472 – Radicals

Welcome to the British History Podcast.

My name is Jamie, and this is episode 472: Radicals.

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We've spent a lot of time with the situation between Anselm and Rufus and all of their messy interpersonal drama.

But we haven't really discussed the true elephant in the room.

Radicalism.

The fact is, Anselm was just one of many bright-eyed zealots who were dragging the church into a period of deep radicalization.

And from the very first moment he started getting involved in English politics, Anselm had been seeking to dramatically change the relationship between the church and the crown.

That was his purpose behind extracting all of those concessions from Rufus as well as the English bishops before he'd even consider accepting the archbishopric.

And had the king not been on death's door, I suspect that Anselm's story within England would have ended right there.

But that illness had changed things, and suddenly, Anselm had a lot of leverage, and he used it to great effect.

Though, when the king recovered, he was pretty pissed about all those things he'd been made to promise.

And honestly, he had a pretty good point there.

This whole situation reeked of duress.

But, the point is that right from the start, Anselm had been seeking seeking to wield power and institute changes within England.

And this current conflict is no different.

While Edmer would have us believe that this feud between Anselm and Rufus was about money, specifically Rufus' endless desire for it, if you look more closely at the actions being taken and the words being spoken, I think you'll see that this wasn't about money at all.

Anselm was insisting that his primary fealty, his top boss, his true higher up, and the one who had final say in his actions taken as archbishop was the Pope in Rome.

His contention was that archbishops answered first to the church and not to the crown.

And since it's the archbishops who direct the actions of the rest of the ecclesiastical figures under their charge, well, it follows that, in Anselm's eyes, everyone within the church answers first to Rome and not to the king.

That was the issue.

That was what these men were fighting about.

And I suspect that is also why Rufus had laid that trap for him, forcing Anselm to acknowledge a pope when England had officially recognized no pope, because that action dramatized the Archbishop's lack of fealty to the king.

Rufus had created a situation where the court witnessed how Anselm saw himself as the head of a parallel government within England.

And just in case that fact was missed by anyone, the king even shouted it in court, saying that he would accept no equals within his kingdom.

And Rufus was on very solid ground with this argument.

This was how things had been operating in England for ages.

So Rufus wasn't demanding change.

He was insisting that the Archbishop recognize the rights and privileges of the king, which just happened to be the very same rights and privileges that Rufus had inherited from his father.

It was Anselm who wanted to change all of that, because he believed his real duty was to Rome.

And then Rufus, I suppose, could have any leftover fealty once his duties to Rome had been satisfied.

That is a radical change.

And the trouble with radical changes is that a lot of people are threatened by them.

Now, obviously, those who are benefiting from a current system don't want to see any change.

But even among those who are suffering under a system, you're going to find a lot of people who are opposed to change.

Because what if that change makes things worse?

So, given that headwind, how does a radical like Anselm convince the public to accept the changes that they want to institute?

Well,

you don't call it a change.

You call it reform.

You call it a restoration.

You say it's a return to better times, and you tie it to the past, or if we're being honest here, you tie it to a cultural imaginary that you pretended existed in the past.

And you say that you're enacting the ways of the ancients that have since been lost.

If you want to make a change, a big, scary, deep change, you better wrap your radical desires in a cozy blanket of things that most people will find comforting.

You want to use ideas and symbols that people associate with stability.

And then you insist that anyone who opposes you is the real radical.

And not in a good way.

You describe them as radically self-interested, radically alien, radically scary.

And as luck would have it for Anselm, much of our record for the Archbishop's life, as well as his plans, comes from a Vida that was penned by his own chaplain, Edmer.

And Edmer is a great primary source for Anselm because he was so close to the guy, but he is also a limited source for exactly that same reason.

On top of that, Vidas are fundamentally propaganda pieces.

In fact, that word propaganda is a word that was invented by the church back when Pope Gregory XV created a group who was tasked with the propagation of the faith.

Hence, propaganda.

Now, these days, propaganda is synonymous with disinformation, but originally, it was about propagating beliefs and ideas.

And Anselm's chief propagandist, Edmur, had a specific idea and belief that he wanted to propagate.

He wanted people to see Anselm as simply a pious man with deeply held religious convictions to God and a holy desire to live a sacred life, but who was forced into politics against his will.

Meanwhile, Rufus was a greedy, tyrannical oaf who was actively seeking to oppress Anselm.

So that's the message.

And the reality was something closer to Rufus was fighting with Anselm because the Archbishop was seeking, in ways big and small, to strip the king of many of the rights and privileges that he had inherited from his father.

