called upon to play a decisive part in the history of nations are more often than not unaware of the destinies they embody. These two people who had had this long interview upon a March afternoon of 1314, in the Palace of Westminster, could not know that, as a result of their actions, they would, almost alone, become the artisans of a war between the kingdoms of France and England which would last more than a hundred years.
THE WALL WAS COVERED with a damp mould. A smoky, yellow light began to filter down into the vaulted, underground room.
The prisoner was dozing, his arms crossed beneath his beard. Suddenly he shivered and sat up, haggard, his heart beating. For a moment he remained still, gazing at the morning mist which was blowing in through the little window. He was listening. Quite distinctly, though the sound was necessarily somewhat softened by the thickness of the walls, he could hear the pealing of the bells of Paris announcing the first Mass: the bells of Saint-Martin, of Saint-Merry, of Saint-Germain-l’Auxerrois, of Saint-Eustache and of Notre-Dame; the country bells of the nearby villages of La Courtille, of Clignancourt and of Mont-Martre.
The prisoner heard no particularly arresting sound. It was distress alone that made him start awake, the distress he suffered at each awakening, as he suffered nightmares whenever he slept.
He pulled a big wooden bowl of water to him and drank largely to allay the fever from which he had now suffered for days and days. Having drunk, he allowed the water in the bowl to subside into stillness and leaned over it as if it were a mirror or the depths of a well. The reflection he saw, though shadowy and indistinct, was that of a centenarian. He remained thus for some moments, searching for some likeness to his old appearance in the floating face with its ancestral beard, the lips sunken in a toothless mouth, the long, thin nose, the shadowed, deep-set eyes.
He put the bowl on one side, got up, then took a few steps till he felt the tautening of the chain that bound him to the wall. Suddenly, he began to scream: ‘Jacques de Molay! Jacques de Molay! I am Jacques de Molay!’
There was no answer; he knew there was no one to answer him, not even an echo.
But he needed to scream his own name, to hurl it at the stone columns, at the vaults, at the oak door, to prevent his mind dissolving into madness, to remind himself that he was sixty-two years old, that he had commanded armies, governed provinces, that he had possessed power equal to sovereigns, and that as long as he still drew breath he would continue to be, even in this dungeon, the Grand Master of the Order of Knights Templar.
From a refinement of cruelty, or perhaps contempt, he and the principal dignitaries of the Order had been imprisoned in the cellars, now transformed into dungeons, of the great tower of the Hôtel-du-Temple, their own building, their Mother House.
‘To think that it was I who had this tower repaired!’ the Grand Master murmured angrily, hitting the wall with his fist.
The blow made him cry out, it renewed an appalling pain in his hand, whose crushed thumb was no more than a stump of half-healed flesh. But indeed, what part of his body was neither an open sore nor the seat of some internal agony? Since he had suffered the torture of the boot, he had been a victim to bad circulation in the legs and abominable cramps. His legs strapped between boards, he had undergone the sharp anguish of oaken wedges tapped into place by the executioners’ mallets, while Guillaume de Nogaret, Keeper of the Seals of the Kingdom, asked him questions, trying to persuade him to confess. To confess what? He had fainted.
Dirt, damp and lack of food had had their effect upon his torn and lacerated body.
And more recently he had undergone the torture by stretching, the most appalling perhaps of all those to which he had been subjected. A weight of two hundred pounds had been tied to his right foot while he, old as he was, had been hoisted to the ceiling by a rope and pulley. And all the time Guillaume de Nogaret’s sinister voice kept repeating, ‘Confess, Messire, why don’t you confess?’ And since he still obstinately refused, they had hauled him from floor to ceiling more hurriedly, more jerkily. He had felt his limbs becoming disjointed, the articulations parting, his whole body seemed to be bursting, and he had begun to scream that he would confess everything, admit every crime, all the crimes of the world. Yes, the Templars practised sodomy among themselves; yes, to gain entrance to the Order, it was necessary to spit upon the Cross; yes, they worshipped an idol with the head of a cat; yes, they practised magic, and sorcery, and had a cult for the Devil; yes, they embezzled the funds confided to their care; yes, they had fomented a plot against the Pope and the King … And what more besides?
Jacques de Molay wondered how he had managed to survive it all. Doubtless because the tortures had been exactly calculated, never pushed to the point where there was a risk of his dying, and because, too, the constitution of an old knight, trained to arms and war, had greater resistance than he himself could have believed.
He knelt down, his eyes turned towards the beam of light that entered by the little window.
‘Oh, Lord my God,’ he cried, ‘why hast Thou given me greater strength of body than of mind? Was I worthy to command the Order? Thou hast not prevented my falling into cowardice; spare me, Lord God, from falling into folly. I cannot hold out much longer, no, not for much longer.’
He had been in chains for seven years, only leaving his dungeon to be dragged before the commission of inquiry, and to be submitted to all the pressures and threats that the theologians and lawyers could devise.
In the circumstances one might well fear madness. Often the Grand Master lost all sense of time. As a distraction, he had attempted to tame a couple of rats that came every night to eat the remains of his bread. He passed quickly from anger to tears, from crises of religious devotion to a longing for violence, from idiocy to fury.
‘They’ll die of it, they’ll die of it,’ he kept repeating to himself.
Who would? Clement, Guillaume, Philip. … The Pope, the Keeper of the Seals and the King. They would die. Molay did not know how, but it would certainly be amid appalling suffering and in expiation of their crimes. He unceasingly chewed over these three hated names.
Still upon his knees, his beard raised towards the narrow window, the Grand Master murmured, ‘I thank thee, Lord God, for leaving me hatred. It is the sole force that sustains me now.’
He got painfully to his feet and went back to the stone bench which, cemented to the wall, served both for seat and bed.
Who could ever have thought that he would come to this? His mind constantly returned to his youth, to the boy he had been fifty years before, as he came down the slopes of his native Jura in search of adventure.
Like all the younger sons of the nobility of the time, he had dreamed of wearing the long white mantle with the black cross, the uniform of the Order of the Knights Templar. In those days, the mere name of Templar evoked the epic and the exotic, ships with bellying sails scudding towards the Orient, lands where the skies were always blue, charges at the gallop across the desert sands, treasures of Arabia, ransomed prisoners, captured and pillaged cities, fortresses with huge staircases, built beside the sea. It was even said that the Templars had secret ports from which they embarked for unknown continents.4
And
