Historic Bubbles

by Frederic Leake

The clergy alone hesitated to stand by the king. They asked time to deliberate. Philip would allow them not an hour. You are Frenchmen, cried he; from whom do you hold your benefices, from me your king, or from the Neapolitan Benedetto. They answered: from the king. They then begged leave to send a deputation to Rome to explain matters; and Philip refused. As for the excommunication and interdict, the king ordered them burnt by the common hangman; and woe to the priest who dared shut his church, or tie up his bell-rope, or stop marrying or confessing or saying mass! The days of Philip-the-handsome were not the days of Philip-the-august.

This triumph at home might well have satisfied Philip; but he still followed up Boniface in his own domain with pitiless energy. He accused him not only of having defrauded Celestin of his throne, but of having poisoned him, and what was still worse, of heresy; and he sent orders to his agent in Italy, William of Nogaret, to seize his sacred person.

Nogaret in conjunction with Sciarra Colonna the chief of the Ghibbeline faction, gathered together a few soldiers and surprised Boniface at his residence at Agnani. The pontiff supposed they intended to kill him. He put the dalmatica on his shoulders and the crown on his head, and sat like Papirius awaiting the blow. Colonna cried out to him to abdicate, as he had driven Celestin to abdicate. Betrayed like Jesus Christ, replied the old man, I will die his vicar![3]

But it was not their purpose to put him to death: no such merciful end was to be his. They held him three days a prisoner, treating him with a mockery of respect; and then the populace of Agnani, perceiving that the Ghibbelines were but a handful, rose and delivered him from his captors. But the unexampled outrage had overthrown his reason, and he died a maniac. The terrible Philip had hounded his enemy into his grave; but even there he did not leave him in peace, as we shall see.

The bishop of Ostia was chosen pope with the name of Benedict XI. Philip demanded that the bull of excommunication be annulled, and himself restored to full communion with the Church. Benedict complied; and thus was completed this first triumph of the temporal over the spiritual. Philip still claimed to be a true son of the Church; but he had shaken off her authority and he now proceeded to put his foot on her neck. It is to this degenerate grandson of a sainted king, that the Church of Rome owes that day of humiliation which forms the title of this paper.

Benedict XI. was as moribund as usage required; and in less than a year he laid down his pontificate and his life together. There now dawned upon Philip a scheme no less bold and sacriligious than that of owning and possessing both pope and papacy. He interfered to prevent an election till his own man could come to the fore; and for more than a year the Church was without a head. Then having by bribery and intimidation, obtained control of the sacred college, he made them choose Bertrand de Goth, bishop of Bordeaux, who took the name of Clement V. Popes, you observe, change their names when they put on the tiara. This custom though ancient has not always existed: Saint Peter for example did not change his.[4]

There was a secret bargain between Clement and Philip by which the former was to pay the price of his elevation. There is discussion whether it related to the removal of the Holy See or to the destruction of the Templars. As Philip needed the pope’s aid in both these enormities which have cast such a lurid glory or glare on his reign, perhaps he bargained for both.

Clement V. after having been crowned at Lyons, established his seat at Avignon on the left bank of the Rhone, and thus began the Captivity. As it was followed by the Great Schism or Schism of the West, more than a century was to pass before the Church, always called Catholic, Apostolic and Roman, was to be wholly reinstated in the Eternal City.

Philip’s old enemy had died demented, and in that collapse of intellect, the last rites of the Church either had not been administered or had proved fruitless. He had gone where Hamlet’s father went, unhouseled unaneled, till his sins could be burned and purged away; and a smart anathema in due form from that Church which rules the dead and the living, might send him prone to the pit. Boniface had canonised Philip’s grandfather, and that soul in purgatory had thus become a saint in Heaven; and now Philip was invoking a rescript of different import, to despatch his grandfather’s benefactor in the other direction. Such are the possible vicissitudes of another life.