KNIGHTS TEMPLARS. 



583 



examined, and are said to have acknowledged the 

 truth of the charges. The king, who was anxious 

 to carry the people with him, had now the act of 

 accusation drawn up, in which the knights are de- 

 signated as ravenous wolves, perjurers, idolaters, 

 and in general as the vilest of men. This act was 

 read to the citizens, assembled in the royal gar- 

 dens. He also sent to Edward II. of England, in- 

 viting him to follow his example, but Edward was 

 reluctant to proceed to any extremities; he wrote 

 on the 30th October, declaring that the charges 

 appeared to him and his barons and prelates, to be 

 incredible, but that he would write to the sene- 

 schal of Agers in Guienne, who was nearer to the 

 country where the reports prevailed, to make in- 

 quiry. On the 10th December, after inquiry had 

 been made by the seneschal, Edward wrote to the 

 pope, stating, that a horrible rumour was abroad 

 respecting the Templars, who should be severely 

 punished if it was found to be true, but that he 

 could give no credit to it, and prayed the pope to 

 institute an inquiry. He had previously (Decem- 

 ber 4th) written to the kings of Portugal, Castile, 

 Arragon, and Sicily, stating that a priest (Philip's 

 envoy) had been lately urging him to suppress the 

 order, Accusing it of heresy, but that in considera- 

 tion of the great merits of the order he had given 

 no credit to these insinuations; and he besought 

 these monarchs to pay no attention to the rumours 

 against it. But Clement had put forth a bull 

 (November 22) stating the charges against the 

 Templars, and calling on the king of England to 

 imprison them, and take their goods into safe keep- 

 ing. To this Edward yielded obedience, and on 

 the Wednesday of the Epiphany the English 

 knights were arrested, but the king gave direc- 

 tions that they should be treated with all gentle- 

 ness. Orders were sent to Ireland, Scotland, and 

 Wales, to the same effect, and Edward wrote to 

 the pope to assure him of obedience. 



Meantime Philip and his chief agents were not 

 remiss. These were, his confessor, William Im- 

 bert, a dominican, member, therefore, of an order 

 hostile to the Templars, and well versed in inqui- 

 sitorial arts ; William Nogaret, the chancellor, the 

 man who had dared to seize pope Boniface at 

 Anagni; William Plesian, who had also borne a 

 part in that bold deed, and afterwards swore in the 

 presence of the peers and prelates of France, that 

 Boniface was an atheist and sorcerer, and had a 

 familiar devil ; and several others of the same 

 stamp, all likely to prove gentle judges! The 

 unhappy knights had been thrown into cold cheer- 

 less dungeons, (for they were arrested, we should 

 remember, at the commencement of winter,) had 

 barely the necessaries of life, were deprived of the 

 habit of their order, and of the rites and comforts 

 of the church ; were exposed to every species of 

 torture then in use ; were shown a real or pre- 

 tended letter of the grand-master, in which he 

 confessed several of the charges, and exhorted 

 them to do the same ; and finally were promised 

 life and liberty, if they freely acknowledged the 

 guilt of the order. Can we then be surprised that 

 the spirit of many a knight was broken, that the 

 hope of escape from misery, even at the cost of 

 disgrace, was eagerly caught at, and that false- 

 hoods, the most improbable, were acknowledged 

 to be true ? At a subsequent period one Templar 

 thus expressed himself before the papal commis- 

 sioners : " I have seen the fifty-four knights con 

 veyed in carts to be committed to the flames, 



because they would not make the required confes- 

 sions ; I have heard that they were burned ; and I 

 doubt if I could, like them, have the noble con- 

 stancy to brave the pile. I believe that if I were 

 threatened with it, 1 should depose on oath before 

 the commissioners and before all who would ask 

 me, that the enormities imputed to the knights 

 are true ; that I should kill God himself if re- 

 quired ; and he implored all present not to let the 

 king's officers know what he had said, lest they 

 should commit him to the flames." This shows the 

 value to be set on confessions extracted by the 

 rack, or the fear of it, for this last kind are those 

 which were termed voluntary. The papal com- 

 mission even declared, that terror had deprived 

 several of the witnesses (the imprisoned Templars) 

 of their senses. 



It is remarkable that the most improbable 

 charges are those which were most frequently ac- 

 knowledged, so just is the observation, that men 

 will more readily in such circumstances acknow- 

 ledge what is false than what is true ; for the 

 false they know can be afterwards refuted by 

 its own absurdity, whereas truth is permanent. 

 There is no improbability whatsoever in supposing, 

 that the Templars, in common with all the reli- 

 gious orders, were obnoxious to the charge of un- 

 natural lust, though certainly not as a rule of their 

 society ; and it is by no means unlikely, that deism 

 may have prevailed to some extent among their 

 members, owing to their intercourse with the 

 Moslems. Yet no Templar confessed himself 

 guilty of either one or the other, though enough 

 deposed to the worship of the head and the spit- 

 ting on the cross. How, we may ask, could deism 

 and the grossest idolatry combine? and does not 

 the charge of their having learned the latter from 

 the Saracens carry its own refutation with it ? 

 How many brave knights expired amidst tortures, 

 sooner than confess these absurd falsehoods, as we 

 must term them ? how many recanted their first 

 declarations, and sealed with their blood their 

 avowal of the innocence of the order ? Is there 

 not eternal and irreconcilable contradiction between 

 the depositions of the different parties, or of the 

 same parties at different times ? Does not terror 

 of the rack visibly pervade every one of the con- 

 fessions? How different, too, is the conduct of 

 the accused before the papal commission, where 

 there was some chance of justice and mercy, and 

 before the royal bloodhounds, where there was 

 none ! 



But truth is one, and the order was one in- 

 quiry must then have brought similar enormities to 

 light in other countries, if they existed. From the 

 additions which the archives of the Vatican have 

 enabled Miinter to make to the pieces in Wilkins's 

 Consilia, our account of the process against the 

 Templars in England is tolerably complete. Of 

 the Templars themselves 228 were examined ; the 

 Dominican, Carmelite, Minorite, and Augustinian 

 friars brought abundance of hearsay evidence 

 against them, but nothing of any importance was 

 proved ; in Castile and Leon it was the same ; in 

 Arragon the knights bravely endured the torture, 

 and maintained their innocence ; in Germany all 

 the lay witnesses testified in their favour ; in 

 Italy their enemies were more successful, as the 

 influence of the pope was there considerable, yet 

 in Lombardy the bishops acquitted the knights. 

 Charles of Anjou, the cousin of Philip and the foe 

 of the Templars, who had sided with Frederic 



