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254 he did very reluctantly. He had long before intervened in the matter as the secretary of Pelagius II: he distrusted the Istrian bishops as schismatics and as assertors of independence, and when he became pope had again addressed them in lucid theological arguments. He received individual submissions, and he used every kind of pressure to heal the schism; but when he died his efforts had not been entirely successful. With Milan too he had similar difficulties. Defective theology was combined with provincial independence in resistance to papal power. In Dalmatia and Illyria other difficulties needed other treatment. An archbishop whose manner of life did not befit his office was rebuked, ironically exhorted, pardoned: when he died a strong attempt was made to fill his place by a man of austere life whom the pope had long honoured. The attempt was a failure, and a very long and bitter struggle ensued in which Maximus, the imperial candidate, was refused recognition, summoned to trial at Rome and only at last admitted to his see as lawful prelate when he had lain prone in penance at Ravenna, crying "I have sinned against God and the most blessed Pope Gregory." Over Illyria generally, in spite of the creation of Justiniana Prima as a patriarchate by the Emperor who had given it his name, he exercised the power of a patriarch. He forbade the bishops to attend a synod at Constantinople without his leave. He made it plain that Illyria belonged to the West and not to the East.

And in the West he was ever eager to enlarge the boundaries of the Church. Already as a young man he had set his heart on the conversion of the English. As pope he had the means to undertake it. It may be that he planned it, as Bede says, as soon as he came to discharge the office of pontiff, and also, as one of his letters suggests, that he prepared for it by ordering the purchase of English slave boys to be trained in Gaulish monasteries. It was probably in 595 that he first sent forth the monk Augustine and his companions to journey through Gaul to Britain for the conversion of the English. When, daunted by anticipated dangers, the monks sent Augustine back, Gregory ordered him to return as their abbot, and furnished him with letters to the bishops of Gaul, and notably to Vergilius of Arles, the bishop of Aix, and the abbot of Lerins, as well as to Theodebert of Austrasia and Theodoric of Burgundy, children of nine and ten, under the guardianship of Brunhild their grandmother. To Brunhild herself, "queen of the Franks," who went with him, he was sure, "in heart and soul," the pope said that the English nation, by the favour of God, wished to become Christian, and he was sending Augustine and other monks to take thought — in which he bade her help — for their conversion. He considered that the bishops of Gaul had been remiss, in doing nothing for the conversion of those English tribes whom he regarded as their neighbours: but when in 596 he set the new mission in motion, he was able, as his letters shew, to rely upon personal kindness from the queen towards the missionaries