Boniface VIII., who had succeeded Celestine in the papal throne, was a man of the most lofty and enterprising spirit; and though not endowed with that severity of manners which commonly accompanies ambition in men of his order, he was determined to carry the authority of the tiara, and his dominion over the temporal power, to as great a height as it had ever attained in any former period. Sensible that his immediate predecessors, by oppressing the church in every province of Christendom, had extremely alienated the affections of the clergy, and had afforded the civil magistrate a pretence for laying like impositions on ecclesiastical revenues, he attempted to resume the former station of the sovereign pontiff, and to establish himself as the common protector of the spiritual order against all invaders. For this purpose he issued very early in his pontificate a general bull, prohibiting all princes from levying without his consent any taxes upon the clergy, and all clergymen from submitting to such impositions; and he threatened both of them with the penalties of excommunication in case of disobedience.[*] This important edict is said to have been procured by the solicitation of Robert de Win chelsey, archbishop of Canterbury, who intended to employ it as a rampart against the violent extortions which the church had felt from Edward, and the still greater, which that prince’s multiplied necessities gave them reason to apprehend. When a demand, therefore, was made on the clergy of a fifth of their movables, a tax which was probably much more grievous than a fifth of their revenue, as their lands were mostly stocked with their cattle, and cultivated by their villains, the clergy took shelter under the bull of Pope Boniface and pleaded conscience in refusing compliance.[**] The king came not immediately to extremities on this repulse; but after locking up all their granaries and barns, and prohibiting all rent to be paid them, he appointed a new synod, to confer with him upon his demand. The primate, not dismayed by these proofs of Edward’s resolution, here plainly told him that the clergy owed obedience to two sovereigns, their spiritual and their temporal; but their duty bound them to a much stricter attachment to the former than to the latter: they could not comply with his commands, (for such, in some measure, the requests of the crown were then deemed,) in contradiction to the express prohibition of the sovereign pontiff.[***] * Rymer, vol. ii. p. 706. Heming. vol. i. p. 104. ** Heming, vol., i. p. 107. Trivet, p. 296. Chron. Dunst. vol. ii p. 652 *** Hemming. vol. i. p. 107.