England as fully as his uncle Innocent III.

Weakness, piety, and self-interest combined to make Henry III.
acquiesce in the legate's exactions. "I neither wish nor dare," said
he, "to oppose the lord pope in anything." The union of king and legate
was irresistible. The lay opposition was slow and feeble. Gilbert
Marshal, though showing no lack of spirit, was not the man to play the
part which his brother Richard had filled so effectively. Richard, Earl
of Cornwall, who constituted himself the spokesman of the magnates,
made a special grievance of the marriage of Simon of Montfort with his
sister Eleanor. England, he said, was like a vineyard with a broken
hedge, so that all that went by could steal the grapes. He took arms,
and subscribed the first of the long series of plans of constitutional
reform that the reign was to witness, according to which the king was
to be guided by a chosen body of counsellors. But at the crisis of the
movement he held back, having accomplished nothing.

There was more vigour in the ecclesiastical opposition. Robert
Grosseteste,[1] a Suffolk man of humble birth, had already won for
himself a position of unique distinction at Oxford and Paris. A teacher
of rare force, a scholar of unexampled range, a thinker of daring
originality, and a writer who had touched upon almost every known
subject, he was at the height of his fame when, in 1235, his appointment
as Bishop of Lincoln gave the fullest opportunities for the employment
of his great gifts in the public service. He was convinced that the
preoccupation of the clergy in worldly employment and the constant
aggressions of the civil upon the ecclesiastical courts lay at the root
of the evils of the time. His conviction brought him into conflict with
the king rather than the legate, though for the moment his absorption in
the cares of his diocese distracted his attention from general
questions. The bishops generally had become so hostile that Otto shrank
from meeting them in another council, and strove to get money by
negotiating individually with the leading churchmen. The old foe of
papal usurpations, Robert Twenge, renewed his agitation on behalf of the
rights of patrons, and the clergy of Berkshire drew up a remonstrance
against Otto's extortions.

[1] For Grosseteste, see F.S. Stevenson, _Robert Grosseteste,
Bishop of Lincoln_ (1899).

Archbishop Edmund saw the need of opposing both legate and king; but he
was hampered by his