an empty show, but Richard took his appointment seriously.  He made his way to Germany, and was crowned King of the Romans on May 17, 1257, at Aachen.  He remained in the country nearly eighteen months, and succeeded in establishing his authority in the Rhineland, though beyond that region he never so much as showed his face.[1] The elevation of his brother to the highest dignity in Christendom was some consolation to Henry for the Sicilian failure.

    [1] See for Richard’s career, Koch’s Richard von Cornwallis,
    1209-1257, and the article on Richard, King of the Romans, in
    the Dictionary of National Biography.

The nation was disgusted to see maladministration grow worse and worse; the nobles were indignant at the ever-increasing sway of the foreigners; and several years of bad harvests, high prices, rain, flood, and murrain sharpened the chronic misery of the poor.  The withdrawal of Earl Richard to his new kingdom deprived the king and nation of an honourable if timid counsellor, though a more capable leader was at last provided in the disgraced governor of Gascony.  Simon still deeply resented the king’s ingratitude for his services, and had become enough of an Englishman to sympathise with the national feelings.  Since his dismissal in 1253 he had held somewhat aloof from politics.  He knew so well that his interests centred in England that he declined the offer of the French regency on the death of Blanche of Castile.  He prosecuted his rights over Bigorre with characteristic pertinacity, and lawsuits about his wife’s jointure from her first husband exacerbated his relations with Henry.  It cannot, however, be said that the two were as yet fiercely hostile.  Simon went to Henry’s help in Gascony in 1254, served on various missions and was nominated on others from which he withdrew.  His chosen occupations during these years of self-effacement were religious rather than political; his dearest comrades were clerks rather than barons.

Among Montfort’s closer intimates, Bishop Grosseteste was removed by death in 1253.  But others of like stamp still remained, such as Adam Marsh, the Franciscan mystic, whose election to the see of Ely was quashed by the malevolence of the court; Eudes Rigaud, the famous Archbishop of Rouen, and Walter of Cantilupe, Bishop of Worcester, who formed a connecting link between the aristocracy and the Church.  Despite the ineffectiveness of the clerical opposition to the papacy, the spirit of independence expressed in Grosseteste’s protests had not yet deserted the churchmen.  Clerks had felt the pinch of the papal exactions, had been bled to the uttermost to support the Sicilian candidature, and had seen aliens and non-residents usurping their revenues and their functions.  More timid and less cohesive than the barons, they had quicker brains, more ideas, deeper grievances, and better means of reaching the masses.  If resentment of the Sicilian candidature was the spark that fired