festival, the new pope, Clement, consecrated Henry emperor, and the latter soon departed from Rome. By the Norman duke, Robert Guiscard, Gregory was at length liberated from his confinement, and repaired to Cremona, where he soon after died, on the 25th of May, 1085. His last words are supposed to furnish evidence of his own conviction of the goodness of his cause; they were as follows: "I have loved righteousness, and hated iniquity; therefore I die in exile.' These words harmonize at least with the conviction which Gregory, in his letters, to the last moment of his life, expresses in the strongest language; and it will be much sooner believed that he sealed the consistency of his life with such words than that he testified on his death-bed, as another account reports,† his repentance at the controversy which he had excited, and recalled the sentence he had pronounced on his adversaries. At all events, we recognize in these two opposite accounts the mode of thinking which prevailed in the two hostile parties. Under the name of this pope we have a number of brief maxims relating to the laws and government of the church, called his dictates (dictatus). Although these maxims did not by any means proceed from himself, still, they contain the principles which he sought to realize in his government of the church, the principles of papal absolutism,-signalizing that new epoch in the history of the papacy which is to be attributed to him as the author, whereby everything was made to depend on the decision of the pope, and the jurisdiction over emperors and kings, as over all the presiding officers of the church, was placed in his hands. Most of these maxims may be confirmed by passages from his letters. A contest like that between the emperor Henry and Gregory the Seventh could not be brought to a termination by the death of the latter; for although the quarrel had at length become a personal one, still there ever lay at bottom withal a conflict of opposite party tendencies and interests. Gregory ordinatum et consensu omnium Romanorum consecratum in die s. Pascha in imperatorem totius populi Romani. Gesta Trevirorum, ed. Wyttenbach et Mueller. Vol. I. p. 164, 1836. *Dilexi justitiam et odi iniquitatem, propterea morior in exilio. † By Sigebert of Gemblours, ad h. a. 166 PHILIP THE FIRST REPUDIATES HIS QUEEN. * was the hero and the saint of the party zealous for the system of the church theocracy. His death in misfortune appeared to that party a martyrdom for the holy cause. He had, moreover, for his successors, men whom he himself would have selected as like-minded with himself, and as persons of ability. After the first of these, Victor the Third (Gregory's enthusiastic admirer, the abbot Desiderius of Monte Cassino), had died, A. D. 1087, Otto, bishop of Ostia, was chosen pope under the name of Urban the Second. Though Urban was obliged to yield to the imperial party, which made their own pope, Clement, sovereign in Rome; still, events by which public opinion was gradually gained over to his side, were in his favour, so that, even when banished from the seat of the papacy, he was still enabled to exercise the most powerful influence. He could resume the position of a judge over princes; and the cause in which he did so was one where the pope could not fail to appear as the upholder of the authority of the divine law, and of the sacredness of the marriage covenant; and the light in which he here exhibited himself was necessarily reflected, greatly to his own advantage, on the whole relation in which he stood to his age. Philip, king of France, a prince accustomed to give free indulgence to his passions, in the year 1092, repudiated his lawful wife, Bertha, with the intention of marrying another, Berthrade, who had left her lawful husband, the count of Anjou. He found bishops cowardly and mean enough to serve as the instruments of his will: but the truly pious bishop Yves of Chartres, a prelate distinguished for the conscientious administration of his pastoral office, accustomed boldly to speak the truth to princes and popes, and zealous in contending for the purity of morals as well as the sacred tenure of the marriage covenant,† was of another mind. When invited to attend the king's wedding, he declared he could not consent to do so until, by a general assembly of the French church, the lawfulness of his separation from his first wife, and of the new marriage, had undergone a fair investiga *Thus the abbot and cardinal Gottfried of Vendôme, in speaking of the opposition to lay investiture, says of Gregory the Seventh: "Qui pro defensione hujus fidei mortuus est in exilio." Ep. 7. See e. g. his letters, ed. Paris, 1610, ep. 5. PHILIP THE FIRST REPUDIATES HIS QUEEN. 167 tion. "Whereas, I am formally summoned to Paris with your wife, concerning whom I know not whether she may be your wife," ," he wrote to the king, "therefore be assured, that for conscience' sake, which I must preserve pure in the sight of God, and for the sake of my good name, which the priest of Christ is bound to preserve towards those who are without, I would rather be sunk with a millstone in the depths of the sea than to be the means of giving offence to the souls of the weak. Nor does this stand in the least contradiction with the fidelity which I have vowed to you; but I believe I shall best maintain that fidelity by speaking to you as I do, since I am convinced that for you to do as you propose, will bring great injury upon your soul, and great peril to your crown." Neither by threats and violence, nor by promises, could the pious man be turned in the least from the course which he considered right. He vehemently reproached those bishops who neglected their duty. The king's anger against him had for its consequence, that, by one of the nobles his property was confiscated, and he himself put under confinement. The first men of the city of Chartres now combined to procure the release of their bishop by force; but he remonstrated in the strongest language against such a proceeding.