Becket wrote again and again to the Pope, bitterly complaining that the successive ambassadors of the King, John of Oxford, John Cummin, the Prior of St. Augustine's, returned from Rome each with larger concessions.[145] The Pope acknowledged that the concessions had been extorted from him. The ambassadors of Henry had threatened to leave the Papal Court, if their demands were not complied with, in open hostility. The Pope was still an exile in Benevento,[146] and did not dare to reoccupy Rome. The Emperor, even after his discomfiture, was still formidable; he might collect another overwhelming Transalpine force. The subsidies of Henry to the Italian cities and to the Roman partisans of the Pope could not be spared. The Pontiff therefore wrote soothing letters to the King of France and to Becket. He insinuated that these concessions were but for a time. "For a time!" replied Becket in an answer full of fire and passion: "and in that time the Church of England falls utterly to ruin; the property of the Church and the poor is wrested from her. In that time prelacies and abbacies are confiscated to the King's use: in that time who will guard the flock when the wolf is in the fold? This fatal dispensation will be a precedent for all ages. But for me and my fellow exiles all authority of Rome had ceased forever in England. There had been no one who had maintained the Pope against kings and princes." His significant language involves the Pope himself in the general and unsparing charge of rapacity and venality with which he brands the court of Rome. "I shall have to give an account at the last day, where gold and silver are of no avail, nor gifts which blind the eyes even of the wise."[147] [SN: To the Cardinals.] The same contemptuous allusions to that notorious venality transpire in a vehement letter addressed to the College of Cardinals, in which he urges that his cause is their own; that they are sanctioning a fatal and irretrievable example to temporal princes; that they are abrogating all obedience to the Church. "Your gold and silver will not deliver you in the day of the wrath of the Lord."[148] On the other hand, the King and the Queen of France wrote in a tone of indignant remonstrance that the Pope had abandoned the cause of the enemy of their enemy. More than one of the French prelates who wrote in the same strain declared that their King, in his resentment, had seriously thought of defection to the Antipope, and of a close connexion with the Imperial family.[149] Alexander determined to make another attempt at reconciliation; at least he should gain time, that precious source of hope to the embarrassed and irresolute. His mediators were the Prior of Montdieu and Bernard de Corilo, a monk of Grammont.[150] It was a fortunate time, for just at this juncture, peace and even amity seemed to be established between the Kings of France and England. Many of the great Norman and French