned to him in wrath; they told him that they would not carry to the King such a message as that, and they went out to the room where the King was. But it was right that the King should know what Anselm’s answer had been. Anselm had no one whom he could send on such an errand; it was not in his nature to thrust another into the mouth of the lion when he could brave the danger himself. Anselm goes in to the King. He went into the presence-chamber; he repeated his own words to the King, and at once withdrew. The wrath of William was kindled; he took counsel with the bishops and the nobles of his party, to see what answer he could make; but they found none. As in the hall at Lillebonne, when the Conqueror put forth his plan for the invasion of England,[1349] men were to be seen talking together by threes and fours, seeking for something to say which might at once soften the King’s wrath and at the same time not directly deny the doctrine set forth by Anselm.[1350] Anselm asleep. They were long over their discussion; the subject of their debates meanwhile sat leaning against the wall of the place of meeting, in a gentle sleep.[1351] He was awakened by the entrance of the bishops, accompanied by some of the lay nobles, charged with a message from the King. The King’s message. His lord the King bade him at once, laying aside all other words—​the words, one would think, of dreamland so cruelly broken in upon—​to hear, and to give his answer with all speed.[1352] Advice of the bishops. They had not as yet to announce any solemn judgement of the King and his Witan; their words still took the form of advice; but it was advice which was meant to be final and decisive.[1353] As for the matters which had been talked about between him and the King at Gillingham, the matter for whose decision he had sought the present adjournment, the matter at issue was plain and easy. The whole realm was complaining of the Archbishop, because he was striving to take away from the common lord of all of them his crown, the glory of his Empire. For he who seeks to take away the King’s dignities and customs seeks to take away his crown; the one cannot be without the other.[1354] Anselm to submit to the King in all things. They counselled Anselm at once to throw aside all obedience and submission to Urban, who could do him no good, and who, if he only made his peace with the King, could do him no harm. Let him be free, as an Archbishop of Canterbury should be in all his doings; as free, let him wait for the will and bidding of the King in all things.[1355] Let him, like a wise man, confess his fault and ask for pardon; then should his enemies who now mocked at his misfortunes, be put to shame as they saw him again lifted up in honour.[1356]

Such was the advice which the stranger bishops of England, with such of the stranger nobles as acted with them, gave to the stranger Primate. Such was their prayer, such was their counsel; such was the course which they insisted on as needful for Anselm and for all who held with him. Their definition of freedom. Among those was the true Englishman who wrote down their words, and who must have smiled over the definition of freedom which, even in their mouths, has a sound of sarcasm. Anselm will not reject Urban. Anselm said that, to speak of nothing else, he could not cast aside his obedience to the Pope. But it was evening; let there be an adjournment till the morrow; then he would speak as God should bid him.[1357] The bishops deemed either that he knew not what more to say or else that he was beginning to yield through fear.[1358] They went back to the King, and urged him that the adjournment should not be allowed, but that, as the matter had been discussed enough, if Anselm would not agree to their counsel, the formal judgement of the Assembly should be at once pronounced against him.[1359]

