But if he thought that Innocent III., would be swayed either by the ordinary motives of Popes or by the ordinary aims of policy, he was much mistaken. That great Pope had set before himself a grand purpose of righteousness as it appeared to him; he was ready to set up the Hohenstaufen again and to depress the Welf, and to set Philip, the ally of the Hohenstaufen, and the husband of Ingeburga, above the other kings of the West, if he could gain his object. Innocent persisted. His legates openly warned John what the result would be if the sentence of deposition were to issue; and their words came true. John found or fancied himself involved in a web of conspiracy; warnings reached him from Wales and Scotland that his enemies were intriguing all around him, that he and his children would be put out of the throne and a new race of kings brought in. Then arose Peter of Wakefield and prophesied that on the next Ascension day John should be a king no more. Then came the news that Philip was equipping his fleet. So the man whom neither spiritual nor temporal weapons could bring to submission, moved by the prophecy of an impostor, lowered his flag and made the most abject submission that any king of the English has ever made. On the 15th of May, 1213, he met Pandulf, the Pope’s subdeacon and envoy, at Ewell, near Dover, and swore fealty to the Pope; he consented at last to receive Langton, to restore the bishops and the monks of Canterbury, and indemnify them for their wrongs: he would do all that was asked of him, hold his kingdoms as fiefs of the Apostolic see and pay tribute for them. The barons and people looked on in amazed acquiescence; they did not, it would seem, all at once realize the shame of the transaction, or see that for them to be vassals of the Pope’s vassal was to sink a long step in the scale of freedom, whether political or ecclesiastical. They acquiesced, some gladly welcoming any solution of the difficulty, some, we are told, with grief and shame. And so that part of the drama of the reign ends. [Sidenote: Political result. ] John made friends with the Pope; but the struggle had thrown the Church into an attitude of opposition to the crown in which she had never stood since the Conquest. It was a providential determination, by which the clergy--who, with the people, had hitherto supported the royal power against the barons--were, just at the moment when the royal power was becoming dangerous, dislodged from the side of the crown and almost compelled to make common cause with the baronial party and the people; awaking all at once to the need of common action, mutual forbearance, and the sense of national unity. Such was the effect of the struggle. Henceforth the Church in union with the barons and the people helps to limit the power which in the earlier days she had striven to strengthen. [Sidenote: The baronial quarrel. ]