Both Henry and Anselm recognized the gravity of the issue. Were the bishops and abbots to continue to receive investiture from the king they were “his men,” and his autocracy was established over all. Stop the investiture and the bishops were first and chiefly the servants of the Most High, acknowledging a sovereignty higher than that exercised by the princes of this world, and preferring loyalty to the Church Catholic and its Father at Rome, to blind obedience to the crown. In brief, the question in dispute really was--Was there, or was there not, any power on earth greater than the English crown?--a question which no English king before Henry VIII. answered successfully in the negative. In contending for the freedom of the bishops of the Church from vassalage to the crown, Anselm was contending for the existence of an authority to which even kings should pay allegiance. It was not the rights of the clergy that were at stake, for the terrors of excommunication did not prevent bishops from receiving consecration on Henry’s terms, and Anselm stood alone now, as in the days of the Red King, in the resistance to despotism. It was the feeling and the knowledge, which Anselm shared with the best churchmen of his day, that great as the power of the king must be, it was a bad thing for such power to exist unchecked, and that it were well for the world that its mightiest monarchs should know there was a spiritual dominion given to the successor of St. Peter, and to his children, a dominion of divine foundation that claimed obedience even from kings. Anselm put it to the king that the canons of the Church, and the decrees of a great council had forbidden the “customs” of investiture which the king claimed; and he pleaded that he was an old man, and that unless he could work with the king on the acceptance of the Church canons, it was no use his remaining in England, “for he could not hold communion with those who broke these laws”: Henry, for his part, was much disturbed. It was a grave matter to lose the investiture of churches, and the homage of prelates; it was a grave matter, too, to let Anselm leave the country while he himself was hardly established in the kingdom. “On the one side it seemed to him that he should be losing, as it were, half of his kingdom; on the other, he feared lest Anselm should make his brother Robert King of England,”--for Robert might easily be brought to submit to the Apostolic See if he could be made king on such terms. Henry suggested an appeal to the pope on the question of the right of the crown to “invest” the bishops, and Anselm, who all along was anxious for peace--if peace could be obtained without acknowledgment of royal absolutism--at once agreed.