Page:The reign of William Rufus and the accession of Henry the First.djvu/390



Of these three the first on the list must claim the precedence. The relations between Rufus and Anselm involve the whole civil and ecclesiastical policy of the reign. The dispute between King and Primate was the outcome of all that had been working in silence while the Red King was winning castles in Normandy, receiving the homage of Scotland, and enlarging the bounds of England. During those years one side of the results of the Norman Conquest was put into formal shape. Between the fall of Rochester and the restoration of Carlisle, new ideas, new claims, had come to their full growth. Those ideas, those claims, had made the kingship of William the Red something marked by not a few points of difference from the kingship either of the Confessor or of the Conqueror. Nowhere does the difference between the elder and the younger William stand forth more clearly than in their dealings with the spiritual power. No king, as I have often shown, was more truly Supreme Governor of the Church within his realm than was the Conqueror of England, her defender against the claims of Rome. But William the Great sought and found his fellow-worker in all things in an archbishop likeminded with himself. We can hardly conceive the reign of the Conqueror without the primacy of Lanfranc. But the great object of William the Red was to avoid the restraints which could not fail to be placed upon his self-will, if he had one standing at his side whose place it was to be at once the chief shepherd of the English Church and the tribune of the English people. For three years and more from the death of Lanfranc the see of Canterbury remained vacant. Such a vacancy was without precedent; but it was designed itself to become a precedent. It was by no accident, from no momentary cause, that William delayed the appointment of any successor to his old guardian and coun