In 1211 came Pandulf from Pope Innocent with suggestions for peace. Let the king restore the property of the clergy, and receive Archbishop Langton, with his kinsmen and friends, and the other exiled bishops “fairly and in peace” and the interdict should be withdrawn. John declined to receive Langton as archbishop, and Pandulf, in the presence of the whole council, pronounced the papal sentence of excommunication on the king, absolving all his subjects from allegiance, and commanding their obedience to whomsoever should be sent as John’s successor. John treated the excommunication with cheerful contempt, and pursued the evil tenour of his way. But his position was precarious, for the barons--especially the northern barons--were plotting his overthrow, and the pope had decided that Philip of France should depose John and reign in his stead. John was driven to capitulate to the pope at the end of 1212, and in May, 1213, Pandulf arrived, and the invasion by Philip was stopped, to the exceeding annoyance of the French king. John met the papal legate at Ewell, near Dover, and in the presence of “the great men of the realm,” swore to carry out all Innocent’s demands, promising that Stephen should be received and recompense paid to the clergy for their losses. Then the King of England formally surrendered “to God and to the Holy Mother Church of Rome, and to Pope Innocent and his Catholic successors,” the whole realm of England and Ireland, “with all rights thereunto appertaining, to receive them back and hold them thenceforth as a feudatory of God and the Roman Church.” He swore fealty to the pope for both realms, and added that he would send a yearly tribute of 1,000 marks. At the same time John declared that the act of homage was voluntary, done, “not at the driving of force nor the compulsion of fear, but of our own good free will and by the common counsel of our barons.” There is no evidence that the pope asked for this abject submission, but there are good reasons why John desired that political protection of the papacy which he obtained by the act of homage.[28] (Matthew Paris has a story that John was willing to pay homage and tribute to the Mohammedan Emir of Morocco in order to effect an alliance with some foreign power.)