The Templars had failed in their work; their usefulness was past; the order had now only to sink into extinction in one of the darkest tragedies of history. Their wealth and pride had sowed a har vest of fear and hatred; their loyalty to the Pope and their exceptional privileges had long since aroused the jealousy of the bishops; their bitter quarrels with the Hospitallers, which blazed into open warfare in Palestine in 1243, had shocked the moral sense of Christendom; and the exclusiveness and secrecy with which all their affairs were conducted opened a door for all manner of sinister suspicions among the populace. Philip the Fair of France was a king who covered with a thin veneer of piety a character of com plete unscrupulousness; he had succeeded in placing Clement V., a miserable crea ture of his own, on the papal throne (1305), and in his minister Guillaume de Nogaret and the officers of the Inquisi tion he found servants of character un scrupulous as his own. In the wealth of the Templars he saw a tempting prize, and the train of treachery was soon com plete.
The Grand-master Jacques de Molay was summoned from Cyprus by the Pope in 1306; he went taking with him the treasure of the order, and awaited his fate in France. On Oct. 13, 1307, the Grand-master and 140 Templars were seized at the Temple and flung into prison. Two degraded Templars sup plied some of the charges the king re quired; tortures, infamous beyond the infamies of the Inquisition, provided the remainder. In August, 1308, Clement sent throughout Christendom the 127 articles of interrogation for the accused, and evi dence in detail self-contradictory beyond all parallel was quickly accumulated. In the 225 witnesses sent to the papal com mission (1310-1311) from various parts of France the depositions, as Mr. Lea points out, occur most suspiciously in groups of identity according to the bish ops from whose preliminary tribunals they had come.
Philip held a so-called national assem bly at Tours (May, 1308) which ob sequiously expressed its approval of the condemnation. The Pope now took the formal responsibility upon himself by per sonally examining 72 Templars brought before him, when those who had already confessed under torture confirmed their confessions, knowing well that the pen alty of retraction was burning forthwith as a relapsed heretic. The Pope con tended that the fate of the order as an institution must be submitted to a gen eral council. Meantime, to the public commission appointed to examine into the charges at Paris, there came (March, 1310), as many as 546 Templars who of fered to defend the order against all the charges. Four of these were at length
commissioned to be present at the investigation on behalf of the order, when suddenly the commission was startled by the news that the provincial council of Sens was about to sentence without further hearing those Templars who had offered to defend the order. On May 12, 1310, 54 knights were slow ly burned to death.
The commission at once suspended its sittings, but at length, after many de lays, on June 5, 1311, transmitted its re port to Clement to help the General Council in its deliberations. The closing act in this drama of papal duplicity was Clement's failure to gain over the Coun cil at Vienne, and the suppression of the order without formal condemnation, by the bull "Vox in excelso" (March 22, 1312). The bull "Ad Providam" (May 2) laid it under perpetual inhibition, and transferred its property to the Hospital of St. John of Jerusalem. The persons of the Templars were handed over to the provincial councils, with the exception of the chiefs of the order, who were reserved to the jurisdiction of the Holy See. On March 19, 1314, Jacques de Molay and the gray-haired Geoffrey de Charney, Master of Normandy, were brought from prison to receive judgment, when, to the dismay of the churchmen and the aston ishment of all, they rose and solemnly declared their innocence and the blame lessness of the order. That same day, on the Isle des Juifs in the Seine, they were slowly roasted to death, declaring with their last breath that the confession formerly wrung from them by torture was untrue.
In England the trials were conducted with much less inhumanity. The charges for the most part failed to be established, and most of the prisoners were granted penances and permitted to escape with a formal abjuration, while a fair provision was made for their support. The last Master of the Temple in England, Will iam de la More, died a prisoner in the Tower, to the last maintaining the inno cence of the order. The memory of the various preceptories and possessions in England, Scotland, and Ireland survives in place names; the round Temple Church in London, consecrated in 1185, was re stored by the Benchers of the Inner and Middle Temple (1839-1842). In Spain, Portugal and Germany the order was found innocent; almost everywhere in Italy, save in the case of six at Florence, the charges broke down.