He determined to compensate himself for the loss he had sustained
in military fame at Courtrai by fiercer exactions on his clergy and
bitterer enmity to the Pope. We have seen how he pursued the wretched
Boniface to the grave, and persisted in trying to force the obsequious
Clement to blacken his memory after he was dead. Clement was unwilling
to expose the vices and crimes of his predecessor, and yet he had given
a promise in that strange meeting in the forest to work his master's
will; he was also resident in France, and knew how unscrupulous his
protector was. Philip availed himself of the discredit brought on
knighthood by the loss of all those golden spurs, and compounded for
leaving the deceased pontiff alone, by exacting the consent of Clement
to his assault on the order of the Templars, the wealthiest institution
in the world, who held thousands of the best manors in France, and
whose spoils would make him the richest king in Christendom. Yet the
Templars were no contemptible foes. In number they were but fourteen
thousand, but their castles were over all the land; they were every
one of them of noble blood, and strong in the relationship of all the
great houses in Europe. If they had united with their brethren, the
Knights Hospitallers, no sovereign could have resisted their demands;
but, fortunately for Philip, they were rivals to the death, and gave no
assistance to each other when oppressed. Both, in fact, had outlived
the causes of their institution, and had forfeited the respect of the
masses of the people by their ostentatious abnegation of all the rules
by which they professed to be bound. Poverty, chastity, and brotherly
kindness were the sworn duties of the most rich, sensual, and unpitying
society which ever lived. When Richard of England was dying, he made an
imaginary will, and said, "I leave my avarice to the Citeaux, my luxury
to the Grey Friars, and my pride to the Templars." And the Templars
took possession of the bequest. When driven from the Holy Land, they
settled in all the Christian kingdoms from Denmark to the south of
Italy, and everywhere presented the same spectacle of selfishness and
debauchery. In Paris they had got possession of a tract of ground
equal to one-third of the whole city, and had covered it with towers
and battlements, and within the unapproachable fortress lived a life
of the most luxurious self-indulgence. Strange rumours got abroad
of the unholy rites with which their initiations were accompanied.
Their receptions into the order were so mysterious and sacred that
an interloper (if it had been the King of France) would have been
put to death for his intrusion. Frightful stories were told of their
blasphemies and hideous ceremonials. Reports came even from over the
sea, that while in Jerusalem they had conformed to the Mohammedan faith
and had exchanged visits and friendly offices with the chiefs of the
unbelievers. Against so dark and haughty an association it was easy to
stir up the popular dislike. Nobody could take their part, they lived
so entirely to themselves and shunned sympathy and society with so cold
a disdain. They were men of religious vows without the humility of that
condition, so they were hated by the nobles, who looked on priests
as their natural inferiors; they were nobles without the individual
riches of the barons and counts, and they were hated by the priests,
who were at all times the foes of the aristocracy. Hated, therefore, by
priest and noble, their policy would have been to make friends of the
lower orders, rising citizens, and the great masses of the people. But
they saw no necessity for altering their lofty course. They bore right
onward in their haughty disregard of all the rest of the world, and
were condemned by the universal feeling before any definite accusation
was raised against them.
Clement yielded a faint consent to the proceedings of Philip, and that
honourable champion of the faith gave full loose to his covetousness
and hatred. First of all he prayed meekly for admission as a brother
of the order. He would wear the red cross upon his shoulder and obey
their godly laws. If he had obtained his object, he would have procured
the grand-mastership for himself and disposed of their wealth at his
own discretion. The order might have survived, but their possessions
would have been Philip's. They perhaps perceived his aim, and declined
to admit him into their ranks. A rejected candidate soon changes his
opinion of the former object of his ambition. He now reversed his plan,
and declared they were unworthy, not only to wallow in the wealth and
splendour of their commanderies, but to live in a Christian land. He
said they were guilty of all the crimes and enormities by which human
nature was ever disgraced. James de Molay, the grand-master, and all
the knights of the order throughout France, were seized and thrown into
prison. Letters were written to all other kings and princes, inciting
them to similar conduct, and denouncing the doomed fraternity in the
harshest terms. The promise of the spoil was tempting to the European
sovereigns, but all of them resisted the inducement, or at least took
gentler methods of attaining the same end. But Philip was as much
pleased with the pursuit as with the catching of the game. He summoned
a council of the realm, and obtained at the same time a commission
of inquiry from the Pope. With these two courts to back him, it was
impossible to fail. The knights were kept in noisome dungeons. They
were scantily fed, and tormented with alternate promises and threats.
