Anselm left Rome and went to Lyons, remaining in France until the death of William in August, 1100. Henry was at once chosen king in his room, and crowned at Westminster three days after his brother’s death. Six weeks later, at Henry’s earnest request--he prayed him “to come back like a father to his son Henry and the English people”--Anselm landed at Dover and returned to take up the task allotted to him on his consecration as archbishop. Henry at the outset of his reign promised “God and all the people” that the old scandals of selling and farming out the Church lands should be stopped, and “to put down all unrighteousness that had been in his brother’s time, and to hold the best laws that ever stood in any king’s day before him.” That this charter was of value may be taken from the verdict on the king by the Chronicler of the time. “Good man he was and great awe there was of him. No man durst misdo against another in his day. He made peace for man and beast. Whoso carried a burden of gold and silver no man durst do him wrong.” Two evils that pressed very hardly on the mass of hard-working people, the devastation that attended the king’s progress through the land[8], and the coining of false money, were at Anselm’s instigation checked by the king. But with all Henry’s desire for the restoration of religion and law in the land, he was the Conqueror’s son, and for Anselm the struggle against absolutism in government was not yet over. Only now the battle was not with a fierce, untamed despot like the Red King, but with an autocrat of an even more formidable type, a stern man of business, in whose person alone must be found the source of all law and order, and who would brook no questioning of the royal will. At the beginning of his reign Henry found the archbishop’s loyalty and good sense invaluable. As Lanfranc had stood by the Conqueror in a marriage which was objectionable from the point of view of Church law, so Anselm stood by his son when he sought the hand of Edith, daughter of the sainted Queen Margaret of Scotland. Here the objection to the marriage was not on the grounds of affinity or consanguinity, but in the fact that Edith was an inmate of the convent at Romsey, and, it was alleged, a professed nun. Edith insisted that she had but taken refuge in the convent to obtain the protection of her aunt Christina, the abbess, and she had worn the habit of a nun as a safeguard against the brutal passions of the Red King and his courtiers. The fear of violence at the hands of the Normans had driven women to take the veil, and Lanfranc had been known to grant release from vows taken under such mortal pressure. Anselm was not the man to exalt the letter of the law above the spirit of liberty. He was content that a council of the great men in Church and State should hold an inquiry, and on their verdict declaring Edith free of her vows, the archbishop gave his blessing on the marriage.