to withdraw his support from Robert. With part he seems to have bribed his own Norman adherents to carry on the war for him, while he himself returned to England on 29 Dec.
Early in 1095 a question arose between William and Anselm as to the latter's right to acknowledge one of the two rival popes without the king's permission. A great council met at Rockingham, 11 March, nominally to discuss this point, but really, in William's intention, to bring Anselm to ruin. Anselm, however, proved more than a match for the king, and a ‘truce’ was made between them, to last till 20 May. Meanwhile Rufus secretly endeavoured to obtain Anselm's deprivation from Pope Urban, through the legate Walter of Albano; but Urban and Walter caught him in his own trap, and on 20 May he was forced to make formal reconciliation with the primate [for details see Anselm, Saint]. Throughout the spring William had been unsuccessfully endeavouring to bring the Earl of Northumberland, Robert of Mowbray, to justice, first for an act of robbery, and next for a defiance of the royal authority which was in fact part of a widespread plot against the king himself [for details see Mowbray, Robert de]. In June the king marched upon Northumberland. He took Newcastle and Tynemouth, and besieged Mowbray in Bamborough. Bamborough, however, proved hard to win; so, after building a tower over against it, and leaving a strong force to continue the siege, William at Michaelmas turned southward. He was met by tidings that the Welsh had taken Montgomery. He at once summoned his host, marched into Wales, and by 1 Nov. was at Snowdon; but the Welsh withdrew into their mountains, out of reach of his cavalry; so he ‘went homeward, for he saw that he could do no more there in the winter.’ Meanwhile Mowbray had been captured, and his capture broke up the plot of which he was the head. On 13 Jan. 1096 the king held a great court at Salisbury, and meted out stern punishment to the traitors.
In the spring of 1096 Robert of Normandy, having taken the cross and wanting money for his crusade, pledged his duchy to William—whether for three years, five years, or simply for the term, whatever it might be, of his own absence—for ten thousand marks. The raising of this almost paltry sum was made by the king an excuse for levying such ‘manifold ungelds’ that the lay barons had to fleece their under-tenants to the uttermost; and it is said that some of the bishops and abbots ventured on a protest against the royal demands, which they declared they could not satisfy without driving to despair the poor tillers of the soil. William's officers then suggested that they should rob the shrines of the saints instead, and they dared not refuse to adopt the suggestion. In September Rufus went to Normandy, met Robert, paid him the stipulated sum, and was left in possession of the duchy. On Easter eve (4 April 1097), he returned to England. Immediately afterwards he held a great council at Windsor; then he marched into Wales and brought the Welsh to submission, but only for a moment. Scarcely had he turned his back when they rose more defiantly than ever. He set off at midsummer at the head of a host of mingled horse and foot, ‘that he might slay all the men of Wales; but he hardly succeeded in capturing or slaying one of them,’ while his own army suffered many losses of ‘men and horses and other things.’ In August he came back to England and held another council, at which, for the second time, he refused Anselm's request for leave to go to Rome. At a council at Winchester, on 14–15 Oct., he met the same request by telling the archbishop that he might go, but that his temporalities should be seized if he went. Though this time he silently accepted Anselm's blessing ere they parted, he carried out his threat; and when Anselm wrote to him from Rome he refused to receive the letter, and swore ‘by the Holy Face of Lucca’—his customary oath—that if the bearer did not hasten to quit his dominions his eyes should be torn out.
About the time of his final quarrel with Anselm (August 1097), William had sanctioned an expedition of the Ætheling Eadgar into Scotland, for the purpose of dethroning Donald Bane and establishing another Eadgar, the Ætheling's nephew, on the throne. This expedition was successful, and William's claim to supremacy over the Scottish crown was acknowledged by the new sovereign [see Edgar]. William now addressed to Philip of France a demand for the cession of the Vexin, the land for which William the Conqueror had died fighting against the same king. Such a demand was in effect a declaration of war, and on 11 Nov. William crossed the sea with his army of mercenaries. He made, however, little progress throughout the winter, and in January 1098 he turned upon Maine, which in 1091 he had promised to recover, or help to recover, for the Duke of Normandy. It was a saying of Rufus that ‘no man can keep all his promises,’ and this promise was one which he had shown no desire to fulfil until 1096, when Normandy passed from his brother's hands
