Leaders of the People: Studies in Democratic History

by Joseph Clayton

At the beginning of his reign Henry found the archbishop’s loyalty and good sense invaluable. As Lanfranc had stood by the Conqueror in a marriage which was objectionable from the point of view of Church law, so Anselm stood by his son when he sought the hand of Edith, daughter of the sainted Queen Margaret of Scotland. Here the objection to the marriage was not on the grounds of affinity or consanguinity, but in the fact that Edith was an inmate of the convent at Romsey, and, it was alleged, a professed nun. Edith insisted that she had but taken refuge in the convent to obtain the protection of her aunt Christina, the abbess, and she had worn the habit of a nun as a safeguard against the brutal passions of the Red King and his courtiers. The fear of violence at the hands of the Normans had driven women to take the veil, and Lanfranc had been known to grant release from vows taken under such mortal pressure. Anselm was not the man to exalt the letter of the law above the spirit of liberty. He was content that a council of the great men in Church and State should hold an inquiry, and on their verdict declaring Edith free of her vows, the archbishop gave his blessing on the marriage.

The same great qualities of loyalty and good sense made Anselm stand by the king when the Norman lords, pricked on by Ranulf the Torch, the rascally Bishop of Durham (who had escaped from imprisonment in the Tower by making his gaolers drunk), and hating Henry for “his English ways,” proposed to back up Robert of Normandy in his attempts to seize the crown. According to Eadmer, but for Anselm’s faithfulness and labours, which turned the scale when so many were wavering, King Henry would have lost the sovereignty of the realm of England at that time.

But Anselm’s services to the king are of small account by the side of his services to English liberty, and Anselm’s resistance to Henry’s demands for an absolute monarchy was of lasting influence in the centuries that followed.[9]

The struggle began when Henry called upon Anselm for a new declaration of homage to the crown, and required him to receive the archbishopric afresh by a new act of investiture. This was a claim that had never been made before. “It imported that on the death of the sovereign the archbishop’s commission expired, that his office was subordinate and derivative, and the dignity therefore reverted to the crown.” (Sir F. Palgrave.)

Anselm met the demand with the answer that such a course was impossible. Nay, the very ecclesiastical “customs” which for some time past had given the appointment of bishops and abbots to the crown, and had made the bishops “the king’s men” by obliging them to do homage and to receive investiture of their office with ring and staff at the royal hands, were now impossible for Anselm. The Council at the Lateran, at which Anselm had been present, had forbidden the bishops of the Church to become the vassals of the kings of the earth, and Anselm was not the man to question this decision. He had seen only too much, under William the Red, of the curse of royal supremacy in the Church. He had stood up alone against the iniquities of misrule, just because the bishops, who should have been pastors and overseers of a Christian people, were the sworn creatures of the king. Henceforth it was forbidden by the authority that rested in the seat of St. Peter at Rome for a bishop to receive consecration as a king’s vassal.

But if Anselm would be no party to what had become an intolerable evil, Henry would not give up the rights his father had exercised without a contest. He was willing to do his best for the Church, but it must be in his own way. “Pledging himself in his own heart and mind not to abate a jot of his supremacy over the clergy, he would exercise his authority in Church affairs somewhat more decently than his father, and a great deal more than his brother; but that was all.” (Sir F. Palgrave.)

Both Henry and Anselm recognized the gravity of the issue. Were the bishops and abbots to continue to receive investiture from the king they were “his men,” and his autocracy was established over all. Stop the investiture and the bishops were first and chiefly the servants of the Most High, acknowledging a sovereignty higher than that exercised by the princes of this world, and preferring loyalty to the Church Catholic and its Father at Rome, to blind obedience to the crown.

In brief, the question in dispute really was—Was there, or was there not, any power on earth greater than the English crown?—a question which no English king before Henry VIII. answered successfully in the negative. In contending for the freedom of the bishops of the Church from vassalage to the crown, Anselm was contending for the existence of an authority to which even kings should pay allegiance. It was not the rights of the clergy that were at stake, for the terrors of excommunication did not prevent bishops from receiving consecration on Henry’s terms, and Anselm stood alone now, as in the days of the Red King, in the resistance to despotism. It was the feeling and the knowledge, which Anselm shared with the best churchmen of his day, that great as the power of the king must be, it was a bad thing for such power to exist unchecked, and that it were well for the world that its mightiest monarchs should know there was a spiritual dominion given to the successor of St. Peter, and to his children, a dominion of divine foundation that claimed obedience even from kings.

Anselm put it to the king that the canons of the Church, and the decrees of a great council had forbidden the “customs” of investiture which the king claimed; and he pleaded that he was an old man, and that unless he could work with the king on the acceptance of the Church canons, it was no use his remaining in England, “for he could not hold communion with those who broke these laws”: Henry, for his part, was much disturbed. It was a grave matter to lose the investiture of churches, and the homage of prelates; it was a grave matter, too, to let Anselm leave the country while he himself was hardly established in the kingdom. “On the one side it seemed to him that he should be losing, as it were, half of his kingdom; on the other, he feared lest Anselm should make his brother Robert King of England,”—for Robert might easily be brought to submit to the Apostolic See if he could be made king on such terms.

Henry suggested an appeal to the pope on the question of the right of the crown to “invest” the bishops, and Anselm, who all along was anxious for peace—if peace could be obtained without acknowledgment of royal absolutism—at once agreed.