The final snub

The proposal the bishops brought back with them to England called for yet more talks and for each side to offer surety in case no agreement was reached. The Montfortians were asked to hand over Dover castle and Edward in return for Edmund and a castle on the continent, as poorly a conceived trade as could be imagined. The bishops were nevertheless ordered to publish letters of interdict and excommunication if he was again snubbed. The garrison at Dover took care of that problem when they searched the bishops and found the letters. It’s not known what kind of gesture they used to rip them up and toss them into the sea, but the response received by the legate and royalists was singularly dismissive. On 11 October 1264 a lone English knight rowed up to the shoreline and dropped a chest into the water containing a formal rejection and the new constitution embodied in the Peace of Canterbury. England had a new government and that was all there was to it. However much the legate now shook with fury, the death of Pope Urban IV in early October left him without a job anyway. He would return to Rome to become the new pope, Clement IV, and in that capacity make sure all the world knew that he considered Montfort and his family to be pestilence.

Bishop preaching
                             Archbishop Guido went back to Rome empty-handed

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