William of Saint-Calais. And now for the first time we come across a distinct mention of an individual actor, standing out with a marked personality from the general mass of the assembled Witan. Foremost on the King’s side, the chosen spokesman of his master, was the very man who had gone so far beyond Anselm, who had forestalled Thomas himself, in asserting the jurisdiction of the Bishop of Rome within this realm of England. William of Saint-Calais, who, when it suited his purpose, had appealed to the Pope, who had been so anxious to go to the Pope, but who, when he had the means of going, had never gone, stood now fully ready to carry out the Imperial teaching that what seems good to the prince has the force of law. His schemes against Anselm. This man, so ready of speech—​that we have seen long ago—​but, in Eadmer’s eyes at least, not rich in any true wisdom, was all this time stirring the King up to wrath against Anselm, and doing all that he could to widen the breach between them.[1360] He aspires to the archbishopric. Men believed, on Anselm’s side at least, that his object was to bring about the Archbishop’s deprivation or resignation by any means, in hopes that he might himself succeed him.[1361] Was this mere surmise, or had the Bishop of Durham any solid ground for looking forward to a translation to Canterbury? Had he the needful means? William of Saint-Calais was not a servant of the King’s to make a fortune in his service, like Randolf Flambard or Robert Bloet. He had risen, like Anselm himself, through the ranks of monk, prior, abbot, and bishop. But so too had Herbert Losinga, who had managed to buy a bishopric for himself and an abbey for his father. William of Saint-Calais had since his consecration spent three years in banishment while his bishopric was in the King’s hands. Still he may, during his two terms of possession before and after, have screwed enough out of the patrimony of Saint Cuthberht to pay even the vast price at which the archbishopric would doubtless be valued. Or he may have fondly dreamed that, if Anselm could be got rid of by his means, the service would be deemed so great as to entitle him to Anselm’s place as a free gift. Anyhow he worked diligently on the King’s behalf. We are told—​and the picture is not out of character—​that Objects of the King. Rufus wished to get rid of Anselm as the representative within his realm of another power than his own. He deemed himself to be no full king as long as there was any one who put the will of God before the will of the King, or who named the name of God as a power to which even the King must yield.[1362] In his hatred to Anselm, he hoped to carry one of two points. Either the Archbishop would abjure the Pope, and would abide in the land a dishonoured man who had given up the cause for which he strove. Or else, if he still clave to the Pope, the King would then have a reasonable excuse for driving him out of the kingdom.

To these intrigues of the blaspheming King the Bishop of Durham was not ashamed to lend himself. He recked nothing of the dishonour under which it was thought that Anselm would hardly bear to live. Bishop William’s promises to the King. He promised to the King that he would bring about one of two things; either the Archbishop should renounce the Pope, or else he should formally resign the archbishopric by restoring the ring and staff.[1363] Now seemingly was the time to press him, when he was weary with the day’s work and sought for a respite, when his enemies were beginning to hope that, either through fear or weariness, he would be driven to yield. So the bishops again went back from the King to the Archbishop, with him of Durham as their leader and spokesman. The time-server made his speech to the man of God. His speech to Anselm. “Hear the King’s complaint against you. He says that, as far as lies in your power, you have robbed him of his dignity by making Odo Bishop of Ostia”—​William of Saint-Calais had had other names for him in an earlier assembly—​“Pope in his England[1364] without his bidding. Having so robbed him, you ask for an adjournment that you may devise arguments to prove that that robbery is just. Rather, if you please, clothe him again with the dignify of his Empire,[1365] and then talk about an adjournment. Otherwise know that he will invoke the wrath of Almighty God upon himself, and we his liegemen will have to make ourselves sharers in the curse, if he grants you an adjournment of an hour. Wherefore at once make answer to the words of our lord, or else expect presently a judgement which shall chastise your presumption. Do not think that all this is a mere joke; we are driven on by the pricks of a heavy grievance.[1366] Nor is it wonderful. For that which your lord and ours claims as the chief thing in his whole dominion, that in which it is allowed that he surpasses all other kings,[1367] that you unjustly take away from him as far as lies in your power, and by taking it away you throw scorn on the oath which you have sworn to him, and plunge all his friends into this distress.”

