watched and prayed, the larger revelled and slept. Edward, among his
favorites and courtiers, had hardly believed that there would “be
any battle, and had no notion of generalship, keeping his whole army
compressed together, so that their large numbers were encumbering
instead of being available. Five hundred horse were closely attached to
his person, with the Earl of Pembroke, Sir Ingeltram de Umfraville, and
Sir Giles de Argentine, the last a gallant knight of St. John. When he
rode forward in the morning, Edward was absolutely amazed at the
sight of the well-ordered lines of Scottish infantry, and turning to
Umfraville, asked if he really thought those Scots would fight. At that
moment Abbot Maurice, of Inchaffray, who had just been celebrating mass,
came barefooted before the array, holding up a crucifix, and raising his
hand in blessing, as all the army bent to the earth, with the prayers of
men willingly offering themselves.
“They kneel! they kneel!” cried Edward. “They are asking mercy.”
“They are, my liege,” said Umfraville, “but it is of God, not of us.
These men will win the day, or die upon the field.”
“Be it so,” said the King, and gave the word.
The Earls of Gloucester and Hereford rushed to the charge with loud
war-cries. Each Scot stood fast, blowing wild notes on the horn he wore
at his neck, and the close ranks of infantry stood like rocks against
the encounter of the mailed horse, their spears clattering against the
armor in the shock till the hills rang again. Randolph meanwhile led his
square steadily on, till it seemed swallowed up in the sea of English;
and Keith, with the five hundred horsemen of the Scots army, making a
sudden turn around Milton Bog, burst in flank upon the English archery,
ever the main strength of the army. The long-bow had won, and was again
to win, many a fair field; but at Bannockburn the manoeuvre of the
Scots was ruinous to the yeomanry, who had no weapons fit for a close
encounter with mounted men-at-arms, and were trodden down and utterly
dispersed.
The ground was hotly contested by the two armies; banners rose and fell,
and the whole field was slippery with blood, and strewn with fragments
of armor, shivers of lances and arrows, and rags of scarfs and pennons.
The English troops began to waver. “They fail! they fail!” was the
Scottish cry, and as they pressed on with double vehemence, there rose
a shout that another host was coming to their aid. It was only the
servants on the Gillies Hill, crowding down in the excitement of
watching the battle, but to the dispirited English they appeared a
formidable reinforcement of the enemy; and Robert Bruce, profiting by
the consternation thus occasioned, charged with his reserve, and decided
the fate of the day. His whole line advancing, the English array finally
broke, and began to disperse. Earl Gilbert of Gloucester made an attempt
to rally, and, mounted on a noble steed--a present from the King--rode
furiously against Edward Bruce; but his retainers hung back, and he
was borne down and slain before his armorial bearings were recognized.
Clifford and twenty-seven other Barons were slain among the pits, and
the rout became general. The Earl of Pembroke, taking the King’s horse
by the bridle, turned him from the field, and his five hundred guards
went with him. Sir Giles de Argentine saw them safely out of the battle,
then, saying, “It is not my custom to fly!” he bade Edward farewell, and
turned back, crying, “An Argentine!” and was slain by Edward Bruce’s
knights.
Douglas followed hotly on the King, with sixty horse, and on the way met
Sir Laurence Abernethy with twenty more, coming to join the English; but
finding how matters stood, the time-serving knight gladly proceeded to
hunt the fugitives, and they scarcely let Edward II. draw rein till he
had ridden sixty miles, even to Dunbar, whence he escaped by sea.
Bannockburn was the most total defeat which has ever befallen an English
army. Twenty-seven nobles were killed, twenty-two more and sixty knights
made prisoners, and the number of obscure soldiers slain, drowned in the
Forth, or killed by the peasantry, exceeds calculation. The camp was
taken, with an enormous booty in treasure, jewels, rich robes, fine
horses, herds of cattle, machines for the siege of towns, and, in short,
such an amount of baggage that the wagons for the transport were
numerous enough to extend in one line for sixty miles. Even the King’s
signet was taken, and Edward was forced to cause another to be made to
supply its place. One prisoner was a Carmelite friar named Baston, whom
Edward of Caernarvon had brought with him to celebrate his victory in
verse; whereupon Robert imposed the same task by way of ransom; and the
poem, in long, rhyming Latin verses, is still extant.
