The same great qualities of loyalty and good sense made Anselm stand by the king when the Norman lords, pricked on by Ranulf the Torch, the rascally Bishop of Durham (who had escaped from imprisonment in the Tower by making his gaolers drunk), and hating Henry for “his English ways,” proposed to back up Robert of Normandy in his attempts to seize the crown. According to Eadmer, but for Anselm’s faithfulness and labours, which turned the scale when so many were wavering, King Henry would have lost the sovereignty of the realm of England at that time. But Anselm’s services to the king are of small account by the side of his services to English liberty, and Anselm’s resistance to Henry’s demands for an absolute monarchy was of lasting influence in the centuries that followed.[9] The struggle began when Henry called upon Anselm for a new declaration of homage to the crown, and required him to receive the archbishopric afresh by a new act of investiture. This was a claim that had never been made before. “It imported that on the death of the sovereign the archbishop’s commission expired, that his office was subordinate and derivative, and the dignity therefore reverted to the crown.” (Sir F. Palgrave.) Anselm met the demand with the answer that such a course was impossible. Nay, the very ecclesiastical “customs” which for some time past had given the appointment of bishops and abbots to the crown, and had made the bishops “the king’s men” by obliging them to do homage and to receive investiture of their office with ring and staff at the royal hands, were now impossible for Anselm. The Council at the Lateran, at which Anselm had been present, had forbidden the bishops of the Church to become the vassals of the kings of the earth, and Anselm was not the man to question this decision. He had seen only too much, under William the Red, of the curse of royal supremacy in the Church. He had stood up alone against the iniquities of misrule, just because the bishops, who should have been pastors and overseers of a Christian people, were the sworn creatures of the king. Henceforth it was forbidden by the authority that rested in the seat of St. Peter at Rome for a bishop to receive consecration as a king’s vassal. But if Anselm would be no party to what had become an intolerable evil, Henry would not give up the rights his father had exercised without a contest. He was willing to do his best for the Church, but it must be in his own way. “Pledging himself in his own heart and mind not to abate a jot of his supremacy over the clergy, he would exercise his authority in Church affairs somewhat more decently than his father, and a great deal more than his brother; but that was all.” (Sir F. Palgrave.)