Henry's submission in 1074 meant that there was a dangerous rebellion in Saxony. The King did not, in fact, part entirely with his excommunicated favourites, and the anathema on them was renewed at the synod of 1075, which also laid a heavy censure on "any emperor, duke, marquis, count, or any temporal lord, or any secular person whatsoever," who claimed the right of investiture. Henry remained friendly: the Saxon war dragged on. In October Henry was sending legates to Rome to confer with the Pope, who had hinted at compromise on the subject of investitures. But the Saxon rebellion suddenly came to an end, and three legates were now sent with a less pleasant message: probably a peremptory claim of the imperial crown. Henry had not only a united Germany, but a strong party in Lombardy. Herlembald was killed, and the Patarenes held in check. Moreover, the recalcitrant bishops were now joined by the Archbishop of Ravenna (who had been hastily excommunicated by Gregory for not attending the Lenten synod) and Cardinal Hugh Candidus. Elated with this support, the young King acted wilfully. He sent one of his excommunicated nobles to Lombardy, crushed the Patarenes, and set up a third Archbishop of Milan, Tedald.[221]
Gregory was alarmed at this combination and at first temporized. He invited Tedald to come to Rome for a polite discussion of his claims; he sent Henry a "doubtful blessing" and would compromise on investitures and consider his further demands, if he abandoned the excommunicated nobles.[222] But he gave Henry's envoys, to whom he handed the letter, a verbal message of a more drastic nature. He threatened to depose Henry for his "horrible crimes," and there is good reason to suppose that these "crimes" were, in part at least, the slanderous fictions of Henry's enemies.[223] Both were men of fiery and indiscreet impulses, and this impolitic act of Gregory kindled the conflagration.
Meantime a remarkable experience befell Gregory at Rome, and it is not unlikely that he held Henry responsible for it; though it is practically certain that Henry was wholly innocent. The increasing difficulties of the Pope encouraged the anti-Puritans at Rome, and one of them, Cenci, a notorious bandit, burst into the church of Sta. Maria on the Esquiline while Gregory was saying midnight mass there on Christmas day (1075). His men scattered the attendants, and one of them struck the Pope with a sword, causing a wound on the forehead. Gregory was stripped of his sacerdotal robes, thrust on a horse behind one of the soldiers, and hurried to Cenci's fortified tower. Some noble matron was taken with him—one of the strangest circumstances of the whole mysterious episode—and she bound his wounds as he lay in the tower, while Cenci threatened to kill him unless he handed over the keys of the Papal treasury. It is fairly clear that the motive was robbery. Meantime the bells and trumpets had spread the alarm through Rome, and the militia beset the tower and relieved the Pope. This remarkable picture of a winter's night in the capital of Christendom ends with Gregory, who cannot have been severely wounded, calmly returning to the altar and finishing his mass.
Henry's envoys had left Rome before Christmas, and it is therefore a mistake to suppose that the message they brought from Gregory had any reference to the violence of Cenci. They reached the court at Goslar on January 1, 1076, and we can easily believe that they would not moderate the offensiveness of the oral message. Gregory had a deliberate policy of preferring oral to written messages. There may at times have been an advantage in this, but in the present instance it was gravely imprudent. Henry's friends urged him to avenge the insult, and three weeks later a synod of twenty-six German bishops, with a large number of abbots, met at Worms and declared Gregory deposed. The irregularity of his election, the despotism of his conduct, and what was described as his scandalous association with women, were the chief reasons assigned for this action. The decree was sent to the insurgent bishops of north Italy, who met in council and endorsed it, and a priest of the church of Parma volunteered to serve the sentence on Gregory. He reached Rome at a moment when Gregory was presiding at a large synod in the Lateran Palace, and boldly read the sentence to the assembled bishops. Lay nobles drew their swords upon the audacious priest, but Gregory restrained them and bade them hear the words of Henry. His intemperate and insulting letter—so intemperate that the Pope could easily remain calm and dignified—could receive only one reply. The King and all his supporters were excommunicated, and Gregory issued a not unworthy letter "To All Christians"[224] informing them that the subjects of King Henry of Germany were released from their allegiance.