The plunder was liberally shared among the Scottish army, and the
prisoners were treated with great courtesy and generosity. The slain
were reverently buried where they fell, except Lord Clifford and the
Earl of Gloucester, whose corpses were carried to St. Ninian’s kirk, and
sent with all honor to England.
Bruce had not forgotten that the blood of the Clares ran in his own
veins, and that Gloucester had warned him of his danger at King Edward’s
court: he not only lamented for the young Earl, but he released Ralph de
Monthermer, the stepfather of Earl Gilbert, and gave him the signet-ring
of Edward II. to bear home.
Gilbert was the last male of the stout old line of De Clares.
Gloucester, and his estates descended to his three sisters--Margaret,
the widow of Gaveston; Eleanor, the wife of Hugh le Despenser; and
Elizabeth, who shortly after married John de Burgh, Earl of Ulster.
The Earl of Hereford had taken refuge in Bothwell Castle, but was unable
to hold it out, and surrendered. He was exchanged for captives no less
precious to Robert Bruce than his well-earned crown. The wife, daughter,
and sister, who had been prisoners for eight years, were set free,
together with the Bishop of Glasgow, now blind, and the young Earl of
Mar. Marjory Bruce had grown from a child to a maiden in her English
prison, and she was soon betrothed to the young Walter, Steward of
Scotland; but it was enacted that, if she should remain without a
brother, the crown should descend to her uncle Edward.
That midsummer battle of Bannockburn undid all the work of Edward I.,
and made Scotland an independent kingdom for three hundred years longer.
Ill-government, a discontented nobility, and a feeble King, had brought
England so low, that the troops could not shake off their dejection,
and a hundred would flee before two or three Scottish soldiers.
Bruce ravaged the northern counties every summer, leaving famine and
pestilence behind him; but Edward II. had neither spirit nor resolution
to make war or peace. The mediation of the Pope and King of France
was ineffectual, and years of warfare passed on, impressing habits of
perpetual license and robbery upon the borderers of either nation.
CAMEO XXXIX. THE KNIGHTS OF THE TEMPLE. (1292-1316.)
_Kings of England_.
1272. Edward I.
1307. Edward II.
_King of Scotland_.
1306. Robert I.
_Kings of France_.
1285. Philippe IV.
1314. Louis X.
_Emperors of Germany_.
1292. Adolph.
1296. Albert I.
1308. Henry VII.
1314. Louis V.
_Popes_.
1296. Boniface VIII.
1303. Benedict XI.
1305. Clement V.
Crusades were over. The dream of Edward I. had been but a dream, and
self-interest and ambition directed the swords of Christian princes
against each other rather than against the common foe. The Western
Church was lapsing into a state of decay and corruption, from which she
was only partially to recover at the cost of disruption and disunion,
and the power which the mighty Popes of the twelfth century had gathered
into a head became, for that very cause, the tool of an unscrupulous
monarch.
The colony of Latins left in Palestine had proved a most unsuccessful
experiment; the climate enervated their constitutions; the _poulains_,
as those were called who were born in the East, had all the bad
qualities of degenerate races, and were the scorn, and derision of Arabs
and Europeans alike; nor could the defence have been kept up at all, had
it not been for the constant recruits from cooler climates. Adventurous
young men tried their swords in the East, banished men there sought to
recover their fame, the excommunicate strove to win pardon by his sword,
or the forgiven to expiate his past crime; and, besides these irregular
aids, the two military and monastic orders of Templars and Hospitallers
were constantly fed by supplies of young nobles trained to arms and
discipline in the numerous commanderies and preceptories scattered
throughout the West.
Admirable as warriors, desperate in battle, offering no ransom but
their scarf, these knightly monks were the bulwark of Christendom, and
would have been doubly effective save for the bitter jealousies of the
two orders against each other, and of both against all other Crusaders.
