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VIII.

CHAP. others, according to their powers of endurance or the cruelty of the inquisitors, confessed to a greater or fewer number of the charges. As to defence, it was out of the question: the court would not permit advocates "whose noise was not to be tolerated in cases of heresy." And Jacques de Molay, the grand master, asked "how could he prepare a defence, when kept a close prisoner without four pence?" Charges equally heinous and almost of the same kind were, previously and subsequently, made against Pope Boniface by the same accuser, Nogaret, who arraigned the Templars; and had the trial proceeded, the Pope remaining in the power of the French lawyers, they could no doubt have proved those crimes in the same way as they proved them against the Templars. With trials conducted after the custom of the Inquisition, any crime might be proved against any person or number of persons accused. And what those crimes were, depended evidently on the imagination and rancour of the accuser, rather than on the guilt of the accused.

A great many theories have been propounded, and very diverse judgments passed, upon this subject. Those who altogether exculpate and those who totally condemn the Templars can make, each of them, a plausible case. But the supposition of complete innocence cannot do away with the numberless instances in which Templars admitted the spitting on the cross and the worship of the head; whilst the existence of this foolish rite cannot be explained as the initiation either into a secret religion or into a system and habits of gross sensuality. No evidence reveals these. Had a peculiar religion existed amongst the Templars, or such gross sensuality as parts of the initiation would imply, some proofs must have been elicited from a number of Templars who were anxious to purchase immunity by

Literally four denarii. "Who loses freedom," (libero arbitrio) says one of the accused, "loses all means

of defence, even the power of science and the use of intellect."

confession. The charges are almost exclusively confined to the initiatory rite, of which, it is quite evident, as Michelet says, the Templars themselves had lost the key. It is nevertheless difficult to consider it, with that historian, a mere symbol, of no more than dramatic origin or importance. The rite must have been a form of magic or incantation learned and first practised in Palestine; and witnesses alleged it to have originated with a grand master, who was prisoner of a Saracen. The form was a magical incantation intended for the protection of the order-a farce, as one of the Templars described it, in so far as it implied any disbelief in the Saviour or the cross-but still considered to be of salutary influence, like so many of the magical operations of the time;—an age in which men plotted to take each other's life by means of a waxen image which they pricked; an age in which a monarch, suspecting the fidelity of his wife, recurred to the beguine of a distant province, to tell him the truth and ease his mind on the subject;-in such an age the Templars might well have made use of Arabic or Gnostic rites, or they might wear an amulet, without comprehending their import, or without drawing from them any consequence with regard to their actual creed or their moral conduct. The detection of Gnostic symbols amidst the paraphernalia of an order which inhabited the East as their home, is not wonderful, but is far from implying a belief in Gnostic tenets. As little is it proved that the Templars were Manichean or Cathar. Had these suppositions been true, the revelations and interrogatories would have extended further than their rules of reception. It is probable that Pierre de Bourgoyne, who was selected as the defender of the order, and who seemed to have been the only brother with a shadow of learning or edu cation, would have explained the trivial nature of these

Some of the Templars, however, confessed a disbelief in Tran

substantiation, which was part of
the creed of the Vandois.

СПАР.

VIII.

VIII.

rites to the satisfaction of the ecclesiastical tribunal; but Philip's legists stood too much in dread of any such explanation, to permit its being publicly made. And Pierre de Bourgoyne was accordingly made away with. This infamous and murderous suppression of the defence creates the strongest presumption of the innocence of the Templars in the main; that is, of the trivial and symbolical or magical nature of their introductory rites; and whatever may remain the opinion respecting the Templars, stamps upon Philip the Fair and his lawyers the stigma. of being most vile and most unscrupulous assassins.

