d the land.
The king was regarded as guilty and damned; his ministers looked upon
him as a Samson shorn of his locks; his very wife feared contamination
from his society; his children, as a man blasted with the malediction of
Heaven. When a man was universally supposed to be cursed in the house
and in the field; in the wood and in the church; in eating or drinking;
in fasting or sleeping; in working or resting; in his arms, in his legs,
in his heart, and in his head; living or dying; in this world and in the
next,--what could he do?

And what could Henry do, with all his greatness? His victorious armies
deserted him; a rival prince laid claim to his throne; his enemies
multiplied; his difficulties thickened; new dangers surrounded him on
every side. If loyalty--that potent principle--had summoned one hundred
thousand warriors to his camp, a principle much more powerful than
loyalty--the fear of hell--had dispersed them. Even his friends joined
the Pope. The sainted Agnes, his own mother, acquiesced in the sentence.
The Countess Matilda, the richest lady in the world, threw all her
treasures at the feet of her spiritual monarch. The moral sentiments of
his own subjects were turned against him; he was regarded as justly
condemned. The great princes of Germany sought his deposition. The world
rejected him, the Church abandoned him, and God had forsaken him. He was
prostrate, helpless, disarmed, ruined. True, he made superhuman efforts:
he traversed his empire with the hope of rallying his subjects; he flew
from city to city,--but all in vain. Every convent, every castle, every
city of his vast dominions beheld in him the visitation of the Almighty.
The diadem was obscured by the tiara, and loyalty itself yielded to the
superior potency of religious fear. Only Bertha, his neglected wife, was
faithful and trusting in that gloomy day; all else had defrauded and
betrayed him. How bitter his humiliation! And yet his haughty foe was
not contented with the punishment he had inflicted. He declared that if
the sun went down on the 23d of February, 1077, before Henry was
restored to the bosom of the Church, his crown should be transferred to
another. That inexorable old pontiff laid claim to the right of giving
and taking away imperial crowns. Was ever before seen such arrogance and
audacity in a priest? And yet he knew that he would be sustained. He
knew that his supremacy was based on a universally recognized idea. Who
can resist