Page:Dictionary of National Biography volume 49.djvu/114

 his bishopric in consequence. Henry, however, was not disposed to proceed to extremities with his cousin. Some of the archbishop's party urged that Roger might be more useful to the cause at home than in exile, and accordingly Roger sought direction from the pope as to the terms on which he might return. The pope bade him go back to his diocese if he could exercise his office there without submitting to the royal ‘customs’ (Materials, vi. 393–4, 390). On this he seems to have rejoined the court in Normandy. In November he was present, with several other English bishops, at a conference between the king and the papal legates at Argentan, when he appears to have acquiesced in the renewal of the bishops' appeal; and he was even reported to have spoken very disrespectfully of the primate and of his cause (ib. pp. 270, 276, 321). His friendly relations with Thomas, however, seem to have continued unbroken. Early in 1169 he endeavoured to persuade the archbishop to delay his threatened excommunications, and asked for instructions how to frame his own conduct towards their victims when once the sentences were issued. Thomas bade him have no dealings whatever with excommunicate persons (ib. vi. 577–9, vii. 50; accordingly when Geoffrey Ridel [q. v.] entered the royal chapel one day, just as mass was about to begin, Roger at once walked out. The king, on hearing the reason of his withdrawal, ordered him out of his dominions, but recalled him immediately (ib. iii. 86–7). Roger was the one English prelate summoned to attend the king at a conference with the legates Vivian and Gratian at Bayeux on 1 Sept. 1169; but he did not make his appearance till the next day, when the business of the meeting was practically over (ib. vii. 72). He was one of the commissioners sent to convey the king's offered terms to the legates at Caen a week later (ib. p. 80). In March 1170 Henry bade the bishop of Worcester follow him to England to take part in the coronation of the ‘young king’ [see II]. Thomas, on the other hand, also bade him go, but for the purpose of conveying to the archbishop of York and the other bishops a papal brief forbidding the coronation (ib. vii. 259–60). The queen and the seneschal of Normandy, discovering this, gave orders that no ship should take him on board, and he could get no further than Dieppe. On Henry's return (midsummer) the cousins met near Falaise. The king upbraided the bishop for his disobedience, and denounced him as ‘no true son of the good earl Robert.’ Roger explained how he had been prevented from crossing. Henry angrily demanded whether he meant to shift the blame on the queen. ‘Certainly not,’ retorted Roger, ‘lest, if she be frightened into suppressing the truth, you should be more angry with me; or, if she avow the truth, you should turn your unseemly wrath against her. Matters are best as they stand; never would I have shared in a rite so iniquitously performed; and if I had been there it never should have taken place. You say I am not earl Robert's son. I know not; at any rate I am the son of my mother, with whose hand he acquired all his possessions; while from your conduct to his children nobody would guess that he was your uncle, who brought you up and risked his life in fighting for you.’ He went on in the same bold strain till a bystander interrupted him with words of abuse, whereupon Henry suddenly declared that ‘his kinsman and his bishop’ should be called names by no one but himself, and the cousins went amicably to dinner together (ib. iii. 104–6).

In 1171, when Henry's dominions were threatened with an interdict on account of the murder of St. Thomas, Roger was one of the prelates sent to intercede, first with the legate Archbishop William of Sens, and afterwards with the pope himself (Materials, vii. 444, 474, 476, 485; Ann. Monast. i. 50). He went to England in August 1172 with the young king and queen, assisted at their crowning at Winchester on 27 Aug., and returned to Normandy about 8 Sept (Gesta Hen. i. 31). In July 1174 he was with the king at Westminster (, p. 181). According to the ‘Gesta Henrici’ (i. 84) he was there again in May 1175, at a council held by the new archbishop, Richard (d. 1184) [q. v.]; but Gervase (i. 251) says that sickness prevented his attendance. In July at Woodstock he and the archbishop as papal commissioners confirmed the election of the king's son Geoffrey [see (d. 1212)] to the see of Lincoln (, i. 401). At the legatine council at Westminster in May 1176, when the archbishops of Canterbury and York came to blows, he averted the king's wrath from his own metropolitan by turning the matter into a jest at the expense of the northern primate ( vii. 63) [see ]. He assisted at Canterbury at the coronation of Peter de Leia as bishop of St. David's on 7 Nov. of the same year ( i. 260;, i. 415). On 29 Jan. 1177 he was sent by the king, with the bishop of Exeter, to expel the nuns of Amesbury (Gesta Hen. i. 135); in March he was present at a great council in London (ib. pp. 144, 155); at Christmas