Gregory X. was in force, not a very comfortable one. This Gregory was one of the best of the Popes,—a holy man in thought and action as well as in words,—one of whom even Protestant Christendom might sadly say,—
"Ostendunt terris hunc tantum fata, neque ultra
Esse sinunt."
His brief reign of four years, four months, and ten days had been preceded by a scandalous interregnum of thirty-four months, filled with intrigues and bitter feuds that might almost have made a Luther of Erasmus, if there had been either an Erasmus or a Luther there. But, unfortunately, or rather fortunately, as time has shown, neither St. Bonaventura nor St. Thomas Aquinas, who both saw and sighed over them, was of the stuff that reformers are made of; and although the scandal ended, at last, by the fifteen cardinals who had been wrangling at Viterbo delegating the power of election to six, who immediately chose Tealdo of Piacenza, neither cardinal nor prelate, it is true, but still a choice which savored more of inspiration than any that had been made for years, yet it came too late to repair the breach which their dissensions had made in the great fabric of Gregory and Innocent. One of the early acts of the new Gregory was to call a general council at Lyons, into which he sought, like his predecessors, to breathe his own spirit,—happily, for once, a spirit of harmony and love. To prevent a recurrence of scandak like those which had preceded his own election, he framed a new constitution for the conclave, appealing, not to the higher motives in which they had so often been found wanting, but to the coarsest form of that selfishness which they had so signally displayed. By this constitution they were confined to a single room,—to be used by all in common for all purposes: a death-blow to those intrigues and bargainings which had so often drawn out the election to a length fatal to the true interests of the Church. If after three days they failed to agree upon a choice, they received a preliminary admonition of the virtue of a temperate diet, being confined to a single dish at noon and a single dish in the evening. If five days of moderation failed, they were brought down for the remainder of the session to bread with wine and water.[1] Lest, too, there should be any unnecessary delay in coming together, the conclave was to begin on the tenth day afler the death of the last Pope, and be held in the place where he died.
With all their reverence for their spiritual father, the cardinals held out against the new constitution like men who knew how to prize the privilege of keeping Christendom in suspense; and it was only by private negotiations with the prelates that it could be carried at last. If any but the cardinals themselves had doubted its efficacy, their doubts must have been shaken by the first trial; for Innocent V., Gregory's immediate successor, was chosen on the very first day of the conclave. The next election, it is true, brought the reverend body to their single dish; but they shrank with instinctive loathing from the bread and water, although the water was kindly tempered with wine, and on the sixth day Adrian V. received the number of votes necessary to save himself and his companions from the humiliation of being starved into a choice. Almost the only act of his thirty-eight days' reign, during which he could not find time to be ordained either bishop or priest, was to suspend the hated constitution; and upon his death the cardinals entered the conclave prepared to take their time about it, as in the happy days of old. Now, however, the people took the matter into their own hands, threatened them with the literal enforcement of the constitution, and secured a speedy election. But what could the people do with both Pope and cardinals against them? Without waiting to issue
- ↑ Gregory seems to have been of Napoleon's opinion,—"C'est la faim, c'est le petit ventre, qui fait mouvoir le monde!"—Las Casas, Tom. V. p. 32
