Stephen accepted his suspension without protest. He was indeed so grievously disappointed at the turn which affairs in England had taken, and so hopeless of doing any further good there, that he had almost determined not only to resign his see, but to retire altogether from the world and bury himself in a hermitage or a Carthusian cell.[1089] Several of the bishops visited the king before they went over sea;[1090] we are not told whether Stephen did so; but he certainly had the king’s permission for his journey to Rome, for on September 10 John by letters patent took under his protection all the archbishop’s men, goods, lands and other possessions, and forbade his own men to do them any injury.[1091] On the 13th the king wrote again to the Pope, asking for his counsel and aid, and complaining that “whereas before we subjected our land to you as overlord, our barons were obedient to us, now they have risen up violently against us, specially on account, as they publicly declare, of that very thing.” This letter was carried by the archbishops of Bordeaux and Dublin and seven other envoys.[1092] Pandulf--now bishop-elect of Norwich--seems to have gone to Rome about the same time, charged with another letter to the Pope.[1093] But before any of these travellers had set out on their way the Pope had drawn his sword again; and this time the sword was a two-handed one. It was the sword of the temporal overlord of England, as well as of the spiritual head of Christendom. The sixty-first article of the Charter enacted, as we have seen, that if the king should procure “from any one” a revocation or cassation of that document, such revocation should be accounted void. The only person, however, from whom such a thing could possibly be sought was of course the Pope; and in so far as the Pope was concerned, the clause was itself in feudal law null and void from the beginning, owing to the action of the barons before the Charter was drawn up or thought of. Whatever may have been their real share in the surrender of the kingdom to the Pope in May 1213, they had at any rate in February 1215, if we may believe William Mauclerc (and there is no reason for disbelieving him), put on record their full concurrence in that transaction after it was accomplished, and even taken voluntarily upon themselves the whole responsibility both for its accomplishment and for its initiation.[1094] Thereby they had deprived themselves of whatever legal pretexts they might otherwise have had for repudiating its consequences; and foremost of those consequences was the fact that the Pope was now legally the supreme arbiter of political affairs in England, by a right which had been given to him by the joint action of the king and the barons, and against which no later reservation made between those two parties themselves (such as the sixty-first article of the Charter) was of any force in feudal law. The framers of the Charter seem to have been conscious of this;[1095] John, indeed,