God

HAMMERSTEIN.

the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghostand in behalf of thy glory and dignity, interdict, excommunicate, and anathematise Henry the king, son and successor of Henry the emperor, who hath rebelled against thy power, and set at nought thy authority; and by these he is interdict, excommunicate, anathematised, and expelled from the government of the holy Roman empire, in Germany, in France, and in Italy; his subjects, of every class and condition, absolved from their allegiance to him; his family dissevered from all natural ties; and, as king and as father, all further obedience and duty to be withheld from him. For it is only right and just, meet and proper, that whoso assails thee, should himself be destroyed-who depreciates thy honour, should be deprived altogether of his own. And since he, the said Henry, hath obeyed not, as a Christian he was bound to do, thy behests, whereof I am the humble organ, and returned not again to the fold of the Lord, which he hath so shamefully abandoned; but, on the contrary, hath only strayed all the more widely from its precincts, keeping up companionship with other hapless men, accursed of the church, and cut off from her holy communion, heeding not my solemn admonitions, slighting the repeated warnings which I gave him, and, as thou art a witness, despising in me thy sanctity, and seeking to separate himself wholly from the true church; so, by that power which thou hast endowed me with as thy successor, and which thou derivest and inheritest from heaven, here, in thy name and on they behoof, do I bind him in the bonds of thy curse and the

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curse of the holy church, to the end that all folk may know and see that thou art Peter; that the Son of the living God - the Saviour of the world-hath built his church on thee, as on a rock; and that the gates of bell shall not prevail against it. Be he therefore accursed, here and hereafter, now and for ever, world without end. Amen."

A similar sentence was pronounced by the enraged pope upon Siegfried, Archbishop of Mentz, president of the council of Worms, and upon all the other archbishops, abbots, bishops and inferior clergy who assisted at it.

This act of Gregory served as the signal for a general outbreak in all parts of Henry's dominions. There had long been a deep-rooted distaste to his rule; but, besides this, there was another cause equally potent, though latent and concealed, to stir up the chief nobility of the empire to rebellion against him. Heretofore, every man among them had had a chance of the empire for himself or his descendants, inasmuch as the imperial dignity was sometime elective: since the accession of the Salique dynasty, however, it had become hereditary; Conrad the Second being succeeded by his son, Henry the Third the father of the hapless subject of this memoir, as a thing of course. It was mainly to bring about this ancient order of succession, so favourable to individual ambition and individual avarice, that the princes and nobles of Germany took advantage of the proclamation of the pope, and stood forth in arms against their sovereign; though it cannot be denied, that their ostensible object was the advocacy of morals and good go

vernment, their ostensible motive the horror of anathema, and the affirmance of true religion. "We may perceive," says a well-informed modern historian, alluding to the events which subsequently ensued; "we may perceive, in the conditions of Rodolph's election,** a symptom of the real principle that animated the German aristocracy against Henry IV. It was agreed, that the kingdom should no longer be hereditary, not conferred on the son of a reigning monarch, unless his merit should challenge the popular approbation. The pope strongly encouraged the plan of rendering the empire elective, by which he hoped either eventually to secure the nomination of its chief for the holy see, or at least, by sowing the seed of civil dissensions in Germany, to render Italy more independent."

Availing themselves of this crisis in the affairs of the emperor, the disaffected princes of the empire, joined with the defeated but not dispirited Saxons, accordingly; and revolting against his sovereignty and rule, they proceeded conditionally to depose him. That is to say, they proposed to refer the quarrel between them to the arbitration of the pope; Henry, in the meanwhile, agreeing to relinquish his dignity, and live in a private station for one year, in which period it was to be settled. If by the end of that time he should not succeed in obtaining a removal of the anathema, which was put forward as the promovent of the rebellion, it was then proposed that he should forfeit for ever his title to the empire,

Hallam's "View of the State of Europe during the Middle Ages," vol. ii. cap. v. p. 98.

Treated of in the succeeding part of this narrative.

and give his unqualified assent to the election of another sovereign in his stead. "When things were come to this desperate extremity," proceeds Mosheim (who has been much followed in this part of his history by later writers, because of his perspicuousness and veracity), "and the faction which was formed against this unfortunate prince grew more formidable from day to day, his friends advised him to go into Italy, and implore, in person, the clemency of the pontiff. The emperor yielded to this ignominious counsel, without, however, obtaining from his voyage the advantages he expected. He passed the Alps amid the rigour of a severe winter, arrived in the month of February, 1077, at the fortress of Canusium, where the sanctimonious pontiff resided at that time with the young Mathilda, countess of Tuscany, the most powerful patroness of the church, and the most tender and affectionate of all the spiritual daughters of Gregory. ** Here the suppliant prince, unmindful of his dignity, stood, during three days, in the open air at the entrance of the fortress, with his feet bare, his head uncovered, and with no other raiment than a wretched piece of coarse woollen cloth thrown over his body to cover his nakedness. The fourth

*

Canossa, or Canusium, was a strong castle in the Modenese, near Reggio, to which Gregory had fled in dismay, on the first rumourof Henry's arrival in Italy.

Matilda, the greatest temporal benefactress the Roman church ever knew, was the daughter of Boniface; Duke of Tuscany, one of the most powerful of the great Italian princes at that period. "She found," says the historian in another part of his work, "that neither ambition nor grace had extinguished the tender passion in the heart of Gregory." -Verbum sap.

day he was admitted to the presence of the lordly pontiff, who, with a great deal of difficulty, granted him the absolution he demanded; but as to what regarded his restoration to the throne, he refused to determine that point before the approaching congress, at which he made Henry promise to appear, forbidding him at the same time to assume, during this interval, the title of king, as also to wear the ornaments, or exercise the functions, of royalty.

These disgraceful conditions were acceded to by the humbled monarch : he had no other alternative, in the hapless state to which he was reduced; and the proud priest who imposed them was inexorable. But not so with his subjects and feudatories, the princes and bishops of Italy. Adverse to the pope, by reason of his severity in matters of ecclesiastical discipline, and availing themselves gladly of the temporal justification for revolt which his conduct to Henry presented, they complained loudly of the intolerable character of these proceedings, and secretly and openly urged that prince to resist them. In the meanwhile, the confederate rebels of Suabia and Saxony called a mock diet at Oppenheim, on the Rhine, in the month of March 1077, and there solemnly deposing Henry, elected their general-in-chief, Rodolph, duke of Suabia, Emperor of Germany, in his stead.** This blow, which would seem to have entirely annihilated the wretched monarch, had,

"Ecclesiastical History," cent. xi. part ii. cap. 2, s. xvi. Gregory, who stimulated this illegal election, sent the anti-emperor a crown, with the following singular legend inscribed on it :

"Petra dedit Petro-Petrus diadema Rhodolpho."