Page:The reign of William Rufus and the accession of Henry the First.djvu/520

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ready to make the wrong good. The bishops laid the prayer of their metropolitan before the King. The answer was characteristic. "I have no fault to find with the Archbishop; yet I will not grant him my favour, because I hear no reason given why I should." What those words meant in the mouth of Rufus the bishops knew very well. They went back to tell the Primate that the mystery was clear. The King's favour was to be won only by money, and by money in no small store. Their counsel was that Anselm should at once give the King the five hundred pounds which he had before offered, and that he should promise him another gift of the same amount as soon as he could get it out of his men. On those terms they fully believed that the King would grant him his peace and friendship. They saw no other way for him; they were in the same strait themselves, and knew no other way out of it.

In the counsel thus given to Anselm by his suffragans we hear the words, not of utterly worldly and unscrupulous men, but of the ordinary prelates of the time, good men, many of them, in all that concerned their own personal lives and the ordinary administration of their churches, but not men disposed to risk or dare much, men disposed to go on as they best might in very bad times, without doing anything which might make things still worse. In the eyes of Anselm, on the other hand, things hardly could be made worse; if they could, it would be by consenting to them. By an unflinching