In his first judicial proceedings against the Templars, and on applying torture to so many of them, the king was aware that he was transgressing the privilege of ecclesiastics and of monks. He obtained a kind of sanction from the university to act thus in cases of heresy, on condition of referring afterwards to the Pope. Even Clement was shocked at the haste of the king and the cruelty of his legists, and he accordingly revoked the powers which he had given to the inquisitors and prelates. Philip remonstrated against his lukewarmness, and said that indulgence towards such criminals was connivance with them. He then took steps to do without the papal sanction, and not only made the university participate in his views, but he summoned an assembly of the States General to meet at Tours. Very few thought fit to attend, either nobles, prelates, or townsfolk, there being four hundred procurations forwarded. The assembly, thus composed principally of courtiers and functionaries, gave its full adherence to the wishes of the monarch, who strengthened by this kind of national vote, entitling him to dispense with the papal authority, proceeded to meet the Pontiff at Poictiers. The great reason of the Pope's distrust, and of the difference between him and Philip, was less any desire on the part of his Holiness to save the Templars, than a determination not to allow

the king to have all the spoil. Philip satisfied the Pope's scruples in this respect at Poictiers by promising and formally declaring that the goods of the Templars should be devoted exclusively to the recovery of the Holy Land. In consequence of this assurance, the Pope restored to the inquisitors the power of proceeding with the trial of the accused.

Notwithstanding this concession, Clement refused to sign any bull for the dissolution of the order. He could not but perceive, as time rolled on, that the king was in reality appropriating its resources to himself. He insisted on personally examining the Templars: the grand master and the chief officers were accordingly brought from Paris as far as Chinon, whither Clement sent cardinals to hear what they had to plead. The grand master and the officers confessed the crimes laid to their charge, no doubt on the understanding that they should be absolved. The cardinals kept their portion of the promise, which the Templars of course considered the term of their sufferings. But this would not warrant confiscation, nor confirm the monarch in the possession of his spoil; and the king insisted on the continuation of their trial. On thus feeling that faith was broken with them, the unfortunate Templars withdrew their avowals, and the Pope named an extraordinary commission to proceed to Paris and examine into the truth of the accusations urged against them, and the motives which had produced this confession.

Whilst the fate of the Templars was thus in abeyance, an event arose which allowed Philip to have full experience of the amity of the Pope. The Emperor Albert of Austria perished by the hand of an assassin in the spring of 1308. Philip lost no time in informing the Pontiff that the sixth condition, to which he had assented in return for his elevation to the chair of St. Peter, was that he should use his utmost endeavours to procure the election of Charles, Count of Valois, to the empire.

CHAP.

VIII.

VIIL

CHAP. This prince, like his uncle and namesake of Anjou, was always on the scent of great enterprises, chiefly those which Charles of Anjou himself had attempted. He had tried to become the master of Italy, to subdue Sicily, to conquer the Greek Empire: he now desired to be Emperor of Germany. Clement wrote glowing epistles in his favour, secretly warning those to whom they were addressed to make no account of them; and Henry of Luxembourg was accordingly elected to the Imperial throne. Clement removed to Avignon, a town in his own county of the Venaissin, at least out of the immediate jurisdiction of Philip. The latter, suspecting the Pope of insincerity in supporting Charles of Valois, avenged himself not only by pressing the trial of the Templars, but by insisting on the continuation of the trial for the degradation of the memory of Pope Boniface.

This trial was a struggle between Nogaret supported by the king on one side, and the memory of Boniface, to protect which his numerous friends exerted themselves on the other. Nogaret collected a mass of witnesses from Italy, who at first were waylaid and dispersed by the opposite party. But at last they were brought up, and their depositions made public. The charges against Boniface very much resembled those against the Templars the testimony went to prove that he was abominably debauched and given to sorcery, that he denied the immortality of the soul and the reality of Christ's mission. To disprove such accusations was now impossible, and the friends of Boniface met them by repeating the same charges against the accuser, Nogaret. Had Philip sought to give even plausibility to the accusation against the Templars, he would have avoided this parody or repetition of a similar trial against the memory of a deceased pope. But the king and his legists had lost not only all sense of justice, but even of decency, in dispensing with it.

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