Encouraged by imperial patronage, and stimulated by a desire to rid himself of disgrace by sullying the hands that had branded him, the excommunicated cardinal did not hesitate to call the Pope a heretic, an adulterer, a sanguinary beast of prey.

The emperor himself knew Gregory too well to believe such a tissue of absurdity; but he hoped to find others more credulous than himself.
Upon the accusations already specified, and the invectives of Hugues le Blanc, the assemblage of prelates at Worms resolve upon the deposition of Gregory VII.

It is then that Henry steps forth, as the life and soul of the conventicle, armed with its decree, and addresses an insulting letter to the Pope, inscribed "Henry, king by the grace of God, to Hildebrand." In this letter, the decree of the conventicle is lost in the insolence of the king.

"I," is the language of the missive, "I have followed their advice, because it seemed to me just.

I refuse to acknowledge you Pope, and in the capacity of patron of Rome command you to vacate the Holy See." Can the most jaundiced eye, can the man who learned, even in his boyhood, to loathe the name of Hildebrand, read these expressions without confessing that the king was the aggressor, and that if the Christian Church had a right to expect protection from its appointed head, Gregory VII was called upon to vindicate the majesty and liberty of religion so grossly outraged in his person?
Surely it will not be asserted at this day that the head of the State, by virtue of his temporal power, should be the head of the Church; or does that beautiful logic still exist, which denied an absolute spiritual supremacy in the successor of St.Peter, yet admitted it as an incidental prerogative to the crown of England?
But we have yet to see the last act of this attempted deposition.
A clerk of Parma, named Roland, was charged with the delivery of this letter, and the decrees of the conventicle of Worms.