In the manner in which it was conducted on both sides, the case compares no less favourably with its continental parallel and with the later contest in England of which it was the forerunner, and for which, in some respects, it unquestionably furnished a model, though that model was very ill followed. For two years the dispute made absolutely no difference in the general working of the Church; Anselm was in full enjoyment of his canonical and constitutional rights as primate of all Britain; he ruled his suffragans, held his councils, superintended the restoration of his cathedral church, and laboured at the reform of discipline, with Henry’s full concurrence; and the clergy, with the archbishop at their head, were the life and soul of the party whose loyalty saved the king in his struggle with the barons. Even when Anselm’s position in England had become untenable, he went over sea in full possession of his property, as the king’s honoured friend and spiritual father. Not till Henry was provoked by a papal excommunication of all the upholders of the obnoxious “paternal customs” except himself, did he seize the temporalities of the archbishopric; and even then Anselm, from his Burgundian retreat, continued in active and unrestrained correspondence with his chapter and suffragans, and in friendly communication not only with Queen Matilda, but even with the king himself. And when at last the archbishop who had gone down on his knees to the Pope to save William Rufus from excommunication threatened to put forth that very sentence against William’s far less guilty brother, he was only, like Henry himself in Normandy at the same moment, preparing his most terrible weapon of war as the surest means of obtaining peace. Henry’s tact warned him, too, that the time for a settlement was come, and the sincerity of his motives enabled him to strike out a line of compromise which both parties could accept without sacrificing their own dignity or the principles for which they were contending. The English king and primate managed to attain in seven years of quiet decorous negotiation, without disturbing the peace or tarnishing the honour of either Church or crown, the end to which Pope and Emperor only came after half a century of tumult, bloodshed and disgrace; the island-pontiff who “loved righteousness and hated iniquity,” instead of “dying in exile” like his Roman brother, came home to end his days in triumph on the chair of S. Augustine. The settlement made little or no practical difference as far as its immediate object was concerned. Henry ceased to confer the spiritual insignia; but the elections, held as of old in the royal court, were as much under his control as before. He yielded the form and kept the substance; the definite concession of the bishops’ homage for their temporalities fully compensated for the renunciation of the ceremonial investiture. But the other side, too, had gained something more than a mere form. It had won a great victory