William’s Imperial claim. Here are forms of words which may make us stop to study them. In this speech, and in the one which went before it, we see the ground on which William founded a claim to which he attached such special importance. It was not merely the King of the English, it was the Basileus of Britain, the Cæsar of the island world, whose dignity was deemed to be touched. To allow or to refuse the acknowledgement of Popes is here declared by William of Saint-Calais to be no part of the prerogative of a mere king; it is spoken of as the special attribute of Empire. He who, alone among Christian princes, knew no superior either in the elder or the younger Rome, was alone entitled to judge how far the claims of the Pontiff of one world should be acknowledged in another. This sole claim to Imperial power on behalf of the Monarch of all Britain[1368] might have been disputed in the last age in Bulgaria and in the next age in Castile; at that moment William of England was without a rival. He might even, if he chose to take up Anselm’s line of argument, bear himself as more truly Imperial than the German king whose Roman crown had been placed on his head by a schismatic pontiff. William and the vassal kingdoms. And yet at no moment since the day when Scot and Briton and Northman bowed to Eadward the Unconquered had the Emperor of the Isle of Albion been less of an Emperor than when Anselm met the Red King at Rockingham. The younger William had indeed fallen away from the dominion of the father who had received the homage at Abernethy and had made the pilgrimage to Saint David’s. The Welsh were in open and triumphant revolt; the Scots had driven out the king that he had given them. His ill-success at this moment. The Welsh had broken down his castles; the Scots had declared their land to be barred against all William’s subjects, French and English.[1369] True he was girding himself up for great efforts against both enemies; but those efforts had not yet been made. William was just then as far away as a man could be from deserving his father’s surnames of the Conqueror and the Great. At such a moment, we may really believe that he would feel special annoyance at anything which might be construed as casting doubt even in theory on claims which he found it so hard to assert in practice. In the moment of his first great success in England, there had been less to bring the wider and loftier side of his dominion before his mind. He had thought less of his right to allow or to refuse the acknowledgement of Popes in the days when the regale was asserted by Lanfranc and the pontificale by William of Saint-Calais, than he thought now that the regale was asserted by William of Saint-Calais and the pontificale by Anselm.

The shamelessness of the words of William of Saint-Calais in the mouth of William of Saint-Calais might have stirred even the meek Anselm to wrath. But he bore all with patience; he only seized, with all the skill of his scholastic training, on the palpable fallacy of the Bishop’s argument. The real question hitherto evaded. The Assembly had come together to discuss and settle a point of law. Was the duty which Anselm professed towards the Pope inconsistent or not with the duty which he no less fully acknowledged towards the King? On that point not only had no judgement been given, but no arguments either way had been heard. Messages had gone to and fro; Anselm had been implored, advised, threatened; but prayers, advice, and threats had all assumed that the point which they had all come there to discuss had already been ruled in the sense unfavourable to Anselm. William of Saint-Calais could talk faster than Anselm; but, as he had not Anselm’s principle, so neither had he Anselm’s logic. Anselm saw both his intellectual and his moral advantage. Anselm’s challenge. His answer to the Bishop of Durham took the shape of a challenge. “If there be any man who wishes to prove that, because I will not give up my obedience towards the venerable chief Pontiff of the holy Roman Church, I thereby break the faith and oath which I owe to my earthly King, let him stand forth, and, in the name of the Lord, he will find me ready to answer him where I ought and as I ought.” He states the real case. The real issue was thus at last stated; Anselm demanded that the thing should at last be done which the Assembly had been called for the very purpose of doing. The bishops were puzzled, as they well might be; they looked at one another, but no one had anything to say; so they went back to their lord.[1370] Our guide however puts thoughts into their hearts which Anselm had certainly not uttered, which his position in no way implied, and which one is tempted to think that both Anselm and Eadmer first heard of in later times when they came to talk with a pope face to face. New position of the bishops. The bishops, we are told, remembered, what they had not thought of before, that an Archbishop of Canterbury could not be judged on any charge by any judge except the Pope.[1371] This may be so far true as that William of Saint-Calais may have remembered the day when he had urged those very claims on behalf, not only of an Archbishop of Canterbury, but of a Bishop of Durham. If the other bishops had any such sudden enlightenment, they did well to keep their new light to themselves. The doctrine that no one but a Pope could judge the Archbishop, combined with the doctrine that there could be no Pope in England without the King’s leave, amounted, during the present state of things, to a full licence to the Archbishop to do anything that he might think good.

