Oculis illaqueat, facie prædatur?
Mapes’s Poems, p. 72.
[709] Matt. Paris ann. 1250.
This Boniface was brother of the Duke of Savoy, and was one of the Italian prelates whose intrusion into the choice places of the Anglican church was a source of intense irritation. The career of another brother, Philip, is an instructive illustration of the ecclesiastical manners of the age. He was in deacon’s orders, and yet, as a leader of condottieri, he was a strenuous supporter of Innocent IV. in his quarrel with Frederic II. He was created Archbishop of Lyons, Bishop of Valence, Provost of Bruges, and Dean of Vienne, and, after enjoying these miscellaneous dignities for some twenty years, when at length Clement IV. insisted on his ordination and consecration, he threw off his episcopal robe, married first the heiress of Franche-Comté and then a niece of Innocent IV.—dying at last as Duke of Savoy (Milman, Latin Christ. IV. 326).
The indignation felt at the standing grievance of foreign prelates is quaintly expressed a century later by Langlande—
And a peril to the pope
And prelates that he maketh,
That bere bisshopes names
Of Bethleem and Babiloigne,
That huppe aboute in Engelond