Honorius was a wise and careful guardian to the young king, Henry III., and his legate, Gualo, upheld the government of the earl-marshal; the Great Charter was twice reissued, the French were got rid of, and peace was restored. On the other hand, Gualo dealt hardly with the bishops and clergy of the baronial party. He deprived many of the clergy of their benefices and gave them to his own friends; and he compelled the bishops to pay large sums to the Roman court, and to give him considerable gifts also, that they might be allowed to retain their sees. He was succeeded by Pandulf. Stephen Langton had now returned, and was helping Hubert de Burgh to give a thoroughly national character to the administration. The presence of a Roman legate, which had certainly done much, during the early years of the reign, to forward the well-being of the kingdom, became needless. Pandulf was overbearing, and thwarted the archbishop and Hubert. Accordingly the archbishop, who himself had a legatine commission, went to Rome, and obtained a promise from the Pope that no other legate should be appointed as long as he lived, and Pandulf soon afterwards left England. The position of these legates was extraordinary. They controlled the ordinary course of government, directed foreign politics, and continually brought the spiritual power of the papacy to bear on the affairs of the country. Through them their master acted as the guardian of the young king and the suzerain of the kingdom. It is to the credit of Honorius that he willingly brought to a close the period of the tutelage of Henry and of the government of England by foreign legates. From this date the legatine authority of the archbishops of Canterbury was always recognized at Rome, though legates _a latere_ were still sent over to England from time to time on special errands.
Henry owed much to the Pope's care, and the gratitude he consequently felt towards the Roman see brought evil on the Church and nation. He became a tool in the hands of successive Popes, who used the wealth of the country for their own purposes. Ecclesiastical preferments were lavishly conferred on Italian adventurers, who were ignorant of the language of the people, and utterly unfit to be their spiritual guides; and the clergy were heavily taxed, sometimes for the Pope's immediate use, and sometimes, by his authority, for the use of the king, though the money thus raised often found its way into the papal treasury. Resistance was difficult, partly because it was widely held that the Pope, as the spiritual father of Christendom, had a right to the goods of the Church, and partly because, even when the king was angry at the papal demands, the bishops dared not reckon on his support, for his heart was of wax, and never bore the same impression long.