in
his splendid dress of green cloth of Auxerre, with a richly trimmed
cloak hanging after the German fashion to his heels. He was no true
servant to the king, declared Herbert when he had seated himself, who
would allow him to go astray. As for the customs, there were bad enough
customs in other countries against the Church of God, but at least they
were not written down either in the lands of the King of France or of
the King of the Germans. "Why do you diminish his dignity?" hastily
demanded the king, "by not calling him the Emperor of the Germans?"
"The King of the Germans he is," retorted Herbert, "though when he writes,
he signs Imperator Romanorum semper Augustus_.'" "Shame!" cried the king,
"here is an outrage! Why should this son of a priest disturb my kingdom
and disquiet my peace?" "Nay," said Herbert, "I am not the son of a
priest, for it was after my birth my father became a priest; neither
is he the son of a king save one whom his father begat being king."
"Whosesoever son he may be," cried a baron who sat by, "I would give the
half of my land that he were mine!" Henry heard the words bitterly, and
held his peace; and in a few moments ordered the intractable Herbert
to depart.

The strife between Church and State was, in fact, taking every day a new
harshness. Gregory VII. a century earlier had suggested that kingly
power was of diabolic origin. "Who is ignorant that kings and princes
have their beginning in this, that knowing not God, they by rapine,
perfidy, and slaughter, the devil moving them, affect rule over their
equals-that is, over men, with blind greed and intolerable presumption."
But the papal theory of a vast Christian republic of all peoples, under
the leadership of Rome, found little favour with the kings of the rising
states which were beginning to shape themselves into the great powers of
modern Europe. Henry, steeped in the new temper, proposed a rival theory
of the origin of government. "Thou," he wrote to the Pope, "by the papal
authority granted thee by men, thinkest to prevail over the authority of
the royal dignity committed to me by God." The wisest of the churchmen of
England used more sober language than all this. "Ecclesiastical
dignity," wrote Ralph of Diceto, later the Dean of St. Paul's, "rather
advances than abolishes royal dignity, and the royal dignity is wont
rather to preserve than to destroy ecclesiastical liberty, for kings
have no salvation without the Church, nor can