An act of accusation was forthwith published ; and Philip at the same time wrote to the pope, and also to the king of England, inti mating what he had done, and calling upon them to second him. Edward II., on receiving letters from Clement, yielded, and the English Templar were seized and thrown into confinement about the end of December. Meanwhile, the examinations had been going on in France under the direction of the king'e confessor, Inibert, a Dominican priest, and, as such, the inveterate enemy of the order of the Templars. Con fessions, in many cases incredible from their inherent absurdity, were extracted from many of the knights at Paris and elsewhere by the most savage tortures. This went on for many months. In August, 1303, Clement, whose person Philip had now contrived to get com pletely into his power, issued a bull, calling upon all Christian princes and prelates to aid him in examining into the guilt of the order ; and about the same time his holiness appointed a commission, consisting of the archbishop of Narbonne and other prelates and dignitaries of the church, to meet at Paris to try the ease. This commission, however, did not commence its sittings till the 7th of August, 1309. A few months later, examinations under judges, deputed or nominated by the pope, commenced in England and other countries. Altogether many hundreds of knights were examined by these commissions during the years 1309, 1310, and 1311 ; but it was only in France, where torture was made use of, that any admissions were obtained of the crimes laid to the charge of the order, except such as were manifestly unworthy of regard. Even the Paris commission, however, did not satisfy the impatience of Philip : on its requisition a great number of knights stood forward to defend the order, among whom were several of those who had confessed and afterwards retracted. Philip, having forced the pope to nominate Philip de Marigni, bishop of Cambray, the brother of Enguerrand do Marigni, his prime minister, to the arch bishopric of Sens, which had just become vacant, and then included the diocese of Paris, got the new archbishop to convoke his provincial council in the capital, on Sunday, the 10th of May, 1310 ; and this body, on the Wednesday morning following, had fifty-four of the defenders of the order, who had formerly made confession, brought out as "relapsed heretics" to a field behind the abbey of St. Antoine, and there committed to the flames. They all died asserting their inno cence and that of the order. These proceedings and others of a like kind in the provinces of Rheims and Sens, put a stop to the attempt at defending the order : the rest of the knights who had undertaken this task now all declared their renouncement of it. ,Meanwhile, a general council met by order of Clement at Vienne, October 13, 1311, but it was not found so compliant as Philip and the pope had expected ; and Clement. having put an end to the session, assembled the cardinals and a few other prelates upon whom he could depend, in a secret con sistory, and abolished the order by his own authority, on the 22nd of March, 1312. The bull of abolition was formally published on the 2nd of May following. On the 18th of March, 1314, Molay, the grand master, and Guy, commander or grand prior of Normandy, who had all this while remained in prison at Paris, were brought before the archbishop of Sens, condemned to death, and burned on one of the small islands in the Seine, about the spot where the statue of Ilenry IV. is now erected on the Pont Neuf.
After all, Clement and l'hilip, the former of whom died suddenly about a month, and the latter, of a fall from hie horse, within a year after the martyrdom of De Molay, were able to secure to themselves only a small portion of the plunder which they had probably hoped for.
The king of France seized and kept, or divided with his confederate, the moveable property of the Templars in that country ; but there, and also in England, and throughout the rest of Europe, with the exception of Spain and Portugal, it was found necessary to transfer their landed possessions to the Ilospitallers, or Knights of St. John (at this time commonly known, from the place where they had fixed their head residence, as the Knights of Rhodes). In Spain, the lands of the Templates were bestowed upon the Knights of Our Lady of Montesa, a new order, founded in 1317 ; and in Portugal the society merely took the new name of the Order of Christ, which still subsists.
It has been calculated that the entire revenue, of the order when it was dissolved did not fall short of six millions sterling, though it seems impossible that this should not be a great exaggeration. Their pos sessions in England were oven at a comparatively early period of great extent and value, as may be seen from an " inquisitio," or account of their lands, taken by royal authority in the year 1185, which Dugdalo has printed in his 3lonasticon ' (vol. vi., pt. ii.). They are supposed to have been settled in the Old Temple, at London, which stood on the south side of Holborn, near the present Southampton Buildings, by the beginning of the reign of Stephen : they removed to their new house at the western extremity of Fleet Street, the site of which still retains the name of the Temple, in 1185. This was the chief seat of the order in England.
The question of the guilt or innocence of the Templars has been much discussed in modern times ; and although it may be said to be now almost universally admitted that the particular charges upon which they were condemned were for the most part entirely unfounded, some attempts have been made to show the probability that the order nevertheless was held together by certain secret principles or doctrines which made its existence dangerous to society, and called for its sup pression. Von Hammer, for instance, in a disquisition printed in the sixth volume of his Mines de l'Orient,' has attempted to convict the order of a participation in the apostacy, idolatry, and impiety of the Gnostics and Ophianites. Von Hammer's Essay was answered by M. Raynouard, iu a long note printed in the fifth volume of Michaud's Histoire des Croisade',' tte. ; and also in two articles in the Journal des Savans ' for March and April, 1819 ; and in two others published in the Bibliotheque lJniverselle; tom. x. The documents relating to the condemnation of the Templars were first published in a work entitled Traitez concernant la Condemnation des Templiers,' par 3L Du Puy, 8vo, Paris, 1654 ; reprinted, with additions, under the title of Histoire de la Condemnation des Templiers,' &c., par Pierre Du Puy, 2 vols. Svo, Bruxelles, 1713 ; and under that of Histoire de l'Ordre Militaire des Templiers, avec lee Pieces Justificatives,' 4to, Bruxelles, 1751. Other works on the subject are—' Nicolai Giirtleri Historia Templariormn,' 8vo, Amst., 1691, and, with large additions, 1703; Christiani Thomasii Dissertatio de Templariorum Equitum Online Sublato; 4to, Halae, 1705 ; Raynouard, Monumens Historiques relatifs it In Condemnation des Templiers,' Svo, Paris, 1813 ; Munter, Statutenbuch des Onions der Tempelherren ;' Wilike, Geschichte dee Tempelherrenordens ;' and The History of the Knights Templars, the Temple Church, and the Temple,' by C. G. Addison, 4to, London, 1842.