The life and times of St. Anselm : Archbishop of Canterbury and Primate of the Britains

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Contents

OF

THE SECOND VOLUME.

BOOK V.

Chapter I. The Consecration

During the summer of 1093 England was deluged with such a . rainfall as had not been known in human memory ; and whilst vast tracts of land were still under water a frost set in, that locked all the rivers of the realm under icy pavements, across which travellers might ride on horseback.

Yet, notwithstanding the inclemency of the season, there was a goodly assemblage of bishops at Canterbury on Sunday, the 4th of December, the day appointed for the consecration of the new Archbishop. St. Wulstan, the venerable Bishop of Worcester, who was now nearing the term of his eventful career, and Osbern, Bishop of Exeter, in the far west, were prevented by illness from taking their share in the ceremony ; and the see of Lincoln was vacant ; but every other diocese of the southern province was represented, so that, besides the Archbishop of York, there were nine wearers of the mitre that morning seated in Lanfranc's apsidal sanctuary, refulgent with all the splendour of their episcopal pomp — Maurice, Bishop of London ; Vauquelin, Bishop of Winchester ; Osmond, Bishop of Sarum ; Robert, Bishop of Hereford ; Robert, Bishop of Lichfield ; John, Bishop of Bath ; ' Ralph, Bishop of Chichegter ; Herbert, Bishop of Thetford,' and the sweet and saintly Gundulf.

The ceremony opened with what later times called the decretum. Eadmer styles it the electio scripta. It should

' The bishop's see had been moved from Wells to Bath in 1091. ^ Thetford was superseded by Norwich in 1094.

4 DISTURBING INCIDENTS.

have been read by the provincial dean, the Bishop of London ; but he, for whatever reason, delegated the task to his brother of Winchester, who began to read, of course in Latin, as follows : — ' My brethren and fellow bishops, you well know how long, by reason of divers causes, this Church of Canterbury, the Metropolitan Church of All Britain, hath remained without a pastor .' ' Metropolitan Church of All Britain ? ' interposed the Archbishop of York, with real or affected surprise. ' If Canterbury be the Metropolitan Church of All Britain, then York is not a metropolitan Church, which it is notorious that she is.'

This interruption affords an instructive example of the way in which things were managed in those days. During a long series of years, stretching over century after century, from before the day that England was one kingdom, the Church of Canterbury had been styled sometimes 'sancta ecclesia Christi,' ' ecclesia salvatoris Domini,' or ' ecclesia salvatoris mundi ; ' sometimes ' metropolitana sancta Doroberniensis ecclesia,' ' metropolitana Doroberniensis ecclesiae sedes,' or ' sancta metropolitana sedes ; ' and the Archbishop sometimes ' sancts Doroberniensis ecclesiae praesul,' sometimes ' Britanniarum primas et sanctse Doroberniensis ecclesiae archiepiscopus,' sometimes 'antistes metropolitanus,' sometimes 'primas totius Britanniae insulae,' sometimes 'totius Britannije regionis primas.' Once, however, Alexander IL had in a letter directed to Archbishop Lanfranc described the Church of St. Saviour at Canterbury as the ' metropolis of all Britain.' This is the only instance I can find of such a mistake ; but we may be sure that note had been made of it, and that the clerk employed to draw out Anselm's decretum had been specially instructed to describe the see of Canterbury as that which it was not, in order that the opposition which would be evoked by the misnomer should render it impossible that the title given in the Papal letter should ever thenceforward be drawn into a precedent.

sr. ANSELM's ' prognosticon: s

Whether or not the northern archbishop had been apprised beforehand of this flaw in the document, his objection to it must of course be urged then or never. Still, such an episode at such a moment must to a man of Anselm's sensibility have been the reverse of soothing. Some conversation now ensued, and when the obnoxious ' metropolitana ' had been replaced by ' primas ' the ceremony again began.

When the moment came for Anselm to make his profession of obedience to the Pope, a careful listener might have observed that the Pope's name had not been introduced into the formula — neither had the antipope's — but that the Archbishop elect was in general terms called upon to promise obedience Romano pontifici.

