Page:The reign of William Rufus and the accession of Henry the First.djvu/559

 *



one hard by, if not present in that company, yet within the wall of the same castle, who had gone many steps further Romeward than Anselm went. Closeted with the King, caballing with him against the man of God, was Bishop William of Durham, the man who had openly appealed to the Pope from the sentence of an English court, the man who had openly refused to Cæsar what was most truly Cæsar's, who had denied the right of the King and Witan of England to judge a bishop, even in the most purely temporal causes. Anselm had made no such appeal; he had made no such exclusive claims; it is needless to say that he did not, like William of Saint-Calais, take to the policy of obstruction, that he did not waste the time of the assembly by raising petty points of law, or subtle questions as to the befitting dress of its members. Anselm was a poor Papist, one might almost say a poor churchman, beside that still recent phase of the bishop who had now fully learned that the will of God was not to be thought of when it clashed with the will of the King. It was not Anselm, but the man who sought to supplant Anselm, who had taken the first and greatest step towards the establishment of foreign and usurped jurisdictions within the realm.

The bishops heard the answer of their Primate. They rose troubled and angry; they talked confusedly to one another; they seemed as if they were pronouncing Anselm to be guilty of death. They turned to him in wrath; they told him that they would not carry to the King such a message as that, and they went out to the room where the King was. But it was right that the King should know what Anselm's answer had been.