Relations of Rufus and Henry. For the last events of Rufus’ second Norman war we have to go wholly to our one witness in our own tongue. It is plain that the King, even after his gold had turned Philip back, did not feel at all at ease in his Norman quarters. He seems to have distrusted two important personages at the other end of the duchy, his other brother and one of the mightiest of his own subjects. Henry, Ætheling and again Count, was safe in his castle of Domfront, among the people who had chosen him as their protector. At one period of this year, he is described as at war with both his brothers at once.[1285] We find him taking the part of the lord of Saint Cenery, Robert son of Geroy,[1286] against the common enemy, Robert of Bellême. Saint Cenery taken by Robert of Bellême. His help however did not hinder the cherished fortress from falling into the hands of the tyrant.[1287] We hear of him before the end of the war in a way which implies at least some suspicious feeling between himself and the King his brother. Henry and Hugh summoned to Eu. Besides Henry, Hugh of Chester—rather Hugh of Avranches or Hugh of Saint-James—was also in his own continental possessions. The King summoned both of them to come to him at Eu, and, as the state of the duchy did not allow them to come across Normandy by land, he sent ships to bring them.[1288] But Henry and Hugh, from whatever causes, did not choose to meet the King face to face. They go to Southampton. October 31, 1094.
They keep Christmas in London. Instead of sailing to Eu or its port, they made for Southampton, where they landed and seemingly stayed—with what objects we are not told—for some weeks.[1289] Thence they went to London, and kept Christmas there. King William was not this year wearing his crown either at Westminster or at Gloucester. But it is clear that the movements of his youngest brother had an effect upon his own. For the first three days of the holy twelve he stayed at Whitsand. The King comes to England. December 28, 1094. On the fourth day, the feast of the Innocents, the anniversary of the dedication of the West Minster, he crossed the sea and landed at Dover.[1290] Thence he seemingly came to London, where Henry was. Whatever quarrels or suspicions had sprung up between the King and the Ætheling were now made up. Henry was received into his brother’s fullest William and Henry reconciled. confidence. He stayed in England till Lent began, when he went to spend the penitential season in Normandy. But it was not to be an idle season; in the month between Epiphany and Lent, the Red King had made his preparations for a campaign in which Henry was to Henry goes to Normandy, c. Feb. 9, 1095. take his place. The Count of Coutances then went again beyond sea with great treasures to be used on the King’s behalf against his brother—Earl Robert, as English lips called him. “And ofttimes upon the Earl he won, and to him mickle harm either on land and His warfare with Robert.on men did.”[1291] Here ends our story. We get no further details till William became master of all Normandy by quite another process. General results of the campaign. But though we get no details of the war from Norman sources, we do get a general picture of its results. The no-rule of Robert is once more set before us in speaking words. The soft Duke, who feared his subjects more than they feared him, was benumbed with softness and idleness.[1292] He is contrasted with both his brothers. Progress of Henry. Henry held his stronghold at Domfront, together with a large but undefined part of the duchy, including without doubt the more part of his old peninsular county. Some places he had won by arms; others, like Domfront itself, had sought his rule of their own free will.[1293] Within these bounds he yielded to his brother the Duke just so much service as he thought good,[1294] which at this particular moment would be little indeed. And the other brother who wore the diadem of England held more than twenty castles on Norman ground. He, unlike Robert, was a ruler whom men feared; and his gifts, and the fear of him together, kept many of the great men of the land, not only in his allegiance, but in his zealous service.[1295] If Normandy was not conquered, it was at least effectually dismembered.
Norman supporters of William. The list of the Norman nobles who joined the King from beyond sea takes in most of the names with which we are most at home. There is Ralph of Conches, Gerard of Gournay, Richard of Courcy. We hear now too of Philip of Braose, a name to become famous in more than one part of our island. And we find the names of men yet higher in power, and nearer to the ducal house. William of Eu.
