Chapter XVIII: The Kingship in France (6)

We were bound to get a good idea and understanding of this violent struggle between the two sovereigns of France and Rome, not only because of its dramatic interest, but because it marks an important period in the history of the papacy and its relations with foreign governments. From the tenth century and the accession of the Capetians the policy of the Holy See had been enterprising, bold, full of initiative, often even aggressive, and more often than not successful in the prosecution of its designs. Under Innocent III. it had attained the apogee of its strength and fortune. At that point its motion forward and upward came to a stop. Boniface had not the wit to recognize the changes which had taken place in European communities, and the decided progress which had been made by laic influences and civil powers. He was a stubborn preacher of maxims he could no longer practise. He was beaten in his enterprise; and the papacy, even on recovering from his defeat, found itself no longer what it had been before him. Starting from the fourteenth century we find no second Gregory VII., or Innocent III. Without expressly abandoning their principles, the policy of the Holy See became essentially defensive and conservative, more occupied in the maintenance than the aggrandizement of itself, and sometimes even more stationary and stagnant than was required by necessity or recommended by foresight. The posture assumed and the conduct adopted by the earliest successors of Boniface VIII. showed how far the situation of the papacy was altered, and how deep had been the penetration of the stab which, in this conflict between the two aspirants to absolute power, Philip the Handsome had inflicted on his rival.

On the 22d of October, 1303, eleven days after the death of Boniface VIII., Benedict XI., son of a simple shepherd, was elected at Rome to succeed him. Philip the Handsome at once sent his congratulations, but by William of Plasian, who had lately been the accuser of Boniface, and who was charged to hand to the new pope, on the king’s behalf, a very bitter memorandum touching his predecessor. Philip at the same time caused an address to be presented to himself in his own kingdom and in the vulgar tongue, called a supplication from the people of France to the King against Boniface. Benedict XI. exerted himself to give satisfaction to the conqueror; he declared the Colonnas absolved; he released the barons and prelates of France from the excommunications pronounced against them; and he himself wrote to the king to say that he would behave towards him as the good shepherd in the parable, who leaves ninety and nine sheep to go after one that is lost. Nogaret and the direct authors of the assault at Anagni were alone excepted from this amnesty. The pope reserved for a future occasion the announcement of their absolution, when he should consider it expedient. But on the 7th of June, 1304, instead of absolving them, he launched a fresh bull of excommunication against “certain wicked men who had dared to commit a hateful crime against a person of good memory, Pope Boniface.” A month after this bull Benedict XI. was dead. It is related that a young woman had put before him at table a basket of fresh figs, of which he had eaten and which had poisoned him. The chroniclers of the time impute this crime to William of Nogaret, to the Colonnas, and to their associates at Anagni; a single one names King Philip. Popular credulity is great in matters of poisoning; but one thing is certain, namely, that no prosecution was ordered. There is no proof of Philip’s complicity; but, full as he was of hatred and dissimulation, he was of those who do their best to profit by crimes which they have not ordered. It is clear that such a pope as Benedict XI. would not do either for his passions or his purposes.

