King Henry I, for most of his reign, exercised unrivaled authority over the English church. Following the Concordat of London in 1107 which formally ended his bitter dispute with Archbishop Anselm of Canterbury, Henry reestablished effective control over the ecclesiastical affairs of England. During the remaining twenty-eight years of his rule, he assiduously cultivated and generally sustained friendly relations with the papacy while maintaining royal control over the internal matters of the English church.
There is, however, a dramatic exception to this picture of royal primacy. In 1125, the papal legate, Cardinal John of Crema, made a spectacular tour of England. During his six-months stay, John exercised greater authority than any other papal legate sent to England during the reign of Henry I. As Austin Lane Poole observes, of the nine legates dispatched between 1100 and 1135, “one only—John of Crema in 1125—was permitted to preside over a church synod or to exercise any legatine authority.” To underscore the unprecedented nature of this visit, neither of Henry's predecessors, William the Conqueror and William Rufus, had allowed a foreign legate to exert such power within England.
This paper will examine the events leading up to the legatine mission of 1125 and attempt to explain why Henry sanctioned this rare exhibition of papal authority within his kingdom.