Page:The reign of William Rufus and the accession of Henry the First.djvu/674

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Second in form, when Hildebrand in truth, had denounced Harold without a hearing for no crime but that of accepting the crown which his people gave him. But men are so apt to judge by results that the fall of Harold and of England may by this time, even among Englishmen, have begun to be looked on as a witness to the power of the Church's thunders. In the days of Rufus a papal excommunication was still a real and fearful thing at which men stood aghast. It might not have turned the heart of Rufus; it might even have hardened his heart yet further. But among his people, even among his own courtiers, the effect would doubtless have been such that he must in the end, like Philip, have formally given way. As it was, the bolt never fell; the hand of Anselm stopped it once; other causes, as we shall soon see, stopped it afterwards. And, instead of the formal excommunication of Rome, there came that more striking excommunication by the voice of the English people, when, by a common instinct, they declared William the Red to have no true part in that communion of the faithful from which he had never been formally cut off.

The negotiations, if we may so call them, which followed the departure of Anselm may be looked on as beginning with a letter written by Anselm to the Pope from Lyons. The Archbishop, once out of England, seems to take up a new tone. His language with regard to the King's doings is still singularly mild; but he now begins to speak, not only of God and right, but of the canons of the Church and the authority of the Pope,