But these two incidents, however significant to him whom they most concerned, were, not improbably, neglected by the bystanders, whose chief and all-absorbing desire it was to learn the new Archbishop's progjiosticon. Scarcely was the mass concluded when some one inspected the sacred page, and presently the whisper was set flying through the church, and men's cheeks turned pale as they heard it and tremblingly passed it on — ' He invited many, and sent his servant to tell them to come ; and they began all with one consent to make excuse.'

Great fear fell on all hearts, and most of all on his. The spell had touched him ; there was no reversing it.

Chapter II. The New Primate At Court

According to custom, the new Archbishop entertained his episcopal brethren for a week after the consecration. He then prepared for his journey to the royal Court at Gloucester.

He was received with becoming ceremony by William and the barons, and on Christmas Day played for the first time his part of spiritual father of the realm by solemnly crowning and blessing ' the sovereign during the course of the mass which was celebrated in supplication of the Divine assistance in the deliberations upon which King and kingdom were about to enter. The consecration of the sovereign, which impressed on him the kingly character, might not be repeated ; but his

' I copy the following from Archbishop Robert's Benedictionary, preserved at Rouen (fol. 70) : —

' Benedictio super Regem in tempore sinodi.

' Quod ipse piestare dignetur.

' Quod ipse prestare dignetur,'

THE PROPOSED INVASION OF NORMANDY. 7

coronation was a ceremony of frequent recurrence, and, like the consecration, appertained of right to the pater patricB.

The proposed expedition into Normandy was to be the great topic of discussion. How long the royal resolution had been made known of undertaking it in the following spring has not been recorded ; all that can be gathered from the accounts would seem to be that Duke Robert had accused his brother of a perjured violation of the agreement concluded between them in the year 1091, and that, although the formal defiance may not have reached England much before Christmas, the King knew what was coming as early, at the very latest, as the end of November. We learn, however, from a biographical notice of the third Abbot of Le Bee, that Robert of Meulan had been at the Duke's Court as late as the last week of October, when the state of affairs was, to all appearance, pacific. Now, Robert of Meulan had not gone over to Normandy for nothing, nor can it have been for nothing that he had kept up a hollow peace between his two masters so long as he did. As soon, however, as his kinsman ' William de Montfort had received the temporalities of the Abbey of Le Bee from the Duke, the moment had, as I suspect, come for playing off the one of those masters against the other. In which case William had already by the middle of November resolved upon invading the duchy in the following spring.

The Duke had thrown the subtle diplomatist into prison, in punishment of his insolent attempt to obtain the patronage of Le Bee ; and now the .subtle diplomatist was tasting the sweets of revenge, for now, to the Duke's undisguised chagrin, Abbot Anselm had been taken away and handed over to the bitterest of rivals, and, to his secret mortification, the vacant preferment had been conferred upon the very person to whom the Count would have given it had it been his to give. The

' William de Montfort's mother was first cousin to the Count of Meulan.

8 THE PRIMATE'S AID ACCEPTED.

Count can now have but one supreme desire in regard of the master he despises.

But, however, the proposed invasion of Normandy was to be the chief topic of discussion in the royal Castle of Gloucester upon the assembling of the Court at Christmas ; and scarcely had the barons gathered round their sovereign when heralds from the Duke were announced, who declared, to quote the Anglo-Saxon chronicle, that their lord renounced all peace and concord unless the King would perform all that they had settled in their agreement, and he called him forsworn and perjured unless he held to the agreement, or came to Normandy and exculpated himself there, where the agreement had been made and sworn to.

The King, who had already exceeded the very considerable estimate made for the proposed enterprise, was greatly in want of money ; and the Archbishop, emboldened by a hope, which his friends assured him would not be disappointed, of conciliating the royal favour to himself, of securing the royal co-operation in contemplated measures for the public good, and of engaging the royal protection against such evilminded persons as might have designs upon the secular interests of his Church and province, begged him to accept at his hands an aid of five hundred silver pounds.