He found one, however, from whom he flattered himself, not without reason, that he would get more complete and efficient co-operation. The cardinals, after being assembled in conclave for six months at Perouse, were unable to arrive at an agreement about a choice of pope. As a way out of their embarrassment, they entered into a secret convention to the effect that one of them, a confidant of Philip the Handsome, should make known to him that the Archbishop of Bordeaux, Bertrand de Goth, was the candidate in respect of whom they could agree. He was a subject of the King of England and a late favorite of Boniface VIII., who had raised him from the bishopric of Comminges to the archbishopric of Bordeaux. He was regarded as an enemy of France; but Philip knew what may be done with an ambitious man, whose fortune is only half made, by offering to advance him to his highest point. He, therefore, appointed a meeting with the archbishop. “Hearken,” said he: “I have in my grasp wherewithal to make thee pope if I please; and provided that thou promise me to do six things I demand of thee, I will confer upon thee that honor; and to prove to thee that I have the power, here be letters and advices I have received from Rome.” After having heard and read, “the Gascon, overcome with joy,” says the contemporary historian Villani, “threw himself at the king’s feet, saying, ‘My lord, now know I that thou art my best friend, and that thou wouldest render me good for evil. It is for thee to command and for me to obey: such will ever be my disposition.’” Philip then set before him his six demands, amongst which there were only two which could have caused the archbishop any uneasiness. The fourth purported that he should condemn the memory of Pope Boniface. “The sixth, which is important and secret, I keep to myself,” said Philip, “to make known to thee in due time and place.” The archbishop bound himself by oath taken on the sacred host to accomplish the wishes of the king, to whom, furthermore, he gave as hostages his brother and his two nephews. Six weeks after this interview, on the 5th of June, 1305, Bertrand de Goth was elected pope, under the name of Clement V.

It was not long before he gave the king the most certain pledge of his docility. After having held his pontifical court at Bordeaux and Poitiers he declared that he would fix his residence in France, in the county of Venaissin, at Avignon, a territory which Philip the Bold had remitted to Pope Gregory X. in execution of a deed of gift from Raymond VII., Count of Toulouse. It was renouncing, in fact, if not in law, the practical independence of the papacy to thus place it in the midst of the dominions and under the very thumb of the King of France. “I know the Gaseous,” said the old Italian Cardinal Matthew Rosso, dean of the Sacred College, when he heard of this resolution; “it will be long ere the Church comes back to Italy.” And, indeed, it was not until sixty years afterwards, under Pope Gregory XI., that Italy regained possession of the Holy See; and historians called this long absence the Babylonish captivity. Philip lost no time in profiting by his propinquity to make the full weight of his power felt by Clement V. He claimed from him the fulfilment of the fourth promise Bertrand de Goth had made in order to become pope, which was the condemnation of Boniface VIII.; and he revealed to him the sixth, that “important and secret one which he kept to himself to make known to him in clue time and place;” and it was the persecution and abolition of the order of the Templars. The pontificate of Clement V. at Avignon was, for him, a nine years’ painful effort, at one time to elude and at another to accomplish, against the grain, the heavy engagements he had incurred towards the king.

He found the condemnation of Boniface VIII. rather an embarrassment than a danger. He shrank, on becoming pope, from condemning the pope his predecessor, who had appointed him archbishop and cardinal. Instead of an official condemnation, he offered the king satisfaction in various ways. It was only from headstrong pride and to cloak himself in the eyes of his subjects that Philip clung to the condemnation of the memory of Boniface; and, after a long period of mutual tergiversation, it was agreed in the end to let bygones be bygones. The principal promoter of the assault at Anagni, William of Nogaret, was the sole exception to the amnesty; and the pope imposed upon him, by way of penance, merely the obligation of making a pilgrimage to the Holy Land, which he never fulfilled. On the contrary he remained, in great favor, about the person of King Philip, who made him his chancellor, and gave him, in Languedoc, some rich lands, amongst others those of Calvisson, Massillargues, and Manduel. For Philip knew how to liberally reward and faithfully support his servants.

