temper rose into firmness and grandeur when it fronted the tyranny of the king.  Much of the struggle between William and the Archbishop turned on questions such as the right of investiture, which have little bearing on our history, but the particular question at issue was of less importance than the fact of a contest at all.  The boldness of Anselm’s attitude not only broke the tradition of ecclesiastical servitude but infused through the nation at large a new spirit of independence.  The real character of the strife appears in the Primate’s answer when his remonstrances against the lawless exactions from the Church were met by a demand for a present on his own promotion, and his first offer of five hundred pounds was contemptuously refused.  “Treat me as a free man,” Anselm replied, “and I devote myself and all that I have to your service, but if you treat me as a slave you shall have neither me nor mine.”  A burst of the Red King’s fury drove the Archbishop from court, and he finally decided to quit the country, but his example had not been lost, and the close of William’s reign found a new spirit of freedom in England with which the greatest of the Conqueror’s sons was glad to make terms.  His exile however left William without a check.  Supreme at home, he was full of ambition abroad.  As a soldier the Red King was little inferior to his father.  Normandy had been pledged to him by his brother Robert in exchange for a sum which enabled the Duke to march in the first Crusade for the delivery of the Holy Land, and a rebellion at Le Mans was subdued by the fierce energy with which William flung himself at the news of it into the first boat he found, and crossed the Channel in face of a storm.  “Kings never drown,” he replied contemptuously to the remonstrances of his followers.  Homage was again wrested from Malcolm by a march to the Firth of Forth, and the subsequent death of that king threw Scotland into a disorder which enabled an army under Eadgar AEtheling to establish Eadgar, the son of Margaret, as an English feudatory on the throne.  In Wales William was less triumphant, and the terrible losses inflicted on the heavy Norman cavalry in the fastnesses of Snowdon forced him to fall back on the slower but wiser policy of the Conqueror.  But triumph and defeat alike ended in a strange and tragical close.  In 1100 the Red King was found dead by peasants in a glade of the New Forest, with the arrow either of a hunter or an assassin in his breast.

[Sidenote:  Henry the First]

Robert was at this moment on his return from the Holy Land, where his bravery had redeemed much of his earlier ill-fame, and the English crown was seized by his younger brother Henry in spite of the opposition of the baronage, who clung to the Duke of Normandy and the union of their estates on both sides the Channel under a single ruler.  Their attitude threw Henry, as it had thrown Rufus, on the support of the English, and the two great measures which followed his coronation,