But scarcely had the simple-hearted Primate retired from the royal presence — retired, it may be, to take the precious five hundred silver pounds from their place of security and transfer them to the King's officers — when a malign but unnamed mischief-maker poured a poisonous whisper into the royal ear. ' Why, you have set him up above all the peers of the realm, and made him first of all in dignity, rank, and place ; and now— now, when, considering the state you are in, he ought to give you in acknowledgment of your bounty two thousand pounds, or, at any rate, to set the sum at the very lowest conceivable figure, one thousand, he comes and asks you to take five hundred. He ought to be ashamed of

THE PRIMATE'S AID REJECTED. g

himself.' The poison had done its work, as the whisperer knew by the flush of anger in the King's face ; and so the whisperer went on. ' Never mind ; wait a little ; look on him with a changed look, and you will see. The people about him will take fright as usual, and he will be only too glad to add five hundred more to the five hundred he offers you, if it be only to recover your good graces.'

The malignity of all this is manifest. The Primate would either succumb or he would refuse to yield. Should he succumb, the five hundred pounds he had offered would not be accepted as a gratuitous aid (' munus '), such as even a prelate of his sensibility might offer an embarrassed prince without violation of his own conscience and honour, but as the price of a favour received (' pro agendis munificentise tuae gratiis ') ; and the second five hundred would be accepted not as a present, but as the expiation of a fictitious offence ; and thus a double disgrace would be attached to his name, from which it would be impossible to free himself without quarrelling with the King. Should he not succumb — God help him !

But no man of ordinary intelligence and honour can fail to see with what possibility of ill this hellish whisper was fraught, and it is unnecessary that I should expatiate on it.

Alas ! and a thousand times alas ! the cruel whisper did its work, and ere the Primate had had time to pay the money word came to him that the King refused to accept it.

He would not believe what he heard, and going to the King asked if the message had really come from him. Most certainly it had, was the reply. ' Sire,' expostulated the Churchman, ' I beg you will not refuse to accept what I am offering you. It is your Archbishop's first gift, I know, but it is not his last. Your wants and your dignity are alike better served by receiving a little and receiving often from a free and friendly giver (' cum amic^ hbertate ') than by forcibly extorting one large sum from me upon servile terms ('sub servili conditione '). My friendship towards you left free and

BOUGHT WITH THE INCOME FROM THE

SAGE ENDOWMENT FUND

THE GIFT OF

fictirig W. Sage lo THE PRIMATE'S REFLECTIONS.

untrammelled ('arnica libertate'), I and all I have will be at your service ; but servile terms imposed (' servili autem conditione '), you will have neither me nor mine.'

William Rufus was not by nature a king of men, neither had he been born in the purple ; facts which may serve, if not to palliate the affront inflicted upon Anselm's honour, at least to explain his inability or his unwillingness — whichever it may have been — to converse with such a man and such a dignitary with temper and decency. ' Keep your scolding and your money to yourself,' he cried. ' I have as much as I want. Get away with you ! '

The ideas of royal dignity, royal mansuetude, and royal grace which Anselm had in his childhood derived from his mother's teaching and example must have been rudely shocked. He rose and left the room, thinking as he went that it might not have been without premonitory purpose that the Gospel read at his enthronement contained the words, ' No man can serve two masters.' The thought made him of good cheer; his countenance brightened, and as he passed along he said, ' Blessed be Almighty God, whose mercy has kept me free from the stain of an evil report. Had the King been graciously pleased to accept my offering, evilminded people — and there is good store of them — would have thought that I had promised money for the bishopric, and that, under pretence of giving him an aid, I. had really been discharging my bond. But now what am I to do .' I will give the present, as they call it, to Christ's poor for the redeeming of the King's soul, not to him, and earnestly pray our Redeemer to pour forth His grace on him and shield me from all evil.'

