In this case, as in virtually all others, the king nominated and the Pope provided, but the bishop wag nevertheless forced to renounce everything prejudicial in the provision. Again, clergy going to Rome were forced to take a standard oath, of which that sworn by the Abbot of St Augustine's, Canterb ury in 1468 is typical: ". . . that you shall sue, or procure to be sued, in the court of Rome, or in any other place beyond the sea, nothing that may be hurtful or prejudicial to the King our sovereign lord, or his crown, or any of his Subjects; nor do anything or attempt anything that is or may be contrary to the laws of this land.' There was a mass of very severe statutes to back up the royal position that any decisions of the Pope, or anything done on his behalf in the English church, must first be filtered through the royal machinery. In all except doctrine, the king was the effective head of the English church long before Henry VIII assumed it by parliame ntary Statute. This was the position in virtually all western countries. In some it is difficult to identify any period in which the papacy made successful inroads into royal control of the national church. In Spain, for instance , the crown had had the whip hand since Visigothic times. The sixth century councils, the earliest examples of Church-State cooperation in Christian-barbarian Europe, show the Church acting virtually as a department of the State, and as essentially subordinate to it. It was the kings, not the bishops, who governed Spain and with it the Spanish church. The position did not change in any essential throughout the Middle Ages. Thus, an examination of the synods and councils held in Castile and Aragon in the thirteenth century, at a time when we might expect to find the papacy on top, in fact shows an almost total subservience of the clergy to State and royal policy. The Church was' protected, even cosseted, by the State: but it was a captive Church. In the fifteenth century, and still more in the sixteenth, the grip of the crown was tightened, as it was elsewhere in Europe, by formal concordats and agreements, which spelt out the respective rights of crown and papacy in such a way as to make it clear that the state interest remained paramount. The fact that Spanish-Habsburg diplomatic and political policy might be, as a rule, in general alignment with papal aims, or that the Spanish crown might be in full agreement with papal doctrinal positions, and enforce them in its territories, does not alter the absolute determination of the Spanish State to control the ecclesiastical scene to the total exclusion of independent papal action. The Spanish Inquisition was essentially an organ of royal power, one of whose functions was to ‘protect’ the Spanish Church from influence by outside agencies, including the papacy. Hence the domination of the Church by the crown was perhaps more comprehensive in Spain during the sixteenth century than in any other Europe state, including those with a Protestant, Erastian system. France, too, ceased to be an effective field for papal penetration, once the monarchy began to establish itself as the dominant force, from the beginning of the thirteenth century. The popes repeatedly used French power to smash the Staufen. It could be said that they thus replaced a potential master with an actual one. The papacy, which had helped to create the western empire as a protective force in the eighth century, destroyed it in the thirteenth without making any long-term arrangements to provide an alternative source of assistance. Yet the papacy still needed protection; and, faut de mieux, it had to look to one or other of the emergent nation-states. The choice was usually France until, in the sixteenth century, it shifted to Spain and Austria. And the French kings, like the more exigent emperors before them, tended to treat the Pope as their chief bishop, rather than as an independent power. Thus, as the thirteenth century progressed, there was a yawning gap between the inflation of the papal claims, and the deflation of its real authority. In 1298, for instance, Boniface VIII was asked to arbitrate between Edward | of England and Philip the Fair of France over their Gascon disputes. Proctors were appointed, and the Pope issued a series of bulls; but at the last minute, under pressure from France, he was obliged to admit that he acted, as he put it, ‘simply as a private person, as Lord Benedict Gaetani'. The career of Lord Benedict Gaetani, indeed, may be said to have led to the calling of the papal bluff. Before him, there was still a certain mysterious potency to the papal claims, a lingering possibility that 58