VIII. Vindictiveness, and the determination to carry a point CHAP. or a decision, however monstrous and iniquitous, alone actuated the government of France, and the government was no other than the crown lawyers, Nogaret and Plasian. Whilst the king's minister was thus, to save his own life and reputation, labouring to degrade and blacken the memory of a pope, the king himself had become a party in the more serious trial which accused and menaced the Templars. Too many of them had perished in tortures, and too much of their treasure had been seized to admit of the order being spared. Its exculpation would have been the king's condemnation. The commission of prelates named by the Pope to try the Templars began to hold its sittings in the autumn of 1309, and numbers of the order were brought before it. Almost all, finding themselves no longer before king's judges, but ecclesiastical dignitaries, recovered self-possession, and vehemently maintained their perfect innocence, declaring that, if they had confessed the crimes laid to their charge, it was because they had been gehennés, subjected to torture, and in fear of death; and though many had expired, they were now determined to persist in their denial, and defend themselves. Eleven specified the tortures they had suffered many times, being confined on bread and water in dark dungeons, hung up repeatedly by the tenderest parts of the body, and their bones forced out of the skin. Such revelations as these, together with the attitude of innocent and injured men, which the Pope's commissioners seemed unable to repress or to deal with, greatly alarmed the legists who conducted the prosecution. When the grand master, Jacques de Molay, was brought before the commission, he at first assumed the attitude of innocence, notwithstanding his previous avowals. The lawyers instantly obtained an adjournment, and by persuasion, no doubt, and promises of pardon and oblivion to CHAP. the order, induced Molay to recede from his attitude of innocence, and his determination to defend the Temple. VIII. court. This point gained, the king's prosecutor determined to get rid of the more dangerous and obstinate of the Templars. The law of the Inquisition was, that those who confessed heresy and relapsed were to be immediately handed over for execution to the secular arm. Under this law they resolved to condemn at once the most refractory. The Pope's commissioners shrunk from the sanguinary act, but they allowed the Archbishop of Sens, Marigni, brother to the king's treasurer, to form a tribunal of ecclesiastics, under the name of a provincial These made no difficulty of declaring to be relapsed a certain number of the Templars, consisting chiefly of those who offered to defend the order. Philip immediately ordered two spaces to be enclosed outside the gates of Paris, the one at the gate of St. Antoine, the other at that of St. Denis. And there fifty-four Templars were tied to stakes, and combustibles piled around them. They were promised pardon if they confessed; but they had been so often deceived, that they trusted Philip and his executioners no longer, and were therefore burned, persisting in their innocence, and died at least, if they had not lived, with the constancy of martyrs. The papal commissioners were shocked at the haste and severity of the Archbishop of Sens and his court. They protested, and claimed to have transferred to them a certain Templar, a defender of the order, whose trial they were proceeding with. But the lawyers of the archbishop's court, who were peculiarly desirous to stop the mouth of this man, replied that his trial had lasted already two years, which was quite long enough, and that the archbishop had the Pope's authority, as well as the commissioners'. These accordingly abandoned their task, and allowed full licence to the courts or councils which the king nominated in each province. The Templars who persisted in their innocence were, without mercy or delay, committed to the flames; those who acknowledged their guilt and had given testimony against their brethren were pardoned; some were immured for life. One knight, Aimery de Villars, declared himself ready to confess that he had murdered our Lord if the prosecution desired it, and would say any thing to escape torture and death. After these executions by courts, to which Pope Clement had given a certain though a reluctant assent, he was as much implicated as Philip, and desirous to accomplish the destruction of the Templars. But such a sweeping act of confiscation and slaughter applied to a religious order, could only be finally sanctioned by a general council. This was accordingly summoned to meet at Vienne in Dauphiny, in 1311. Philip, who admitted the necessity of a council, as well as the Pope, saw that it would be unadvisable to face it with that proposal on which he had long insisted, of a solemn