government. Within six months the new constitution was overthrown, and
the chief part in its destruction was taken by the Scots by whose
advice Edward had drawn it up.

Edward at last felt himself in a position to take his long deferred
revenge on Winchelsea. The primate still kept aloof from the councils of
the king, and his spirit was as irreconcilable as ever. He gained his
last victory in the Lenten parliament of 1305, when he prevented the
promulgation of a statute, passed on the petition of the laity, but
agreed to by all the estates, which forbade taxes on ecclesiastical
property involving the exportation of money out of the country.[1] At
this moment the long vacancy of the papacy, which followed the
pontificate of Benedict XI., Boniface VIII.'s short-lived successor, had
not yet come to an end. Soon, however, Winchelsea's zeal on behalf of
papal taxation was to be ill requited. On June 5, 1305, Bertrand de
Goth, a Gascon nobleman who since 1299 had been archbishop of Bordeaux,
was elected to the papacy as Clement V., through the management of
Philip the Fair. A dependant of the King of France and a subject of the
King of England, the new pope showed a complaisance towards kings which
stood in strong contrast to the ultramontane austerity of his
predecessors. He refused to visit Italy, received the papal crown at
Lyons, and spent the first years of his pontificate in Poitou and
Gascony. Ultimately establishing himself at Avignon, he began that
seventy years of Babylonish captivity of the apostolic see which greatly
degraded the papacy. Though Clement's main concern was to fulfil the
exacting conditions which, as it was believed, Philip had imposed upon
him, he was almost as subservient to Edward as to the King of France.
His deference to his natural lord enabled Edward to renounce the most
irksome of the obligations which he had incurred to his subjects, to
punish Winchelsea, and to restrain Roman authority by laws which