Some seven or eight weeks before this, Pandulf had been--of course on the King’s recommendation--elected to the bishopric of Norwich;[531] but no steps towards his consecration were taken for more than six years. Shortly after the middle of September, 1215, he seems to have gone to Rome on a mission from John, who wrote to the Pope that “although Master Pandulf is most useful to us in England, inasmuch as he labours faithfully and devotedly for the honour of the Roman Church and of ourself and our whole realm, yet we send him to your Holiness because we can trust no one else to explain the state of ourself and our realm so well as he can do it.”[532] We find no further trace of Pandulf for nearly two years. It is doubtful whether he had returned to England before John’s death; Gualo had been residing there as Legate since May, 1216, and the subdeacon’s presence was therefore no longer necessary for the interests of either Pope or King. In July, 1218, he was at Rome, acting as notary to the Pope.[533] On 12th September Honorius appointed him to the office which Gualo had just resigned;[534] and on 2nd December he was formally welcomed as Legate in S. Paul’s cathedral in London.[535] Pandulf had well earned his promotion; and the special appropriateness of his appointment as Legate in England was obvious. His qualifications for the post may be summed up in an adaptation of the words in which John had commended him to Honorius: there was no one in the Roman Curia who could be trusted to understand and manage the affairs of John’s heir and of his realm so well as this man whom King and Pope alike had found by experience to be “most useful, faithful, and devoted” to the interests of both. As Legate, Pandulf came to his task in far less difficult circumstances than Gualo had done. Even when he set out from Rome, however, there must have been a general consciousness that the new Legate would ere long have to take upon him another charge, with which his predecessor had never been burdened. The selection of an English noble, instead of the legal representative of the overlord of England, as governor of King and kingdom in 1216 had been occasioned by circumstances which in 1218 had ceased to exist. There was now no invader to expel, no rebellion to subdue, no need for a warrior-regent: and there was also no man among the baronage clearly marked out for the regent’s office as the Marshal had been by his personal qualities and by the universal estimation of his fellow barons. It is only fair to the English magnates to say that there are no indications of rivalry among them for the reversion of the regent’s office; but there can be no doubt that, as the Marshal himself foresaw, the appointment of any one of them as his successor must inevitably have led to jealousy and discord, and that the only person who could safely take the foremost place in the government after him was the representative of the Apostolic See.