The treaty remained a dead letter.  Henry found it quite impossible to raise either the men or the money promised, and abandoned any idea of visiting Sicily in person.  Meanwhile Naples and Sicily were united in support of Manfred, and discomfited the feeble forces of the papal legates who acted against him in Edmund’s name.  At last the Archbishop of Messina came from the pope with an urgent request for payment of the promised sums.  It was in vain that Henry led forth his son, clothed in Apulian dress, before the Lenten parliament of 1257, and begged the magnates to enable him to redeem his bond.  When they heard the king’s speech “the ears of all men tingled”.  Nothing could be got save from the clergy, so that Henry was quite unable to meet his obligations.  He besought Alexander to give him time, to make terms with Manfred, to release Edmund from his debts on condition of ceding a large part of Apulia to the Church,—­to do anything in short save insist upon the original contract.  The pope deferred the payment, but the respite did Henry no good.  Edmund’s Sicilian monarchy vanished into nothing, when, early in 1258, Manfred was crowned king at Palermo.  Before the end of the year, Alexander cancelled the grant of Sicily to Edmund.  Yet his demands for the discharge of Henry’s obligations had contributed not a little towards focussing the gathering discontent.[1]

    [1] For Edmund’s Sicilian claims, see W.E.  Rhodes’ article on
    Edmund, Earl of Lancaster, in the English Historical
    Review, x. (1895), 20-27.

While Henry was seeking the Sicilian crown for his son, his brother Richard was elected to the German throne.  Since William of Holland’s death in January, 1256, the German magnates, divided between the Hohenstaufen and the papalist parties, had hesitated for nearly a year as to the choice of his successor.  As neither party was able to secure the election of its own partisan, a compromise was mooted.  At last the name of Richard of Cornwall was brought definitely forward.  He was of high rank and unblemished reputation; a friend of the pope yet a kinsman of the Hohenstaufen; he was moderate and conciliatory; he had enough money to bribe the electors handsomely, and he was never likely to be so deeply rooted in Germany as to stand in the way of the princes of the empire.  The Archbishop of Cologne became his paid partisan, and the Count Palatine of the Rhine accepted his candidature on conditions.  The French party set up as his rival Alfonso X. of Castile, who, despite his newly formed English alliance, was quite willing to stand against Richard.  At last, in January, 1257, the votes of three electors, Cologne, Mainz, and the Palatine, were cast for Richard, who also obtained the support of Ottocar, King of Bohemia.  However, in April, Trier, Saxony, and Brandenburg voted for Alfonso.  The double election of two foreigners perpetuated the Great Interregnum for some sixteen years.  Alfonso’s title was only