When physically weak and mentally depressed, they were tortured in
their secret cells, and under the pressure of fear and desperation
confessed to whatever was laid to their charge. Relieved from their
torments for a moment, they retracted their confessions; but the
written words remained. [A.D. 1312.] And in one day, before the public
had been prepared for such extremity of wrong, fifty-four of these
Christian soldiers--now old, and fallen from their high estate--were
publicly burned in the place of execution, and no further limit was
placed to the rapacity of the king. Still the odious process crept on
with the appearance of law, for already the forms of perverted justice
were found safer and more certain than either sword or fagot; and at
last, in 1314, the ruined brotherhood were allowed to join themselves
to other fraternities. The name of Templar was blotted out from the
knightly roll-call of all Europe; and in every nation, in England and
Scotland particularly, the order was despoiled of all its possessions.
Clement, however, was furious at seeing the moderation of rulers like
Edward II., who merely stripped the Templars of their houses and lands,
and did not dabble, as his patron Philip had done, in their blood,
and rebuked them in angry missives for their coldness in the cause of
religion.
Now, early in this century, a Pope had been personally ill used, and
his successor had become the pensioner and prisoner of one of the
basest of kings; a glorious brotherhood of Christian knights had been
shamelessly and bloodily destroyed. Was there no outcry from outraged
piety?--no burst of indignation against the perpetrator of so foul a
wrong? Pity was at last excited by the sufferings and humiliations
of the brothers of the Temple; but pity is not a feeling on which
knighthood can depend for vitality or strength. Perhaps, indeed, the
sympathy raised for the sad ending of that once-dreaded institution
was more fatal to its revival, and more injurious to the credit of
all surviving chivalry, than the greatest amount of odium would have
been. Speculative discussions were held about the guilt or innocence
of the Templars, but the worst of their crimes was the crime of being
weak. If they had continued united and strong, nobody would have heard
of the excesses laid to their charge. Passing over the impossible
accusations brought against them by ignorance and hatred, the offence
they were charged with which raised the greatest indignation, and was
least capable of disproof, was that in their reception into the order
they spat upon the crucifix and trampled on the sign of our salvation.
Nothing can be plainer than that this, at the first formation of the
order, had been a symbol, which in the course of years had lost its
significance. At first introduced as an emblem of Peter's denial and
of worldly disbelief, to be exchanged, when once they were clothed
with the Crusader's mantle, for unflinching service and undoubting
Faith,--a passage from death unto life,--it had been retained long
after its intention had been forgotten; and nothing is so striking as
the confession of some of the younger knights, of the reluctance, the
shame and trembling, with which, at the request of their superior, they
had gone through the repulsive ceremony. This is one of the dangers of
a symbolic service. The symbol supersedes the fact. The imitation of
Peter becomes a falling away from Christ. But a century before this
time, who can doubt that all Christendom would have rushed to the
rescue of the Pope if he had been seized in his own city and maltreated
as Boniface had been, and that every gentleman in Europe would have
drawn sword in behalf of the noble Templars?
But papacy, feudalism, and knighthood, as they had risen and flourished
together, were enveloped in the same fall. The society of the Dark
Ages had been perfect in its symmetry and compactness. Kings were but
feudal leaders and chiefs in their own domains. Knighthood was but the
countenance which feudalism turned to its enemies, while hospitality,
protection, and alliance were its offerings to its friends. Over all,
representative of the heavenly power which cared for the helpless
multitudes, the serfs and villeins, those who had no other friend,--the
Church extended its sheltering arms to the lowest of the low. Feudalism
could take care of itself; knighthood made itself feared; but the
multitudes could only listen and be obedient. All, therefore, who
had no sword, and no broad acres, were natural subjects of the Pope.
