Everything Turned Upside DownEarly 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!,”80 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.”
81 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 the royal supplicant shivering in the snow below him, vigorously urged the course of mercy.As well they might have done. For Matilda, though she remained unstintingly loyal to the Holy Father, the benefits of securing the friendship of Henry, her overlord and second-cousin, were obvious – not least because, with the death of her mother the previous year, she now ruled alone as the protectress of her lands. Hugh, meanwhile, in his concern to see his godson redeemed from the yawning jaws of hell, felt little call to consider what impact Henry’s absolution might have upon Gregory’s plans and hopes for the reordering of the fallen world. The monks of Cluny, after all, were already as close to an angelic state as it was possible for flesh and blood to be. Far from labouring to bring the remainder of humanity to share in their own miraculous condition, their instinct had always been instead to man the ramparts of their abbey. Whereas Gregory did not hesitate to charge seasoned warriors such as Erlembald to fight for the cause of reform from their saddles, Hugh would invariably urge the opposite course upon them, and encourage any penitent knight to swap his mail coat for a cowl. Indeed, the glamour and mystique of Cluny’s name being what it was, even dukes, on occasion, had been known to abandon their princedoms for the abbey’s cloisters. “The shepherds flee, as do the dogs who are the protectors of their flocks,” Gregory, in naked frustration, had once raged at Hugh. “Only take or receive a duke into the quiet of Cluny, and you will be leaving a hundred thousand Christians without a guardian!”