And he knew still better how to persecute and ruin his foes. He had no reason, of a public kind, to consider the Templars his enemies. It is true that they had given him a merely qualified support on his appeal to the council against Boniface VIII.; but, both before and after that occurrence, Philip had shown them marks of the most friendly regard. He had asked to be affiliated to their order; and he had borrowed their money. During a violent outbreak of the populace at Paris, in 1306, on the occasion of a fresh tax, he had sought and found a refuge in the very palace of the Temple, where the chapters-general were held and where its treasures were kept. It is said that the sight of these treasures kindled the longings of Philip, and his ardent desire to get hold of them. At the time of the formation of the order, in 1119, after the first crusade, the Templars were far from being rich. Nine knights had joined together to protect the arrival and sojourning of pilgrims in Palestine; and Baldwin II., the third Christian King of Jerusalem, had given them a lodging in his own palace, to the east of Solomon’s temple, whence they had assumed the name of “Poor United Champions of Christ and the Temple.” Their valor and pious devotion had soon rendered them famous in the West as well as the East; and St. Bernard had commended them to the Christian world. At the council of Troyes, in 1123, Pope Honorius II. had recognized their order, and regulated their dress, a white mantle, on which Pope Eugenius III. placed a red cross. In 1172 the rules of the order were drawn up in seventy-two articles, and the Templars began to exempt themselves from the jurisdiction of the patriarch of Jerusalem, recognizing that of the pope only. Their number and their importance rapidly increased. In 1130 the Emperor Lothaire II. gave them lands in the Duchy of Brunswick. They received other gifts in the Low Countries, in Spain, and in Portugal. After a voyage to the West, Hugh des Payens, the chief of the nine Templars, returned to the East with three hundred knights enlisted in his order; and a hundred and fifty years after its foundation the order of the Temple, divided into fourteen or fifteen provinces,--four in the East and ten or eleven in the West,--numbered, it is said, eighteen or twenty thousand knights, mostly French, and nine thousand commanderies or territorial benefices, the revenue of which is calculated at fifty-four millions of francs (about ten and a half million dollars). It was an army of monks, once poor men and hard-working soldiers, but now rich and idle, and abandoned to all the temptations of riches and idleness. There was still some fine talk about Jerusalem, pilgrims, and crusades. The popes still kept these words prominent, either to distract the Western Christians from intestine quarrels, or to really promote some new Christian effort in the East. The Isle of Cyprus was still a small Christian kingdom, and the warrior- monks, who were vowed to the defence of Christendom in the East, the Templars and the Hospitallers, had still in Palestine, Syria, Armenia, and the adjacent lands, certain battles to fight and certain services to render to the Christian cause. But these were events too petty and too transitory to give serious employment to the two great religious and military orders, whose riches and fame were far beyond the proportions of their public usefulness and their real strength; a position fraught with perils for them, for it inspired the sovereign powers of the state with the spirit rather of jealousy than fear of them.

