[Footnote 61: There was also a prayer to prohibit the practice of confiscating the goods of Jews and heathens at their baptism, a practice tending to debar them from offering themselves at the font.] [Footnote 62: Cotton. Tiber. B. vi. F. 64.] Henry, deeply lamenting the gross abuses referred to in this petition, implored the Pope to suffer them to be redressed. His Holiness agreed to certain constitutions, by which, if fully acted upon, most of the evils complained of would have been rectified. The Pope, however, begged Henry in return to abrogate all the laws which had been enacted in England to the prejudice of Rome; but the King declared his inability to meet the wishes of his Holiness. The extent to which the abuse of the Pope's[63] authority had been connived at in this country,--a state of things which naturally indisposed him towards any change for the better,--may be inferred from two facts: that he (in defiance of the statutes of Edward III. and Richard II.) had by his own authority created thirteen (p. 067) bishops in the province of Canterbury in two years; and had appointed his nephew, Prospero Colonna, a boy of only fourteen years of age, Archdeacon of Canterbury, with fourteen benefices in England. [Footnote 63: The fact is, that Henry, during his wars in France, suffered Pope Martin to exercise his pretended prerogative in the disposal of benefices to an extent, if not unprecedented, certainly most unjustifiable. The Chapter of York gave the first blow to this growing usurpation by refusing to admit, in obedience to the Pope's mandate, Richard Fleming, Bishop of Lincoln, into the archiepiscopal see.] * * * * *