asked him to stand godfather to one of his children; and Molay was pall-bearer at the burial of the king’s sister-in-law. Meanwhile the most sinister reports, the gravest imputations, were bruited abroad against the Templars; they were accused “of things distasteful, deplorable, horrible to think on, horrible to hear, of betraying Christendom for the profit of the infidels, of secretly denying the faith, of spitting upon the cross, of abandoning themselves to idolatrous practices and the most licentious lives.” In 1307, in the month of October, Philip the Handsome and Clement V. had met at Poitiers; and the king asked the pope to authorize an inquiry touching the Templars and the accusations made against them. James de Molay was forthwith arrested at Paris with a hundred and forty of his knights; sixty met the same fate at Beaucaire; many others all over France; and their property was put in the king’s keeping for the service of the Holy Land. On the 12th of August, 1308, a papal bull appointed a grand commission of inquiry charged to conduct, at Paris, an examination of the matter “according as the law requires.” The Archbishops of Canterbury in England and of Mayence, Cologne, and Troves in Germany, were also named commissioners, and the pope announced that he would deliver his judgment within two years, at a general council held at Vienne, in Dauphiny, territory of the Empire. Twenty-six princes and laic lords, the Dukes of Burgundy and Brittany, the Counts of Flanders, Nevers, and Auxerre, and the Count of Talleyrand de Perigord, offered themselves as the Templars’ accusers, and gave powers of attorney to act in their names. On the 22d of November, 1309, the Grand Master, Molay, was, called before the commission. At first he firmly denied all that his order had been accused of; afterwards he became confused and embarrassed, said that he had not the ability to undertake the defence of his order, that he was but a poor, unlettered knight, that the pope had reserved to himself the decision in the case, and that, for his part, he only wished the pope would summon him as soon as possible before him. On the 28th of March, 1310, five hundred and forty-six knights, who had declared their readiness to defend their order, appeared before the commission; and they were called upon to choose proctors to speak in their name. “We ought also, then,” said they, “to have been tortured by proxy only.” The prisoners were treated with the uttermost rigor and reduced to the most wretched plight: “out of their poor pay of twelve deniers per diem they were obliged to pay for their passage by water to go and submit to their examination in the city, and to give money besides to the man who undid and riveted their fetters.” In October, 1310, at a council held at Paris, a large number of Templars were examined, several acquitted, some subjected to special penances, and fifty-four condemned as heretics to the stake, and burned the same day in a field close to the abbey of St. Anthony; and nine others met the same fate at the hands of a council held at Senlis the same year: “They confessed under their tortures,” says Bossuet, “but they denied at their execution.” The business dragged slowly on; different decisions were pronounced, according to the place of decision; the Templars were pronounced innocent, on the 17th of June, 1310, at Ravenna, on the 1st of July at Mayence, and on the 21st of October at Salamanca; and in Aragon they made a successful resistance. Europe began to be wearied at the uncertainty of such judgments and at the sight of such horrible spectacles; and Clement V. felt some shame at thus persecuting monks who, on more than one occasion, had shown devotion to the Holy See.
But Philip the Handsome had attained his end: he was in possession of the Templars’ riches. On the 11th of June, 1311, the commission of inquiry terminated its sittings, and the report of its labors concluded as follows: “For further precaution, we have deposited the said procedure, drawn up by notaries in authentic form, in the treasury of Notre-Dame, at Paris, to be shown to none without special letters from Your Holiness.” The council-general, announced in 1308 by the pope, to decide definitively upon this great case, was actually opened at Vienne, in October, 1311; more than three hundred bishops assembled; and nine Templars presented themselves for the defence of their order, saying that there were at Lyons, or in the neighborhood, fifteen hundred or two thousand of their brethren, ready to support them. The pope had the nine defenders arrested, adjourned the decision once more, and, on the 22d of March in the following year, at a mere secret consistory, made up of the most docile bishops and a few cardinals, pronounced, solely on his pontifical authority, the abolition of the order of the Temple: and it was subsequently proclaimed officially, on the 3d of April, 1312, in presence of the king and the council. And not a soul protested.
