CLEMENT
22
CLEMENT
ments, etc.)- PhUip, however, did not wait for the
ordinary operation of the Inquisition, but, with the
aid of his confessor, Guillaume de Paris (the inquisitor
of France), and his clever, unscrupulous jurists
(Nogaret, de Plaisians, Enguerrand de Marigny)
struck suddenly at the whole order, 12 October, 1307,
by the arrest at Paris of Jacques de Molay, the Grand
Commander, and one hundred and forty knights, fol-
lowed by the inquisitor's mandate to arrest all other
members throughout France, and by royal sequestra-
tion of the property of the order. Public opinion
was cunningly and successfully forestalled by the
aforesaid jurists. It was also falsely made to appear
that the pope approved, or was consentingly aware, of
the royal action, while the co-operation of French
inquisitors and bishops put the seal of ecclesiastical
approval on an act that was certainly so far one of
gross injustice.
While Philip invited the other princes of Europe to follow his example, Clement V protested (27 Octo- ber) against the royal usurp.ition of the papal au- thority, demanded the transfer to his own custody of the prisoners and their property, and suspended the inquisitional authority of the king's ecclesiastic and the French bishops. Philip made an apparent submission, but in the meantime Clement had issued another Bull (22 November) commanding an investi- gation of the anti-Templar charges in all European countries. (It may be said at once that the results were generally favourable to the order; nowhere, given the lack of torture, were confessions obtained like those secured in France.) The feeble efforts of Clement to obtain for the order strict canonical justice (he was himself an excellent canonist) were counteracted by the new Bull that dignified and seemed to confirm the charges of the French king, neither then nor later supported by any material evidence or documents outside of his own suborned witnesses and the confessions of the prisoners, ob- tained by torture or by other dubious methods of their jailers, none of whom dared resist the well- known will of Philip. The alleged secret Rule of the Templars, authorizing the aforesaid charges, was never produced. In the meantime William Nogaret had been busy defaming Pope Clement, threatening him with charges not unlike those pending against Boniface VIII, and working up successfully an anti- Templar public opinion against the next meeting (May, 1308) of the States-General. In July of that year it was agreed between the pope and the king that the guilt or innocence of the order itself should be separated from that of its individual (French) mem- bers. The former was reserved to a general council, soon to be convoked at Vierme in Southern France, and to prepare evidence for which, apart from the examinations now going on through Europe, and a hearing before the pope of seventy-two members of the order brought from the prisons of Philip (all of whom confessed themselves guilty of heresy and prayed for absolution), there were appointed various special commissions, the most important of which began its sessions at Paris in August, 1309. Its members, act- ing in the name and with the authority of the pope, were opposed to the use of torture, hence before them hundreds of knights maintained freely the innocence of the order, while many of those who had formerly yielded to the diocesan inquisitors now retracted their avowals as contrary to truth. When Nogaret and de Plaisians saw the probable outcome of the hearings before the papal commissions, they precipitated matters, caused the Archbishop of Sens (brother of Enguerrand de Marigny) to call a provincial council (Sens was then mctmimlitan of Paris and seat of the local inquisition tribun.nl), at which were condemned, as relapsed heretics, fifty-four knights who had re- cently withdrawn before the papal commissioners their former confessions on the plea that they had
been given under torture and were quite false. That
same day (12 May, 1310), all these knights were pub-
licly bm"ned at Paris outside the Porte St-Antoine.
To the end all protested their innocence.
There could no longer be any question of liberty of defence; the papal commission at Paris suspended its sessions for six months, and when it met again found before it only knights who had confessed the crimes they were charged with and had been recon- ciled by the local inquisitors. The fate of the Templars was finally sealed at the Council of Vienne (opened 16 October, 1311). The majority of its three hundred members were opposed to the abolition of the order, believing the alleged crimes unprovcn, but the king was urgent, appeared in person at the council, and finally obtained from Clement V the practical execution of his will. At the second session of the council, in presence of the king and his three sons, was read the Bull " Vox in excelsis", dated 22 March, 1312, in which the pope said that though he had no suflScient reasons for a formal condemnation of the order, nevertheless, because of the common weal, the hatred borne them by the King of France, the scandalous nature of their trial, and the probable dilapidation of the order's property in every Christian land, he suppressed it by virtue of his .sovereign power, and not by any definitive sentence. By another Bull of 2 May he vested in the Hospitallers the title to the property of the sup- pressed order. In one way or another, however, Philip managed to become the chief legatee of its great wealth in France. As to the Templars them- selves, those who continued to maintain their con- fessions were set free; those who withdrew them were considered relapsed heretics and were dealt with as such by the tribunals of the Inquisition. It was only in 1314 that the Grand Master, Jacques de Molay and Geoffroy de Charnay, Grand Preceptor of Nor- mandy, reserved to the judgment of the pope, were condemned to perpetual imprisonment. Thereupon they proclaimed the falsity of their confessions, and accused themselves of cowardice in betraying their order to save their lives. They were at once declared relapsed heretics, turned over to the secular arm by the ecclesiastical authority, and were burned that same day (18 March, 1314). Of Pope Clement it may be said that the few measures of equity that appear in the course of this great crime were owing to him ; imfortunately his sense of justice and his respect for the law were counterbalanced by a weak and vacil- lating character, to which perhaps his feeble and un- certain health contributed. Some think he was con- vinced of the Templars' guilt, especially after so many of the chief members had admitted it to him- self; they explain thus his recommendation of the use of torture, also his toleration of the king's sup- pression of all proper hberty of defence on the part of the accused. Others believe that he feared for himself the fate of Boniface VIII, whose cruel enemy, William Nogaret, still lived, attorney-general of Philip, skilled in legal violence, and emboldened by a long career of successful infamy. His strongest motive was, in all probability, anxiety to save the memory of Boniface VIII from the injustice of a formal condemnation which the malice of Nogaret and the cold vindictiveness of Philip would have in- sisted on, had not the rich prey of the Temple been thrown to them; to stand for both with Apostolic courage might have meant intolerable consequences, not only personal indignities, but in the end the graver evil of schism under conditions peculiarly un- favourable for the papacy. (See Philip the Fair; Vienne, Council of; Templars.)
Clement V and Emperor Hexry VII. — In pur- suance of the vast ambitions of the French monarchy (Pierre Dubois, "De recuperatione terrse sanctse ", ed. Langlois, Paris, 1891), King Philip was anxious to see his brother Charles of Valois chosen lung of Germany
