William Rufus went back to England, and in the course of time there was a war with the Scotch, who were defeated again and again and finally made quiet. Then the Welsh rebelled in their turn and [Pg349] were much harder to subdue. Robert got the king of France to join forces with him soon afterward, and that war was only avoided by the payment to France by Rufus of an enormous sum of money. All this time William Rufus was doing some good things for his kingdom and a great many more bad ones that there is not time to describe. After Lanfranc's death the king grew worse and worse; he was apparently without any religious principle, and there was always a quarrel between him and the priests about the church money, which both of them wanted. When bishops and abbots died the king would not appoint their successors, and took all the tithes for himself. His chief favorite was a low-born, crafty, wicked man named Ralph Flambard, and the two were well matched. William Rufus had little of the gift for business that made his father such a practical statesman and organizer, and, in fact, his boisterous, lawless, indecent manner of living shocked even the less orderly of his subjects. He had the lower and less respectable of the Norman qualities, and something of the rudeness of the worst of his more remote ancestry crops out in his conduct. Once when he was very ill and was afraid that he was going to die with all his sins on his head, he sent for Anselm, the holy prior, his father's friend and counsellor, and appointed him to the archbishopric of Canterbury, which had been vacant ever since Lanfranc's death four years before. Rufus' guilty conscience was quieted, and the people of England were deeply thankful for such a prelate, but before long the king and Anselm naturally did not find [Pg350] each other harmonious, and after a brave fight for what he believed to be the right, Anselm appealed to Rome and left England with orders never to return.