Chapter V · JOHN AND THE POPE 1210–1214 (continued 2)
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Serious grievances connected with it, however, still remained. A special tax seems to have been levied throughout the realm, under the title of “aid for the relaxation of the interdict”[917]—either to pay the remainder of the indemnity to the bishops or to furnish the tribute due to Rome. No indemnification was provided for the losses of any one except the bishops; the multitude of lower clergy, the monks, nuns and lay people of both sexes whose property had been seized or damaged “on occasion of the interdict” were ignored in the settlement. When they applied to the legate for redress, he told them that he had no instructions to deal with their case, but that they might appeal to the Pope.[918] For the great majority of individual victims, ruined as they were, such an appeal was impracticable. The greater religious houses might have been able to attempt it; but regulars and seculars alike were apparently in too much dread of the king to attempt anything at all. Within two months after his return to England John put forth a demand to the clergy of at least one diocese, and to several religious houses, in the shape of a courteous request that they would waive all claim to the return of “those things which you gave to us in the time of the interdict, and which are now described as having been taken from you.” A form of renunciation or quit-claim was issued, evidently intended for distribution throughout the country, to be signed by the parties concerned.[919] John in fact seems to have again asked all the English clergy, as he had asked them two years before, for a quit-claim on the plea that their contributions had been voluntary; and though we have no statement of the result, there seems no reason to doubt that in 1214, as in 1212, the audacious demand was complied with.
The weakness of the clergy was partly owing to the fact that they were disappointed in their hopes of finding a champion in the legate. At his coming he had been hailed as a reformer both in Church and State[920]; but the year 1214 had scarcely begun when Archbishop Stephen, after consultation with his suffragans,[921] addressed to him a solemn protest, threatening to appeal against him to the Pope unless he desisted from instituting prelates to vacant churches, contrary to the rights of the metropolitan. Nicolas disregarded the protest, and commissioned Pandulf—who had just gone back to Rome—to defend him against the appeal.[922] For nine months Nicolas continued to exercise his influence as he chose, without remonstrance from the Pope. He was an instrument which could not be dispensed with until its special work—the removal of the interdict—was done; moreover, the king was on the Continent, and in the doubtful state of political affairs it would scarcely have been prudent, during his absence, for Innocent to withdraw his own representative from England. No sooner, however, had John returned than Nicolas was summoned back to Rome.[923] It is clear that Stephen’s protest and appeal had been really directed not merely against legatine intrusion into his own metropolitical rights, but also, and chiefly, against the legate’s interpretation of the papal letter concerning elections to churches, and his action in making himself the medium of royal interference in this matter.[924] Stephen indeed seems to have looked upon Nicolas as the chief obstacle to a settlement, between himself and the king, of this question of elections; and a formal settlement, wholly in the Church’s favour, was in fact made as soon as king and archbishop were once more face to face. On November 21 John published a grant of free and canonical election to all the churches in his realm.[925] This grant, like every other acknowledgement made by the Crown, before or since, of the Church’s right on this point, was of course destined never to be anything but a dead letter. But it served John’s purpose. It saved him from a fresh quarrel with the Church at a moment when the struggle with the barons in which he had been engaged almost ever since his accession to the Crown had entered upon a new phase and assumed a new character which made it, alike for them and for him, a matter of life and death.