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Out of the conflict over investitures, regarded from the practical side, the Norman monarchy had emerged, as we have seen, in triumph, making but one slight concession, and that largely a matter of form.
How long would it avail the Norman monarchy anything to have triumphed in the struggle of investitures, when it could no longer find the bishop to appoint who was not thoroughly devoted to the highest papal claims?
Henry, well pleased to rid himself, without violence, of so inflexible an antagonist, readily granted him permission. W. Malm. p. 225. Hoveden, p. 469. Sim. The English minister told Pascal, that his master would rather lose his crown than part with the right of granting investitures. W. Malm. p. 226.
Two good things Henry III. gave us, Westminster Abbey and Edward I.; but he was almost as difficult as Henry II., with regard to investitures. Fortunately he was not so obstinate, or we might have had a martyr instead of a confessor in Chichester, as we have in Canterbury.
We must now show that Gregory enforced his views as to investitures. This part of our subject is important, because it gave occasion for the assertion that the pope could depose the Holy Roman emperor and the king of Italy, if he should find him morally or physically disqualified for fulfilling the condition on which his appointment depended that he should defend him from his enemies.
It deserved to be magnificent; for here have been stately ceremonials, marriages of kings, coronations, investitures, before the high altar, which has now been overthrown or crumbled away; and the floor so far as there is any floor consists of tombstones of the old Scottish nobility.
Legally the change meant the transference, from the bishop or another seigneur to the town, of powers derived by delegation from the Emperor; and it took place in the course of the Investitures contest, when the bishops, conscious of simony and other offences which made their position insecure, were more concerned to dissuade their citizens from siding with the party of ecclesiastical reform than to fulfil their duties as officials of the Empire.
After the failure of direct negotiations between Pope and Emperor, a Council at Rheims, presided over by the Pope, renewed the anathema against Henry and his party, but only consented to a modified prohibition of investitures, since the office alone was mentioned and all reference to the property of bishop or abbot was omitted.
There, however, he learned a stricter doctrine on the subject of lay investitures, of appointments to ecclesiastical office by kings and princes, than he had yet held, so that when he finally returned to England he brought with him the germs of another bitter controversy with a king, with whom but for this he might have lived in peace.
Henry the Fourth, of Germany, asserted the right of investitures, the prerogative of confirming his bishops by the delivery of the ring and crosier.
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