And to be clear, I'm not defending Rufus here.

He was a bad king.

He was a nightmare for the English public, and I think he genuinely hated Anselm.

But I don't want you to get lost in the sauce.

While the personal animosity between the two men is very funny to read after the fact, what we're seeing here is much more than an interpersonal conflict.

It's a battle between the church and the crown, who just happened to be two institutions that were undergoing deep radicalization.

I mean, if conquering England and replacing the entire government and aristocracy with continental figures who were loyal to the the House of Normandy wasn't radical?

I don't know what is.

And as for the church, well, ever since Hildebrand and his allies got into power, they had been taking the position that what the House of Normandy was doing was actually just small-time nonsense.

Why rule a kingdom when you could rule all the kings in all the kingdoms?

They wanted to be in charge.

And the church didn't just want to rule the kingdoms they were already in.

They were starting to get interested in conquest as well, because we're less than a year away from the Pope launching the first crusade.

So, there you go.

That's the elephant.

And now we've all seen it, let's get back to the story.

When we left off, the king's crafty clerks, Gerard and William Warrelwast, were headed for Rome.

They had been instructed to figure figure out which pope was the real pope, and then obtain a pallium from that pope and bring that pallium back to the king.

Rufus' big plan here was that if he had possession of that sacred scarf, then he'd be able to eject Anselm and install his own archbishop, a more submissive and loyal archbishop.

At least, that's what Edmer tells us.

Though, while I totally believe that Rufus did hate Anselm and would have liked to have a new archbishop, this is one of those times where Edmer seems to be laying it on a bit thick.

And as a result, he was kind of tying himself into knots in his effort to explain how Anselm was actually the real victim here.

Because reading all the various records surrounding these events, I suspect that Well, first, I suspect that both men were insufferable jerks.

It's really hard to to get around that fact.

But in the case of Rufus' grand plan to replace Anselm, I suspect that Edmur was embellishing things a little bit here and was painting Rufus as a bit more ignorant about papal politics than he actually was.

Because the king's emissaries soon returned with a papal legate, a man named Cardinal Walter.

And he, not the emissaries, carried that much-discussed pallium.

And, well, all of this was very normal and very typical in this sort of situation.

If you've got an issue with an archbishop and there are issues regarding investiture, then seeking out a legate to address the situation is about as normal a move as you could ask for.

So, pretty far from the godless tyrant trying to steal a scarf from an old man so he could make his own archbishop, which is what Edmur is implying.

Similarly, returning with Cardinal Walter, who was loyal to Pope Urban, indicates that the king was quite willing to acknowledge Urban's claim to the papacy.

And it's likely that he had told his emissaries as such when he dispatched them, since I doubt that he would have actually told his clerks to just pick the one they liked once they got there.

I mean, if that was actually his intent, Rufus was basically telling his clerks to just pretend that they were the king of England and rule in his stead on a matter as important as selecting a pope.

So I don't think any king would have gone for that, but I am certain that Rufus wouldn't have.

So yeah, I think this was Rufus' plan from the start.

But regardless, in early May, the king's emissaries landed at Dover and brought the papal legate to the king.

Now the king was either at Windsor or Winchester at the time, so this journey would have taken them through Canterbury.

But interestingly, they didn't stop there and they didn't meet with Anselm.

Instead, they went straight to the king's court without delay.

And they had really good news for the king.

They had struck a deal with Pope Urban, and he was prepared to grant the king all that he wanted.

Historian Frank Barlow argues that Pope Urban likely confirmed for the term of the king's life, all of the royal rights and privileges that Anselm had been disputing.

And then the legate went a step farther and expressly agreed that the Pope would not send any legates to England unless they were specifically invited and requested by the king.

This resulting agreement and the series of concessions made by the legate meant that no one within the English Church would dare accept or obey any directives, letters, or orders from the papacy during this period unless the king specifically commanded them to do so.

Similarly, no papal envoy was received with due honor as had been done in the past.

Now, as I said, these concessions were just for the term of the king's life.

So, if the king should die, the terms would need to be renegotiated.

But Rufus was still in his 30s, so so he had a long life ahead of him.

And so with this agreement, power swung dramatically back towards the crown.

And you might be wondering that, given the scale of these concessions, what was Pope Urban getting out of the deal?

Well, he was getting the one thing that he really wanted, a job.

This crisis that Anselm had created with his behavior and his out-of-turn acknowledgement carried a real risk that England might recognize Clement as the real pope and thus further deepen this rift within Christendom.

So healing that breach was Urban's priority here.

