....
Si la terre n’est defendue
Par l’Apostoire en icest point
....
Dont ne sai je qui la defende.
Hist. G. le Mar., ll. 18041–18060.
Ille [Pandulfus] multos bellicos tumultus nondum congelatos auctoritate sibi tradita tempore legationis viriliter comprimebat.
Flores Historiarum, a. 1221.
The new Legate was not a stranger to England. His first recorded visit there had taken place in 1211. He was then in subdeacon’s orders, and a member of the household of Pope Innocent III.[519] Of his earlier life nothing is known, except that he was a Roman by birth;[520] but King John seems to have already had some indirect knowledge of him, for it was at John’s request that he and another papal envoy, a brother of the Temple, were appointed by Innocent to go and confer with the King of England for the restoration of peace to the English Church.[521] In the one interview which took place between the commissioners and the King, Pandulf was the spokesman on the papal side; and John found that he had mistaken his man. The subdeacon simply stated the terms which he was instructed to offer to John; a long argument ensued, in which John was worsted; but he still refused to submit, whereupon Pandulf told him to his face, in the presence of all the court, that the Pope meant to subdue him and had already excommunicated him and absolved his subjects from their allegiance, and that the sentence was to take effect from that day forth. “If I had not sent for you, I would make you ride about my realm for a year!” raved the King. “You might as well say you would hang us,” coolly answered Pandulf; “we look for no other reward from you”; and when John tried to frighten him by issuing in his presence orders for the mutilation and execution of sundry prisoners, one of whom was a priest, the only result was that Pandulf went to fetch a candle for the avowed purpose of formally excommunicating then and there any person who should lay hands on this particular victim, and that John, evidently alarmed lest the candle should be used against himself as well as against his officers, hurried after the dauntless subdeacon and surrendered the man to his judgement.[522] Thenceforth Pandulf became the Pope’s special confidant and assistant in all matters relating to England and its King. It was he who in January, 1213, carried to Philip Augustus the Pope’s letter charging Philip with the execution of the sentence of deprivation against John; and it was he alone who shared with the Pope the secret of the negotiations which were then already afoot for rendering Philip’s expedition needless. Four months later he was in England again, receiving, in the Pope’s behalf, first John’s assent to the identical terms which he had refused in 1211, and secondly the King’s homage to the Roman See for the realms of England and Ireland.[523]
After a hurried visit to France, to stop the intended invasion from thence,[524] Pandulf returned to England, and remained there till the beginning of the next year. His position during this time is somewhat difficult to define. His official rank was merely that of “the Pope’s messenger”;[525] he had never held a commission as Legate; and the distinction between the two offices was clearly marked when in September, 1213, an envoy of higher standing in the Curia, Nicolas, Cardinal Bishop of Tusculum, came clothed with the full powers of a Legate a latere to receive a repetition of John’s homage to Rome, and to raise the Interdict as soon as the bishops and clergy should have been compensated for their losses and wrongs. Certain payments made to Pandulf on the King’s behalf seem to indicate that he was the authorized receiver of the earliest instalments of the tribute to Rome.[526] John had already made a friend of the man who had withstood him in 1211; the Pope’s clerk was taken into the counsels of the King; “We have granted to Master Pandulf that a truce be made between ourself and the Welsh,” wrote John to the Marcher barons in July, 1213;[527] and when Pandulf went oversea in January, 1214, he went as “the King’s messenger”[528]—whether to France or to Rome, there is nothing to shew with certainty; but it is probable that he carried some of the tribute money to the Pope. He seems to have been back in England by the end of the year, when the recall of Nicolas of Tusculum left him once more sole representative of the Pope in England, but still without any higher title than before. In the spring of 1215 he and the Bishop of Chichester conjointly were delegated by the Pope to investigate the merits of a project for dissolving the union between the see of Bath and the abbey of Glastonbury.[529] In the preamble to the Great Charter “Master Pandulf, the Pope’s subdeacon and familiar,” stands with the Master of the Temple between the bishops and the lay magnates in the list of the King’s advisers; and he is the last named of the three commissioners (the other two being the Bishop of Winchester and the Abbot of Reading) to whom the Pope addressed his letter ordering that the “disturbers of King and kingdom” should be proclaimed excommunicate by the bishops. If any of these latter failed to obey the order, the commissioners themselves were empowered to suspend the recalcitrant prelates; and thus it fell to the lot of Pandulf and Bishop Peter to proclaim the suspension of Archbishop Stephen.[530]