The Protestant historian Hurter says: “In this instance, the pope stands face to face, not with the king, but with the Christian. Innocent III. (he had succeeded Celestine) would not sacrifice the moral importance of his office even to procure help for the Crusade or to prepare for himself an ally in his dissensions with the German emperors.”
Pope Innocent remonstrated with the king first through the Bishop of Paris, Eudes de Sully, then personally by letter, and threatened him with the last and most awful punishment, excommunication. The king temporized, and would give no satisfactory answer, until in 1198 the papal legate, Peter of Capua, was directed to give him his choice between submission within one month or the imposition of an interdict upon the whole kingdom. This appalling measure had never before been so sweepingly resorted to, and the preparations for it were as solemnly magnificent as if they had portended the funeral of a nation. The council met at Dijon in 1199, and, during its seven days' session, once more invited the king to attend and avert the doom his sin had well-nigh brought upon the realm. But Philip remained inflexible, despite the last and urgent letters of the pope, and the interdict was accordingly pronounced.
Four archbishops, eighteen bishops, and a great number of abbots composed the august assembly, and on the seventh day of the council a strange and impressive scene closed the unavailing deliberations. At midnight the great bell of the cathedral tolled out the knell of a parting soul, the prelates repaired in silent and lugubrious procession to the high altar, now divested of all its ornaments, the lights were extinguished and removed, the figure of Christ on the great rood was veiled in penitential guise, the relics of the patron saints were removed into the crypt below, and the consecrated hosts yet unconsumed were destroyed by fire. The legate, clothed in purple, advanced to the foot of the denuded altar, and promulgated the awful sentence that was to deprive a whole Christian kingdom of the consolations of religion. The assembled people answered with a great groan, and, says a historian of the times, it seemed as if the Last Judgment had suddenly come upon men. A respite of twenty days was allowed before the interdict was publicly announced, but after Candlemas Day, 1200, it was not only announced, but rigorously enforced. The effect was terrible; thousands flocked to Normandy and other provinces belonging to the King of England, to receive the sacraments and perform their usual devotions; the king's own sister, on [pg 596] the occasion of her marriage with the Count of Ponthien, had to remove to Rouen to have the ceremony canonically performed. The king, meanwhile, vented his fury on the bishops, imprisoned some, confiscated the temporalities of others, and caused many to be even personally maltreated. Queen Ingeburga was dragged from her convent, and barbarously imprisoned in the Castle of Etampes, near Paris. Philip's wrath extended to all classes; the nobles he oppressed, the burghers he taxed beyond their means, until his very servants left him as a God-forsaken man. The pressure at last became so terrible that he was heard to exclaim in a transport of rage, “I shall end by becoming a Mussulman! Fortunate Saladin! he at least had no pope over him!” At a meeting of the lords and prelates of the kingdom, at which Agnes of Merania assisted, Philip moodily asked, in the midst of an ominous silence, what he was to do. “Obey the pope,” was the instant and uncompromising reply of the assembly; and, when the king further obtained a confession from his uncle the Archbishop of Rheims that the decree of divorce passed by him had been invalid from the first, he exclaimed in ill-concealed anger, “You were a fool to give it, then!”
At this juncture, both Agnes and the king sent ambassadors to Rome to ask for a suspension at least of the interdict, but the pope was inflexible, and would hear of no negotiation before an unconditional submission. This Philip reluctantly promised; the interdict had now lasted seven months, and he could no longer withstand the dangerous and threatening attitude of his dissatisfied subjects. In the summer of the year 1200, Cardinal John Colonna, Cardinal Octavian, of Ostia, and several others repaired first to Vezelay, then to Compiègne, where they met the king and received his overtures. On the eve of the Nativity of the Blessed Virgin, the assembly of lords spiritual and temporal met at the Castle of S. Léger, where the legate insisted on the deliberations being held in public. The anxious people crowded round the doors of the great hall, eager to watch every fluctuation in the proceedings. At last, on the legate's urgent advice, and in his presence, Philip consented to visit Queen Ingeburga in state. She had been sent for to be present, but had not yet seen her husband. It was their first meeting since their separation six years before. At sight of her, the king recoiled, crying out, “The pope is forcing me to this.”
“Nay, my lord,” replied the injured wife, calmly and meekly, “he seeks but justice.”
Philip soon afterwards swore by proxy to receive the queen as his only and lawful wife, and to render her all the honors due to her rank. As soon as this was done, the bells rang out a joyous peal, and the people knew that peace had been made. The sacred images were again uncovered, the church doors were opened, and Mass was everywhere celebrated with great pomp. The people were frantic with joy, but the king, though he had bent under the weight of influence that had been brought to bear upon him, still persisted in asking for a divorce from his wife on the before-mentioned plea of relationship. The pope delayed an answer, and, the better to satisfy the reason of the refractory king, appointed another meeting to be held at Soissons, six months after the date of the recent one at S. Léger.
