in her own house; but she had the frequent company of Hildebrand and Peter Damian, and of the Bishop of Como, who seems to have been devoted to her service; and perhaps like other penitents was not so badly off in her humility, thus delivered out of all the tumults against which she had so vainly attempted to make head for years. [Illustration: THE VILLA BORGHESE.] While these smaller affairs--for even the anti-pope never seems to have been really dangerous to Rome notwithstanding his many efforts to disturb the peace of the Church--the world of Christendom which surrounded that one steady though constantly contested throne of the papacy, was in commotion everywhere. It seems strange to speak in one breath of Hildebrand's great and noble ideal of a throne always standing for righteousness, and of a sacred monarch supreme and high above all worldly motives, dispensing justice and peace: and in the next to confess his perfect acquiescence in, and indeed encouragement of, the undertaking of William the Conqueror, so manifest an act of tyranny and robbery, and interference with the rights of an independent nation, an undertaking only different from those of the brigands from Tusculum and other robber castles who swept the roads to Rome, by the fact of its much higher importance and its complete success. The Popes had sanctioned the raids of the Normans in Italy, and confirmed to them by legal title the possessions which they had taken by the strong hand: with perhaps a conviction that one strong rule was better than the perpetual bloodshed of the frays between the existing races--the duke here, the marquis there, all seeking their own, and no man thinking of his neighbour's or his people's advantage. But the internal discords of England were too far off to secure the observation of the Pope, and the mere fact of Harold's renunciation in favour of William, though it seems so specious a pretence to us, was to the eyes of the priests by far the most important incident in the matter, a vow taken at the altar and which therefore the servants of the altar were bound to see carried out. These two reasons however were precisely such as show the disadvantage of that grand papal ideal which was burning in Hildebrand's brain; for a Pope, with a sacred authority to set up and pull down, should never be too far off to understand the full rights of any question were it in the remotest parts of the earth: and should be far above the possibility of having his judgment confused by a foregone ecclesiastical prejudice in favour of an unjust vow.