Part 2

A year later (March, 1095) at a great council of bishops and nobles, held at the castle of Rockingham, the king’s hatred had full vent. From the first the Archbishop of Canterbury received from the Pope a _pallium_, the white woollen stole with four crosses, which was “the badge of his office and dignity,”[2] and Anselm was anxious to journey to Rome to obtain his pallium from Pope Urban. William objected to this on the ground that there was another claimant to the papacy, and that until he had decided who was the rightful pope no one in England had a right to do so. In vain Anselm pointed out that he, with all Normandy, had acknowledged Urban before he had become archbishop. William retorted angrily that Anselm could only keep his faith to the Apostolic See by breaking his faith to the king.

The council of Rockingham met to settle the question--not the question of the supremacy of Rome in Western Christendom[3]--but the question whether, in England, there was any higher authority than the crown. William did not pretend to dispute the papal supremacy in the Church. His claim was that the king alone must first acknowledge the pope before any of his subjects could do so. In reality the king’s one desire was “to take from Anselm all authority for maintaining the Christian religion. For as long as any one in all the land was said to hold any power except through him, even in the things of God, it seemed to him that the royal dignity was diminished.” (Eadmer.) William acknowledged Pope Urban readily enough, but he would have Archbishop Anselm understand that the papacy must be acknowledged by permission of the king of England. That was the real ground of contention between these two men: was there any power on earth higher in England than the English crown? According to William, to appeal to Rome was to dispute the absolutism of the crown. Anselm maintained that in all things of God he must render obedience to the Chief Shepherd and Prince of the Church, to the Vicar of St. Peter; and in matters of earthly dignity he must render counsel and service to his lord the king.

The bishops at Rockingham were the king’s men. Many of them had bought their bishoprics, all were afraid of the royal displeasure. The stand made by Anselm, unsupported though he was, did something to inspire a better courage in the ranks of the clergy[4]; but in that Lent of 1095 there was no sign of support for the archbishop. William only wanted to break the will of this resolute old man, the one man in all the kingdom who dared to have a mind and utterance of his own, and the mitred creatures of the king supported their lord even to the point of recommending the forcible deposition of Anselm from his see, or at least of depriving him of the staff and ring of office. With one consent the bishops accepted the king’s suggestion of renouncing all obedience to Anselm.

But the barons were not so craven. To the king’s threat, “No man shall be mine, who will be his” (Anselm’s), the nobles said bluntly that not having taken any oath of fealty to the archbishop they could not abjure it. And Anselm was their archbishop. “It is his work to govern the Christian religion in this land, and we who are Christians cannot deny his guidance while we live here.”

The three days’ conference at Rockingham ended in disappointment to the hopes of William of absolute autocracy, and in general contempt for the prelates whose abject servility had availed nothing.

Anselm alone stood higher in the eyes of the men of England, and greater was the ill-will of William. For another two years Anselm held his ground against the king. The pallium was brought from Rome by Walter, Bishop of Albano, and placed on the altar at Canterbury, and Anselm was content to take it from the altar. William had written in vain to Pope Urban praying for the deposition of Anselm, and promising a large annual tribute to Rome if his prayer was granted. The pope, of course, declined to do anything of the sort, and William had to make the best of the situation. He wanted money for his own purposes, and his barons were now against him in his quarrel with the archbishop. For a time William adopted a semblance of peace with Anselm, but his anger soon blazed out again. The ground of complaint this time was that the soldiers whom the archbishop had sent to the king for his military expedition against Wales were inadequate--without proper equipment, and unfit for service. The archbishop was summoned to appear before the King’s Court to “do the king right.”

From the time of his acceptance of the archbishopric, Anselm had been hoping against hope that the king would support him, as the Conqueror had supported Lanfranc, in the building up of the Christian religion in England--this summons to the King’s Court was the death-blow to all these hopes. The defendant in the King’s Court was at the mercy of the king, who could pronounce whatever judgment he pleased.[5] Anselm returned no answer to the summons, but his mind was made up.

“Having knowledge that the king’s word ruled all judgment in the King’s Court, where nothing was listened to except what the king willed, it seemed to Anselm unbecoming that he should contend, as if disputing, as litigants do, about a matter of words, and should submit the justice of his cause to the judgment of a court where neither law, nor equity, nor reason prevailed. So he held his peace, and gave no answer to the messenger.” (Eadmer.)

