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.
The King turns again to the lay lords. His words were reported to the King.[1388] We are again admitted to witness the scene in the presence-chamber. The bishops had proved broken reeds; William would make one more appeal to the lay nobles. “Everything that he says,” began the King, “is against my pleasure, and no one shall be my man who chooses to be his.[1389] Wherefore, you who are the great men of my kingdom, do you, as the bishops have done, withdraw from him all faith and friendship, that he may know how little he gains by the faith which he keeps to the Apostolic See in defiance of my will.” But the lay lords were not like the bishops; one would like to know by what mouth they made their calm and logical answer. They drew a clear distinction between spiritual and temporal allegiance. The King had told them that no one could be his man and the Archbishop’s at once, and he had bidden them to withdraw their faith—clearly using the word in the feudal sense—from the Archbishop. The lay lords support Anselm. They answered that they were not the Archbishop’s men, that they could not withdraw from him a fealty which they had never paid to him. This of course was true of the lay nobles as a body, whatever questions there might be about Tunbridge castle or any other particular fief. But they went on to say that, though Anselm was not their lord, yet he was their archbishop, that it was he who had to “govern Christianity” in the land; that, as Christian men, they could not, while in that land, decline his mastership, all the more as there was no spot of offence in him which should make the King treat him in any other way.[1390] The King’s difficulties. Such an answer naturally stirred up William’s wrath; but the earls and great barons of his kingdom were a body with whom even he could not dare to trifle. He was stronger than any one among them; he might not be stronger than all of them together, backed as they now were, as the events of the day before had shown, by popular feeling. He had once beaten the Norman nobles at the head of the English people; he might not be able to beat the Norman nobles and the English people together. He therefore made an effort, and kept down any open outburst of the wrath that was in him.[1391] But the bishops were covered with confusion;Shame of the bishops. they felt that all eyes were turned on them, and that their apostasy was loathed of all.[1392] This and that bishop was greeted, seemingly by this or that earl or baron, with the names usual in such cases, Judas, Pilate, and Herod.[1393] The King further examines the bishops. Then the King put the trembling bishops through another examination. Had they abjured all obedience to Anselm, or only such obedience as he claimed by the authority of the Roman Pontiff?[1394] The question was hard to answer. Anselm does not seem to have claimed any obedience by virtue of the authority of the Pope; he had simply refused to withdraw his own obedience from the Pope. Some therefore answered one way, some another. But it was soon plain which way the King wished them to answer. The real question in William’s mind had nothing to do with the Pope; any subtlety about acknowledging this or that Pope was a mere excuse. It was Anselm himself, as the servant of God, the man who spake of righteousness and temperance and judgement to come, that Rufus loathed and sought to crush. Those bishops therefore who said that they had abjured Anselm’s obedience utterly and without condition were at once bidden to sit down as his friends in seats of honour.[1395] His treatment of them. Those who said that they had abjured only such obedience as was claimed by the Pope’s authority, were sent, like naughty children, into a corner of the room, to wait, as traitors and enemies, for their sentence of condemnation.[1396] But they debated among themselves in their corner, and soon found the means of winning back the royal favour. A heavy bribe, paid at once or soon after, wiped out even the crime of drawing distinctions while withdrawing their obedience from a metropolitan whom the King hated.[1397]
Anselm wishes to leave England. While his suffragans were undergoing this singular experience of the strength of the secular arm, Anselm sent a message to the King. He now asked that, as all protection within the kingdom was withdrawn from him, the King would give him and his companions a safe-conduct to one of his havens, that he might go out of the realm till such a time as God might be pleased to put an end to the present distress.[1398] Perplexity of the King. The King was much troubled and perplexed. He wished of all things for Anselm to leave the kingdom; but he feared the greater scandal which would arise if he left the kingdom while still in possession of the archbishopric, while he saw no way of depriving him of it.[1399] He again took counsel; but this time he did not trouble the bishops for their advice. Of them he had had enough; it was their counsel which had brought him into his present strait.[1400] He once more turned to the lay lords. Another adjournment. They advised yet another adjournment. The Archbishop should go back to his own quarters in the King’s full peace,[1401] and should come again in the morning to hear the King’s answer to his petition. Many of the King’s immediate courtiers were troubled; they groaned at the thought of Anselm’s leaving the land.[1402] But he himself went gladly and cheerfully to his lodgings, hoping to cross the sea and to cast off all his troubles and all the burthens of the world.[1403]
Wednesday, March 14, 1095.
Anselm summoned to the King’s presence. The fourth day of the meeting came, and the way in which its business opened marks how the tide was turning in Anselm’s favour. A body of the nobles came straight from the King, asking the Primate to come to the royal presence.[1404] Anselm was tossed to and fro between the hope of leaving the kingdom and the fear of staying in it. Eadmer was eager to know what would be the end of the whole matter.[1405] They set forth and reached the castle. They were not however, at first at least, admitted to the presence-chamber, but sat in their wonted place. Before long the lay nobles, accompanied by some of the bishops, came to Anselm. They were grieved, they said, as old friends of his, that there had been any dispute between him and the King. The lay lords propose a “truce.” Their object was to heal the breach, and they held that the best means towards that object was to agree to an adjournment—a truce, a peace[1406]—till a fixed day, during which time both sides should agree to do nothing which could be counted as a breach of the peace. Anselm agreed, though he said that he knew what kind of peace it would be.[1407] But it should not be said of him that he preferred his own judgement to that of others. To all that his lord the King and they might appoint in the name of God he would agree,[1408] saving only his obedience to Pope Urban. Adjournment till May 20. The lords approved; the King agreed; he pledged his honour to the observance of the peace till the appointed day, the octave of Pentecost. The day seems to have been chosen in order that the other business of the Whitsun Gemót might be got over before the particular case of Anselm came on. If matters had not been brought to an agreement before that time, the case was to begin again exactly at the stage in which it had left off at Rockingham.[1409] It is not clear whether, even at this last moment, William and Anselm again met face to face. But the Archbishop, by the King’s leave, went to Canterbury, knowing that the truce was but an idle and momentary veiling of hatred and of oppression that was to come.[1410]
Importance of the meeting at Rockingham. So it soon proved; yet the scene at Rockingham was a victory, not only for a moment but for ever. No slight step had been taken in the great march of English freedom, when Anselm, whom the King had sought to condemn without trial or indictment, went back, with his own immediate case indeed unsolved, but free, uncondemned, untried, with the voice of the people loud in his favour, while the barons of the realm declared him free from every crime. It was no mean day in English history when a king, a Norman king, the proudest and fiercest of Norman kings, was taught that there were limits to his will. It is like a foreshadowing of brighter days to come when the Primate of all England, backed by the barons and people of England—for on that day the very strangers and conquerors deserved that name—overcame the Red King and his time-serving bishops. The day of Rockingham has the fullest right to be marked with white in the kalendar in which we enter the day of Runnymede and the day of Lewes.