To this meeting Canute III. of Denmark sent bishops and learned doctors to plead his sister's cause, but, as on the king's side was arrayed the [pg 597] best—though servile—talent of France, the case seemed not very hopeful, until an unknown and obscure ecclesiastic arose, and, towards the end of the council, which had already lasted a fortnight, modestly asked leave of the august judges to speak in favor of Queen Ingeburga. His address startled and moved all who listened, and they agreed with one voice that this sudden and almost inspired burst of eloquence was surely a sign of the will of God directly urging the queen's rights. Philip, anticipating the papal decision, determined to surprise the assembly by forestalling it. He accordingly appeared on horseback very early one morning at the gate of the palace of Notre Dame, the queen's residence, and in public—and shall we not say primitive?—token of reconciliation took Ingeburga away with him, making her sit on a pillion behind him. They rode away quietly and almost unattended, but soon after it became known that he had again imprisoned her in an old castle, and that, having thus broken up the council before a public decision had been rendered, he still considered himself free to seek the divorce. Soon after the difficulty was lessened by the death of the unfortunate Agnes of Merania, whose health had been shattered by the terrible and infamous publicity necessarily brought upon her during her recent pregnancy. It was not, however, for many years after her death, not until 1213, that Philip was sincerely and permanently reconciled to Ingeburga, whom he calls in his will his dear wife, and to whom he left a suitable provision as queen-dowager.
Hurter and Schlegel both give witness to the admirable conduct of the mediæval popes in these and kindred struggles. The former says: “If Christianity was not reduced to a vain formula like the religion of the Hindoos, or relegated to one corner of the globe like a common sect, or sunk altogether in the mire of oriental voluptuousness, it was entirely owing to the vigilance and constant efforts of the popes.” And Schlegel, in his Concordia, speaks thus: “We hardly dare to liken the Guelphs, with the popes at their head, to anything approaching liberalism, so degraded has the term become in connection with modern liberals; yet they alone, because they had religion and the church on their side, were the true liberals of the middle ages. Indeed, if we look at the position of the popes in its highest type, we shall find that they were always either gentle peace-makers and arbiters in times of unnecessary and foolish wars, or stern champions of the oppressed, and austere censors of morals.”
We pass over a few other less important cases, and come at once to the last and most fatal, those connected with the Protestant Reformation. In the XVIth century, the old story of Bardas and Photius was lamentably repeated in England. Germany was in open revolt; Philip, Landgrave of Hesse, was extorting shameful permissions for polygamy from the married monk Luther; religious were trampling their vows underfoot; Wittenberg, according to the Lutheran chronicler Illyricus, was no better than a den of prostitution; troops of “apostate nuns,” as Luther himself called them, were constantly arriving, begging, says Rohrbacher, for food, clothing, and husbands; Luther, their prophet, was hawking his mistress, Catharine Boris, about among his disciples, offering her as a wife first to one, then to the other, till he was at last forced to take her himself, to the no small disgust of his best friends, who remonstrated in the following graphic words: [pg 598] “If any, at least not this one.” The Germanic world was crazy with a new revolution, and henceforth the struggle was no longer to be a partial one, a revolt of the flesh, but a radical onset upon everything divine, upon revelation and faith, as well as upon moral restraints and social decencies. Philip of Hesse, petitioning in 1539 for permission to marry a second wife while the first was living, says that “necessities of body and of conscience obliged him thereto”; that “he sees no remedy save that allowed of old to the chosen people” (polygamy); that “he begs this dispensation in order that he may live more entirely for the glory of God, and lie more ready to do him earthly services; that he is ready to do anything that may be required of him in reason (as an equivalent), whether concerning the property of convents or anything else.” He also hints that he will seek this permission from the emperor, “no matter at what pecuniary cost,” if it be denied him by the Wittenberg divines, and alleges as a sufficient reason that it is too costly for him to take his wife to diets of the empire, with all the honors due to her rank, and equally too hard for him to live without female society during such times of gaiety. The permission was granted at last, reluctantly, it must be admitted, for even the first Reformers, lax as they were, were not Mormons. Melancthon drew it up, and eight divines, including Bucer and Luther, signed it, but made secrecy a condition. The shameful “marriage” was performed on the 4th of March, 1540, between the landgrave and Marguerite de Saal, and perhaps the most revolting feature of the proceeding was the consent of Philip's lawful wife, the Duchess Christina.
In Chambers' Book of Days, a collection of curious information, we read that a still more liberal dispensation from the ordinary rules of morality was in the last century accorded by the Calvinistic clergy of Prussia to the reigning King, Frederick William, successor of Frederick the Great, to have three wives at the same time, the Princess of Hesse, the Countess Euhoff, and Elizabeth of Brunswick. The progenitor of the Prussian dynasty had already given a similar example of licentiousness. In Luther's time, Albert of Brandenburg, Grand Master of the religious order of chivalry, the Knights of S. Mary, otherwise called the Teutonic Order, broke his vows and took a wife, having already abjured his faith. Prussia, then only a province dependent on the Order, he seized as his own, Protestantizing it, and making moral disorder the rule there rather than the exception.