In 1303 the king and the pope simultaneously summoned from Cyprus to France the Grand Master of the Templars, James do Molay, a Burgundian nobleman, who had entered the order when he was almost a child, had valiantly fought the infidels in the East, and fourteen years ago had been unanimously elected Grand Master. For several months he was well treated, to all appearance, by the two monarchs. Philip said he wished to discuss with him a new plan of crusade, and asked him to stand godfather to one of his children; and Molay was pall-bearer at the burial of the king’s sister-in-law. Meanwhile the most sinister reports, the gravest imputations, were bruited abroad against the Templars; they were accused “of things distasteful, deplorable, horrible to think on, horrible to hear, of betraying Christendom for the profit of the infidels, of secretly denying the faith, of spitting upon the cross, of abandoning themselves to idolatrous practices and the most licentious lives.” In 1307, in the month of October, Philip the Handsome and Clement V. had met at Poitiers; and the king asked the pope to authorize an inquiry touching the Templars and the accusations made against them. James de Molay was forthwith arrested at Paris with a hundred and forty of his knights; sixty met the same fate at Beaucaire; many others all over France; and their property was put in the king’s keeping for the service of the Holy Land. On the 12th of August, 1308, a papal bull appointed a grand commission of inquiry charged to conduct, at Paris, an examination of the matter “according as the law requires.” The Archbishops of Canterbury in England and of Mayence, Cologne, and Troves in Germany, were also named commissioners, and the pope announced that he would deliver his judgment within two years, at a general council held at Vienne, in Dauphiny, territory of the Empire. Twenty-six princes and laic lords, the Dukes of Burgundy and Brittany, the Counts of Flanders, Nevers, and Auxerre, and the Count of Talleyrand de Perigord, offered themselves as the Templars’ accusers, and gave powers of attorney to act in their names. On the 22d of November, 1309, the Grand Master, Molay, was, called before the commission. At first he firmly denied all that his order had been accused of; afterwards he became confused and embarrassed, said that he had not the ability to undertake the defence of his order, that he was but a poor, unlettered knight, that the pope had reserved to himself the decision in the case, and that, for his part, he only wished the pope would summon him as soon as possible before him. On the 28th of March, 1310, five hundred and forty-six knights, who had declared their readiness to defend their order, appeared before the commission; and they were called upon to choose proctors to speak in their name. We ought also, then,” said they, “to have been tortured by proxy only.” The prisoners were treated with the uttermost rigor and reduced to the most wretched plight: “out of their poor pay of twelve deniers per diem they were obliged to pay for their passage by water to go and submit to their examination in the city, and to give money besides to the man who undid and riveted their fetters.” In October, 1310, at a council held at Paris, a large number of Templars were examined, several acquitted, some subjected to special penances, and fifty-four condemned as heretics to the stake, and burned the same day in a field close to the abbey of St. Anthony; and nine others met the same fate at the hands of a council held at Senlis the same year: “They confessed under their tortures,” says Bossuet, “but they denied at their execution.” The business dragged slowly on; different decisions were pronounced, according to the place of decision; the Templars were pronounced innocent, on the 17th of June, 1310, at Ravenna, on the 1st of July at Mayence, and on the 21st of October at Salamanca; and in Aragon they made a successful resistance. Europe began to be wearied at the uncertainty of such judgments and at the sight of such horrible spectacles; and Clement V. felt some shame at thus persecuting monks who, on more than one occasion, had shown devotion to the Holy See.

But Philip the Handsome had attained his end: he was in possession of the Templars’ riches. On the 11th of June, 1311, the commission of inquiry terminated its sittings, and the report of its labors concluded as follows: “For further precaution, we have deposited the said procedure, drawn up by notaries in authentic form, in the treasury of Notre-Dame, at Paris, to be shown to none without special letters from Your Holiness.” The council-general, announced in 1308 by the pope, to decide definitively upon this great case, was actually opened at Vienne, in October, 1311; more than three hundred bishops assembled; and nine Templars presented themselves for the defence of their order, saying that there were at Lyons, or in the neighborhood, fifteen hundred or two thousand of their brethren, ready to support them. The pope had the nine defenders arrested, adjourned the decision once more, and, on the 22d of March in the following year, at a mere secret consistory, made up of the most docile bishops and a few cardinals, pronounced, solely on his pontifical authority, the abolition of the order of the Temple: and it was subsequently proclaimed officially, on the 3d of April, 1312, in presence of the king and the council. And not a soul protested.

The Grand Master, James de Molay, in confinement at Gisors, survived his order. The pope had reserved to himself the task of trying him; but, disgusted with the work, he committed the trial to ecclesiastical commissioners assembled at Paris, before whom Molay was brought, together with three of the principal leaders of the Temple, survivors like himself. They had read over to them, from a scaffold erected in the forecourt of Notre-Dame, the confessions they had made, but lately, under torture, and it was announced to them that they were sentenced to perpetual imprisonment. Remorse had restored to the Grand Master all his courage; he interrupted the reading, and disavowed his avowals, protesting that torture alone had made him speak so falsely, and maintaining that

“Of his grand order nought he wist
‘Gainst honor and the laws of Christ.”

