And what could Henry do, with all his greatness?  His victorious armies deserted him; a rival prince laid claim to his throne; his enemies multiplied; his difficulties thickened; new dangers surrounded him on every side.  If loyalty—­that potent principle—­had summoned one hundred thousand warriors to his camp, a principle much more powerful than loyalty—­the fear of hell—­had dispersed them.  Even his friends joined the Pope.  The sainted Agnes, his own mother, acquiesced in the sentence.  The Countess Matilda, the richest lady in the world, threw all her treasures at the feet of her spiritual monarch.  The moral sentiments of his own subjects were turned against him; he was regarded as justly condemned.  The great princes of Germany sought his deposition.  The world rejected him, the Church abandoned him, and God had forsaken him.  He was prostrate, helpless, disarmed, ruined.  True, he made superhuman efforts:  he traversed his empire with the hope of rallying his subjects; he flew from city to city,—­but all in vain.  Every convent, every castle, every city of his vast dominions beheld in him the visitation of the Almighty.  The diadem was obscured by the tiara, and loyalty itself yielded to the superior potency of religious fear.  Only Bertha, his neglected wife, was faithful and trusting in that gloomy day; all else had defrauded and betrayed him.  How bitter his humiliation!  And yet his haughty foe was not contented with the punishment he had inflicted.  He declared that if the sun went down on the 23d of February, 1077, before Henry was restored to the bosom of the Church, his crown should be transferred to another.  That inexorable old pontiff laid claim to the right of giving and taking away imperial crowns.  Was ever before seen such arrogance and audacity in a priest?  And yet he knew that he would be sustained.  He knew that his supremacy was based on a universally recognized idea.  Who can resist the ideas of his age?  Henry might have resisted, if resistance had been possible.  Even he must yield to irresistible necessity.  He was morally certain that he would lose his crown, and be in danger of losing his soul, unless he made his peace with his dangerous enemy.  It was necessary that the awful curse should be removed.  He had no remedy; only one course was before him.  He must yield; not to man alone, but to an idea which had the force of fate.  Wonder not that he made up his mind to submit.  He was great, but not greater than his age.  How few men are!  Mohammed could renounce prevailing idolatries; Luther could burn a papal bull; but the Emperor of Germany could not resist the supposed vicegerent of the Almighty.

Behold, then, the melancholy, pitiable spectacle of this mighty monarch in the depth of winter—­and a winter of unprecedented severity—­crossing, in the garb of a pilgrim, the frozen Alps, enduring the greatest privations and fatigues and perils, and approaching on foot the gloomy fortress of Canossa (beyond the Po), in which Hildebrand had intrenched himself.  Even then the angry pontiff refused to see him.  Henry had to stoop to a still deeper degradation,—­to stand bareheaded and barefooted for three days, amid the blasts of winter, in the court-yard of the castle, before the Pope would promise absolution, and then only at the intercession of the Countess Matilda.