From the despotism of the Red King Anselm would turn for justice to the centre of Christendom. In England he was impotent to stem the evil that flowed from the savage absolutism of the throne. All that one man could do to resist the royal tyranny Anselm had done, and now this summons to the King’s Court was the final answer to all his efforts to restrain a lawless king, and to promote the Christian religion in England. He would not go through the farce of pleading in the King’s Court, where judgment was settled by the unbridled caprice of the king, self-respect forbade the archbishop from that; he would appeal to the only court on earth higher than the courts of kings--the court whose head, in those days, was the head of Christendom.[6]

William dropped the summons to the King’s Court, and for a time refused permission to Anselm to leave the country. Bishops and barons now urged Anselm not to persist in his appeal to Rome. But the archbishop was resolute, and in the autumn of 1097 the king yielded, and Anselm left the country.[7]

The first campaign against despotism in England was over--the battle was to be renewed when Henry I. wore the crown.

At Rome Pope Urban, with all the goodwill in the world, and with a very real affection and regard for Anselm, could do nothing against the Red King except rebuke his envoys, and do honour to the much-tried archbishop. Anselm himself prevented the excommunication of William when it was proposed at the Council of Bari, October, 1098.

But Pope Urban would not allow Anselm to resign his archbishopric, and this in spite of all Anselm’s entreaties.

In the spring of 1099 came a General Council at Rome--at which Anselm assisted--a council remarkable for its decision against allowing clergy to receive investiture of churches from the hands of laymen, and by so doing to become the vassals of temporal lords. Excommunication was declared to be the penalty for all who gave or received Church appointments on such conditions.

It was at the close of this council that an outspoken Bishop of Lucca called attention to Anselm’s case. “One sits amongst us in silence and meekness who has come from the far ends of the earth. His very silence cries aloud. His humility and patience, so gentle and so deep, as they rise to God should set us on fire. This one man has come here, wronged and afflicted, seeking judgment and justice of the Apostolic See. And now this is the second year, and what help has he found?”

Pope Urban answered that attention should be given, but nothing further was done.

Anselm left Rome and went to Lyons, remaining in France until the death of William in August, 1100. Henry was at once chosen king in his room, and crowned at Westminster three days after his brother’s death. Six weeks later, at Henry’s earnest request--he prayed him “to come back like a father to his son Henry and the English people”--Anselm landed at Dover and returned to take up the task allotted to him on his consecration as archbishop.

Henry at the outset of his reign promised “God and all the people” that the old scandals of selling and farming out the Church lands should be stopped, and “to put down all unrighteousness that had been in his brother’s time, and to hold the best laws that ever stood in any king’s day before him.” That this charter was of value may be taken from the verdict on the king by the Chronicler of the time. “Good man he was and great awe there was of him. No man durst misdo against another in his day. He made peace for man and beast. Whoso carried a burden of gold and silver no man durst do him wrong.”

Two evils that pressed very hardly on the mass of hard-working people, the devastation that attended the king’s progress through the land[8], and the coining of false money, were at Anselm’s instigation checked by the king.

But with all Henry’s desire for the restoration of religion and law in the land, he was the Conqueror’s son, and for Anselm the struggle against absolutism in government was not yet over. Only now the battle was not with a fierce, untamed despot like the Red King, but with an autocrat of an even more formidable type, a stern man of business, in whose person alone must be found the source of all law and order, and who would brook no questioning of the royal will.

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.

The pope, of course, could not grant Henry’s request. To allow the high offices of the Church to be disposed of at the caprice of kings and princes, without any recognition of the sacredness of these offices, to admit that the chief ministers of religion were first and foremost “the king’s men,” seemed to Pope Paschal, as it seemed to Anselm, a concession to evil, and the establishment of a principle which experience had proved thoroughly vicious and mischievous.

Then for nearly three years a correspondence dragged on between Henry and the pope, neither wishing for an open rupture, and in the meantime, Henry, backed by most of the bishops and nobles in setting at nought the canons which had forbidden investiture, proposed to go on appointing and investing new bishops as before.

Finally, the king appealed to Anselm to go to Rome “and try what he could do with the pope, lest the king by losing the rights of his predecessors should be disgraced.”

Anselm was now (1103) an old man of seventy, but he agreed to go; only “he could do nothing to the prejudice of the liberty of the Church or his own honour.” What Henry hoped for was that the pope would grant some personal dispensation in the matter of the royal “customs,” and he had tried to persuade Anselm that such dispensation was sure to be granted. Anselm did not believe the dispensation possible or desirable, but left the decision with the acknowledged head of Christendom at Rome; and though for another three years Henry urged his suit, no dispensation could be wrung from the pope. All that the pope would grant was that the bishops might do “homage” to the crown for their temporal rights.

