raise either the men or the money promised, and abandoned any idea of
visiting Sicily in person. Meanwhile Naples and Sicily were united in
support of Manfred, and discomfited the feeble forces of the papal
legates who acted against him in Edmund's name. At last the Archbishop
of Messina came from the pope with an urgent request for payment of the
promised sums. It was in vain that Henry led forth his son, clothed in
Apulian dress, before the Lenten parliament of 1257, and begged the
magnates to enable him to redeem his bond. When they heard the king's
speech "the ears of all men tingled". Nothing could be got save from
the clergy, so that Henry was quite unable to meet his obligations. He
besought Alexander to give him time, to make terms with Manfred, to
release Edmund from his debts on condition of ceding a large part of
Apulia to the Church,--to do anything in short save insist upon the
original contract. The pope deferred the payment, but the respite did
Henry no good. Edmund's Sicilian monarchy vanished into nothing, when,
early in 1258, Manfred was crowned king at Palermo. Before the end of
the year, Alexander cancelled the grant of Sicily to Edmund. Yet his
demands for the discharge of Henry's obligations had contributed not a
little towards focussing the gathering discontent.[1]

[1] For Edmund's Sicilian claims, see W.E. Rhodes' article on
_Edmund, Earl of Lancaster_, in the _English Historical
Review_, x. (1895), 20-27.

While Henry was seeking the Sicilian crown for his son, his brother
Richard was elected to the German throne. Since William of Holland's
death in January, 1256, the German magnates, divided between the
Hohenstaufen and the papalist parties, had hesitated for nearly a year
as to the choice of his successor. As neither party was able to secure
the election of its own partisan, a compromise was mooted. At last the
name of Richard of Cornwall was brought definitely forward. He was of
high rank and unblemished reputation; a friend of the pope yet a kinsman
of the Hohenstaufen; he was moderate and conciliatory; he had enough
money to bribe the electors handsomely, and he was never likely to be so
deeply rooted in Germany as to stand in the way of the princes of the
empire. The Archbishop of Cologne became his paid partisan, and the
Count Palatine of the Rhine accepted his candidature on conditions. The
French party set up as his rival Alfonso X. of Castile, who, despite his
newly forme