Not a disaster happened in the Holy Land but the treachery of one order
or the other was said to have occasioned it; and, on the whole, the
greater degree of obloquy seems usually, whether justly or not, to have
lighted on the Knights of the Temple. They were the richer and the
prouder of the two orders; and as the duties of the hospital were not
included in their vows, they neither had the same claims to gratitude,
nor the softening influence of the exercise of charity, and were simply
stern, hated, dreaded soldiers.
After a desperate siege, Acre fell, in 1292, and the last remnant of the
Latin possessions in the East was lost. The Templars and Hospitallers
fought with the utmost valor, forgot their feuds in the common danger,
and made such a defence that the Mussulmans fancied that, when one
Christian died, another came out of his mouth and renewed the conflict;
but at last they were overpowered by force of numbers, and were finally
buried under the ruins of the Castle of the Templars. The remains of
the two orders met in the Island of Cyprus, which belonged to Henry de
Lusignan, claimant of the crown of Jerusalem. There they mustered their
forces, in the hope of a fresh Crusade; but as time dragged on, and
their welcome wore out, they found themselves obliged to seek new
quarters. The Knights of the Hospital, true to their vows, won sword in
hand the Isle of Rhodes from the Infidel, and prolonged their existence
for five centuries longer as a great maritime power, the guardians of
the Mediterranean and the terror of the African corsairs. The Knights
Templars, in an evil hour for themselves, resolved to spend their time
of expectation in their numerous rich commanderies in Europe, where they
had no employment but to collect their revenues and keep their swords
bright; and it cannot but be supposed that they would thus be tempted
into vicious and overbearing habits, while the sight of so formidable a
band of warriors, owning no obedience but to their Grand Master and the
Pope, must have been alarming to the sovereign of the country. Still
there are no tokens of their having disturbed the peace during the
twenty-two years that their exile lasted, and it was the violence of a
king and the truckling of a pope that effected their ruin.
Philippe IV., the pest of France, had used his power over the French
clergy to misuse and persecute the fierce old pontiff, Boniface VIII.,
and it was no fault of Philippe that the murder of Becket was not
parodied at Anagni. Fortunately for the malevolent designs of the King,
his messengers quailed, and contented themselves with terrifying the old
man into a frenzied suicide, instead of themselves slaying him. The next
Pope lived so few days after his election, that it was believed that
poison had removed him; and the cardinals remained shut up for nine
months at Perugia, trying in vain to come to a fresh choice. Finally,
Philippe fixed their choice on a wretched Gascon, who took the name of
Clement V., first, however, making him swear to fulfil six conditions,
the last and most dreadful of which was to remain a secret until the
time when the fulfilment should be required of him.
Lest his unfortunate tool should escape from his grasp, or gain the
protection of any other sovereign, Philippe transplanted the whole papal
court to Avignon, which, though it used to belong to the Roman empire,
had, in the break-up after the fall of the Swabian house, become in
effect part of the French dominions.
There the miserable Clement learned the sixth condition, and, not daring
to oppose it, gave the whole order of the Templars up into his cruel
hands, promising to authorize his measures, and pronounce their
abolition. Philippe’s first measure was to get them all into his hands,
and for this purpose he proclaimed a Crusade, and actually himself took
the Cross, with his son-in-law Edward II., at the wedding of Isabel.
Jacque de Molay, the Grand Master, hastened from Cyprus, and convoked
all his chief knights to take counsel with the French King on this
laudable undertaking. He was treated with great distinction, and even
stood godfather to a son of the King. The greater number of the Templars
were at their own Tower of the Temple at Paris, with others dispersed
in numbers through the rest of France, living at ease and securely,
respected and feared, if not beloved, and busily preparing for an
onslaught upon the common foe.
Meanwhile, two of their number, vile men thrown into prison for former
crimes--one French, the other Italian--had been suborned by Philippe’s
emissaries to make deadly accusations against their brethren, such as
might horrify the imagination of an age unused to consider evidence.
These tales, whispered into the ear of Edward II. by his wily
father-in-law, together with promises of wealth and lands to be wrested
from them, gained from him a promise that he would not withstand the
measures of the French King and Pope; and, though he was too much shocked
by the result not to remonstrate, his feebleness and inconsistency
unfitted him either to be a foe or a champion.