And he was successful in that because King Rufus decreed that Urban was the real pope and that his rival, Clement, was just some guy in a hat.

Now, unfortunately, considering the amount of concessions that Urban gave to get that decree, at least within England, Urban was pretty much some guy in a hat as well.

He'd just given away any real authority in England, at least so long as Rufus lived.

And then Edward tells us that Rufus tried to get one more concession.

He wanted Cardinal Walter to depose Anselm.

Now, this one, I totally believe.

These two men pretty clearly hated each other, so it would be kind of weird if the king didn't at least ask.

But Cardinal Walter refused.

And Edmur says that the king did not take this well at all, and that Rufus felt that he'd been deceived, and that consequently, he thought that this entire agreement was an absolute failure.

And on the one hand, Rufus was a famous hothead.

But I wonder if Edmur is trying to rewrite the situation a little bit into something that fits his overall thesis.

Because when you look at what Rufus got from the legate, this really had been an unqualified success.

And while Anselm wasn't ejected from his seat or the kingdom, The fact was, Rufus had conflicts with a lot of churchmen, so there's a very good chance that most of the clergy annoyed the hell out of him.

And while Anselm had gotten on his last nerve, it was unlikely that another archbishop would be all that much better.

I mean, the bishop of Durham was currently angling for the job, and it wasn't all that long ago that he dragged Rufus through a long and frustrating legal battle, pulling many of the same holier-than-thou tactics that Anselm had been using recently.

So, if anything, I'm guessing that Rufus was a bit disappointed that he couldn't oust Anselm, but on the whole, it didn't matter all that much, because it was the concessions from Pope Urban that he really wanted.

And he got those.

Not only that, but all of this was finalized on May 13th, a full week before that May 20th deadline of the truce between Rufus and Anselm, which meant that now that the king had gone over Anselm's head and sorted things out with the guy's boss, It was time to call the priest back in and bury the holy hatchet.

So, Rufus sent a messenger to the Archbishop's Manor at Mortlake, and he told Anselm to halt his Pentecostal celebrations and hustle his bony butt over to Hayes, which was close to the royal residence at Windsor, and there they'd resolve their dispute.

And Anselm actually did what he was told.

And while I don't know if he was aware of the king's deal with the legate, I am pretty sure that he realized the fix was in as soon as he arrived at Hayes.

Because while the king wasn't there, most of the English bishops were.

And they all immediately started pressing Anselm to offer the king large payments of cash.

It seems that the bishops knew that the king had been pushed too far.

And now that he had the upper hand, they thought it would be best to soothe his wounded pride by just handing him a bunch of cash so he felt like a big winner.

Which sounds depressingly familiar.

But the fact is, these bishops really did need to save their skins because the king was much more powerful than them.

Like, orders of magnitudes more powerful.

The bishops were essentially a parallel aristocracy that relied upon the support of secular aristocrats to enhance their wealth and status.

And so it was in their interests to keep the king happy.

Hence, why they were really enthusiastic about this bribery scheme that they were convinced would work.

Anselm, however, wasn't a bishop.

He was an archbishop.

And not just any archbishop.

He was the archbishop of Canterbury, which was the dominant see for the whole of England.

And on top of that, he was also famous.

We haven't really gotten a bunch into it, but Anselm was a big name among the clergy on the continent.

And so while the bishops were concerned about what might happen to them and how they'd support themselves if they enraged the king, Anselm wasn't concerned at all.

I mean, what was the worst that could happen?

If Rufus threw another hissy fit, then Anselm would just go back to the continent and continue being famous and influential.

Oh no.

And so, when the bishops suggested that Anselm give the king some cash to get back into his good graces, Anselm told them where they could stuff that cash.

He said that unless the king was willing to put this behind him without any weird demands for bribes or concessions,

then he'd just return to the continent.

It wasn't like he'd like this job or this kingdom all that much anyway.

The bishops, exasperated, told him that a papal legate had come here all the way from Rome and had brought a pallium with him.

I mean, surely you'd be willing to pay something for that holy scarf, wouldn't you?

Nope.

So they pointed out that it cost a lot of money to get a legate over here.

So come on, Anselm.

A cardinal had to travel all the way from Italy.

So surely you can at least pay the cost of that journey from Rome, right?

I could,

but I won't.

I would rather surrender my position than pay that man a penny.

Now these are the actions of a small man.

I know he holds a lot of power and he has an impressive title, but this refusal does not advance his goals in any way.

It's just small and petty.

And when people act small like this, they do harm to themselves.

which was happening right here.