One of his three comrades in misfortune, the commander of Normandy, made aloud a similar disavowal. The embarrassed judges sent the two Templars back to the provost of Paris, and put off their decision to the following day; but Philip the Handsome, without waiting for the morrow, and without consulting the judges, ordered the two Templars to be burned the same evening, March 11, 1314, at the hour of vespers, in Ile-de-la-Cite, on the site of the present Place Dauphine. A poet-chronicler, Godfrey of Paris, who was a witness of the scene, thus describes it: “The Grand Master, seeing the fire prepared, stripped himself briskly; I tell just as I saw; he bared himself to his shirt, light-heartedly and with a good grace, without a whit of trembling, though he was dragged and shaken mightily. They took hold of him to tie him to the stake, and they were binding his hands with a cord, but he said to them, ‘Sirs, suffer me to fold my hands a while, and make my prayer to God, for verily it is time. I am presently to die; but wrongfully, God wot. Wherefore woe will come, ere long, to those who condemn us without a cause. God will avenge our death.’”

It was probably owing to these last words that there arose a popular rumor, soon spread abroad, that James de Molay, at his death, had cited the pope and the king to appear with him, the former at the end of forty days, and the latter within a year, before the judgment-seat of God. Events gave a sanction to the legend: for Clement V. actually died on the 20th of April, 1314, and Philip the Handsome on the 29th of November, 1314, the pope, undoubtedly, uneasy at the servile acquiescence he had shown towards the king, and the king expressing some sorrow for his greed and for the imposts (_maltote, maletolta,_ or _black mail_) with which he had burdened his people.

In excessive and arbitrary imposts, indeed, consisted the chief grievance for which France, in the fourteenth century, had to complain of Philip the Handsome; and, probably, it was the only wrong for which he upbraided himself. Being badly wounded, out hunting, by a wild boar, and perceiving himself to be in bad case, he gave orders for his removal to Fontainebleau, and there, says Godfrey of Paris, the poet-chronicler just quoted in reference to the execution of the Templars, “he said and commanded that his children, his brothers, and his other friends should be sent for. They were no long time in coming; they entered Fontainebleau, into the chamber where the king was, and where there was very little light. So soon as they were there, they asked him how he was, and he answered, ‘Ill in body and in soul; if our Lady the Virgin save me not by her prayers, I see that death will seize me here; I have put on so many talliages, and laid hands on so much riches, that I shall never be absolved. Sirs, I know that I am in such estate that I shall die, methinks, to-night, for I suffer grievous hurt from the curses which pursue me: there will be no fine tales to be told of me.’” Philip’s anxiety about his memory was not without foundation; his greed is the vice which has clung to his name; not only did he load his subjects with poll taxes and other taxes unauthorized by law and the traditions of the feudal system; not only was he unjust and cruel towards the Templars in order to appropriate their riches; but he committed, over and over again, that kind of spoliation which imports most trouble into the general life of a people; he debased the coinage so often and to such an extent, that he was everywhere called “the base coiner.” This was a financial process of which none of his predecessors, neither St. Louis nor Philip Augustus, had set him an example, though they had quite as many costly wars and expeditions to keep up as he had. Some chroniclers of the fourteenth century say that Philip the Handsome was particularly munificent and lavish towards his family and his servants; but it is difficult to meet with any precise proof of this allegation, and we must impute the financial difficulties of Philip the Hand-some to his natural greed, and to the secret expenses entailed upon him by his policy of dissimulation and hatred, rather than to his lavish generosity. As he was no stranger to the spirit of order in his own affairs, he tried, towards the end of his reign, to obtain an exact account of his finances. His chief adviser, Enguerrand de Marigny, became his superintendent-general, and on the 19th of January, 1311, at the close of a grand council held at Poissy, Philip passed an ordinance which established, under the headings of expenses and receipts, two distinct tables and treasuries, one for ordinary expenses, the civil list, and the payment of the great bodies of the state, incomes, pensions, &c., and the other for extraordinary expenses. The ordinary expenses were estimated at one hundred and seventy-seven thousand five hunded livres of Tours, that is, according to M. Boutaric, who published this ordinance, fifteen million nine hundred thousand francs (about three million eighty-four thousand dollars). Numerous articles regulated the execution of the measure; and the royal treasurers took an oath not to reveal, within two years, the state of their receipts, save to Enguerrand de Marigny, or by order of the king himself. This first budget of the French monarchy dropped out of sight after the death of Philip the Handsome, in the reaction which took place against his government. “God forgive him his sins,” says Godfrey of Paris, “for in the time of his reign great loss came to France, and there was small regret for him.” The general history of France has been more indulgent towards Philip the Handsome than his contemporaries were; it has expressed its acknowledgments to him for the progress made, under his sway, by the particular and permanent characteristics of civilization in France. The kingly domain received in the Pyrenees, in Aquitaine, in Franche-Comte, and in Flanders territorial increments which extended national unity. The legislative power of the king penetrated into and secured footing in the lands of his vassals. The scattered semi-sovereigns of feudal society bowed down before the incontestable pre-eminence of the kingship, which gained the victory in its struggle against the papacy. Far be it from us to attach no importance to the intervention of the deputies of the communes in the states-general of 1302, on the occasion of that struggle: it was certainly homage paid to the nascent existence of the third estate; but it is puerile to consider that homage as a real step towards public liberties and constitutional government. The burghers of 1302 did not dream of such a thing; Philip, knowing that their feelings were, in this instance, in accordance with his own, summoned them in order to use their co-operation as a useful appendage for himself, and absolute kingship gained more strength by the co-operation than the third estate acquired influence. The general constitution of the judiciary power, as delegated from the kingship, the creation of several classes of magistrates devoted to this great social function, and, especially, the strong organization and the permanence of the parliament of Paris, were far more important progressions in the development of civil order and society in France. But it was to the advantage of absolute power that all these facts were turned, and the perverted ability of Philip the Handsome consisted in working them for that single end. He was a profound egotist; he mingled with his imperiousness the leaven of craft and patience, but he was quite a stranger to the two principles which constitute the morality of governments, respect for rights and patriotic sympathy with public sentiment; he concerned himself about nothing but his own position, his own passions, his own wishes, or his own fancies. And this is the radical vice of absolute power. Philip the Handsome is one of the kings of France who have most contributed to stamp upon the kingship in France this lamentable characteristic, from which France has suffered so much, even in the midst of her glories, and which, in our time, was so grievously atoned for by the kingship itself when it no longer deserved the reproach.