On the 14th of September, 1307, Philippe sent out secret orders to his
seneschals. On the 13th of October, at dawn of day, each house of the
Templars was surrounded with armed men, and, ere the knights could rise
from their beds, they were singly mastered, and thrown into prison.
Two days after, on Sunday, after mass, the arrest was made known, and
the crimes of which the unfortunate men were accused. They were to be
tried before the grand inquisitor, Guillaume Humbert, a Dominican friar;
but in the meantime, to obtain witness against them, they were starved,
threatened, and tortured in their dungeons, to gain from them some
confession that could be turned against them. Out of six hundred
knights, besides a much greater number of mere attendants, there could
not fail to be some few whose minds could not withstand the misery of
their condition, and between these and the two original calumnies, a
mass of horrible stories was worked up in evidence.
It was said that, while outwardly wearing the white cross on their robe,
bearing the vows of chivalry, exercising the holy offices of priests,
and bound by the monastic rules, there was in reality an inner society,
bound to be the enemies of all that was holy, into which they were
admitted upon their reviling and denying their faith, and committing
outrages on the cross and the images of the saints. It was further said
that they worshipped the devil in the shape of a black cat, and wore his
image on a cord round their waists; that they anointed a great silver
head with the fat of murdered children; that they practised every kind
of sorcery, performed mass improperly, never went to confession, and had
betrayed Palestine to the Infidels.
For the last count of the indictment the blood that had watered Canaan
for two hundred years was answer enough. As to the confessional, the
accusation emanated from the Dominicans, who were jealous of the
Templars confessing to priests of their own order. With respect to the
mass, it appears that the habits of the Templars were similar to those
of the Cistercian monks; who, till The Lateran Council, had not elevated
the Host to receive adoration from the people.
The accusation of magic naturally adhered to able men conversant with
the East. The head was found in the Temple at Paris. It was made of
silver, resembled a beautiful woman, and was, in fact, a reliquary
containing the bones of one of the 11,000 virgins of Cologne. But truth
was not wanted; and under the influence of solitary imprisonment,
hunger, damp and loathsome dungeons, and two years of terror and misery,
enough of confessions had been extorted for Philippe’s purpose by the
year 1309.
Many had died under their sufferings, and some had at first confessed
in their agonies, and, when no longer tortured, had retracted all their
declarations with horror. These became dangerous, and were therefore
declared to be relapsed heretics, and fifty-six were burnt by slow
degrees in a great inclosure, surrounded by stakes, all crying out, and
praying devoutly and like good Christians till the last.
Having thus horribly intimidated recusant witnesses, the King caused the
Pope to convoke a synod at Paris, before which the Grand Master, Jacques
de Molay, was cited. He was a brave old soldier, but no scholar, and
darkness, hunger, torture, and distress had so affected him, that, when
brought into the light of day, he stood before the prelates and barons,
among whom he had once been foremost, so utterly bewildered and
confused, that the judges were forced to remand him for two days to
recover his faculties.
When brought before them again, he was formally asked whether he would
defend his order, or plead for himself. He made answer that he should
be contemptible in his own eyes, and those of all the world, did he not
defend an order which had done so much for him, but that he was in such
poverty that he had not fourpence left in the world, and that he must
beg for an advocate, to whom he would mention the great kings, princes,
barons, bishops, and knights whose witness would at once clear his
knights from the monstrous charges brought against them.
Thereupon he was told that advocates were not allowed to men accused of
heresy, and that he had better take care how he contradicted his own
deposition, or he would be condemned as relapsed. His own deposition,
as three cardinals avouched that he had made it before them, was then
translated to him from the Latin, which he did not understand. In
horror-struck amazement at hearing such words ascribed to himself, the
old knight twice made the sign of the cross, and exclaimed, “If the
cardinals were other sort of men, he should know how to deal with them!”
He was told that the cardinals were not there to receive a challenge to
battle. “No,” he said, “that was not what he meant; he only wished that
might befall them which was done by the Saracens and Tartars to infamous
liars--whose heads they cut off.”