The first serious rencontre between King and Primate did not terminate favourably to the former. He had tried, and tried in vain, to force Anselm, as the first act of his archiepiscopate, to make a simoniacal payment as conditio sine qud 7ion of royal favour; had tried, and tried in vain, to make him

WHO WAS THE MISCHIEF-MAKER f n

establish an immoral consuetiido that must prove at once a scandal and an embarrassment to future archbishops ; had outraged the grey hairs and the mitre of the spiritual father of King and kingdom, and had lowered the dignity of his own royal majesty.

Matthew Paris's account of the episode is at once brief, clear, and instructive. ' It was then that William, King of the English, wishing to circumvent Anselm, Archbishop of Canterbury, rudely demanded of him a present of a thousand pounds, alleging as his reason — and to him it appeared a perfectly just one — that he had accorded a gratuitous assent to the prelate's elevation to the episcopate. But the Archbishop, who could see in such a case no difference between paying down money before promotion and paying it down after, deemed the latter course just as guilty and just as reprehensible as the former ; and as he could not fill the King's purse without violating conscience, chose to incur his resentment rather than cast a blot upon his own honour, imperil his own soul, and sow for time to come the seed of inevitable confusion and scandal in the Church of God.'

' Keep your scolding and your money to yourself I have as much as I want. Get away with you ! ' Hitherto the King had treated Anselm with respect, and would even seem to have been not only reticent but abashed when speaking with him. Whence, then, a change of demeanour even more surprising than the change of temper it accompanied .' Whence a change of demeanour like that of a man who has been provoked into a pet in spite of himself .? A mischief-maker had done the mischief. Who, then, was the mischief-maker }

There cannot, I think, be a doubt that it was William of Saint-Calais, Bishop of Durham ; and even if there were, the style and manner of the speech which Eadmer assigns to his quidam malignce mentis homines would, I think, suffice to remove it. Reriouf the Firebrand had for four years and

12 THE VISIT 'AD LIMINA' PUT OFF.

a half expended his best energies in racking the Canterburyrevenues for the King, and now the Bishop of Durham was evolving the baleful scheme which he excogitated as we watched him riding moodily on the northern road last August. That baleful scheme was to issue, so he flattered himself, in lodging all spiritual authority over England in the person of the King, and as mean to that end the new Primate must either be degraded in his character or deposed from his office.

' Keep your money and j-our scolding to yourself I have as much as I want. Get away with you ! ' He obeyed and retired.

Messages now passed between the Primate and the King, but to no purpose, and the former resolved, so soon as he could with decency do so, to leave the Court.

Before going, however, there was another subject on which he was anxious to communicate with the sovereign.

I should scarcely suppose that William Rufus had a profound, or even an extensive, knowledge of canon law ; but he must by this time have been informed that it was the duty of a new archbishop, within three months after consecration, to approach the Sovereign Pontiff and ask for the pallium, and that if Anselm should fail to do so for twelve months from the day of consecration he would forfeit the archiepiscopate. He cannot, therefore, have been surprised to learn that the Primate begged leave to quit England in quest of the pallium ; but he declined to give the desired permission on the ground that he had not yet acknowledged the Pope, and at the same time requested that Anselm would not inform Urban of the alleged excuse. The perplexed Primate now consulted his suffragans, and was advised to decline a fruitless quarrel and await the happy moment when it should please God to put it into the King's heart to recognise the Sovereign Pontiff. He seems to have quitted the Court on the 29th of December.

He set forth from Gloucester inspired with sentiments of profoundest thankfulness. ' Thanks be to God,' he wrote some

THE PRIMATE LEAVES COURT. 13

months later to Archbishop Hugh, Legate of the Gauls, ' thanks be to God, who took pity on the simplicity of my heart and gave this turn to the affair. If I had offered little or nothing, the King might have seemed to have just cause for complaint against me ; had he accepted the gift, the thing might have been turned into an offence and a suspicion of simoniacal practice.'

