and it was not without significance that on the eve of setting out he
betrothed himself to the daughter of Henry I of England. He was more
fortunate than his father had been in the moment of his visit. The
Lombard cities quarrelling among themselves were quickly forced to
submission; the Countess Matilda, grown old and tired of strife, sent
her envoys to do homage for the imperial fiefs; the Normans had just
lost their Duke. Pope Pascal, finding himself isolated, did not dare
to meet by a simple negative Henry's demand for the right of
investiture as well as for his coronation as Emperor.

[Sidenote: His proposal.]

By way of escaping from his difficulty he sent to the King an
astonishing proposal. The King was to renounce the right of
investiture and all interference in the elections, in return for which
the prelates should give up all imperial lands and rights with which
they were endowed, retaining merely the right to tithes, offerings,
and private gifts: the papal rights over the Patrimony of St. Peter
and the Norman lands were specially excepted. It has been pointed out
that this was the policy which Count Cavour made famous as "a free
Church in a free State." It seems almost impossible that Pascal should
have thought that the German bishops would accept this solution: he
may have hoped that they could be coerced into it. But in contracting
himself out of the obligations to be imposed on all other
ecclesiastical dignitaries, he practically renounced any claim to set
the policy of the Church. Henry may have aimed at digging an
impassable ditch between the Pope and the German bishops. It was an
impossible agreement; for neither bishops nor lay nobles would wish to
see so large an addition to the King's resources, while Henry himself
could not afford to surrender the right of investiture, since it would