After a hurried visit to France, to stop the intended invasion from thence,[524] Pandulf returned to England, and remained there till the beginning of the next year. His position during this time is somewhat difficult to define. His official rank was merely that of “the Pope’s messenger”;[525] he had never held a commission as Legate; and the distinction between the two offices was clearly marked when in September, 1213, an envoy of higher standing in the Curia, Nicolas, Cardinal Bishop of Tusculum, came clothed with the full powers of a Legate _a latere_ to receive a repetition of John’s homage to Rome, and to raise the Interdict as soon as the bishops and clergy should have been compensated for their losses and wrongs. Certain payments made to Pandulf on the King’s behalf seem to indicate that he was the authorized receiver of the earliest instalments of the tribute to Rome.[526] John had already made a friend of the man who had withstood him in 1211; the Pope’s clerk was taken into the counsels of the King; “We have granted to Master Pandulf that a truce be made between ourself and the Welsh,” wrote John to the Marcher barons in July, 1213;[527] and when Pandulf went oversea in January, 1214, he went as “the King’s messenger”[528]--whether to France or to Rome, there is nothing to shew with certainty; but it is probable that he carried some of the tribute money to the Pope. He seems to have been back in England by the end of the year, when the recall of Nicolas of Tusculum left him once more sole representative of the Pope in England, but still without any higher title than before. In the spring of 1215 he and the Bishop of Chichester conjointly were delegated by the Pope to investigate the merits of a project for dissolving the union between the see of Bath and the abbey of Glastonbury.[529] In the preamble to the Great Charter “Master Pandulf, the Pope’s subdeacon and familiar,” stands with the Master of the Temple between the bishops and the lay magnates in the list of the King’s advisers; and he is the last named of the three commissioners (the other two being the Bishop of Winchester and the Abbot of Reading) to whom the Pope addressed his letter ordering that the “disturbers of King and kingdom” should be proclaimed excommunicate by the bishops. If any of these latter failed to obey the order, the commissioners themselves were empowered to suspend the recalcitrant prelates; and thus it fell to the lot of Pandulf and Bishop Peter to proclaim the suspension of Archbishop Stephen.[530]