Meanwhile things were taking a new turn in the outer place of assembly. There a state of mind very unlike that of the King’s inner council began to show itself. There were those, as there will always be in every gathering of men, whose instinct led them to insult and trample on one who seemed to be falling. By such men threats, revilings, slanders of every kind, were hurled at the Archbishop, Anselm insulted. as he sat peacefully waking and sleeping, while William of Saint-Calais marched to and fro at the head of his episcopal troop. But threats and revilings were not the only voices that Anselm heard. Popular feeling on his side. The feeling of the great mass of the assembly was with him. Well might it be so. Englishmen still abiding on their own soil, Normans who on English soil were growing into Englishmen, men who had brought with them the spirit which had made the Conqueror himself pause on the day of Lillebonne, were not minded to see the assembly of the nation turned into a mere tool to carry out a despot’s will. They were not minded that the man whose cause they had come together to judge according to law should be judged without law by a time-serving cabal of the King’s creatures. English thegns, Norman knights, were wrought in another mould from the simoniacal bishops of William’s court. A spirit began to stir among them like the spirit of the old times, the spirit of the day which called back Godwine to his earldom and drove Robert of Jumièges from his archbishopric. When Anselm spoke and William of Saint-Calais stood abashed and speechless, the general feeling of the assembly went with the man who was ready to trust his cause to the event of a fair debate, against the man who could do nothing but take for granted over and over again the very question which they had come there to argue. There went through the hall that deep, low murmur which shows that the heart of a great assembly is stirring and that it will before long find some means of clearer utterance. But for a while no man dared to speak openly for fear—​it is Eadmer’s word—​of the tyrant.[1372] At last a spokesman was found. A knight—​we should gladly know his name and race and dwelling-place—​stepped Anselm and the knight. forth from the crowd and knelt at the feet of Anselm,[1373] with the words, “Father and lord, through me your suppliant children pray you not to let your heart be troubled at what you have heard; remember how the blessed Job vanquished the devil on his dunghill, and avenged Adam whom he had vanquished in paradise.” Anselm received his words with a pleased and cheerful look; for he now knew that the heart of the people was with him. “Vox populi vox Dei.” And his true companions rejoiced also, and grew calmer in their minds, knowing the scripture—​so our guide tells us—​that the voice of the people is the voice of God.[1374] Perplexity of the King. While a native English heart was thus carried back to the feelings of bygone times, the voice of the stranger King, to whom God was as a personal enemy, was speaking in another tone. His hopes had utterly broken down; his loyal bishops had made promises to him which they had been unable to fulfil. When he heard how popular feeling was turning towards Anselm, he was angered beyond measure, to the very rending asunder of his soul.[1375] His speech to the bishops. He turned to his bishops in wrath. “What is this? Did you not promise that you would deal with him altogether according to my will, that you would judge him, that you would condemn him?” William of Saint-Calais breaks down. The boasted wisdom, the very flow of speech, of their leader the Bishop of Durham now failed him; he spoke as one from whom all sense and reason had gone away.[1376] The assembly adjourned. All that he could say who had so lately with curses and threats refused Anselm’s plea for an adjournment was to propose an adjournment himself. It was night; let Anselm be bidden to go to his own quarters; they, the bishops, would spend the night in thinking over what Anselm had said, and in devising an answer on the King’s behalf.[1377] The assembly was accordingly prorogued till the next morning, and Anselm went to his own quarters, uncondemned, with his cause as yet unheard and unanswered, but comforted doubtless that he had put his enemies to silence, and that he had learned that the hearts of the people were with him.

