claimants hastened to appeal to Rome, and their appeal reached the Papal Court before Christmas.  The result of the contest was a startling one both for themselves and for the king.  After a year’s careful examination Innocent the Third, who now occupied the Papal throne, quashed at the close of 1206 both the contested elections.  The decision was probably a just one, but Innocent was far from stopping there.  The monks who appeared before him brought powers from the convent to choose a new Primate should their earlier nomination be set aside; and John, secretly assured of their choice of Grey, had promised to confirm their election.  But the bribes which the king lavished at Rome failed to win the Pope over to this plan; and whether from mere love of power, for he was pushing the Papal claims of supremacy over Christendom further than any of his predecessors, or as may fairly be supposed in despair of a free election within English bounds, Innocent commanded the monks to elect in his presence Stephen Langton to the archiepiscopal see.

[Sidenote:  The Interdict]

Personally a better choice could not have been made, for Stephen was a man who by sheer weight of learning and holiness of life had risen to the dignity of Cardinal, and whose after career placed him in the front rank of English patriots.  But in itself the step was an usurpation of the rights both of the Church and of the Crown.  The king at once met it with resistance.  When Innocent consecrated the new Primate in June 1207, and threatened the realm with interdict if Langton were any longer excluded from his see, John replied by a counter-threat that the interdict should be followed by the banishment of the clergy and the mutilation of every Italian he could seize in the realm.  How little he feared the priesthood he showed when the clergy refused his demand of a thirteenth of movables from the whole country and Archbishop Geoffry of York resisted the tax before the Council.  John banished the Archbishop and extorted the money.  Innocent however was not a man to draw back from his purpose, and in March 1208 the interdict he had threatened fell upon the land.  All worship save that of a few privileged orders, all administration of Sacraments save that of private baptism, ceased over the length and breadth of the country:  the church-bells were silent, the dead lay unburied on the ground.  Many of the bishops fled from the country.  The Church in fact, so long the main support of the royal power against the baronage, was now driven into opposition.  Its change of attitude was to be of vast moment in the struggle which was impending; but John recked little of the future; he replied to the interdict by confiscating the lands of the clergy who observed it, by subjecting them in spite of their privileges to the royal courts, and by leaving outrages on them unpunished.  “Let him go,” said John, when a Welshman was brought before him for the murder of a priest, “he has killed my enemy.”