Page:The reign of William Rufus and the accession of Henry the First.djvu/418

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Pope of the staff which he had received from the King of the English, were all of them offences, and the last act was distinctly a novelty. Ulf, Ealdred, Thomas, Remigius, had all been deprived of their staves and had received them again; but no English prelate of those times had of his own act made the Pope his judge in such a matter. When the holy Wulfstan was threatened with deposition, he had, even in the legend, given back his staff, not to the Pope who ruled at Rome, but to the King who slept at Westminster. No wonder then that the Red King was moved to anger by a slight to his authority which his father could not have overlooked, and which might have stirred the Confessor himself to one of his passing fits of wrath. The return of Herbert from Rome forms part of a striking group of events to which we shall presently come.

The two bishoprics of Chichester and Thetford were thus filled soon after they became vacant. In the year after the consecration of Ralph and Herbert, a third see, as we have seen, fell vacant by the death of Remigius of Lincoln. That see was not filled so speedily as Chichester and Thetford had been; still it did not remain vacant so long as some of the abbeys. But a longer vacancy befell, a lasting vacancy seemed designed to befall, the mother church of all of them. All this while the metropolitan throne of Canterbury remained empty. No successor to Lanfranc was chosen or nominated; it was the fixed purpose of the Red King to make no nomination himself, to allow no choice on the part of the ecclesiastical electors. Here at least the doctrines of Randolf Flam-*

nominare."]
 * [Footnote: *tudinis esse, ut absque sua electione alicui liceret in regno suo papam