the head.

Instantly there came on a terrific storm, the ship went to pieces, and nearly all who were on board perished. The very fish vanished from that part of the sea.

Another of the witnesses had heard the same story. The common tradition of the East, he said, was, that in old times, before the two spiritual orders of knighthood were founded, a head used to rise in a certain whirlpool named Setalia, the appearance of which was very dangerous for the ships which happened to be near it. We are to suppose, though it does not appear that the witnesses said so, that the Templars had contrived to get possession of this formidable head.

We are to observe that the witnesses who thus deposed had been picked and culled in all parts of France, by the king's officers, out of those who had confessed before the different prelates and provincial councils, and who were, by threats and promises, engaged to persist in what they had said. The terror they were under was visible in their countenances, their words, and their actions. Many of them began by saying that they would not vary from what they had deposed before such a bishop or such a council; yet even among these some were bold enough to revoke their confessions, declaring that they had been drawn from them by torture, and asserted the innocence of the order. Others retracted their confessions when brought before the commissioners, but shortly afterwards, having probably in the interval been well menaced or tortured by the king's officers, returned and retracted their retractation.

The case of John de Pollencourt, the thirty-seventh witness, is a remarkable instance. He began in the usual way, by declaring that he would persist in his confession made before the Bishop of Amiens, touching the denial of Christ, &c. The commissioners, observing his paleness and agitation, told him to tell

the truth and save his soul, and not to persist in his confession if it had not been sincere, assuring him that neither they nor their notaries would reveal any thing that he said. After a pause he replied::

"I declare then, on peril of my soul, and on the oath which I have taken, that, at the time of my reception, I neither denied God nor spat upon the cross, nor committed any of the indecencies of which we are accused, and was not required so to do. It is true that I have made confessions before the inquisitors; but it was through the fear of death, and because Giles de Rotangi had, with tears, said to me, and many others who were with me in prison at Montreuil, that we should pay for it with our lives, if we did not assist by our confessions to destroy the order. I yielded, and afterwards I wished to confess myself to the Bishop of Amiens; he referred me to a Minorite friar; I accused myself of this falsehood, and obtained absolution, on condition that I would make no more false depositions in this affair. I tell you the truth; I persist in attesting it before you; come what may of it, I prefer my soul to my body."

Nothing can bear more plainly the character of truth than this declaration; yet three days afterwards the witness came back, revoked it all, spoke of the cat which used to appear in the chapters, and said that, if the order had not been abolished, he would have quitted it. Had he not been well menaced and tortured in the interim?

'

The examination of Peter de la Palu, a bachelor in theology of the order of the preachers, the 201st witness, brought from him these remarkable words: "I have been present at the examination of several Templars, some of whom confessed many of the things contained in the said articles, and some others totally denied them; and for many reasons it appeared to me that greater credit was to be given to those who denied than to those who confessed."

CHAPTER XI.

Examinations in England-Germany-Spain-Italy-Naples and Provence-Sicily-Cyprus-Meeting of the Council of Vienne-Suppression of the order-Fate of its Members— Death of Molay.

THE time fixed for the meeting of the council at Vienne was now at hand, in which the fate of the order was to be decided. Before we proceed to narrate its acts we will briefly state the result of the examinations of the Templars in other countries.

The pope sent, as his judges, to England, Dieudonné, abbot of Lagny, and Sicard de Vaux, canon of Narbonne; and the examinations commenced at York, London, Lincoln, and other places, on the 25th November, 1309. The inquiry continued till the council held in London in 1311; the number of Templars examined was two hundred and twentyeight; that of the witnesses against the order was seventy-two, almost all Carmelites, Minorites, Dominicans, and Augustinians, the natural foes of the order. The Templars were treated with great mildness; and in England, Ireland, and Scotland, they were unanimous and constant in their assertion of the innocence of the order. The evidence against the order was almost all hearsay: its nature will be shown by the following specimens.

John de Goderal, a Minorite, had heard that Robert de Raxat, a Templar, had once gone about a meadow crying "Wo, wo is me! that ever I was born. I have been forced to deny God, and give myself up to the devil."

A Templar had said to William de Berney, in the presence of several respectable people, at the funeral of the parish-priest of Duxworth, near Cambridge, that a man has no more a soul, after death, than a dog.

John De Eure, a secular knight, said that he once invited the prior William de Fenne to dine with him. After dinner the prior took from his bosom a book, and gave it to the knight's lady to read. She found on a paper which was fastened into the book the following words, "Christ was not the Son of God, nor born of a virgin, but conceived by Mary, the wife of Joseph, in the same way as all other men. Christ was not a true but a false prophet, and was crucified for his own crimes and not for the redemption of mankind, &c." The lady showed this paper to her husband, who spoke to the prior, who only laughed at it; but, being brought before a court of justice, he confessed the truth, excusing himself on the grounds of his being illiterate and ignorant of what the book contained.

Robert of Oteringham, a Minorite, said, "One evening my prior did not appear at table, as relics were come from Palestine which he wished to show the brethren. About midnight I heard a confused noise in the chapel; I got up, and, looking through the keyhole, saw that it was lighted. In the morning I asked a brother who was the saint in whose honour they had celebrated the festival during the night? He turned pale with terror, thinking I had seen something, and said "Ask me not; and if you value your life say nothing of it before the superiors."

Another witness said that the son of a Templar had peeped through the slits of the door into the chapter-room, and seen a new member put to death for hesitating to deny Christ. Long afterwards,

being asked by his father to become a Templar, he refused, telling what he had seen: his father instantly slew him.

John of Gertia, a Minorite, was told by a woman named Agnes Lovecote, who said she had it from Exvalethus, prior in London, that when in one of the chapters a brother had refused to spit on the cross, they suspended him in a well and covered it up. This witness also deposed to some other enormities which he said he had heard of from the same woman, herself speaking from hearsay.

In June, 1310, the pope wrote to King Edward, blaming his lenity and calling on him to employ the torture in order to elicit the truth. The council of London, after a long discussion, ordered it to be employed, but so as not to mutilate the limbs or cause an incurable wound or violent effusion of blood. The knights persisted in asserting their innocence.

In Germany the different prelates examined the Templars in their respective dioceses. Nothing was elicited.

At Mentz the order was pronounced innocent. The Wildgraf Frederic, preceptor on the Rhine, offered to undergo the ordeal of glowing iron. He had known the Master intimately in the East, and believed him to be as good a Christian as any man.

The Templars in the Spanish peninsula were examined, and witnesses heard for and against them in Castile, Leon, Aragon, and Portugal, and nothing was proved against them. The council of Tarragona in Aragon, after applying the torture, pronounced the order free from the stain of heresy. At the council of Medina del Campo in Leon, one witness said that he had heard that, when some Minorites visited the preceptor at Villalpando, they found him reading a little book, which he instantly locked up in three boxes, saying, "This book might fall