It is possible that the barons may have asked for the conference at Oxford in order to remonstrate against the warlike preparations of the king, and that it may have resulted in some temporary arrangement which compelled him to dismiss the Poitevins. It is also possible that this dismissal may have been prompted by tidings from Rome. The prospect of some such crisis as the present one had almost certainly been in the minds of king and barons alike when John performed his homage to the Pope; and both alike now sought to make their profit out of that transaction, each side appealing to the Pope, as the common overlord of both, to use his authority in compelling the other to yield. An envoy from John, William Mauclerc, had reached Rome on February 17. Eleven days later Eustace de Vesci and two other representatives of the malcontent party arrived with letters for the Pope. In these letters--so Mauclerc reported to his master--the confederate barons besought Innocent, “since he was lord of England,” to urge and, if needful, compel the king to restore the ancient liberties granted by his predecessors and confirmed by his own oath. They recited how at the meeting in London at Epiphany John had not only refused to grant these liberties, but had endeavoured to make the petitioners promise never to ask for them again. They begged that the Pope would take measures to help them in this matter, “forasmuch as he well knew that they had at his command boldly opposed the king in behalf of the Church’s liberty, and that the king’s grant of an annual revenue and other honours to the Pope and the Roman Church had been made not of free will and devotion, but from fear and under compulsion from them.”[984] Of what John wrote, or charged his envoy to say, to Innocent in his behalf, no record remains; but Innocent’s letters show what the tenour of John’s argument must have been. With his usual dexterity the king made capital out of the secret meetings held, or said to have been held, by the malcontents; and he also brought into special prominence the one point of discussion which was quite clearly defined, and in which he unmistakeably had precedent on his side--the question of the scutage. On March 19 Innocent wrote to the archbishop of Canterbury and the other English bishops, expressing his surprise that they had not checked the quarrel between the king and “certain magnates and barons,” and reproving them for their failure to do so; he strongly condemned the “conspiracies and conjurations” which the barons were reported to have made, and ordered the bishops to quash all such conspiracies and urge the barons to proceed only by fair and lawful means. On the other hand, he besought the king “to treat the aforesaid nobles graciously, and mercifully to grant their just petitions.” On the same day he wrote to the barons, informing them of the contents of his letter to the bishops.[985] On April 1 he wrote to the barons again, avowedly in