degradation of the memory of Pope Boniface. He accordingly waived this; Nogaret, the great instigator, receiving absolution in return from the Pope for his attack on Boniface, on condition of proceeding to the Holy Land with the next crusade. At the same time, and with the same view of not provoking hostility in the future council, Philip gave up, in appearance at least, his hold of the property and revenues of the Templars, praying the Pope in a public demand that, since the order would no doubt be condemned by the forthcoming assembly, the property might be given to some new military religious fraternity. Whilst the general council was about to meet at Vienne, Philip had determined on summoning a parliament or assembly of his adherents at Lyons. The principal part of that city on the left bank of the Saone, formerly belonging to the emperor, had fallen under the jurisdiction of its archbishop, at the time a prince of the CHAP. VIII. CHAP. House of Savoy. The citizens, oppressed by the exactions of its prelate, had had recourse to the protection of France, but they soon found the seneschals of Philip as extortionate and arbitrary as the prelate's officers. They rose consequently in insurrection, and stormed the castle of St. Just. Philip took the opportunity of sending against them his eldest son, Louis Hutin, then styled King of Navarre. The force which the prince brought was sufficient to defy resistance, and the archbishop Peter, of Savoy, who had but a life interest in Lyons, nevertheless ceded it in perpetuity to Philip, who thus acquired the second city of the kingdom. The council of Vienne was opened in October, 1311, and it was at once manifest that the condemnation of the Templars, without hearing the testimony of those who survived, would be against the wishes of the majority. The Pope in consequence suspended the sittings, put in close prison those of the Templars who had escaped and who had presented themselves for the defence, and spent the winter in negotiating with the prelates, and endeavouring to obtain their adhesion to what had taken place. By these efforts and manœuvres Clement was at last able to have the order of the Templars condemned by the council; this was done, however, in secret consistory, and more by way of provision than of active condemnation. A public session of the council was then held in the spring of 1312, when the Pope, in consequence of the former vote, pronounced, in the presence of Philip and the council, the order of the Templars dissolved. It was then ordained that the property of the order should be made over to the Knights Hospitallers. The grand master of this order had prudently withdrawn from France, fearing that the storm which overwhelmed the Knights of the Temple might extend also to those of the Hospital. Collecting the knights at Cyprus, the grand master proceeded to the conquest of Rhodes, which he accom VIII. plished; thus securing a stronghold and a home for the CHAP. order, away from the rapacious designs of the Pope and of European sovereigns. Although the property of the Templars was assigned to the Hospitallers, this profited them little, for Philip and his legists brought them in so enormous a bill of the costs for his law expenditure in the trial, that the greater part of the Templars' wealth was absorbed by the crown. The difficulty remained of dealing with the persons of the grand master De Molay and of those other great officers of the order; one of them Guy, brother of the Dauphin of Auvergne. The Pope had reserved these for the judgment of the council, wishing to save them from the cruelty of Philip; for the council, though consenting to the abolition of the order, would have no complicity with the work of blood. They would have heard and tried but to acquit: and this Clement would not permit; his intention, however, was to save their lives. For this purpose he named a commission of three cardinals, who, unfortunately, adjoined to their tribunal the sanguinary Archbishop of Sens, who had already imbued his hands in the blood of the Templars. The prelates held their court in public, on a scaffold hung round with red, on the open space before the portal of Notre Dame de Paris. The grand master De Molay, Guy of Auvergne, and two other dignitaries, were brought before the tribunal. Bidden to repeat their confession of guilt, all four obeyed, and the cardinals proceeded to pass the sentence which condemned the four dignitaries of the Temple to perpetual imprisonment. The ceremony, and with it the melancholy tragedy of the Templars, seemed over; when two of the condemned, Molay and Guy D'Auvergne, in whose breasts indignation had been bursting, and who probably had been led to expect a milder sentence, broke forth with a passionate protest, that all which they had confessed of their own crimes and those of the order were untrue; that they had been |