When made archbishop, he convoked a provincial council at Paris, and condemned, as relapsed heretics, the knights who had repudiated their confessions. Fifty-nine of these knights belonged to his own diocese. He had them brought to a fenced enclosure in a field near the Abbey of Saint Antoine, and there offered them pardon if they would recant. Then they were chained to stakes, and slowly burned to ashes from the feet upward. Not one flinched, but amidst shrieks of anguish, when half consumed, they protested their innocence, and died imploring mercy of Christ and of the Virgin.[180]
Devotion so superb might have fired the imagination of even such a craven as Clement, but Philip was equal to the emergency. He had caused scores of witnesses to be examined to prove that Boniface was a murderer, a sorcerer, a debauchee, and a heretic. Suddenly he offered to drop the prosecution, and to restore the Temple lands to the Church, if the order might be abolished and the process closed. Clement yielded. In October, 1311, the council met at Vienne. The winter was spent in intimidation and bribery; the second meeting was not held until the following April, and then the decree of suppression was published. By this decree the corporation was dissolved, but certain of the higher officers still lived, and in an evil moment Clement bethought him of their fate. In December, 1313, he appointed a commission to try them. They were brought before a lofty scaffold at the portal of the Cathedral of Paris, and there made to reiterate the avowals which had been wrung from them in their dungeons. Then they were sentenced to perpetual imprisonment. But at this supreme moment, when it seemed that all was over, de Molay, the grand-master, and the Master of Normandy, broke into a furious defence. The commissioners adjourned in a panic, but Philip, thirsting for blood, sprang upon his prey.
He gave his orders to his own officers, without consulting any prelate. On March 18, 1314, as night fell, the two crusaders were taken from the provost, who acted as their gaoler, and carried to a little island in the Seine, on which a statue of Henry of Navarre now stands. There they were burned together, without a trial and without a sentence. They watched the building of their funeral pile with “hearts so firm and resolute, and persisted with such constancy in their denials to the end, and suffered death with such composure, that they left the witnesses of their execution in admiration and stupor.”[181]
An ancient legend told how de Molay, as he stood upon his blazing fagots, summoned Clement to meet him before God’s judgment-seat in forty days, and Philip within a year. Neither survived the interval. Philip had promised to restore the goods of the Temple to the Church, but the plunder, for which this tremendous deed was done, was not surrendered tamely to the vanquished after their defeat. The gold and silver, and all that could be stolen, disappeared. The land was in the end ceded to the Hospital, but so wasted that, for a century, no revenue whatever accrued from what had been one of the finest conventual estates in Europe.[182]
Such was the opening of that social revolution which, when it reached its height, was called the Reformation.
CHAPTER VII
THE ENGLISH REFORMATION
Many writers have pointed out the relation between commerce and scepticism in the Middle Ages, and, among others, Thorold Rogers has a passage in his History of Agriculture and Prices so interesting that it should be read entire:—
“The general spread of Lollardy, about which all the theologians of the age complain, was at once the cause anti the effect of progressive opulence. It cannot be by accident that all the wealthiest parts of Europe, one district only excepted, and that for very sufficient reasons, were suspected during the Middle Ages of theological nonconformity. Before the campaigns of Simon de Montfort, in the first half of the thirteenth century, Provence was the garden and workshop of Europe. The sturdiest advocates of the Reformation were the burghers of the Low Countries.... In England the strength of the Lollard party was, from the days of Wiklif to the days of Cranmer, in Norfolk [the principal manufacturing county]; and I have no doubt that ... the presence of students from this district must have told on the theological bias of Cambridge University, which came out markedly at the epoch of the Reformation....
“English Lollardy was, like its direct descendant Puritanism, sour and opinionative, but it was also moral and thrifty. They who denounced the lazy and luxurious life of the monks, the worldliness and greed of the prelates, and the gross and shallow artifices of the popular religion, were pretty sure to inculcate parsimony and saving. By voluntarily and sturdily cutting themselves off from the circumstance of the old faith, they were certain, like the Quakers of more than two centuries later, to become comparatively wealthy. They had nothing to spare for monk or priest....”[183]