And right on cue, Edmer gets really quiet in his Vita.

Probably, because what happens next is just embarrassing.

But Edmur's silence here wasn't able to erase the events, and later documents spill the tea.

The fact is, Anselm should have realized the bind he was in and the weakness of his position as soon as that legate appeared.

I mean, Anselm was an archbishop and a relatively famous figure in ecclesiastical circles, but as far as the papacy was concerned, he was a local subordinate and he was focused on local issues.

Anselm's goal of changing the structure of fealty within England weren't the same goals as the papacy, and frankly, recently they'd started to hurt the cause.

The pope, and thus the legate, had bigger fish to fry here.

The church was in the middle of a legitimacy crisis, and acquiring royal support was their number one goal.

And the fact that Anselm was even talking about competing fealties means that he'd lost the plot and he apparently wasn't at all aware of the policies and positions that the pope was seeking to advance.

And thus, he was not qualified to be part of this meeting.

And that wasn't just an Anselm problem, by the way.

This view on hierarchy was pretty common across all of Christendom, and is part of why popes and their legates generally like to negotiate with rulers directly rather than trying to negotiate with their own subordinates.

And so as soon as that legate got involved, Anselm lost his seat at the table and the archbishop's goals for reformation were sidelined and replaced by Pope Urban's goals.

namely, obtaining a recognition by the King of England at pretty much any any cost.

And so when it became clear that Anselm still wasn't backing down, Cardinal Walter, the papal legate, got involved.

And he pulled the Archbishop aside and basically read him the Riot Act.

Now, the contemporary historian, Hugh of Flavigny, probably butchering that, claims that the Cardinal did all of this because Rufus had seduced him through the payments of large sums of cash, Which, frankly, isn't impossible.

Rufus wasn't just a big taxer, after all.

He was also a big spender, and he was no stranger to using bribes.

But regardless, Anselm was ordered, directly by the papal legate, to swear fealty to St.

Peter and the Pope, with the exception of, and this is the big part, the duties and fealties that he owed to King William Rufus of England.

Basically, the legate was confirming the king's contention that the fealty that Anselm owed to the crown superseded any fealty he owed to the papacy.

And that wasn't all.

After getting a stern talking to, Anselm was made to go before the king and ask him for reconciliation.

And the king was ready for this.

He immediately insisted that before any reconciliation could take place, that the archbishop must first swear to observe and faithfully defend the king's royal usages and laws.

Meaning that not only was Anselm forced to admit that he lost this power struggle, He was forced to swear that he would fight to defend the king against anyone who might wish to challenge his supremacy and the laws that he enacts.

And this is on top of the fact that Rufus had gotten the Pope to to confirm that the King of England, not the Pope, would manage the affairs of the English Church, and that the Pope couldn't even communicate with the members of the English Church unless he first obtained permission from the King.

Now, Edver spends a lot of time lauding Anselm's deeply held convictions and religious beliefs, and he repeatedly insists that Rufus' demands here were tyrannical and that he was obsessed with money.

But as I mentioned at the top of the episode, money wasn't the king's primary concern.

In fact, once the argument about fealty began, Rufus didn't talk about money at all.

It was the bishops who kept insisting that this could be resolved with a cash payment.

And that does appear to have been their idea.

Rufus was pretty consistent that his demands were for fealty and supremacy, just as his father had been given during his reign.

The king wanted an acknowledgement that Anselm served under him.

And in the end, that is exactly what he got.

And as far as I can tell, all Anselm got, other than an earful from the legate, was that he kept his job as archbishop and he didn't have to temporarily renounce Pope Urban.

So Rufus won big here.

But he did make one extra concession to the papacy.

He promised that he would renew the payment of Peter's pence.

Basically, a national tithe to the church in Rome.

Now, due to the papal legitimacy crisis, this hadn't been paid in about a decade.

So, people in England weren't used to paying it, and there was also about a decade of back taxes that had gone uncollected.

And while Rufus had many faults, he does seem to have generally understood people, at least in regards to how to manipulate them.

And he knew that the papacy wanted the resumption of those payments and may have wanted the back taxes as well.

After all, they needed the cash.

And so he knew that they would eagerly accept this concession, which they did, and that they weren't likely to consider the serious trouble that it would cause.

Because collecting that tax was the responsibility of the church, which meant that the English public, who were already so heavily taxed that they were undergoing a famine, were suddenly being taxed even further by their own clergy.

And meanwhile, the Pope's man, Cardinal Walter, was still in country and collecting those taxes for transport back to Rome.

Poison pill doesn't even begin to describe what Rufus did here.

