Page:The reign of William Rufus and the accession of Henry the First.djvu/159

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laid to the Bishop's charge was a purely temporal one, that of treason against his lord the King. So arraigned, he refuses the judgement of the King of the English and his Witan, and appeals from them to the Bishop of Rome. He justifies his appeal by referring to some law other than the law of England, some special law of his own order, by which, he alleges, he is forbidden to submit to any such judgements as that of the national assembly of the realm of which he is a subject. We again instinctively ask, how would William the Great have dealt with such an appeal, if any man had been so hardy as to make it in his hearing? But we again see how the ecclesiastical system which William the Great had brought in was one which needed his own mighty hand to guide. He was indeed, in all causes and over all persons, ecclesiastical and temporal, within his dominions supreme. But the moment he himself was gone, that great supremacy seems to have fallen in pieces. Lanfranc himself, steadily as he maintains the royal authority throughout the dispute, seems to shrink from boldly grappling with the Bishop's claim. Some lesser fallacies we are not surprised to find passed over. The daring statement that the sole right of the Bishop of Rome to judge other bishops was established by the Apostles may perhaps have seemed less strange even to Lanfranc than it does to us. But Lanfranc must have smiled, and Thomas of York must have smiled yet more, at the Bishop of Durham's grotesque complaint that he was deprived of the help of his comprovincial bishops. It was a vain hope indeed, if he thought that King Malcolm would allow him the comfort of any brotherly counsel from Glasgow or Saint Andrews. But the real