In 1239 Gregory IX. began his final conflict with Frederick II., and demanded the support of all Europe.  As before, from 1227 to 1230, the pressure of the papal necessity was at once felt in England.  The legate had to raise supplies at all costs.  Crusaders were allowed to renounce their vows for ready money.  Every visitation or conference became an excuse for procurations and fees.  Presents were no longer rejected, but rather greedily solicited.  On the pretence that it was necessary to reform the Scottish Church, “which does not recognise the Roman Church as its sole mother and metropolitan,” Otto excited the indignation of Alexander II. by attempts to extend his jurisdiction to Scotland, hitherto unvisited by legates.  In England his claims soon grew beyond all bearing.  At last he demanded a fifth of all clerical goods to enable the pope to finance the anti-imperial crusade.  Even this was more endurable than the order received from Rome that 300 clerks of Roman families should be “provided” to benefices in England in order that Gregory might obtain the support of their relatives against Frederick.  Both as feudal suzerain and as spiritual despot, the pope lorded it over England as fully as his uncle Innocent III.

Weakness, piety, and self-interest combined to make Henry III. acquiesce in the legate’s exactions.  “I neither wish nor dare,” said he, “to oppose the lord pope in anything.”  The union of king and legate was irresistible.  The lay opposition was slow and feeble.  Gilbert Marshal, though showing no lack of spirit, was not the man to play the part which his brother Richard had filled so effectively.  Richard, Earl of Cornwall, who constituted himself the spokesman of the magnates, made a special grievance of the marriage of Simon of Montfort with his sister Eleanor.  England, he said, was like a vineyard with a broken hedge, so that all that went by could steal the grapes.  He took arms, and subscribed the first of the long series of plans of constitutional reform that the reign was to witness, according to which the king was to be guided by a chosen body of counsellors.  But at the crisis of the movement he held back, having accomplished nothing.

There was more vigour in the ecclesiastical opposition.  Robert Grosseteste,[1] a Suffolk man of humble birth, had already won for himself a position of unique distinction at Oxford and Paris.  A teacher of rare force, a scholar of unexampled range, a thinker of daring originality, and a writer who had touched upon almost every known subject, he was at the height of his fame when, in 1235, his appointment as Bishop of Lincoln gave the fullest opportunities for the employment of his great gifts in the public service.  He was convinced that the preoccupation of the clergy in worldly employment and the constant aggressions of the civil upon the ecclesiastical courts lay at the root of the evils of the time.  His conviction brought him into conflict with the king rather than