LIBERATION
oty placed the ban on them and was fully able to reckon with the consequences, though at the rime his own situation was perilous. The leader of the Milan Pataria had fallen in a street fight. Papal friend- ship with the Normans was broken off, the higher German clergy sided with the king, and Cencius, leader of a conspiracy of Roman nobles, seized the Pope's person during a coup which took place during 1075. Seized by the hair during midnight Mass on Christmas Day and dragged off, the wounded and maltreated Pontiff was the victim of female scoffers in Cencius' dungeon until the people liberated him. He forgave the culprit on the spot, and protected him against the wrath of the populace. Brought back to the Church by an enthusi- astic crowd, he finished the interrupted Mass. Courageously, firmly, imperturbably, he took up the battle against the King in the same spirit he had revealed on this night, though the outlook was very unfavourable. Of the King it is said that he provoked the crime of this Christmas Eve. Now Henry also disregarded Gregory's final warning, and at a Synod convened iii Worms declared him deposed. A dangerous enemy of the Pope, Cardinal Hugo Candidas, who had previously been his friend and furtherer but had since been excom- municated, now fanned the flames with the worst of calumnies. Greg- ory, he said, was secretly the paramour of Mathilda of Tuscany, and the most recent Popes had not died without his doing.
The riotous events of the years 1076 and 1077 are familiar to every- one. Henry's fateful letter containing the decisions reached at Worms employed this initial address: "Hildebrand, not the Pope, but the false monk." And in the final sentence the King commanded him, in the name also of the German bishops to "step down, step down." The tumultuous, formless election by which the Pope had risen to power now proved the weakest point in his armour. But the Romans shielded it well. The anger of the throng assembled at the Lateran Synod of 1076 rose against the royal bearer of evil tidings and Greg- ory himself prevented the legate's assassination. In the basilica there also sat as a witness of the Council, Agnes, the King's mother. Long before, this wife of the strict third Henry had turned from her vicious son and had taken the veil in Rome. Now she saw and heard every- thing that happened. The Pope gave the counterstroke and called down the curse of the ban on Henry. The form he chose was that
HENRY