Philip the Handsome left three sons, Louis X., called _le Hutin_ (_the Quarreller_), Philip V., called the _Long,_ and Charles IV., called _the Handsome,_ who, between them, occupied the throne only thirteen years and ten months. Not one of them distinguished himself by his personal merits; and the events of the three reigns hold scarcely a higher place in history than the actions of the three kings do. Shortly before the death of Philip the Handsome, his greedy despotism had already excited amongst the people such lively discontent that several leagues were formed in Champagne, Burgundy, Artois, and Beauvaisis, to resist him; and the members of these leagues, “nobles and commoners,” say the accounts, engaged to give one another mutual support in their resistance, “at their own cost and charges.” After the death of Philip the Handsome, the opposition made head more extensively and effectually; and it produced two results: ten ordinances of Louis the Quarreller for redressing the grievances of the feudal aristocracy, for one; and, for the other, the trial and condemnation of Enguerrand de Marigny “coadjutor and rector of the kingdom” under Philip the Hand-some. Marigny, at the death of the king his master, had against him, rightly or wrongly, popular clamor and feudal hostility, especially that of Charles of Valois, Philip the Handsome’s brother, who acted as leader of the barons. “What has become of all those subsidies, and all those sums produced by so much tampering with the coinage? “asked the new king one day in council. “Sir,” said Prince Charles, “it was Marigny who had the administration of everything; and it is for him to render an account.” “I am quite ready,” said Marigny. “This moment, then,” said the prince. “Most willingly, my lord: I gave a great portion to you.” “You lie!” cried Charles. “Nay, you, by God!” replied Marigny. The prince drew his sword, and Marigny was on the point of doing the same. The quarrel was, however, stifled for the moment; but, shortly afterwards, Marigny was accused, condemned by a commission assembled at Vincennes, and hanged on the gibbet of Montfaucon which he himself, it is said, had set up. He walked to execution with head erect, saying to the crowd, “Good folks, pray for me.” Some months afterwards, the young king, who had indorsed the sentence reluctantly, since he did not well know, between his father’s brother and minister, which of the two was guilty, left by will a handsome legacy to Marigny’s widow “in consideration of the great misfortune which had befallen her and hers;” and Charles of Valois himself, falling into a decline, and considering himself stricken by the hand of God “as a punishment for the trial of Enguerrand de Marigny,” had liberal alms distributed to the poor with this injunction: “Pray God for Euguerrand de Marigny and for the Count of Valois.” None can tell, after this lapse of time, whether this remorse proceeded from weakness of mind or sincerity of heart, and which of the two personages was really guilty; but, ages afterwards, such is the effect of blind, popular clamor and unrighteous judicial proceedings, that the condemned lives in history as a victim and all but a guileless being.

