England responded as quickly and readily as France to the call of her king; the threat of “culvertage” seems to have acted upon the Englishmen of John’s day as the threat of being accounted “nithing” had acted upon their forefathers in the days of William Rufus and Henry I.; they came together at the appointed places--Dover, Faversham and Ipswich--in such crowds that in a few days, despite John’s precautions, the supply of food became insufficient, and the marshals of the host found it needful to dismiss the greater part of the light-armed troops, retaining only the knights, sergeants and better-armed freemen, with the cross-bowmen and archers. The picked body thus left, which was finally reviewed by the king on Barham Down, near Canterbury, {May 4–6} was still so numerous that a patriotic chronicler declares, “If they had been all of one heart and mind for king and country, there was no prince under heaven against whom they could not have defended the realm of England.”[792] How many of the barons in the host had come to it with the intention of going over to Philip as soon as he landed, it is useless to inquire; perhaps the only one whom we can with full confidence acquit of any such suspicion is William the Marshal.[793] The king’s plan, however, was that his fleet should intercept the invaders and “drown them in the sea before ever they could set foot on the land”; and as his ships were more numerous than Philip’s, the plan had a good chance of success.[794] But the first check to Philip’s enterprise was to come from another quarter. Even if we could perceive no outward indication of the Pope’s motives in giving his commission to the French king, we should still find it hard to believe that so far-seeing a statesman as Innocent III. seriously contemplated with approval the prospect of a French conquest of England. At the moment, indeed, France was the most efficient political instrument of the Papacy; but it could scarcely be a part of the papal policy to give her such an overwhelming predominance as she would have acquired by the annexation of England to her crown. England, no less than France, had her place in the European political system, of which Innocent looked upon himself as the director and the guardian; and the extinction of England as an independent state would have destroyed the balance of powers which it was a special function of the Papacy to maintain with the utmost care, and whose preservation was of great importance to Innocent for carrying into effect his own political designs. There can hardly be a reasonable doubt that he made use of Philip’s ambition for a purpose of his own, a purpose which was really the direct opposite of that which Philip had in view--the purpose, not of crushing England, but of winning her back to the Roman alliance, and thus securing her as a counterpoise, in case of need, to the power of Philip himself.[795] In a word, Innocent and John had simultaneously