Royal prohibitions did not prove the existence of a national Canon Law. "To prove that we must see an ecclesiastical judge, whose hands are free and who has no 'prohibition' to fear, rejecting a decretal because it infringes the law of the English Church or because that Church has not received it." Whatever might be the view of a late age, no such testimony was forthcoming before the breach with Rome. Indeed the "one great work of our English canonist in the fifteenth century" showed that the position which had been attributed to the English Church in the Middle Ages was alien to its whole way of thought. In the age of the conciliar movement, when men of liberal temperament were urging that the Pope was subject to a general council, William Lyndwood evidenced nothing but "a conservative curialism." The book was necessarily controversial, but written with that complete absence of the polemical spirit which characterised all Maitland's work. "I hope and trust," he wrote to Mr Poole, September 12, 1898, "that you were not very serious when you said that the bishop was sore. I feel for him a respect so deep, that if you told me that the republication of my essays would make him more unhappy than a sane man is whenever people dissent from him, I should be in great doubt what to do. It is not too late to destroy all or some of the sheets. I hate to bark at the heels of a great man whom I admire, but tried hard to seem as well as to be respectful." An accident of friendship drew Maitland still further into the tormented sea of controversial church history. Lord Acton was appointed Regius Professor of Modern History at Cambridge in 1895, and, despite radical differences of creed and outlook, soon discovered in Maitland a spirit as ardent and disinterested as his own. Outwardly there was a great contrast between the two men, Maitland frail and delicate, his pale eager face a lamp of humour and curiosity, Acton massive, reserved, deliberate; but they understood one another, and soon came to share a common interest in a great literary enterprise. One day Acton propounded to Maitland the scheme for a great Cambridge history written upon the combined plan which was already familiar in France and Germany. It was to be a Universal History, a history of the whole world from the first beginnings to the present day, written by an army of specialists, and concentrating the latest results of special study. Maitland suggested that a more modest plan, a history of modern Europe since the Reformation, would prove to be more practical, and in this view Acton concurred.