The weakness of the clergy was partly owing to the fact that they were disappointed in their hopes of finding a champion in the legate. At his coming he had been hailed as a reformer both in Church and State[920]; but the year 1214 had scarcely begun when Archbishop Stephen, after consultation with his suffragans,[921] addressed to him a solemn protest, threatening to appeal against him to the Pope unless he desisted from instituting prelates to vacant churches, contrary to the rights of the metropolitan. Nicolas disregarded the protest, and commissioned Pandulf--who had just gone back to Rome--to defend him against the appeal.[922] For nine months Nicolas continued to exercise his influence as he chose, without remonstrance from the Pope. He was an instrument which could not be dispensed with until its special work--the removal of the interdict--was done; moreover, the king was on the Continent, and in the doubtful state of political affairs it would scarcely have been prudent, during his absence, for Innocent to withdraw his own representative from England. No sooner, however, had John returned than Nicolas was summoned back to Rome.[923] It is clear that Stephen’s protest and appeal had been really directed not merely against legatine intrusion into his own metropolitical rights, but also, and chiefly, against the legate’s interpretation of the papal letter concerning elections to churches, and his action in making himself the medium of royal interference in this matter.[924] Stephen indeed seems to have looked upon Nicolas as the chief obstacle to a settlement, between himself and the king, of this question of elections; and a formal settlement, wholly in the Church’s favour, was in fact made as soon as king and archbishop were once more face to face. On November 21 John published a grant of free and canonical election to all the churches in his realm.[925] This grant, like every other acknowledgement made by the Crown, before or since, of the Church’s right on this point, was of course destined never to be anything but a dead letter. But it served John’s purpose. It saved him from a fresh quarrel with the Church at a moment when the struggle with the barons in which he had been engaged almost ever since his accession to the Crown had entered upon a new phase and assumed a new character which made it, alike for them and for him, a matter of life and death. FOOTNOTES: [700] _Ann. Dunst._ a. 1210. [701] W. Coventry, vol. ii. p. 202. [702] _Brut y Tywysogion_, a. 1210.