There can be no doubt that Henry IV. had merited a sentence of excommunication, and it is a nice point whether a King could continue to rule his territory when he was thus cut off from communication with his subjects. We may, at all events, gravely question whether the Pope was either politic or just in going on formally to depose the King, and, as the news of this unprecedented action spread through Christendom, even religious prelates shook their heads. Throughout the rest of his life Gregory had repeatedly to defend his conduct, not against the partisans of Henry, but against some of his own supporters. His chief apology is contained in a letter to the Bishop of Metz[225] and is invalid and illogical. He relies on a forged letter of St. Peter, and he appeals to the excommunication of Theodosius by St. Ambrose and the "deposition" of Childeric by Pope Zachary in 753; the former was in no sense a precedent, and in the latter case the Pope merely confirmed the design of Pippin and the Franks. There was no precedent whatever for deposition, and Gregory is severely censured even by modern writers for not observing the canonical forms in his excommunication of Henry.[226]
Gregory at once prepared for war. The Duchess Beatrice died in April, and the devoted Mathilda, who was so pointedly insulted, though not named, in her royal cousin's manifesto, put the troops of Tuscany at the Pope's disposal. Gregory also tried to reconcile the Normans with each other and weld them into a common army for the defence of Rome. But his chief reliance was on the Germans themselves. He knew well, when he excommunicated Henry, that the embittered Saxons would leap with joy at the fresh pretext of rebellion, and the intriguing Swabians would secretly welcome the censure. Henry found himself very soon on the road to Canossa. He summoned two councils in rapid succession, but their defiance of the Pope brought him little pleasure when he noted the small number of his supporters. Saxony threw off his yoke at once, and prelates and nobles began to fall away from his cause. Gregory pressed his advantage with fiery energy, showering letters upon the German clergy and people, and in the middle of October a large body of the nobles and prelates (chiefly Saxon and Swabian) met at Tribur, near Darmstadt, to consider the position of the kingdom. Two Papal legates and Rudolph of Swabia presided, and Henry watched the proceedings from the other side of the river.
From this stage onward we are compelled to consult the contemporary chroniclers, and it is almost impossible to disentangle the truth from their contradictory and mendacious statements. It is clear that for seven days the Diet held long debate on the situation. Undoubtedly they wished to depose Henry, but, apparently, they were unwilling to recognize in the Pope this dangerous power of deposing kings, and the Diet seems to have ended with an injunction to Henry to make peace with the Pope. According to the monk Lambert of Hersfeld, who seems to have gathered into his Chronicle all the wild cloister-gossip of the time, the Diet decided that, according to the "Laws of the Palace,"—there were no such laws at that time,—Henry forfeited his crown if he remained excommunicated a year and a day, and commanded him to retire into private life at Spires until Gregory should come to Germany and decide the case. The Gregorian writer, Bishop Bonitho,[227] contrives in this instance to improve on Lambert; he tells us that, if Henry submitted, the nobles would accompany him to Rome, where he would receive the imperial crown, and they would then sweep the Normans out of south Italy. One suspects that in this the Bishop of Sutri is betraying a design of Gregory which was certainly not endorsed by the Diet.
The most authentic evidence is the Promissio (or Letter of Apology) which, at the dictation of the Diet, Henry submitted to the Pope.[228] He expressed regret for any affront he may have put on the dignity of the Pope, promised obedience on spiritual matters, and declared that on certain other grave matters he would vindicate his innocence. When this short and dry letter was eventually handed to the Pope by one of the chief prelates of Germany, Gregory was outraged to find that its concluding sentence ran: "But it befitteth thy Holiness not to ignore the things repeated about thee which bring scandal on the Church, but to remove this scruple from the public conscience and provide in thy wisdom for the tranquillity of the Church and the kingdom." Gregorian writers insist that this was added by Henry to the draft approved by the Diet, but this is by no means certain. Henry was not a broken man. He had a considerable force with him, and Rudolph of Swabia evidently found that it would be no easy task to displace him. The edict which Henry published at the same time, declaring that he had been misled when he obtained a censure of the Pope, gives one the same impression. He had still a powerful following, and it was agreed to avert civil war by reconciliation and by inviting Gregory to preside at a Diet at Augsburg.
Gregory, in spite of the advice of his friends (except Mathilda, who spurred him on), at once set out for the north. His impetuous journey was, however, arrested in the north of Italy by the news that the German nobles had failed to send an escort for him, and that Henry himself was crossing the Alps with a large army. Mathilda persuaded him to retire to her impregnable fortress of Canossa, and there, about the end of January, Henry enacted his historic part of penitent.
Here the chroniclers are hopelessly discordant, and the full picturesque narrative of Lambert of Hersfeld, on which some historians still implicitly rely, has been riddled by modern critics.[229] It is clear that Henry wished to keep the Pope out of Germany, and he there-fore hastily crossed the Alps in the depth of winter. It is clear that a "vast army" (in the words of Lambert himself) gathered about him in rebellious Lombardy, but he pushed on with a few followers (incidentally admitted by Lambert) to Canossa. It is clear that Gregory, on the other hand, was desperately bent on presiding over a council in Germany, and shocked his friends by his obstinacy in refusing to be reconciled[230]; he had condemned Henry without trial, but he would not absolve him without trial. And, obviously inaccurate as the narrative of Lambert is,[231] it seems to me certain that Henry went through the form of penance on the icy platform before the gate of Canossa. In the letter written immediately afterwards to the nobles and prelates of Germany,[232] Gregory describes Henry as doing penance for three days, in bare feet and woollen robe, before the gates. However impolitic and irritating it was for Gregory to write such a letter, Dr. Dammann seems to me to fail to impeach its genuineness. Indeed in his great speech to the Roman synod of 1080, when he excommunicated Henry a second time, Gregory says that in 1076 Henry came to him "in confusion and humiliation" at Canossa to ask absolution.