Like John he came into collision with the iron will of Pope Innocent III, but on a purely moral question, his refusal to live with the Danish princess Ingeborg, to whom he had taken a violent and unaccountable dislike on his wedding-day. The bride was a girl of eighteen; she could speak no French, her husband’s bishops were afraid to uphold her cause whatever their secret opinions, but in appealing to the Pope for help she gained an unyielding champion. In other chapters we shall see Innocent III as a politician and a persecutor of heretics: here he stands as the moral leader of Europe; and no estimate of his character and work would be fair that neglected this aspect. It was to Innocent’s political advantage to please the French king, whose help he needed to chastise the English John and to support a crusade against an outburst of heresy in Languedoc. Moreover, he had no armies to compel a king who accused his wife of witchcraft to recognize her as queen. Yet Innocent believed that Philip was in the wrong; and when the French king persuaded his bishops to divorce him and then promptly married again, papal letters proceeded to denounce the divorce as a farce and the new marriage as illegal. ‘Recall your lawful wife,’ wrote Innocent, ‘and then we will hear all that you can righteously urge. If you do not do this no power shall move us to right or left until justice be done.’ This letter was followed by threats of excommunication, and after some months by an interdict that reduced Philip to a promise of submission in return for a full inquiry into his case. The promise so grudgingly given remained but a promise, and it was not until 1213, nearly twenty years since he had so cruelly repudiated Ingeborg, that, driven by continual papal pressure and the critical state of his fortunes, Philip openly acknowledged the Danish princess as his wife and queen. We have seen something of Philip’s dealings with his greater tenants-in-chief; but such achievements as the conquest of Normandy and Anjou and the victory of Bouvines were but the fruits of years of diplomacy, during which the royal power had permeated the land, like ether the atmosphere, almost unnoticed. In lending a sympathetic ear to the complaints of Richard and his brothers against their father, Philip was merely carrying out the policy we have noticed in his treatment of the Church.