At last, in April, 1106, Anselm returned to England. The bishops themselves, who had sided with the king against him, implored him to return, so wretched had become the state of religion in England in his absence. They promised to do his commands and to fight with him the battle of the Lord.

Henry, fresh from the conquest of Normandy, sent word of his good-will, and of his desire for the archbishop’s presence. The long drawn-out battle was over, and the king had to be content with “homage,” and to resign the claim to investiture.

“On August 1st (1107) an assembly of bishops, abbots, and chief men of the realm, was held in London, in the king’s palace, and for three days the matter of the investiture of churches was fully discussed between the king and the bishops in Anselm’s absence. Then, in the presence of Anselm and before the whole multitude, the king granted and decreed that henceforth and for ever no one should be invested in England with bishopric or abbey by staff and ring, either by the king or the hand of any layman; while Anselm allowed that no one chosen for a bishopric should be refused consecration for having done homage to the king. This having been settled, the king, by the counsel of Anselm and the chief men of the realm, appointed priests in nearly all those churches in England which had long been widowed of their pastors.” (Eadmer.)

Victory rested with Anselm. The old archbishop had done his best for the liberty of religion, and by contending for this liberty he had wrought for common freedom.[10] Later ages and struggles were to bring out more clearly that some measure of political and social liberty must follow the demand for freedom in religion. “Religious forces, and religious forces alone, have had sufficient influence to ensure practical realisation for political ideas.” (Figgis, _Studies of Political Thought_.)

Anselm’s life was nearly over, his work was accomplished, a philosophical treatise “Concerning the agreement of Foreknowledge, Predestination and the Grace of God with Free Will” was written with difficulty in the last years. Then his appetite failed him, and all food became loathsome. At last he was persuaded to take to his bed, and on April 21st, 1109--the Wednesday of Holy Week--at daybreak Anselm passed away.

Anselm’s name has long been enrolled in the calendar of the saints of the Church Catholic, no less is it to be cherished by all who love liberty. Well may it be said of him, “he was ever a close follower of Truth, and walked in noble companionship with Pity and Courage.” Anselm’s plain good sense and charity were conspicuous in his benediction of the marriage of Henry and Edith, but these great qualities were earlier displayed when Lanfranc consulted him as to the claims of the English Archbishop Ælphege to be canonised as a martyr. Ælphege had been slain by the Danes for refusing to ransom his life at the expense of his tenants; and Anselm replied to Lanfranc that he who would die rather than oppress his tenants dies for justice’ sake, and he who dies for justice dies a martyr for Christ.

His sympathy and humaneness shone out a thousand times. There is the story Eadmer tells of an abbot, who came to Anselm at Bec, and deplored that he could do no good with the boys at his monastery. “In spite of all we do they are perverse and incorrigible,” said the abbot, despondently. “We are always beating them, but they only get worse: and though we constrain them in every way we can, it’s all of no use.” “_Constrain_ them!” answered Anselm. “Tell me, my lord abbot, when you plant a tree in your garden, do you so tie it up that it cannot stretch forth its branches? And if you did so, what sort of tree would it become a few years hence when you released it? But this is just what you do with your boys. You cramp them in with terrors and threats and blows, so that it is quite impossible for them to grow or enjoy any freedom. And kept down in this way their temper is spoilt by evil thoughts of hatred and suspicion against you, and they put down all you do to ill-nature and dislike. Why are you so harsh with them? Are they not human beings of the same nature as yourself? How would you like to be treated as you treat them?” The abbot was finally persuaded that he had been all wrong. “We have wandered,” he said, “from the way of truth, and the light of discretion hath not shone on us.”

There is another story which gives Anselm’s pity and feeling of kinship with the whole animal creation. It was when he was archbishop, and was riding one day from Windsor to Hayes that a hare chased by the dogs of some of his company took refuge under the feet of his horse. Anselm at once pulled up and forebade the hare to be molested, and when his escort laughed gleefully at the capture, the archbishop said: “You may laugh, but it is no laughing matter for this poor unhappy creature, which is like the soul of a departing man pursued by evil spirits. Mortal enemies attack it, and it flies to us for its life: and while it turns to us for safety we laugh.” He rode on, and in a loud voice forbade the dogs to touch the hare; which, glad to be at liberty, darted off to the fields and woods.

That Anselm never wavered in his tenderness for the weak and oppressed may be learnt from the great Church Synod held at Westminster in 1102--a council summoned on the strong request of the archbishop. The slave trade was specially denounced at this council as a “wicked trade used hitherto in England, by which men are sold like brute animals,” and a canon was drawn up to that effect.