March 13, 1095. Tuesday morning came, and Anselm and his companions took their seats in the accustomed place,[1378] awaiting the King’s bidding. That bidding was slow in coming. The debates in the King’s closet were perplexed. Debates in the inner council. The King and his inner counsellors were working hard to find some excuse for the condemnation of Anselm. The King asked the Bishop of Durham how he had passed the night;[1379] but the night thoughts of William of Saint-Calais, sleeping or waking, did not bring much help to the royal cause. He confessed that he could find no way to answer Anselm’s argument, all the more because it rested on holy writ and the authority of Saint Peter. We must always remember that the texts which Anselm quoted, and the interpretation which he put upon them, were in no way special to himself. Every one acknowledged them; William of Saint-Calais recommends force. William of Saint-Calais had appealed to them when it suited his purpose to do so. But the bishop who had once laid the lands of northern England waste could recommend force when reason failed. He whose dealings towards the King in whose cause he was now working had been likened to the deed of Judas was now ready to play Judas over again towards the Patriarch of all the nations beyond the sea. “My counsel,” he said in plain words, “is that he be put down by force;[1380] if he will not consent to the King’s will, let the ring and staff be taken from him, and let him be driven from the kingdom.” The lay nobles refuse. This short way of dealing with the Archbishop, proposed by the man who had once argued that none but the Pope could judge any bishop, suited the temper of the King; it did not suit the temper of the lay nobles. Many of them had great crimes of their own to repent of; but they could see what was right when others were to practise it. Besides Anselm was in one way their own chief; if they were great feudatories of the kingdom, so was he, the highest in rank among them. The doctrine that the first vassal of the kingdom was to be stripped of his fief at the King’s pleasure might be dangerous to earls as well as to bishops. The lay nobles refused their consent to the violent scheme of the Bishop of Durham. Speech of the King. The King turned fiercely on them. “If this does not please you, what does please you? While I live, I will not put up with an equal in my kingdom.” Speaking confusedly, it would seem, to bishops and barons alike, he asked, “If you knew that he had such strong grounds for his cause, why did you let me begin the suit against him? Go, consult, for, by God’s face, if you do not condemn him according to my will, I will condemn you.”[1381] The common spokesman was found in him whose counsel was held to be as the oracle of God.[1382] Speech of Robert of Meulan. Count Robert of Meulan spoke, and his speech was certainly a contrast to that of Bishop William, though both alike, these two special counsellors, confessed that Anselm had been too much for them. “All day long were we putting together counsels with all our might, and consulting how our counsels might hang together, and meanwhile he, thinking no evil back again, sleeps, and, when our devices are brought out, with one touch of his lips he breaks them like a spider’s web.”[1383]

The King and the bishops. When the temporal lords, the subtlest of counsellors among them, thus failed him, the King again turned to his lords spiritual. “And you, my bishops, what do you say?” They answered, but their spokesman this time is not mentioned; Bishop William, it would seem, had tried and had failed. They were grieved that they could not satisfy the pleasure of their lord. Anselm was Primate, not only of the kingdom of England, but of Scotland, Ireland, and the neighbouring islands—​lands to which William’s power most certainly did not reach at that moment. They were his suffragans;[1384] they could not with any reason judge or condemn him, even if any crime could be shown against him, and now no crime could be shown. “What then,” asks William, “can be done?” The king bids the bishops withdraw their obedience from Anselm. The question was answered by a suggestion of his own, one which sounds as if it really were his own, and not the device of Bishop William or Count Robert. If the bishops could not judge him, could they not withdraw from him all obedience and brotherly friendship? This, they said, if he commanded it, they could do. It is not clear by what right they could withdraw their obedience from a superior whom they could not judge; but both king and bishops were satisfied. The bishops were to go and do the business at once; when Anselm saw that he was left alone, he would be ashamed, and would groan that he had ever forsaken his lord to follow Urban.[1385] He withdraws his protection. And, that they might do this the more safely, the King added that he now withdrew from Anselm all protection throughout his Empire, that he would not listen to or acknowledge him in any cause,[1386] that he would no longer hold him for his archbishop or ghostly father. Though the King’s commandment was urgent, the bishops still stayed to devise other devices against Anselm; yet found they none. The bishops and abbots carry the message. At last the bishops, now taking with them the abbots, a class of whom we have not hitherto heard in the story, went out and announced to Anselm at once their own withdrawal of obedience and friendship and the King’s withdrawal of protection. The Archbishop’s answer was a mild one. They did wrong to withdraw their obedience and friendship where it was due, merely because he would not withdraw his where it was also due. But he would not deal by them as they dealt by him. Anselm’s answer. He would still show them the love of a brother and a father; he would do what he could for them, as brethren and sons of the church of Canterbury, to bring them back from their error into the right way. And whereas the King withdrew from him all protection and would no longer acknowledge him as father and archbishop, he would still discharge to the King every earthly duty that lay upon him, and, so far as the King would let him,[1387] he would still do his duty for the care of the King’s soul. Only he would, for God’s service, still keep the name, power, and office, of Archbishop of Canterbury, whatever might be the oppression in outward things that it might bring upon him.