A penance imposed by the church was laid upon the emperor in Soissons, excluding him from the communion of believers, so that he could not retain the reins of government. Although nobody doubted his imperial dignity, yet the emperor was in a sad and melancholy frame of mind. It is narrated that he had been told that his youngest son Charles had been forced to become a monk, and that his consort had not only become a nun, but had already died far away. He was cut off from all society, and the story goes that he had already been persuaded to order the monks surrounding him to say masses for the departed.
Such a situation is doubly painful to the wielder of supreme power, who has often to perceive that the responsibility lies at his own door.
In such desperate isolation was the emperor Louis, when a message from the ecclesiastical synod at Soissons reached him, reminding him of all his transgressions and urging him not to imperil his very soul, seeing that he had forfeited the secular power by the judgment of God and the authority of the church.
Louis begged for time for consideration. When the day he had himself appointed arrived, all the great ecclesiastics of Compiègne proceeded to Soissons to remind him of those acts by which he had offended God, given umbrage to the church, and brought disaster on the people. The emperor listened without contradiction, and declared his readiness to submit to the judgment of the church. At his request Lothair attended with some of his chief adherents, in order to be present at the solemn penance. This painful ordeal took place at the beginning of October, 833, in the church of St. Médard at Soissons, in presence of Lothair and the highest court dignitaries, and of a crowd which filled the church. Louis made a general confession that he had not duly fulfilled the duties of his office and had thereby sinned against God; that he had also set the Christian church at nought, and thereby brought confusion to the people, and that in expiation of these crimes he was ready to submit to public and ecclesiastical penance in order now to receive absolution from those to whom power was given on earth to bind and to absolve.
The ecclesiastical lords were not quite satisfied with this declaration; they required of him an explicit confession of his misdeeds; they gave utterance to their apprehensions that the emperor would return to his former reprehensible conduct as he had done once before, three years ago.
Hereupon Louis in still stronger terms repeated that he had given offence to the church, and that he purposed to be a model penitent; whereat the ecclesiastical lords placed in his hands a list of his offences, the contents of which are readily seen in the three heads—sacrilege, perjury, and murder. It does not appear whether Louis acknowledged the truth of these accusations in detail. Had he done so, the history of his life would present the most repulsive spectacle, and be absolutely incomprehensible.
Whilst speaking, he held the record of his sins in his hands; he then returned it to the ecclesiastics, who laid it upon the altar. He himself divested himself of his weapons and arms and assumed the dress of a penitent. A dark, cheerless scene, symbolising the triumph of the ecclesiastical party over secular interests. How could a prince stand up against a court of justice such as this?
In order to take complete possession of the empire, Lothair repaired to Aachen, where an attempt was again made to induce Louis to enter a monastery. His answer was decisive; he declared it impossible for him to take the vow so long as he was not free. His disposition is well known; he was docile and yielding, but he doggedly clung to the quintessence of his rights; he possessed the faculty of finding valid excuses, in order to save himself from taking a final step. From the deepest abasement he once more rose triumphant.
LOUIS RETURNS TO POWER
[834 A.D.]