He was sent back to prison and brought back again, less vehement against
his accusers, but still declaring himself a faithful Christian, and
begging to be admitted to the rites of religion; but he was left to
languish in his dungeon for two years longer, while two hundred and
thirty-one witnesses were examined before the commissaries. In May,
1311, five hundred and forty-four persons belonging to the order were
led before the judges from the different prisons, while eight of the
most distinguished knights, and their agent at Rome, undertook their
defence. Their strongest plea was, that not a Templar had criminated
himself, except in France, where alone torture had been employed;
but they could obtain no hearing, and a report was drawn up by the
commissaries to the so-called Council of Vienne. This was held by
Clement V. in the early part of 1312; and on the 6th of March it passed
a decree abolishing the Order of the Temple, and transmitting its
possessions to the Knights of St. John.
There were other councils held to try the Templars in the other lands
where they had also been seized. In England, the confessions of the
knights tortured in France were employed as evidence, together with the
witness of begging friars, minstrels, women, and discreditable persons;
and on the decision of the Council of Vienne, the poor knights
confessed, as well they might, that their order had fallen under evil
report, and were therefore pardoned and released, with the forfeiture of
all their property to the hospital. Their principal house in England was
the Temple in Fleet street, where they had built a curious round church
in the twelfth century, when it was consecrated by the Patriarch
Heraclius of Jerusalem. The shape was supposed to be like the Holy
Sepulchre, to whose service they were devoted; but want of space obliged
them to add a square building of three aisles beyond. This, with the
rest of their property, devolved on the Order of St. John, who, in
the next reign, let the Temple buildings for £10 per annum to the
law-students of London, and in their possession it has ever since
continued. The ancient seal of the knights, representing two men mounted
upon one horse, was assumed by the benchers of one side of the Temple,
though in the classical taste of later times the riders were turned into
wings, and the steed into Pegasus; while their brethren bear the lamb
and banner, likewise a remembrance of the Crusaders who founded the
round church, eight of whom still lie in effigy upon the floor.
In Spain the bishops would hardly proceed at all against the Templars,
and secured pensions for them out of the confiscated property. In
Portugal they were converted into a new order for the defence of the
realm. In Germany, they were allowed to die out unmolested; but in Italy
Philippe’s influence was more felt, and they were taken in the same net
with those in France. There the King’s coffers were replenished with
their spoil, very little of which ever found its way to the Knights of
St. John. The knights who half confessed, and then recanted, were put to
death; those who never confessed at all, were left in prison; those who
admitted the guilt of the order, were rewarded by a miserable existence
at large. The great dignitaries--Jacques de Molay, the Grand Master, and
Guy, the son of the Dauphin of Auvergne, the Commander of Normandy, and
two others--languished in captivity till the early part of 1314, when
they were led out before Notre Dame to hear their sentence read,
condemning them to perpetual imprisonment, and rehearsing their own
confession once more against them.
The Grand Master and Guy of Auvergne, both old men, wasted with
imprisonment and torture, no sooner saw the face of day, the grand old
cathedral, and the assembly of the people, than they loudly protested
that these false and shameful confessions were none of theirs; that
their dead brethren were noble knights and true Christians; and that
these foul slanders had never been uttered by them, but invented
by wicked men, who asked them questions in a language they did not
understand, while they, noble barons, belted knights, sworn Crusaders,
were stretched on the rack.
The Bishops present were shocked at the exposure of their treatment, and
placed them in the hands of the Provost of Paris, saying that they would
consider their case the next morning. But Philippe, dreading a reaction
in their favor, declared them relapsed, and condemned them to the flames
that very night, the 18th of March. A picture is extant in Germany, said
to have been of the time, showing the meek face of the white-haired,
white-bearded Molay, his features drawn with wasting misery, his eyes
one mute appeal, his hands bound over the large cross on his breast. He
died proclaiming aloud the innocence of his order, and listened to with
pity and indignation by the people. His last cry, ere the flames stifled
his voice, was an awful summons to Pope Clement to meet him before the
tribunal of Heaven within forty days; to King Philippe to appear there
in a year and a day.