So excessive was the mortality even in more fortunate districts during this peculiarly inclement winter that, to borrow the historian's phrase, the living scarce sufficed to bury the dead ; and Anselm's tenants, after their four years and a half of misery, were dying of cold and starvation all over his domains. On them, therefore, he resolved to bestow the five hundred pounds which the King had scorned, and solaced himself with the hope that the poor people's prayers might be of service to the prince.

And so he rode away from the gate of the very castle in which on Quadragesima Sunday the now estranged King had, in the hour of contrition, implored him to take the archbishopric from off his soul.

Chapter III. Pope Urban II. : The ' De Incarnatione Verbi : ' Arras

I FEAR that I must now trouble the reader with a few details of less obvious interest than real importance. These relate (i) to the interval between the election of St. Anselm and his acceptance of the primacy ; (2) to the omission of the name of Urban from his profession of obedience to the Pope ; (3) to the five hundred pounds which he offered to the King soon after his consecration.

I. The Pope had, early in 1093, received notice of the contemplated elevation of the Abbot of Le Bee to the see of Canterbury; and Anselm was no sooner appointed than men like Bishop Gundulf took it for granted that the Pope would require him to acquiesce in the election. It is, therefore, obvious to conclude that the election had scarcely been made when notice of it was sent to Urban, and with that notice the further information that Anselm had refused to accept the crosier, and had declared the whole proceeding invalid, but that the King, the prelates, and the barons were set on compelling him to yield, and that the Christ Church monks, whose absence on the occasion had been unavoidable and was not likely to be drawn into a precedent, were as clamorous for his acquiescence as either of the other electoral bodies.

We know that no long time after Anselm had paid his homage to the prince the Pope was informed of that fact ' and we further know that by the close of the year William

PROBABLE COMMUNICATIONS WITH ROME. 15

seems to have taken it for granted that Pope and Primate were in correspondence with each other.

Now, nothing could have been more thoroughly in accordance both with the principles and the conduct of Anselm than to turn to Rome for advice in the troubles which overtook him in his election, and if on that memorable day he protested that he would never for one hour abate one jot of his subjection to Urban, it is scarcely probable but that so soon as occasion occurred for seeking counsel of the Pope, he, without a moment's hesitation, proceeded to do so.

Now, by the time of his interview with the King at Rochester — by the end of July, that is to say — he had obliged his monks to empower him to resign the abbatial dignity, but had not as yet made up his own mind to accept the archiepiscopal, so that the acceptance of the greater honour was not a necessary consequence of his release from the less. By the end of July, then, he had not once for all said to himself, ' If the King will do this, that, and the other, I am now ready to comply with his wishes ; ' but after the expiration of some six or seven weeks he had thus communed with himself, or, at any rate, had shown a willingness to interpose no further delay, provided only that the King's conduct made acquiescence possible. The balance of his inclination, therefore, dipped from one side to the other at some date between the end of July and the middle of September ; at some time, that is to say, between the interview at Rochester and his final surrender at Winchester, it passed from unwillingness, or at any rate neutrality, to willingness ; and, supposing this to have happened as early as the middle of August, supposing, I mean, that Anselm as early as the middle of August said to himself, ' I now clearly see it to be my duty to yield, acquiescence not being made impossible by the King's misconduct,' what can have brought about the change ? I have no documentary evidence to produce, and the absence of documentary evidence is easily explained ; but i6 THE 'DE INCARNATIONE VERBI.'

I throw the onus probandi of the contrary opinion on those who think that he had had no communication with Rome, and frankly assert my belief that his final acquiescence had been dictated by the Holy See. And, supposing him to have sent to the Pope soon after the execution of the deed of conveyance executed on the 27th of April, there was ample time for the receipt of an answer by the early days of August.

II. It was, as we have seen, towards the close of 1089 that Anselm wrote a short letter to his monk Dom John, in which, whilst declaring his detestation of Roscelin's heresy and elucidating in general terms the Church's teaching on the doctrine of the Holy Trinity, he aimounced his intention of writing again on the subject at greater length. Before, however, he had had time to finish the proposed epistle news reached him of the heretic's abjuration at the Council of Soissons, and he laid aside his manuscript.

