Such violence cannot fill the measure up,
With no decree to sanction, pushes on
Into the temple his yet eager sails.”
We are here reminded it was at Auch all the Knights-Templars of Bigorre, with their commander, Bernard de Montagu, were executed. M. Martin, in his History of France, observes that all the traditions of this region are favorable to the Templars. There is not one that is not to their credit. The old saying, “Drink like a Templar,” has no echo in the mountains of Bigorre. Many of their churches are still standing, objects of interest to the archæologist, and of devotion to the pious. There are six or seven skulls shown at Gavarnie, said to be of the martyred Templars, and every year, on the anniversary of the destruction of the Order, a knight armed from top to toe, and wearing the great white mantle of the Order, appears in the churchyard and cries three times: “Who will defend the Holy Temple? Who will deliver the Sepulchre of the Lord?” Then the seven heads come to life and reply: “No one! no one! The Temple is destroyed!” How earnestly these unfortunate knights begged to be tried by the Inquisition is well known. They felt there was some chance for justice at a tribunal in which there was a religious element.
A Cardinal d’Armagnac was Archbishop of Auch when the tragedy of Rodèle took place, which rivals that of the Torre della Fame at Pisa in horror. Geraud, brother of Count Bernard VII. of Armagnac, having married his son to Margaret of Comminges, took up arms against her for forsaking her youthful husband and withdrawing to the castle of Muret. Count Bernard took advantage of this to make war on Geraud for holding the county of Pardiac, on which he himself had claims, and pursued his brother from one castle to another. Finally taking him captive, he carried him to the fortress of Rodèle, and threw him into a deep pit, where he died of hunger and cold in four or five days.
Geraud’s two sons, John and Guilhem, alarmed at his captivity, but unaware of his fate, were induced to come to Auch to implore the clemency of their ferocious uncle, and on Good Friday, 1403, the Count de l’Isle Jourdain, kneeling with the poor children at his feet, besought him to pardon them, in memory of the Divine Passion that day celebrated; but neither the day nor the helplessness of the children, so touchingly alluded to by their advocate, softened the inflexible count. He had them imprisoned in the castle of Lavardens, and shortly after, Guilhem, a lad of barely fifteen, was tied to a horse and taken to the fortress of Rodèle. There he was shown the horrible pit into which his father had been let down alive to incur so fearful a death. The poor boy looked into the fatal pit, fell senseless to the ground, and was never restored to life. His brother John, the unhappy husband of the faithless Margaret of Comminges, was carried to the castle of Brugens, where horrid tortures awaited him. He had only escaped from the hatred of his wife to fall into the hands of Bonne de Berri, Count Bernard’s wife, a woman of insatiable ambition and relentless purpose. This new Frédégonde put his eyes out by passing a red-hot brazier before them, and then, remembering the strength God gave the blind Samson to take vengeance on his enemies, she had him thrown into a deep moat, where he died of hunger.
Never was there a family that reflected more faithfully than the Armagnacs all the vices and defects as well as the virtues of the Middle Ages. Its history contains every element to fix the attention, with its tragedies, its examples of brutal power, its prodigies of valor and heroism, its struggles in the cause of liberty, and, finally, in its marvels of faith. Religious influence sooner or later asserted its triumph in the heart. Many of the counts laid aside their armor for the cowl and scapular, and atoned for their sins in the cloister. They were benefactors to the Church, they founded monasteries, they fought in the holy wars. We find them with Godfrey of Bouillon under the walls of Jerusalem, and fighting against the Moors with the Kings of Castile and Aragon. Among the most renowned members of the race, we must not forget Count John I., a native of Auch, whose valor placed him on a level with Du Guesclin, the greatest captain of the age. For a time they fought on the same side, but they met as opponents on the plain of Navarrete, where Count John fought for Don Pedro and greatly contributed to the victory. Du Guesclin was taken prisoner. For more than thirty years Count John was one of the strongest supporters of the King of France. After the battle of Crécy, he stopped the tide of English invasion, and when the Black Prince was covering Aquitaine with blood and ruins in 1355, he alone ventured to resist him and obstruct his victorious march.
After the defeat at Poitiers, he veiled the humiliation of the king with the splendor of his munificence. He sent the king all kinds of provisions, as well as silver utensils, for his table. He convoked the Etats-Généraux to organize forces to avert calamities that threatened the country. He fought beside the Duke of Anjou and Du Guesclin in the immortal campaigns of 1369 and 1370. This was the period in which the grandeur of the house of Armagnac culminated. John I. married Reine de Got, niece of Pope Clement V., whom Dante thrusts lower than Simon Magus. She was buried in the choir of the Cordeliers at Auch, now, alas! a granary. The count’s second wife was Beatrice de Clermont, great-granddaughter of S. Louis IX., king of France, and one of his daughters married the brother of Charles V., and the other the oldest son of Don Pedro of Aragon.
Such were the royal pretensions of this great house. Descended from the Merovingian race of kings through Sanche Mitarra, the terrible scourge of the Moors, who lies buried at S. Oren’s Priory, founded by the first Count of Armagnac, on the banks of the Gers, the Counts of Auch, as they were sometimes called, bore themselves right royally. They acknowledged no suzerain. They were the first to call themselves counts by the grace of God, a formula then used to express the divine right, but in the sense of S. Paul and of the Middle Ages, which was simply acknowledging that all power comes from God, and that the right of exercising it has for its true source not the force of arms, but in God alone. We must come down to the XVth century to find the jealous susceptibility that only interpreted, in the sense of absolute independence of all human power, such expressions as Dei gratiâ; per Dei gratiam; Dei dono, etc., which had been used with the sole intention of expressing a truth of the Christian faith, a profound sentiment of subordination to divine authority. This intention is nowhere so explicit as in the legend on the ancient money of Béarn, where its rulers used almost the words of the apostle: Gratia autem Dei sumus id quod sumus.
Charles VII. thought it worth while to forbid John IV. of Armagnac, in 1442, the use of such formulas. Seven years after, he obliged the Dukes of Burgundy to declare they bore no prejudice to the crown of France. Louis XI. vainly tried to prevent the Duke of Brittany from using them. Since that time it has been claimed as the exclusive right of sovereigns. Bishops, however, retain the formula Dei gratia in their public acts of diocesan administration, with the addition: et apostolicæ sedis, which dates from the end of the XIIIth century only.