The following historical facts should be carefully noted. Each of the several divisions of England—call them the Heptarchy or anything else—owed its evangelization to a source not exclusively of the Roman mission. Kent and Essex had certainly remained Christian under the successors of Augustine; but Wessex, with Winchester as its capital, was converted by Birinus a missionary from Northern Italy; East Anglia by Felix, a Burgundian; Northumbria and Mercia by Irishmen; Essex by Cidd and Sussex by Wilfrid. Therefore the Roman mission, after the death of King Ethelbert whose successors relapsed into heathenism, was rather a failure.[53] Augustine was narrow-minded and sectarian, attached to everything Italian. There were seven British bishops then in England. In 602 a meeting was held at which representatives of the Italian and British Churches were present. Augustine demanded that the Celtic Church should change the time of keeping Easter in order to adopt the Roman time. The British bishops declined to do anything of the sort, and then Augustine lost his temper and rebuked them. His conduct thus exasperated the members of the Celtic Church. The Italians were looked upon as foreigners seeking to lord it over the native Church, and the Scots and Britons were determined to yield their independence to neither threats nor entreaties. Augustine claimed metropolitan power, but the Celtic bishops haughtily rejected such a proposal. On the death of Ethelbert, and when a difference arose between his son who succeeded him and Laurentius the archbishop, Laurentius, Mellitus and Justus, were about to throw up the Italian mission in England and retire to Gaul.[54] London was lost, and the whole aspect of the Roman mission was gloomy in the extreme, when the second Archbishop died in 619. Mellitus the third died in 624. Justus who succeeded him had consecrated Paulinus on the 21st of July, 625, as the first Archbishop of York. In 627 King Edwin held a Witenagemót in a _room_ where the introduction of Christianity into the Kingdom of Northumbria was discussed. The result was that the king and his nobles were converted to the Christian religion.[55] The fact that a room was capable of accommodating the Witenagemót has led to the conclusion that the number must be small. Paulinus had fled from York in 633, eight years after his consecration, and after the battle of Heathfield. But his place was taken by Bishop Aidan, a missionary from Columba’s Irish monastery in Iona, who had established an Episcopal see in Lindisfarne. There is a letter of Pope Boniface V. to Archbishop Justus, written between April, 624, and October, 625, conferring on him the primacy of all Britain and ending with these words, “Hanc autem ecclesiam utpote specialiter consistentam sub potestate et tuitione sanctæ Romanæ ecclesiæ.”[56] [But this Church as specially remaining under the power and instruction of the Roman Holy Church.]