But with the rise of the masses the relations between them and the
Church became changed. It was found that during the last two hundred
years, since the awakening of mercantile enterprise by the Crusades
and the commingling of the population in those wild and yet elevating
expeditions, by the progress of the arts, by the privileges wrung
from king and noble by flourishing towns or purchased from them with
sterling coin, by the deterioration in the morals of priest and baron,
and the rise in personal importance of burghers, who could fight like
those of Courtrai or raise armies like those of Pisa and Genoa,--that
the state of society had gradually been changed; that the commons were
well able to defend their own interest; that the feudal proprietor had
lost his relative rank; that the knight was no longer irresistible
as a warrior; and that the Pope had become one of the most worldly
and least scrupulous of rulers. Far from being the friend of the
unprotected, the Church was the subject of all the ballads of every
nation, wherein its exactions and debaucheries were sung at village
fairs and conned over in chimney-corners. Cannon were first used in
this century at the siege of Algesiras in 1343; and with the first
discharge knighthood fell forever from the saddle. The Bible was first
translated into a national tongue,[C] and Popery fell forever from its
unopposed dominion. How, indeed, even without this incident, could the
Papacy have retained its power? From 1305 till 1376 the wearers of the
tiara were the mere puppets of the Kings of France. They lived in a
nominal freedom at Avignon, but the college of electors was in the pay
of the French sovereign, and the Pope was the creature of his hands.
This was fatal to the notion of his independence. But a heavier blow
was struck at the unity of the papal power when a double election, in
1378, established two supreme chiefs, one exacting the obedience of
the faithful from his palace on the banks of the Rhone, and the other
advancing the same claim from the banks of the Tiber. From this time
the choice of the chief pontiff became a political struggle between
the principal kings. There were French and German, and even English,
parties in the conclave, and bribes were as freely administered as
at a contested election or on a dubious question in the time of Sir
Robert Walpole. Family interest also, from this time, had more effect
on the policy of the Popes than the ambition to extend their spiritual
authority. They sacrificed some portion of their claims to insure
the elevation of their relations. Alliances were made, not for the
benefit of the Roman chair, but for some kinsman's establishment in a
principality. Dukedoms became appanages of the papal name, and every
new Pope left the mark of his beneficence in the riches and influence
of the favourite nephew whom he had invested with sovereign rank.
Italy became filled with new dynasties created by these means, and the
politics of the papal court became complicated by this diversity of
motive and influence. Yet feudalism struggled on in spite of cannon and
the rise of the middle orders; and Popery struggled on in spite of the
spread of information and the diffusion of wealth and freedom. For some
time, indeed, the decline of both those institutions was hidden by a
factitious brilliancy reflected on them by other causes. The increase
of refinement gave rise to feelings of romance, which were unknown in
the days of darkness and suffering through which Europe had passed. A
reverence for antiquity softened the harsher features by which they
had been actually distinguished, and knighthood became subtilized into
chivalry. [A.D. 1350.] As the hard and uninviting reality retreated
into the past, the imagination clothed it in enchanting hues; and at
the very time when the bowmen and yeomanry of England had shown at
Crecy how unfounded were the "boast of heraldry, the pomp of power,"
Edward III. had instituted the Order of the Garter,--a transmutation
as it were of the rude shocks of knighthood into carpet pacings in the
gilded halls of a palace; as in a former age the returned Crusaders
had supplied the want of the pride and circumstance of the real
charge against the Saracen by introducing the bloodless imitation
of it afforded by the tournament. In the same way the personal
disqualification of the Pope was supplied by an elevation of the ideal
of his place and office. Religion became poetry and sentiment; and
though henceforth the reigning pontiff was treated with the harshness
and sometimes the contempt his personal character deserved, his
throne was still acknowledged as the loftiest of earthly thrones. The
plaything of the present was nevertheless an idol and representative
of the past; and kings who drove him from his home, or locked him up
in their prisons, pretended to tremble at his anger, and received his
letters on their knees.