In an instant, the church's reputation for avarice and rapacity had been renewed, and the English public were furious.

At the same time, church figures, including the papal legate and many of the English bishops, were furious with Anselm because he'd dragged them all to this precipice.

The Archbishop's constant antagonism of the king had created such a crisis that the Pope had to get involved and was probably forced to concede far more than he wanted to.

And for what?

His behavior had doomed his goals for reformation right from the start.

I mean, consider this.

In the light most favorable to Anselm, what he wanted was to reform the English church, right?

Well, to pull that off, you need a reform council.

And in England, you can't effectively hold a reform council without the support of the king.

And yet here we had Anselm picking fights with the king at every opportunity.

Not only that, but the church really did want papal supremacy.

Anselm's goals weren't actually a problem for Pope Urban or Cardinal Walter.

It was Anselm's behavior and the way that he went about pursuing those goals that was the huge problem.

Because thanks to Anselm's efforts, the church now had less authority in England than it had done before.

And the only gain that they could cling to here was Peter's pence, which was currently pissing off virtually their entire flock, so that was hardly a gain either.

So needless to say, the churchmen were livid with Anselm, and some of them were even preparing sternly worded letters and cataloging the charges that they could level against him.

Because we have copies of them.

So yeah, it is wild how complete Rufus' victory was here.

Because in the end, he got everything he wanted and managed to dodge the church's efforts at a power grab.

Though, at the same time, you can see that the church was anticipating that things would change once this papal crisis came to an end.

And they were positioning themselves to argue for a lot more authority in England once that happened.

Because this agreement for primacy only lasted for the term of Rufus' life.

Not only that, but the churchmen conveniently forgot to write any of the details down of this agreement in any sort of document.

They had given Rufus everything he wanted, but they gave it to him as an oral contract.

And I don't think that was an accident, because we know that later on, they're going to start disputing the terms of that agreement.

And we'll helpfully point out that, whoops, no one has a written copy.

In fact, and some will later claim that actually there was a caveat to the agreement, and that they all agreed that he would only observe the king's laws and duties subject to God's will.

And naturally, Anselm was the one to determine God's will.

Now, the kings of barons were all, that was not part of the agreement at all.

But Anselm ends up arguing back that, well, it was kind of implied though, wasn't it?

Which the king at court were all like, dude, do you even contract law?

No, that was not implied.

At which point, Anselm falls back on the fact that there's no written contract, and so can anyone really know what the agreement was all about?

The whole thing is really cheeky, especially considering that they are the people who are tasked with writing stuff down.

And so, I suspect that as they were making this agreement, Anselm and the church were lining up that future power struggle.

But that is a problem for future Rufus.

Current Rufus was just happy to be done with this whole mess, and he was probably amused that he maneuvered the church into a position where they were getting at least some of the blame for the tax policies that were angering the public.

And now, with all that handled, there was only one thing that needed to be dealt with before this would be truly done.

The pallium.

Anselm still needed his f ⁇ ing scarf.

But since that legate brought one to England, that means that they had one on hand.

So no biggie, right?

Rufus could give Anselm his fashion accessory.

The old man would be a real archbishop.

And all of this would be finally over.

And since the king was the authority on church matters within England, and since he was the one who sent his clerks to obtain that pallium, it only made sense that he would be the one to give it to Anselm.

And besides, what better way to heal this breach than to have the king in scarf the archbishop?

Everyone thought this was a great idea.

Everyone, except for Anselm.

He didn't want a pallium if the king was the one giving it to him.

In fact, he would rather go without thank you very much.

True to form, Anselm was putting the church into a very difficult position because Because the Pope, through his legate, had just acknowledged all of Rufus' rights and privileges, and agreed that they wouldn't even send letters to the English clergy without his permission.

So if letters are forbidden, you can pretty much guarantee that bestowing palliums was straight out.

That was now the domain of the king.

But Anselm just would not budge.

And personally, if I was Rufus at this point, I would have just put Anselm into a cybertruck and let nature take its course.

But luckily for Anselm, Cardinal Walter was still in country, because those taxes weren't going to gather themselves.

And the Cardinal found a compromise.

He decided that instead of giving the pallium to the king, he would just head over to Canterbury Cathedral.

and, you know, just leave the pallium on the high altar.

And then, if Anselm just happened to go over there and pick it up and, you know, carry out a ritual at a later date, well, that was his business.

And so, on the 27th of May of 1095, Anselm became the proud owner of a pallium.

And it looks like everybody but Edmer absolutely hated him now.

Great job.

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