remember the details of such a sojourn, but there would certainly remain in his mind some recollections of anxious faces waiting for news of the war, stories of pagan cruelties, the horror of infidel sacrilege, solemn litanies for deliverance, and the steady raising of walls and fortresses, which were to give security against the invader.1 All which recollections found a parallel in his own experience in due time.

2

Alfred also saw some things in Rome which prevented him from cherishing any illusions about its claims to special sanctity. We find nothing of Æthelwulf's hankering after the mysterious city. in Alfred's later life. When the English king arrived, Leo was already dying; within a few weeks he was dead. The Pope was no sooner out of the way than Alfred and his father witnessed the scandal of a contested election. Benedict III. had the support of the clergy and the people. Anastasius was the candidate of the Roman nobles, and declared that he had the Emperor's support. At the head of an armed faction he seized the Lateran, and stripped Benedict of his pontifical robes. The appointment of the chief Pontiff of

1 Bishop Swithun is said to have walled Winchester; this may be another link between what the English Embassy saw in Rome and the work set on foot in England.

2 The dates are not quite certain. The coincidence of these two events is accepted also by the Bishop of Bristol.

the Christian Church was settled by the investigation of Imperial legates, who decided in favour of Benedict III. Anastasius was disgraced and degraded to lay communion. This was in September 855, and it was not till after Easter of the next year, 856, when spring had opened the Alpine passes again, that Æthelwulf set out to return northwards, with Alfred in his train.

It was natural that reflection on these early recollections should aid in giving Alfred's character a somewhat different stamp from that of his father, and that, in comparing Æthelwulf with Alfred, we think of Ethelwulf as one of several royal ecclesiastics, and of Alfred as a more solitary and saintly character. Æthelwulf's religion leans on the conventional props, and his good intentions have to be taken as an excuse for some neglect of duty towards his kingdom. Alfred's is the more religious life, finding its religious duty in the service of his people, and working out his own salvation-and theirs-in fear and trembling indeed, but also with high motive and religious breadth of conception and aim. When all allowance has been made for a considerable Protestant bias which Sir John Spelman shares with seventeenth-century England, there is still some truth in his remark that "the life and ways of Alfred were not perfectly pleasing to the Fathers of Rome. All which I have the

rather noted because that Baronius, Harpsfeld, and other Romish Catholicks do not a little boast of the obedience and captivity of this Glorious Prince as of one wholly pious, whereas indeed (all things considered) he manifested himself to be less theirs than one would think a Christian Prince of those times could have been." His original impressions must have been strengthened and confirmed when, ten years later, the Papacy sank into one of those periods of degradation which have recurred intermittently in its history.

1 Sir John Spelman's “Life of Alfred,” p. 221.

2 The table of contents of a Papal history for the years 896 and 897 would give: "Death of Pope Formosus; Pope Boniface VII.; trial and condemnation of the body of Formosus by Pope Stephen VI.; Pope Stephen strangled; Pope Romanus; Pope Theodorus VI.; Pope John IX.; Pope Sergius IV. Marquisate of Tusculum. Theodora and Marozia." It would be difficult for a good man to remain attached to the Papacy at such a time. Cf. Bishop of Bristol in Bowker's "Alfred."

Chapter IV

The Court of the Emperor

"To live with a man who has lived with the immortals, who has advanced from youth to manhood in such converse with their spirits that intimacy and affection deepening year by year have turned the dead names into living friends, to catch from him the same ardour of admiration and passion of delight, is a rare felicity, a lifelong blessing." -R. W. Dale.

AT the age of six what a boy knows is not of much importance: but his interests are already prophetic. It was part of Alfred's singular good fortune, that on his way home from Rome his father visited the court of Charles the Bald with his son in his train, and spent several months with the king of the Western Franks. This gave him an early introduction to the ways of the greatest and most famous court in Europe. Anyone who has watched the effect of a long voyage, or even of a long journey, on an intelligent child, can appreciate how the sights and sounds of this busy court awakened Alfred's interest, and helped to determine his development afterwards. He could never again shut out from his view the great world beyond his own kingdom. When, in after days, news came to England of

battles and treaties and controversies in Europe, his memory would fill with faces and forms and voices which made what were mere names to others living men to him. His early recollections were kept alive by travellers and pilgrims, for whom he kept open house. Some of these associations and memories no doubt supplied him with material when he came to form his own conception of kingship.

It is important to realise how much was meant by a visit to Charles' court at this time. The vast empire of Charles the Great [Charlemagne] had only been held together by his titanic force of character. When he died, it fell naturally into sections which corresponded with the differences in race and history of the peoples he had ruled. His only surviving son was Lewis the Pious, who succeeded him in 814. Three years later he made the first division of the Empire between the three sons of his first marriage. He married for his second wife an ambitious and beautiful woman, whose son was Charles the Bald. The endeavour to carve a heritage for the late-born child out of the kingdoms promised to the elder brothers, and their consequent jealousy towards the young interloper, combined to bring about a series of disastrous dissensions and bloody battles. At last, in the year 843, at the Treaty of Verdun, a division of the Empire took place which later events ratified as