Grosseteste fought the extortionate papal demands for Church revenues all the time. In 1239, with his fellow bishops, he tells Otho plainly that the Church is drained dry by the grasping importunity of Rome. Otho left in 1241, and that same year saw Boniface of Savoy, a handsome, soldierly man appointed to Canterbury as St. Edmund’s successor. The following year came a new extortioner from Rome, named Martin, an altogether inferior person to Otho, but with all the legate’s powers of suspension and excommunication. His confiscations and rapacity provoked a remonstrance to the pope even from Henry. Martin at last, in 1245, had to fly for his life from England, and when Grosseteste subsequently had a calculation made of the English Church revenues enjoyed by foreigners, it was found that the incomes of foreign clerks appointed by Pope Innocent IV. amounted to more than 70,000 marks--more than treble the king’s income. And all this was done in spite of refusals by Grosseteste to appoint illiterates or allow boys to hold benefices. The barons sided with the Church against Martin, and drew up a long protest which they sent to the pope at the council of Lyons in 1245. In this they complained:--That the pope, not content with Peter’s Pence, which had been paid cheerfully from old times, wrung money from the Church against the law of the realm, without the king’s permission; and that the pope wrongfully put ignorant, covetous, or absentee Italians into English livings notwithstanding his own promises, the rights of patrons, and the privileges of the English clergy. A year later the protest was repeated with another item objecting to the pope’s claim to recall former charters. Innocent IV.’s answer to this was to threaten to dethrone Henry as he had dethroned his brother-in-law, the Emperor Frederick. The king weakly said no more, the barons, without a leader, were equally silent, and the Church continued “to sate the greed of Rome.” But in Grosseteste there was no spirit of surrender. In 1253, the very last year of his life, he was called upon by the pope to provide a nephew of his with a canonry at Lincoln, and the bishop’s letter of refusal is, perhaps, the only well remembered thing of all Grosseteste’s writings. This letter was not, as commonly stated, sent to the pope but to his representative who was also named Innocent.[38] “The pope has power to build up,” wrote Grosseteste, “but not to pull down. These appointments tend to destruction, not edification, being of man’s device and not according to the words of the Apostles or the will of Christ. By my very love and obedience to the Holy See I must refuse obedience in things altogether opposed to the sanctity of the Apostolic See and contrary to Catholic unity. As a son and a servant I decline to obey, and this refusal must not be taken as rebellion, for it is done in reverence to divine commands.”