Whilst the feudal aristocracy was thus avenging itself of kingly tyranny, the spirit of Christianity was noiselessly pursuing its work, the general enfranchisement of men. Louis the Quarreller had to keep up the war with Flanders, which was continually being renewed; and in order to find, without hateful exactions, the necessary funds, he was advised to offer freedom to the serfs of his domains. Accordingly he issued, on the 3d of July, 1315, an edict to the following effect: “Whereas, according to natural right, every one should be born free, and whereas, by certain customs which, from long age, have been introduced into and preserved to this day in our kingdom . . . many persons amongst our common people have fallen into the bonds of slavery, which much displeaseth us; we, considering that our kingdom is called and named the kingdom of the Free (Franks), and willing that the matter should in verity accord with the name . . . have by our grand council decreed and do decree that generally throughout our whole kingdom . . . such serfdoms be redeemed to freedom, on fair and suitable conditions . . . and we will, likewise, that all other lords who have body-men (or serfs) do take example by us to bring them to freedom.” Great credit has very properly been given to Louis the Quarreller for this edict; but it has not been sufficiently noticed that Philip the Handsome had himself set his sons the example, for, on confirming the enfranchisement granted by his brother Charles to the serfs in the countship of Valois, he had based his decree on the following grounds: “Seeing that every human being, which is made in the image of Our Lord, should generally be free by natural right.” The history of Christian communities is full of these happy inconsistencies; when a moral and just principle is implanted in the soul, absolute power itself does not completely escape from its healthy influence, and the good makes its way athwart the evil, just as a source of fresh and pure water ceases not to flow through and spread over a land wasted by the crimes or follies of men.

It is desirable to give an idea and an example of the conduct which was already beginning to be adopted and of the authority which was already beginning to be exercised in France, amidst the feudal reaction that set in against Philip the Handsome and amidst the feeble government of his sons, by that magistracy, of such recent and petty origin, which was called upon to defend, in the king’s name, order and justice against the count-less anarchical tyrannies scattered over the national territory. During the early years of the fifteenth century, a lord of Gascony, Jordan de Lisle, “of most noble origin, but most ignoble deeds,” says a contemporary chronicler, “abandoned himself to all manner of irregularities and crimes.” Confident in his strength and his connections,--for Pope John XXII. had given his niece to him in marriage,--“he committed homicides, entertained evil-doers and murderers, countenanced robbers, and rose against the king. He killed, with the man’s own truncheon, one of the king’s servants who was wearing the royal livery according to the custom of the royal servants. When his misdeeds were known, he was summoned for trial to Paris; and he went thither surrounded by a stately retinue of counts, nobles, and barons of Aquitaine. He was confined, at first, in the prison of Chatelet; and when a hearing had been accorded to his reply and to what he alleged in his defence against the crimes of which he was accused, he was finally pronounced worthy of death by the doctors of the parliament, and on Trinity-eve he was dragged at the tail of horses and hanged, as he deserved, on the public gallows at Paris.” It was, assuredly, a difficult and a dangerous task for the obscure members of this parliament, scarcely organized as it was and quite lately established for a permanence in Paris, to put down such disorders and such men. In the course of its long career the French magistracy has committed many faults; it has more than once either aspired to overstep its proper limits or failed to fulfil all its duties; but history would be ungrateful and untruthful not to bring into the light the virtues this body has displayed from its humble cradle, and the services it has rendered to France, to her security at home, to her moral dignity, to her intellectual glory, and to the progress of her civilization with all its brilliancy and productiveness, though it is still so imperfect and so thwarted.