The Grand Master, James de Molay, in confinement at Gisors, survived his order. The pope had reserved to himself the task of trying him; but, disgusted with the work, he committed the trial to ecclesiastical commissioners assembled at Paris, before whom Molay was brought, together with three of the principal leaders of the Temple, survivors like himself. They had read over to them, from a scaffold erected in the forecourt of Notre-Dame, the confessions they had made, but lately, under torture, and it was announced to them that they were sentenced to perpetual imprisonment. Remorse had restored to the Grand Master all his courage; he interrupted the reading, and disavowed his avowals, protesting that torture alone had made him speak so falsely, and maintaining that
| “Of his grand order nought he wist ’Gainst honor and the laws of Christ.” |
One of his three comrades in misfortune, the commander of Normandy, made aloud a similar disavowal. The embarrassed judges sent the two Templars back to the provost of Paris, and put off their decision to the following day; but Philip the Handsome, without waiting for the morrow, and without consulting the judges, ordered the two Templars to be burned the same evening, March 11, 1314, at the hour of vespers, in Ile-de-la-Cite, on the site of the present Place Dauphine. A poet-chronicler, Godfrey of Paris, who was a witness of the scene, thus describes it: “The Grand Master, seeing the fire prepared, stripped himself briskly; I tell just as I saw; he bared himself to his shirt, light-heartedly and with a good grace, without a whit of trembling, though he was dragged and shaken mightily. They took hold of him to tie him to the stake, and they were binding his hands with a cord, but he said to them, ‘Sirs, suffer me to fold my hands a while, and make my prayer to God, for verily it is time. I am presently to die; but wrongfully, God wot. Wherefore woe will come, ere long, to those who condemn us without a cause. God will avenge our death.’ ”
It was probably owing to these last words that there arose a popular rumor, soon spread abroad, that James de Molay, at his death, had cited the pope and the king to appear with him, the former at the end of forty days, and the latter within a year, before the judgment-seat of God. Events gave a sanction to the legend: for Clement V. actually died on the 20th of April, 1314, and Philip the Handsome on the 29th of November, 1314, the pope, undoubtedly, uneasy at the servile acquiescence he had shown towards the king, and the king expressing some sorrow for his greed and for the imposts (maltote, maletolta, or black mail) with which he had burdened his people.
In excessive and arbitrary imposts, indeed, consisted the chief grievance for which France, in the fourteenth century, had to complain of Philip the Handsome; and, probably, it was the only wrong for which he upbraided himself. Being badly wounded, out hunting, by a wild boar, and perceiving himself to be in bad case, he gave orders for his removal to Fontainebleau, and there, says Godfrey of Paris, the poet-chronicler just quoted in reference to the execution of the Templars, “he said and commanded that his children, his brothers, and his other friends should be sent for. They were no long time in coming; they entered Fontainebleau, into the chamber where the king was, and where there was very little light. So soon as they were there, they asked him how he was, and he answered, ‘Ill in body and in soul; if our Lady the Virgin save me not by her prayers, I see that death will seize me here; I have put on so many talliages, and laid hands on so much riches, that I shall never be absolved. Sirs, I know that I am in such estate that I shall die, methinks, to-night, for I suffer grievous hurt from the curses which pursue me: there will be no fine tales to be told of me.’ ” Philip’s anxiety about his memory was not without foundation; his greed is the vice which has clung to his name; not only did he load his subjects with poll taxes and other taxes unauthorized by law and the traditions of the feudal system; not only was he unjust and cruel towards the Templars in order to appropriate their riches; but he committed, over and over again, that kind of spoliation which imports most trouble into the general life of a people; he debased the coinage so often and to such an extent, that he was everywhere called “the base coiner.”