Stephen of Aumale. There is the first author of the late troubles, Count William of Eu, for the present still an adherent of Rufus, before long to be heard of in quite another character. With him stands Count Stephen of Aumale, also before long to play a part in our story wholly different from that which we find him playing now. Robert of Meulan. And it is needless to say that Count Robert of Meulan was the Red King’s servant in his Norman, as well as in his English character.[1296] Walter Giffard. Nor do we wonder to find in the same list—for he was Earl of Buckingham as well as lord of Longueville—the name of Walter Giffard, him who appeared as an aged man forty years before.[1297] He still lived, while, during this very year, more than one of the elder generation of the famous men of Normandy passed away. Death of Roger of Beaumont. 1094. The father of the Count of Meulan, the old Roger of Beaumont, renowned so many years before alike in arms and in council,[1298] died on the Norman soil which he had guarded so well, and which he seems never to have left. He had for some years left the world, to become a monk in the monastery of Preaux of his father’s rearing.[1299] His estates had passed to his son at Meulan, the mighty vassal of three lords. Henry Earl of Warwick. His younger son Henry had his lot cast in England, where, perhaps before this time, the Red King bestowed on him the earldom of Warwick. And, in the same year as the lord of Beaumont, died, far away in England, another Roger, Death of Roger of Montgomery. 1094. like him a monk, but four days before a mighty earl, Roger of Montgomery, of Arundel, and of Shrewsbury, the youngest brother of the house beyond the Severn bridge of which he at least claimed to be the founder.[1300] His vast possessions were divided at his death. Robert of Bellême succeeds his father in Normandy, and Hugh in England. Robert of Bellême, already heir of his mother in the border-land, now became heir of his father in Normandy. The earldom of Shrewsbury and Roger’s other English estates passed to his second son Hugh, who bears the character of being the only one of the sons of Mabel who was mild and gentle[1301]—mild and gentle, we must understand, to Normans, perhaps even to Englishmen, but certainly not to captive Britons. Of Hugh, as well as of Robert of Bellême and Roger of Poitou, as well as of Arnulf of Montgomery, a fourth son of the same fierce stock, we shall hear much as our tale goes on. Death of Hugh of Grantmesnil. In England too, perhaps within his sheriffdom of Leicester, died Hugh of Grantmesnil, of whom we have lately heard in the civil wars both of Normandy and of England, and whom his own shire and his neighbours of Northamptonshire had no reason to bless. His burial at Saint Evroul. His body, we need hardly say, found its way across the sea, to lie among his loyal bedesmen at Saint Evroul.[1302] These men all left the world in the year with which we are now dealing, Death of Walter Giffard. 1102. and left the hoary Earl of Buckingham to be for eight years longer the representative of an earlier day.[1303] The hands which eight and twenty years before had been too feeble to bear the banner of the Apostle[1304] were still, it would seem, ready to do whatever was still found for them to do in the service of the Red King. But the warfare of the King and his partisans is set down simply as one among the many ways in which Normandy was torn in pieces by her own children.[1305] Eadmer’s judgement of the campaign. An English writer meanwhile, on whose main subject the Norman campaigns of Rufus had but a very indirect bearing, speaks casually of this expedition as an undertaking on which a vast deal of money was spent, but by which very little was gained.[1306]
It is indeed to be borne in mind, as supplying at least a partial explanation of the way in which the second Norman expedition comes to an end without any end, that things in England were, just as they had been three years and a half before, in a state which urgently called for the presence of the King within his kingdom. Wretchedness of England. We know not whether it at all moved him that the heavy taxation which had been laid on his kingdom for the cost of his warfare had brought the land to the lowest pitch of wretchedness. Men, we are told, had ceased to till the ground; hunger followed; there were hardly left any who could tend the dying or bury the dead.[1307] These things might not have greatly stirred the heart of the Red King; but he may, like other tyrants, have felt that there was a bound beyond which oppression could not be safely carried. Causes for the King’s return. And there were political and military reasons which called him back. He could not afford to jeopard his undisputed possession of England for the sake of a few more castles in Normandy. He could hardly afford to jeopard for their sake the imperial supremacy of his crown over the whole isle of Britain, a supremacy which he was at that moment specially called on to assert. The year of the second Norman campaign was a year of special importance in the history both of Scotland and of Wales. Affairs of Scotland While the Red King was warring and bribing in Normandy, Scotland had, as in the days of Siward, received a king from England, and, what had not happened in the days of Siward, her people had slain the foreign nominee, and had again chosen a king of their own. The first reign of Donald, the momentary reign of Duncan, the beginning of the second reign of Donald, all of them events which were not mere changes of sovereign, but real revolutions in the state of the nation, had happened between the death of Malcolm and the return of William from Normandy thirteen months later. and Wales. Wales too had risen in a movement which had more than was usual of the character of real national insurrection, and the movement had called for all the energies of the new Earl of Shrewsbury and of the King himself on his return. Plots at home. And a plot yet nearer home, a plot to deprive the King of his crown and life, a plot devised by men who had been just now the foremost in supporting his cause, broke out soon after his return. It broke out so soon after it that one is tempted to think that it was already hatching, and that it was one of the causes which brought him back. The seeming break-down of the Red King’s second Norman campaign thus becomes more intelligible than some of the other cases where he began an undertaking and failed to finish it. William had plenty to do in Britain, both in camp and in council. As soon as he was assured of the adhesion of his brother Henry, he could afford, indeed he was driven, to leave him to do the work which had to be done in Normandy.
§ 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.