Page:John Wycliff, last of the schoolmen and first of the English reformers.djvu/60

 resisted in each successive generation, however intermittently, by the monarchs and statesmen of the day. Henry II. and John both measured swords against the enemy of their country. Each of them, indeed, found his blade too short, and extricated himself from his difficulty by a politic compromise. It may even be argued that the payment of tribute from 12 13 to 1333 rather assisted than hindered the growth of the national independence, in an age when the temporal power of Rome was at its zenith. The tribute did not prevent Henry III. and Edward I. from continuing the struggle. A like combative spirit was displayed by the Holy Roman Empire. The extreme personal humiliation of the Emperor Henry IV. and Frederick Barbarossa merely point us to two conspicuous instances of German resistance.

Up to the close of the thirteenth century, these contests of the civil against the ecclesiastical authority, and of the national spirit against the encroachments of Rome, appeared to have little practical or permanent result. It was reserved for France to give the Papacy its first effectual check, and to stagger it by a blow from which it never entirely recovered.

Benedict Cajetano, Pope Boniface VIII., was the most capable man and the most politically aggressive pontiff who had sat in the chair of St. Peter since Innocent III.; but he carried the policy of his predecessor to a wild extreme, and invited the active hostility by which he was speedily overwhelmed. It is true that in Edward I. of England and Philip the Fair of France he had encountered two monarchs of more than ordinary mettle, and that a conflict with