of the diocesan clergy, for the first occasion on record, were summoned, as well as the baronial and clerical grandees.  Nothing came of the meeting save fresh complaints.  The Earl of Leicester became the spokesman of the opposition.  Hurrying back from France he warned the parliament not to fall into the “mouse-traps” laid for them by the king.  In default of English money, enough to meet the king’s necessities was extorted from the Jews, recently handed over to the custody of Richard of Cornwall.  After his return from France at the end of 1254, Henry’s renewed requests for money gave coherence to the opposition.  Between 1254 and 1258 the king’s exactions, and an effective organisation for withstanding them, developed on parallel lines.  To the old sources of discontent were added grievances proceeding from enterprises of so costly a nature that they at last brought about a crisis.

The foremost grievance against the king was still his co-operation with the papacy in spoiling the Church of England.  Though the death of the excommunicated Frederick II. in 1250 was a great gain for Innocent IV., the contest of the papacy against the Hohenstaufen raged as fiercely as ever.  Both in Germany and in Italy Innocent had to carry on his struggle against Conrad, Frederick’s son.  After Conrad’s death, in 1254, there was still Frederick’s strenuous bastard, Manfred, to be reckoned with in Naples and Sicily.  Innocent IV. died in 1254, but his successor, Alexander IV., continued his policy.  A papalist King of Naples was wanted to withstand Manfred, and also a papalist successor to the pope’s phantom King of the Romans, William of Holland, who died in 1256.

Candidates to both crowns were sought for in England.  Since 1250 Innocent IV. had been sounding Richard, Earl of Cornwall, as to his willingness to accept Sicily.  The honourable scruple against hostility to his kinsman, which Richard shared with the king, prevented him from setting up his claims against Conrad.  But the deaths both of Conrad and of Frederick II.’s son by Isabella of England weakened the ties between the English royal house and the Hohenstaufen, and Henry was tempted by Innocent’s offer of the Sicilian throne for his younger son, Edmund, a boy of nine, along with a proposal to release him from his vow of crusade to Syria, if he would prosecute on his son’s behalf a crusading campaign against the enemies of the Church in Naples.  Innocent died before the negotiations were completed, but Alexander IV. renewed the offer, and in April, 1255, Peter of Aigueblanche, Bishop of Hereford, accepted the preferred kingdom in Edmund’s name.  Sicily was to be held by a tribute of money and service, as a fief of the holy see, and was never to be united with the empire.  Henry was to do homage to the pope on his son’s behalf, to go to Italy in person or send thither a competent force, and to reimburse the pope for the large sums expended by him in the prosecution of the war.  In return the English and Scottish proceeds of the crusading tenth, imposed on the clergy at Lyons, were to be paid to Henry.  On October 18, 1255, a cardinal invested Edmund with a ring that symbolised his appointment.  Henry stood before the altar and swore by St. Edward that he would himself go to Apulia, as soon as he could safely pass through France.