And certainly, the peril was very great. On 16 October, a letter from Gregory was read out by his legate to the assembled princes, in which the Pope for the first time broached the possibility of electing a new king, should Henry continue unregenerate. The Saxon leaders, however, and not a few of the southern dukes, were already set upon his deposition; and for a whole week they sought to force their case upon their peers. To a majority of the princes, though, such a step was simply too drastic to countenance – and Henry, sensing a chance to save his skin, even at a ferocious cost, duly signalled his willingness to bow his neck before the man he now referred to, once again, as ‘the lord Pope Gregory’. For ten days, envoys from the rival camps were ferried back and forth across the Rhine — until in due course a shaky compromise had been hammered out. The details of it, for Henry, were mortifying. He was required to swear an oath of obedience to Gregory; to revoke the sentence of Worms; to banish his excommunicated advisers once and for all. One term, however, more than any other, appeared particularly ominous: for the Pope, Henry’s enemies had insisted, was to be invited to an assembly at Augsburg, there to sit in judgement on the king, to consider whether to grant him absolution, and to listen to the Saxons and the southern dukes press for his deposition. A Damocles’ sword indeed. And yet, despite it all, Henry had secured his primary objective, and foiled that of his foes. For the while, at any rate, he remained the king.
Nor, even though the assembly at Augsburg had been set for February, the anniversary of his excommunication, and a date that by now was only three months away, had he been left altogether without freedom of manoeuvre. First, Henry dispatched an urgent letter to Gregory, pleading to be allowed to come to Rome for his absolution, where it could be granted to him in cloistered privacy. Next, when this request was bluntly refused, he settled upon a desperate expedient. Knowing that Gregory, if he were to make Augsburg for February, would have to travel throughout the winter, Henry resolved to do the same. His plan: to head southwards, cross the Alps, and look to meet the Pope, not in Augsburg, but in Italy. ‘For as the anniversary of the King’s excommunication drew steadily nearer, so he knew that he had no choice but to be absolved before that date. Otherwise, by the sentence of the princes who would sit together in judgement on him, his cause would be fatally doomed, and his kingdom lost for ever.’
So it was, shortly after Christmas, in the very dead of winter, that Henry began his ascent of the Alps. Ahead of him, icy and deep buried in snow, there wound the road that would lead him, in due course, to Italy, and the gates of Canossa.
Everything Turned Upside Down
Early in the summer of 1076, as the full horror of the crisis afflicting Christendom was starting to dawn on people, the Abbot of Cluny had been confronted by a terrifying apparition. William of Utrecht, the same bishop who only one month previously had dared to condemn Gregory as a false pope from the very pulpit of his cathedral, had materialised suddenly before Hugh, licked all about by fire. ‘I am dead,’ the bishop had cried out in agony, ‘dead, and deep buried in hell!,’ before vanishing as mysteriously as he had appeared. Sure enough, a few days later, grim confirmation of the vision’s tidings had been brought to Cluny. The Bishop of Utrecht was indeed no more.
Prompted by this alarming experience, Abbot Hugh had dutifully set himself to the task of redeeming his godson from the prospect of a similarly infernal fate. In early November, crossing into the Reich, he had selflessly put his own prospects of salvation into jeopardy by meeting with the excommunicated king, and urging him to hold true to his chosen course of penitence. Then, heading on southwards, Hugh had journeyed to Rome, where he had sought absolution for his dealings with Henry from the Pope himself. Gregory had granted it readily enough. Relations between the two men had long been close. ‘We walk by the same way,’ as Gregory would later express it, ‘by the same mind, and by the same spirit.’ Indeed, aside from his much-loved spiritual daughter, the Countess Matilda, Hugh was the only person to whom the sternly self-disciplined pontiff ever thought to confess his private anxieties. It was telling, no doubt that what he most admired in the abbot were precisely those qualities of compassion and emollience that he so often felt obliged, by virtue of all his responsibilities as the shepherd of the Christian people, to guard against in himself. Hugh’s attempts at peacemaking, though initially brushed aside, were certainly not begrudged. Leaving Rome that icy December on his fateful attempt to reach Augsburg, and his rendezvous with the German princes, the Pope made sure to keep the Abbot of Cluny by his side. Soon afterwards, crossing into Tuscany, he was joined by the Lady Matilda. So it was, in the new year, as the startling news was brought to the papal party of Henry’s crossing of the Alps, that Gregory, amid all the panic of his hurried doubling back to Canossa, found himself bolstered by the companionship of the two people upon whose support he had always most depended. Their advice, at this supreme crisis-point of his life, was unhesitating. Both, before Henry’s arrival at the gates of Matilda’s stronghold, had met with the king and promised to plead his cause. Both duly kept their word. Both, as Gregory sat by his window and stared out at
