cession in 1216 was doubtless due to the
Archbishop's absence and disgrace at Rome. The suppression of disorder
seems to have revived the older spirit of resistance among the royal
ministers; for when Langton demanded a fresh confirmation of the Charter in
Parliament at London William Brewer, one of the King's councillors,
protested that it had been extorted by force and was without legal
validity. "If you loved the King, William," the Primate burst out in anger,
"you would not throw a stumbling-block in the way of the peace of the
realm." The young king was cowed by the Archbishop's wrath, and promised
observance of the Charter. But it may have been their consciousness of such
a temper among the royal councillors that made Langton and the baronage
demand two years later a fresh promulgation of the Charter as the price of
a subsidy, and Henry's assent established the principle, so fruitful of
constitutional results, that redress of wrongs precedes a grant to the
Crown.

[Sidenote: State of the Church]

These repeated sanctions of the Charter and the government of the realm
year after year in accordance with its provisions were gradually bringing
the new freedom home to the mass of Englishmen. But the sense of liberty
was at this time quickened and intensified by a religious movement which
stirred English society to its depths. Never had the priesthood wielded
such boundless power over Christendom as in the days of Innocent the Third
and his immediate successors. But its religious hold on the people was
loosening day by day. The old reverence for the Papacy was fading away
before the universal resentment at its political ambition, its lavish use
of interdict and excommunication for purely secular ends, its degradation
of the most sacred sentences into means of financial extortion. In Italy
the struggle that was opening between Rome and Frederick the Second
disclosed a spirit of scepticism which among the Epicurean poets of
Florence denied the immortality of the soul and attacked the very
foundations of the faith itself. In Southern Gaul, Languedoc and Provence
had embraced the heresy of the Albigenses and thrown off all allegiance to
the Papacy. Even in England, though there were no signs as yet of religious
revolt, and though the political action of Rome had been in the main on the
side of freedom, there was a spirit of resistance to its interference with
national concerns which broke out in the struggle against John.