But when he came to England in the autumn of 1092 he learnt that Roscelin was again at mischief, and, sending to Le Bee for the unfinished letter, resumed his labours, but so far recast the work as to change it from the epistolary form into that of a treatise designed for general perusal ; for Dom John had by this time been removed by the Pope from under his jurisdiction.

Fresh interruptions now awaited him ; for, being elected Archbishop before he had elaborated his argument and perfected his diction, he was unwilling to draw fresh attention to himself by any new literary effort, and laid aside the essay a second time.

It was therefore under a second revision that the work known to us as the ' De Incarnatione Verbi ' was thrown into the shape which it now bears ; and I believe that revision to have taken place about the time of his consecration.

Once or twice, indeed, he terms the essay an epistola ; but with these exceptions, there is not a paragraph in it which

EPISTOLARY FORM OF THE WORK. 17

reads like part of a letter, and of all letters a letter to a Pope ; nowhere are the dry, ungenial forms of a work designed for the general perusal either replaced or relieved by any of the warm and delicate touches with which none knew better than he how to decorate an epistolary effort ; nowhere — I am still speaking of the body of the work — do we find in it any direct address, however short, nowhere any indirect allusion, however remote, to the Sovereign Pontiff. Nor is this all. It ends without a conclusion ; and the only thing about it which has a proper epistolary character is a prefatory address to the Pope, which fills no more than some eighteen lines in a column of the Abbe Migne's reprint. Thus the address and the essay are heterogeneous ; and the whole work, notwithstanding the author's pains to call it a letter, consists of two perfectly distinct and inharmonious parts — namely, a brief epistolary exordium and a long unepistolary treatise. I suspect, therefore, it assumed its third form under the pressure of urgent haste, and that all the author could find time to do, so as to render the work fit for the inspection of the Sovereign Pontiff, was to indite the epistolary preface,' and to change ' hoc opus ' into ' hsc epistola ' wherever it occurred in the text of the treatise.

And this suspicion is confirmed by a very curious coincidence. In Bishop Grandison's collection of the saint's correspondence the ' Epistola de Incarnatione Verbi ' stands last in a group of twelve letters written between the election in March and the consecration nine months later ; but, curiously enough, the superscription represents the writer as already consecrated, and, what is still more remarkable, describes him by the very style to which the Archbishop of York took such effectual exception on the 4th of December, a style which Anselm never again assumed from that day forward, if a

' The ' PrEefalio ' beginning ' Quamvis post apostolos ' and ending ' quK corrigenda sunt emendentur,' which in some printed editions is made to precede this treatise, has nothing to do with it. It belongs to the De Processionc Sancti SpiritAs.

VOL. II. C

1 8 THE WORK SENT TO THE POPE.

correspondence of some three hundred letters may be taken in evidence.

I conclude, therefore, that the ' Da Incarnatione Verbi,' as we now know it, was committed to parchment shortly before the saint's consecration and in anticipation of that event.

Now we know that the name of Urban did not occur in the profession of obedience to the Pope which Anselm's consecrators called upon him, according to immemorial usage, to make ; and we also know that the ostensible reason of the omission was that the consecrators did not know who was Pope.' I suspect, therefore, that it was in anticipation of this circumstance that the Archbishop elect hurriedly gave his treatise such epistolary form as he might, and addressed it to the Pope, with the intention of despatching it so soon as he had received the episcopal unction. In which case he had three objects in view — first, to assure Urban of his unswerving loyalty ; secondly, to satisfy the requirements of his own conscience ; and thirdly, to countervail and remedy any unfavourable interpretation which ill-disposed persons might give to his tolerance of the suppression of Urban's name by his consecrators.

III. My next topic is the five hundred pounds. When did he procure them .' Not before he had no doubt left that the prince was resolved to invade Normandy in the coming spring ; not before he had had time to consult his friends on the subject ; not before he was actually Archbishop. I conclude, therefore, that he procured the money between the 5th of December and the 19th, on which day he probably left Canterbury for Gloucester.