Before the submission of Hugh Mortimer the third of the great councils of the year had been held at Wallingford early in April, and there the barons had been required to swear allegiance to Henry's eldest son William, and in case of his death to his brother Henry who had been born a few weeks before. The fourth great council met at Winchester in the last days of September, and there a new question of policy was discussed which led ultimately to events of great importance in the reign, and of constantly increasing importance in the whole history of England to the present day,--the conquest of Ireland. Apparently Henry had already conceived the idea, to which he returns later in the case of his youngest son, of finding in the western island an appanage for some unprovided member of the royal house. Now he thought of giving it to his youngest brother William. Religious and political prejudice and racial pride have been so intensely excited by many of the statements and descriptions in the traditional account of Henry's first steps towards the conquest, which is based on contemporary records or what purports to be such, that evidence which no one would think of questioning if it related to humdrum events on the dead level of history has been vigorously assailed, and almost every event in the series called in question. The writer of history cannot narrate these events as they seem to him to have occurred without warning the reader that some element of doubt attaches to his account, and that whatever his conclusions, some careful students of the period will not agree with him. A few days before Henry landed in England to be crowned, Nicholas Breakspear, the only Englishman who ever became pope, had been elected Bishop of Rome and had taken the name of Hadrian IV. He was the son of an English clerk, who was later a monk at St. Albans, and had not seemed to his father a very promising boy; but on his father's death he went abroad, studied at Paris, and was made Abbot of St. Rufus in Provence. Then visiting Rome because of trouble, with his monks, he attracted the notice of the pope, was made cardinal and papal legate, and finally was himself elected pope in succession to Anastasius IV. We cannot say, though we may think it likely, that the occupation of the papal throne by a native Englishman made it seem to Henry a favourable time to secure so high official sanction for his new enterprise. Nor is it possible to say what was the form of Henry's request, or the composition of the embassy which seems certainly to have been sent, or the character of the pope's reply, though each of these has been made the subject of differing conjectures for none of which is there any direct evidence in the sources of our knowledge. The most that we can assert is what we are told by John of Salisbury, the greatest scholar of the middle ages.