It must have been evident to any far-seeing observer that some great
change was in progress during the whole of this century, not so much
from the results of Courtrai, or Crecy, or Poictiers, or the migration
of the Pope to Avignon, or the increasing riches of the trading and
manufacturing towns, as from the great uprising of the human mind
which was shown by the almost simultaneous appearance of such stars
of literature as Dante, and Petrarch, and Boccaccio, and our English
Chaucer. I suppose no single century since has been in possession of
four such men. Great geniuses, indeed, and great discoveries, seem
to come in crops, as if a certain period had been fixed for their
bursting into flower; and we find the same grand ideas engaging
the intellects of men widely dispersed, so that a novelty in art or
science is generally disputed between contending nations. But this
synchronous development of power is symptomatic of some wide-spread
tendency, which alters the ordinary course of affairs; and we see in
the Canterbury Tales the dawning of the Reformation; in Shakspeare
and Bacon the inauguration of a new order of government and manners;
in Locke and Milton a still further liberation from the chains of a
worn-out philosophy; in Watt, and Fulton, and Cartwright, we see the
spread of civilization and power. In Walter Scott and Wordsworth, and
the wonderful galaxy of literary stars who illuminated the beginning
of this century, we see Waterloo and Peace, a widening of national
sympathies, and the opening of a great future career to all the
nations of the world. For nothing is so true an index of the state
and prospects of a people as the healthfulness and honest taste of
its literature. It was in this sense that Fletcher of Saltoun said,
(or quoted,) "Give me the making of the ballads of a people, and I
don't care who makes the laws." While we have such pure and wholesome
literature as is furnished us by Hallam, and Macaulay, and Alison, by
Tennyson, Dickens, Thackeray, and the rest, philosophy like Hamilton's,
and science like Herschel's and Faraday's, we have no cause to look
forward with doubt or apprehension.
"Naught shall make us rue
If England to herself do rest but true."
But those pioneers of the Fourteenth Century had dangers and
difficulties to encounter from which their successors have been free.
It is a very different thing for authors to write for the applause of
an appreciating public, and for them to create an appreciating public
for themselves. Their audience must at first have been hostile.
First, the critical and scholarly part of the world was offended with
the bad taste of writing in the modern languages at all. Secondly,
the pitch at which they struck the national note was too high for the
ears of the vulgar. A correct and dignified use of the spoken tongue,
the conveyance, in ordinary and familiar words, of lofty or poetical
thoughts, filled both those classes with surprise. To the scholar it
seemed good materials enveloped in a very unworthy covering. To "the
general" it seemed an attempt to deprive them of their vernacular
phrases and bring bad grammar and coarse expressions into disrepute.
Petrarch was so conscious of this that he speaks apologetically of his
sonnets in Italian, and founds his hope of future fame on his Latin
verses. But more important than the poems of Dante and Chaucer, or
the prose of Boccaccio, was the introduction of the new literature
represented by Froissart. Hitherto chronicles had for the most part
consisted of the record of such wandering rumours as reached a
monastery or were gathered in the religious pilgrimages of holy men.
Mingled, even the best of them, with the credulity of inexperienced
and simple minds, their effect was lost on the contemporary generation
by the isolation of the writers. Nobody beyond the convent-walls knew
what the learned historians of the establishment had been doing. Their
writings were not brought out into the light of universal day, and a
knowledge of European society gathered point by point, by comparing,
analyzing, and contrasting the various statements contained in those
dispersed repositories. But at this time there came into notice the
most inquiring, enterprising, picturesque, and entertaining chronicler
that had ever appeared since Herodotus read the result of his personal
travels and sagacious inquiries to the assembled multitudes of Greece.
