"What Can Be More Unjust
Than That This People Of Ancient Faith, Because They Answer Force By
Force In Defence Of Their Lives, Their Lands, And Their Liberties,
Should Be Forthwith Separated From The Body Corporate Of
Christendom, And Delivered Over To Satan?"
The story of the long fight between Gerald on the one hand and the
whole forces of secular and ecclesiastical authority on the other
cannot be told here.
Three times did he visit Rome to prosecute his
appeal - alone against the world. He had to journey through
districts disturbed by wars, infested with the king's men or the
king's enemies, all of whom regarded Gerald with hostility. He was
taken and thrown into prison as King John's subject in one town, he
was detained by importunate creditors in another, and at Rome he was
betrayed by a countryman whom he had befriended. He himself has
told us
Of the most disastrous chances
Of moving accidents by flood and field,
which made a journey from St. David's to Rome a more perilous
adventure in those unquiet days than an expedition "through darkest
Africa" is in ours. At last the very Chapter of St. David's, for
whose ancient rights he was contending, basely deserted him. "The
laity of Wales stood by me," so he wrote in later days, "but of the
clergy whose battle I was fighting scarce one." Pope Innocent III.
was far too wary a politician to favour the claims of a small and
distracted nation, already half-subjugated, against the king of a
rich and powerful country.
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