of the order, in the presence of Robert Swillington, canon, Sir Richard Chatesby, an English priest, and William Gaston of England, Turcopolier to the king of Cyprus. The ceremony was performed in the church of S. Nicolas of the English in the city of Nicosia; one of the many churches which formerly, according to Father Stephen of Lusignan, adorned that city, of which the Venetians destroyed 130 in the process of fortification. [It is possible that it still exists, and is indeed that church of S. Nicolas, which our dear friend the bishop of Gibraltar tried to recover in 1879.J The hospital in London became, probably at the fall of the Templars, a mere Augustinian Hospital. Its church, or one built on the site of it, is now the chapel of the Mercers' Company[1].
England had not, with all her business under Henry III and Edward I, forgotten Palestine: some of her sons fell at Acre, and the remnant of the little order found a home at Nicosia. But the great king himself never forgot his first love; in fact all the nobler Plantagenets, Richard of Cornwall, Edward I, Henry of Lancaster, Henry of Bolingbroke, Henry V, and Cardinal Beaufort, all either made the pilgrimage or looked forward to a great crusade. To Edward I, in or about 1303, was addressed the very amusing ' Libellus de recuperatione Terræ Sanctæ[2],' the work of an ecclesiastical judge in Aquitaine, whose name is unknown, but who speculates like a special correspondent of the period; a book which shows a just sense of the evils which had rendered the united action of Christendom impossible; points out ways in which all political dangers in Europe can be avoided; stigmatises the crime of war between Christian princes, the ruinous discord between Venice, Pisa, and Genoa, and proposes to settle the military orders chiefly in Cyprus, and employ them in the recovery of the holy places. Curiously enough, one of the remedial measures proposed by the writer, who is especially strong on the subject of natural science, is that
- ↑ The history of the London house may be read in Newcourt, Repertorium, i. 553; and Men. Angl. vi. 645; it must be carefully distinguished from the Hospital of S. Thomas the Martyr in Southwark, the germ of the present S. Thomas's Hospital. See also Itinerarium Regis Ricardi, præf. pp. cxii-cxiii.
- ↑ Printed at the end of the second volume of Bongars' Gesta Dei per Francos.