John Froissart, called by the courtesy of the time Sir John, in honour
of his being priest and chaplain, devoted a long life to the collection
of the fullest and most trustworthy accounts of all the events and
personages characteristic of his time. From 1326, when his labours
commenced, to 1400, when his active pen stood still, nothing happened
in any part of Europe that the Paul Pry of the period did not rush
off to verify on the spot. If he heard of an assemblage of knights
going on at the extremities of France or in the centre of Germany,
of a tournament at Bordeaux, a court gala in Scotland, or a marriage
festival at Milan, his travels began,--whether in the humble guise of a
solitary horseman with his portmanteau behind his saddle and a single
greyhound at his heels, as he jogged wearily across the Border, till
he finally arrived in Edinburgh, or in his grander style of equipment,
gallant steed, with hackney led beside him, and four dogs of high
race gambolling round his horse, as he made his dignified journey
from Ferrara to Rome. Wherever life was to be seen and painted, the
indefatigable Froissart was to be found. Whatever he had gathered up on
former expeditions, whatever he learned on his present tour, down it
went in his own exquisite language, with his own poetical impression
of the pomps and pageantries he beheld; and when at the end of his
journey he reached the court of prince or potentate, no higher treat
could be offered to the "noble lords and ladies bright" than to form a
glittering circle round the enchanting chronicler and listen to what
he had written. From palace to palace, from castle to castle, the
unwearied "picker-up of unconsidered trifles" (which, however, were
neither trifles nor unconsidered, when their true value became known,
as giving life and reality to the annals of a whole period) pursued
his happy way, certain of a friendly reception when he arrived, and
certain of not losing his time by negligence or blindness on the
road. If he overtakes a stately cavalier, attended by squires and
men-at-arms, he enters into conversation, drawing out the experiences
of the venerable warrior by relating to him all he knew of things and
persons in which he took an interest. And when they put up at some
hostelry on the road, and while the gallant knight was sound asleep
on his straw-stuffed couch, and his followers were wallowing amid the
rushes on the parlour floor, Froissart was busy with pen and note-book,
scoring down all the old gentleman had told him, all the fights he had
been present at, and the secret history (if any) of the councils of
priests and kings. In this way knights in distant parts of the world
became known to each other. The same voice which described to Douglas
at Dalkeith the exploits of the Prince of Wales sounded the praises of
Douglas in the ears of the Black Prince at Bordeaux. A community of
sentiment was produced between the upper ranks of all nations by this
common register of their acts and feelings; and knighthood received its
most ennobling consummation in these imperishable descriptions, at the
very time when its political and military influence came to a close.
Froissart's Chronicles are the epitaph of feudalism, written indeed
while it was yet alive, but while its strength was only the convulsive
energy of approaching death. The standard of knightly virtue became
raised in proportion as knightly power decayed. In the same way as the
increased civilization and elevating influences of the time clothed
the Church in colours borrowed from the past, while its real influence
was seriously impaired, the expiring embers of knighthood occasionally
flashed up into something higher; and in this century we read of Du
Guesclin of France, Walter Manny and Edward the Third of England, and
many others, who illustrated the order with qualifications it had
never possessed in its palmiest state.
Courtrai was fought and Amadis de Gaul written almost at the same
time. Let us therefore mark, as a characteristic of the period we have
reached, the decay of knighthood, or feudalism in its armour of proof,
and the growth at the same time of a sense of honour and generosity,
which contrasted strangely in its softened and sentimentalized
refinement with the harshness and cruelty which still clung to the
ordinary affairs of life. Thus the young conqueror of Poictiers led his
captive John into London with the respectful attention of a grateful
subject to a crowned king. He waited on him at table, and made him
forget the humiliation of defeat and the griefs of imprisonment in
the sympathy and reverence with which he was everywhere surrounded.
This same prince was regardless of human life or suffering where the
theatrical show of magnanimity was not within his reach, bloodthirsty
and tyrannical, and is declared by the chronicler himself to be of "a
high, overbearing spirit, and cruel in his hatred." It shows, however,
what an advance had already been made in the influence of public
opinion, when we read how generally the treatment of the noble captive,
John of France, was appreciated. In former ages, and even at present in
nations of a lower state of feelings, the kind treatment of a fallen
enemy, or the sparing of a helpless population, would be attributed
to weakness or fear. Chivalry, which was an attempt to amalgamate the
Christian virtues with the rougher requirements of the feudal code,
taught the duty of being pitiful as well as brave. And though at this
period that feeling only existed between knight and knight, and was not
yet extended to their treatment of the common herd, the principle was
asserted that war could be carried on without personal animosity, and
that courage, endurance, and the other knightly qualities were to be
admired as much in an enemy as a friend.