† By laying houses in ashes, and plundering the poor," he wrote to them, " ye cannot propitiate God's favour, but will only provoke his vengeance; and without his favour neither can ye nor any man deliver me. I would not, therefore, that on my account ye should make the cry of the poor and the complaint of widows go up to God's ear. For neither is it befitting that I, who did not attain to the bishopric by warlike weapons, should recover it again by such means, which would not be the act of a shepherd, but of a robber. If the arm of the Lord has stricken me, and is still stretched out over me, then let me alone to bear my sorrow and the anger of the Lord, till he vindicates my cause; and wish not to augment my misery by making others wretched, for I am determined not only to suffer incarceration or the deprivation of my ecclesiastical rank, but even to die, rather than that on my account one drop of blood should be spilt." He called upon laity and clergy, instead of attempting to effect his liberation by such * Ep. 15. 66 + Ep. 20. 168 means, simply to pray for him, for prayer had procured the deliverance of Peter, Acts xii. The king caused bishop Yves to be informed that he would forbear doing him a great harm, and on the other hand bestow on him great favours, if, by his intercession, he would obtain leave for him to retain Berthrade a short time longer; but Yves repelled the proposition with horror, saying, that neither bribes nor deception could blot out any man's sin, while he resolved to persist in it.** He who resolved to persist in sin, could not redeem himself from its guilt by alms or gifts. There was no help for the king, except by abstaining from his sin, and submitting himself by repentance to the yoke of Christ; for God did not require men's possessions, but themselves, as an offering in order to their salvation. While Yves rejected all forcible, he employed every lawful means which the existing constitution of the church put into his hands, to procure victory to the side of the righteous cause. He applied to pope Urban the Second, and was strongly supported by him. This pontiff addressed a severe letter of reproof to the French bishops who had suffered themselves to be used as mere instruments of the king's pleasure, and threatened the king with the ban if he did not separate from Berthrade. He demanded, under the same threat, the liberation of Yves. This demand was complied with; but the might of papal authority still could not do the work thoroughly. A council, which assembled at Rheims in 1094, once more allowed itself to be determined by its dependence on the king and cited bishop Yves, who was animated by a different spirit, before its tribunal, to answer to the charge of high treason and of violating his oath of allegiance to the king. Yves protested against the competency of this tribunal, and appealed to the pope; and in a letter relating to this matter,§ he said, "The charge of hightreason fell with more justice upon those who by their treach YVES OF CHARTRES IMPRISONED. HIS FIRMNESS. * Ep. 47. He writes to the Marshal of the royal court (Dapifer): Ex auctoritate divina hoc caritati tuæ rescribo, quia nulla redemptione vel commutatione quis peccatum suum poterit abolere, quamdiu vult in eo permanere. Nemo in peccato suo perdurare volens peccatum suum poterit aliqua eleemosyna vel oblatione redimere. Cum Deus non nostra, sed nos ad salutem nostram requirat. § Ep. 35. BAN ON PHILIP THE FIRST. 169 erous compliance had done the king most harm, who had shrunk from applying sharper remedies for healing the wound, when milder ones were unavailing."* :6 If you had, with me, held fast to this principle," he writes to them, "you would have already restored our patient to health. Consider whether, so long as you neglect to do this, you evince that perfect fidelity to the king which you are bound to show; whether you rightly discharge the duty of your calling. Let the king then," concluded this pious man, in a truly apostolical spirit. "do towards me what, under God's permission, he may please and be able to do. Let him shut me up, or shut me out, and deprive me of the protection of the law. By the inspiration and under the guidance of the grace of God, have I resolved to suffer for the law of my God; and no consideration shall induce me to participate in the guilt of those in whose punishment I would not share also." In the very same year the pope's threat was executed on the king. At a council in Autun, A. D. 1094, the archbishop Hugo of Lyons, as papal legate, actually pronounced the ban on the king, and not till the latter submitted and made professions of amendment † did the pope remove the ban, which, however, on finding that he had been deceived, he pronounced anew, at the council of Clermont. Meantime there had been developing itself among the Western nations a great movement, which, beyond every other, could not fail so to operate as to increase the authority of the pope and exalt his dignity; for he was called to place himself at the head of a vast undertaking which grew out of and was consecrated to the religious interest, which was seized with mighty enthusiasm by the nations, and for which vast forces were leagued together. This was an event upon * Quod, ut pace vestra dicam, rectius in eos retorqueri potest, qui vulnus fomentis incurabile, tanquam pii medici cauteriis competentibus dissimulant urere vel medicinali ferro præcidere. † Yves warned the pope (ep. 46) not to let himself be deceived by the envoys of the king, and induced to grant him absolution. It was intended to alarm the pope by the threat that the king, if he were not pronounced free from the ban, would go over to the pope of the imperial party. Yves wrote him: What hope of sinning with impunity will be given hereafter to transgressors, if forgiveness is granted to the impenitent, is a point on which I need not detain your wisdom, since it is especially your business not to protect sinners but to punish them. |