Another fact which has held an important place in the history of France, and exercised a great influence over her destinies, likewise dates from this period; and that is the exclusion of women from the succession to the throne, by virtue of an article, ill understood, of the Salic law. The ancient law of the Salian Franks, drawn up, probably, in the seventh century, had no statute at all touching this grave question; the article relied upon was merely a regulation of civil law prescribing that “no portion of really Salic land (that is to say, in the full territorial ownership of the head of the family) should pass into the possession of women, but it should belong altogether to the virile sex.” From the time of Hugh Capet heirs male had never been wanting to the crown, and the succession in the male line had been a fact uninterrupted indeed, but not due to prescription or law. Louis the Quarreller, at his death, on the 5th of June, 1316, left only a daughter, but his second wife, Queen Clemence, was pregnant. As soon as Philip the Long, then Count of Poitiers, heard of his brother’s death, he hurried to Paris, assembled a certain number of barons, and got them to decide that he, if the queen should be delivered of a son, should be regent of the kingdom for eighteen years; but that if she should bear a daughter he should immediately take possession of the crown. On the 15th of November, 1316, the queen gave birth to a son, who was named John, and who figures as John I. in the series of French kings; but the child died at the end of five days, and on the 6th of January, 1317, Philip the Long was crowned king at Rheims. He forthwith summoned--there is no knowing exactly where and in what numbers--the clergy, barons, and third estate, who declared, on the 2d of February, that “the laws and customs, inviolably observed among the Franks, excluded daughters from the crown.” There was no doubt about the fact; but the law was not established, nor even in conformity with the entire feudal system or with general opinion. And “thus the kingdom went,” says Froissart, “as seemeth to many folks, out of the right line.” But the measure was evidently wise and salutary for France as well as for the king-ship; and it was renewed, after Philip the Long died on the 3d of January, 1322, and left daughters only, in favor of his brother Charles the Handsome, who died, in his turn, on the 1st of January, 1328, and likewise left daughters only. The question as to the succession to the throne then lay between the male line represented by Philip, Count of Valois, grandson of Philip the Bold through Charles of Valois, his father, and the female line represented by Edward III., King of England, grandson, through his mother, Isabel, sister of the late King Charles the Handsome, of Philip the Handsome. A war of more than a century’s duration between France and England was the result of this lamentable rivalry, which all but put the kingdom of France under an English king; but France was saved by the stubborn resistance of the national spirit and by Joan of Arc, inspired by God. One hundred and twenty-eight years after the triumph of the national cause, and four years after the accession of Henry IV., which was still disputed by the League, a decree of the parliament of Paris, dated the 28th of June, 1593, maintained, against the pretensions of Spain, the authority of the Salic law, and on the 1st of October, 1789, a decree of the National Assembly, in conformity with the formal and unanimous wish of the memorials drawn up by the states-general, gave a fresh sanction to that principle, which, confining the heredity of the crown to the male line, had been salvation to the unity and nationality of the monarchy in France.