with the crowning of the new King and the organization of the new government the Legate seems to have purposely kept himself as much as possible in the background, guarding the rights of the Pope and the interests of the Pope’s ward not by direct intervention but rather by his mere presence, and putting forth his official powers only when their exercise was required to confirm, by the Papal sanction given through him, the measures agreed upon by the great men of the land, on whom the actual responsibility of appointing a regent thus devolved. If in undertaking that responsibility they were guided by any precedent or analogy at all, it must have been one drawn from a land far remote from England, but probably better known to many Englishmen in the days of Richard Cœur-de-Lion’s nephew than most of the countries nearer home; a land, too, which for fifty years in the preceding century had been ruled by kings of the same blood as Richard and Henry themselves. The “Assizes of Jerusalem” in which the jurisconsults of Cyprus, towards the end of the thirteenth century, embodied the traditions of law and custom said to be derived from a code originally compiled by the first King of the Latins in Jerusalem, Godfrey of Bouillon, and modified by his successors down to Saladin’s capture of the Holy City in 1187, contain an ordinance about minor heirs which runs thus: “If he” (the minor) “is a lord of land”--that is, a sovereign or suzerain lord--“his body and his fortresses ought to be guarded as shall be agreed by the community of his men.”[327] This provision had been acted upon in the case of King Baldwin III, on whose accession, at the age of thirteen, the princes and barons of the realm claimed and exercised the right to elect a regent.[328] What the magnates of Palestine thus did in 1174 the magnates of England did as freely in 1216. Not only did Gualo make no claim to the regency for himself, but he did not even attempt to dictate their choice. If indeed that choice was influenced by any one outside their own circle, that one was the late King. John’s commendation, however, could scarcely have been needed to point out the man for the office.