The string of papal difficulties begins in 1226, when the Pope demanded a share of the property of every cathedral, church, and monastery. In 1229 Gregory IX. demanded a tithe of all movables, which only Earl Ranulf of Chester had courage to refuse. In 1231, the Roman exactions produced public tumults, and led to the quarrel which ruined Hubert de Burgh. In 1237, the king invited Cardinal Otho to reform the Church. He stayed until 1241, visited Oxford, and put the University under interdict; visited Scotland in 1239, and in 1240 exacted enormous sums for the benefit of the Pope, besides forbidding the king to bestow preferment on Englishmen, until three hundred Italians had been provided for. In 1244, Innocent IV. sent a still more intolerable representative, Master Martin, who within a year was obliged to fly; but neither king nor parliament ventured to refuse money. Besides direct payments, a vast proportion of English livings was held by foreigners. Bishop Grosseteste, who regarded these usurpations as the very destruction of the flock for which he was ready to lay down his life, declared, that in 1252, the Pope’s nominees had revenues within the realm three times as great as the royal income. There was too, a constant succession of appeals to Rome, as the episcopal elections were disputed, and the Pope either assumed the power of presentation, or sold the justice or injustice that it pleased him to dispense. To understand how these vast sums were disposed of by the popes, involves the careful reading of the history of Frederick II. The exactions of Gregory IX. begin with the first quarrel with Frederick, and the crowning difficulties of Henry III. are caused by his entanglement with Alexander IV. on the subject of Sicily. Yet Frederick II. was his own brother-in-law, and a prince who, whatever his faults may have been, suffered papal enmity for reasons which had nothing to do with his short-comings. Frederick was admired and pitied in England as a papal victim. Lewis IX. could refuse to be an instrument in his humiliation, but Henry III. seems to have tied himself to the Pope’s chariot-wheels. The Pope and the king, according to the saying of the time, left to men only the task of discerning whether the upper or the nether millstone were the heaviest. [Sidenote: Henry accepts the kingdom of Sicily. ]