7
AN INCONVENIENT TRUTH
Just Say NoIt took a conqueror to seize a kingdom. Kings, however, if they were weak, and especially if they were children, might be captured with altogether greater ease. Even the very highest ranking of them – even future emperors. Eighty years had passed since the abduction of the infant Otto III in 984 – and now, once again, the Reich was ruled by a child. Henry IV, son and namesake of the great emperor who had done so much to implant the cause of reform in Rome, had been crowned king back in 1056, when he was only five years old. Self-reliant and sharp-witted he may have been – but not even the most precocious boy could hope to stamp his authority at such a tender age. Just as Duke William, throughout his minority, had found himself powerless to prevent the steady collapse of order within Normandy, so was the infant Henry, for all his talents, bound to remain the toy of those who had the keeping of him. Control the king and take control of the kingdom: so it seemed to the more unscrupulous among the great lords of the
Reich. Henry, for as long as he remained under age, at any rate, could hardly help but rank as a likely candidate for a kidnapping.So it was, in the spring of 1062, when the Archbishop of Cologne came gliding down the Rhine in a particularly handsome galley and docked at the island palace of Kaiserswerth, where the court had been celebrating Easter, the king’s guardians should have been fully on their guard. But they were not. A serious lapse: for Henry himself – impulsive, mercurial and twelve years old – was just the boy to jump at the chance of exploring a state-of-the-art showboat. No sooner had he stepped on board, however, than all the oars began to beat, “and he was immediately propelled out into the middle of the river with a quite remarkable speed.”1 The young king, despite not being able to swim, boldly jumped overboard: an attempt at escape that would have left him drowned had one of the archbishop’s accomplices not dived in after him, and hauled him back to safety. To captivity as well. Rowed upriver to Cologne, where he discovered that even the Holy Lance, that most awesome of all his possessions, had been filched, Henry found himself the impotent cipher of his abductors: a whole swaggering gang of dukes and prelates. Hardly the experience, in short, to bolster his faith much in either princes or bishops.