While Henry hesitated in dismay and alarm, not knowing what step to take, seeing his friends, both lay and clerical, abandon him on every side, consequences more decisive still followed. The great princes met together in an assembly of their own in Ulm without any reference to Henry, whom they named in their proceedings the ex-king, and decided upon another more formal meeting later to choose a new sovereign. These potentates became doubly religious, doubly Catholic, in their sudden revulsion. They surrounded Gregory's legates with reverence, they avoided all communion with simoniacal prelates, and even--carrying the Pope's new influence to the furthest extent--with the married priests against whom he had long fulminated in vain. A reformation of all evils seemed to be about to follow. They formally condemned the excommunicated Henry on every point moral and political, and though they hesitated over the great step of the threatened election of a king in his place, they announced to him that unless he could clear himself of the interdict before the beginning of the following year, when they had decided to call a diet in Augsburg to settle the question, his fall would be complete and without remedy. At the same time they formally and solemnly invited the presence of the Pope at Augsburg to preside over and confirm their conclusions. This invitation Gregory accepted at once, and Henry, with no alternative before him, consented also to appear before the tribunal of his subjects, and to receive from their hands, and those of the Pope whom he had so insulted and outraged, the sentence of his fate. His humiliation was complete.