Page:The reign of William Rufus and the accession of Henry the First.djvu/423

 a charge to speak in the name of the Church and the nation in a way which could hardly be pleasing in his ears. The metropolitan see therefore remained unfilled till the day when William Rufus became for a short season another man.

It is worth remarking that what might have seemed a very obvious way out of the difficulty clearly did not come into the head of the King or of any one else. The long vacancy of the archbishopric made men uneasy; they were grieved and amazed as to what might happen in so unusual a case; but they felt sure that the present distress must end some time, and they seem to have taken for granted that, when it did end, it would end by the appointment of some one worthy of the place. Men were troubled at the King's failure to appoint any archbishop; they do not seem to have been at all troubled by fear that he might appoint a bad archbishop. Rufus himself seems never to have thought of granting or selling the metropolitan see to any of his own creatures, to Flambard for instance or to Robert Bloet. He might so deal with Lincoln or Durham; something within or without him kept him from so dealing with Canterbury. It is throughout taken for granted that the choice lay between a good archbishop or none at all. A good archbishop was the yoke-fellow of a good king, the reprover of an evil king. William Rufus wanted neither of those. But even William Rufus had not gone so far, his subjects did not suspect him of going so far, as to think of appointing an evil archbishop in order to be the tool of an evil king. The precedent of making the patriarchal throne of Britain the reward of merely temporal services did not come till it had been filled by*