re-enacted, and mostly accompanied with a pardon for the offenders against them in times past, or with provisoes for rendering them dispensable by the King at his pleasure; and, as a fact, they were used or disused in a perfectly arbitrary fashion.[1]
There were thus causes, both general throughout Christendom and others specially appertaining to England, why the papal power should have reached its lowest point during this period.
It would, nevertheless, be a great mistake to suppose that it was small even then. To give but a few instances of what the popes could do in England, and of what English kings could admit that they could do.[2] Henry III., on one occasion, when in want of money, told his Parliament, October 13, 1252, that the Pope had given him an entire tenth of the revenues of the Church of England. Again, years later, the nuncio Raymond raised a tenth for the purpose of a crusade. In Edward I.'s time, Peckham, Archbishop of Canterbury, and William de Wickwar, Archbishop of York, were both appointed by the Pope on his own authority, and the former openly declared that, whatever oaths he had taken, he should feel himself absolved from them if they interfered with his duty to the Pope.[3] Yet, of all the self-relying and independent monarchs who ever reigned in England, Edward I. stands foremost, and Professor Creighton[4] even says that it was under his wise government and patriotic care that ' the spirit of national resistance to the claims of the Papacy to exercise supremacy in temporal matters was first developed.' 'If they do these things in a green tree, what shall be done in the dry?'
