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to be, that the treatment which he received was too much for a man of his temper, and that rage, if not the immediate cause of his death, certainly tended to hasten it in a man who was eighty-seven years of age. But it is absurd to appeal to the state in which his body was found 300 years (and not exactly a hundred years, as has been said) after his death, when the hands were more particularly observed to be perfect. When we say that a man bites his fingers in a paroxysm of rage, we do not say that he bites them off, nor are the bombastic exaggerations of chroniclers to be received au pied de la lettre. It would, moreover, be more prudent not to provoke too minute an inquiry into the question of identity of the body examined in 1605, there being circumstances which render it rather more than suspicious.

We should willingly allow the case for or against Boniface VIII. to rest on the facts above stated, were we not afraid that readers who are not conversant with the subject might be misled by passages like the following one :

"The cause of Boniface was solemnly examined and judged by the General Council of Vienne, convoked and held in 1312, in great measure for that purpose. The decision was entirely in his favour; his memory was discharged from the slightest imputation, in the face of every hostile influence, ecclesiastical and civil. Moreover, we do not find in any writer, however hostile to him, the slightest insinuation against his moral conduct and character."

We beg to recapitulate what history tells us, and leave our readers to draw their own conclusions.

Boniface was succeeded by Benedict XI., who died within a few months. His successor was Bertrand de Got, a Gascon, archbishop of Bordeaux, elected by the partisans of Philip the Fair, whose tool he was. He took the name of Clement V., and it was he who transferred the papal see to Avignon. Nogaret and others, moved undoubtedly by Philip, accused Boniface of all sorts of crimes before Clement, and demanded that he should be declared a heretic and usurper of the papal chair. After having done all he could to postpone the affair, Clement, by the advice of the Cardinal da Prato, answered that so momentous an affair ought to be inquired into by a general council. After some time, the king still pressing, Clement was compelled to enter upon an inquiry, and began to take evidence; but the sittings were few and far between, and the

proceedings carried to an interminable length. The Pope and the whole of the court of Rome wished that some arrangement might be made by which the whole affair might be hushed up: their position was very delicate. However well-founded the charges against Boniface might be, it was not to be expected that they would ever bring in a verdict of guilty. If Boniface were not a true pope, all the cardinals he had created were not true cardinals, and they had therefore no right to give a vote in the election of Clement V.; all the bishops he had ordained (amongst others Clement himself, whom he had made archbishop of Bordeaux) were not true bishops, and therefore had no power of conferring orders: thousands of priests, therefore, all over Christendom were not duly elected to their sacred calling. The condemnation of Boniface carried along with it fatal consequences to the hierarchy. On the other hand, the Pope and the papal court were helpless, being in the power of the French monarch. To acquit the memory of Boniface under any circumstances, was to provoke the vengeance of a tyrant whose rage it would be almost impossible to appease.

But although Philip was bent upon having the memory of Boniface condemned, he was no less impatient to have the Templars persecuted, their order suppressed, and, if possible, their property transferred into his keeping. The proceedings against those illustrious and unhappy victims of the most odious and absurd heap of calumnies that were ever invented, were carried on against individuals with a ferocity and on a scale of which no other age or country affords an example; but the Pope alone could suppress the order, and this was what Philip wanted and urged Clement to do. It is not too much to suppose, that to save the hierarchy the Pope sacrificed the Templars. The prosecutors of Boniface urged that the Pope was the competent judge in such a controversy; the defendants, at the head of whom was Cardinal Francis Gaetani, Boniface's nephew, contended that the council only was competent to decide such a cause. The prosecutors alleged facts, and urged to be admitted to prove them, whilst the defendants limited themselves to dilatory exceptions; such, for instance, as that the accusers, Nogaret more particularly, could not appear in this character, being excommunicated. Although many of the charges were manifestly false, and some far-fetched, yet, on the other hand, the defendants either avoided joining issue

on precise facts which were offered to be proved, or gave most inconclusive answers. For instance, the prosecutors said that they could prove that Boniface had repeatedly said that he would rather be a dog than a Frenchman*; which proved that he did not believe in the immortality of the soul; an inference rather too distant to be drawn from the words laid to his charge, even if proved uttered. On the other hand, Cardinal Gaetani, when charged with having been enriched by the money received from Christians-particularly Frenchmen-by his uncle, did not deny the fact: he rather admitted it, by saying that the Gaetani were as much disposed as the Colonnas to spend what they had for the French crown. The question was, not how the money was spent, but how it was got. The modern apologist of Boniface makes use of much the same argument, when, in answer to those who charge Boniface with greediness, he speaks of his liberality in endowing churches. Strictly speaking, the charge against Boniface is, not that he was a miser, but that he had no very correct notions of the rights of property, and that he unscrupulously seized what belonged to others. Robin Hood and Boniface's friend Ghino di Tacco were guilty of exactly such incorrect proceedings, although they were as generous to the poor, we are told, as Boniface was to churches, with what they acquired in an equally questionable manner.

From all this it will appear that the cause was far from being ready for judgement on its merits when Clement obtained the consent of all the parties interested, prosecutors as well as defendants, that he alone should pronounce judgement; which he however never did, being right glad to put a stop to all proceedings and bury the whole matter in oblivion. It was a sort of compromise, an arrangement in which great care was taken not to say who was right, and, still more, who was wrong. The subject is not mentioned in the bull of convocation of the Council, nor by contemporary historians, as having been treated of at that assembly, with the following exceptions. An anonymous writer, in an unpublished work

* "Quod horrendum est repetere,” say the accusers on making the charge. "Et deinde quod per processus hujusmodi causæ utriusque partis jam erat conclusum, ipse Clemens per modum tractatus pacis ad se retinuit et suscepit."-R. I. S. iii. p. 2. 447. The same is said by Ptol. Luc. xi. 1234, and others.

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quoted by Raynaldus, enumerates this among the affairs settled by the Council *. * Villani (translated as usual by Antoninus, archbishop of Florence) positively says that Boniface's memory was acquitted at that synod. Villani however, as F. Pagi observes, did not seem to know much about this Council; he mistakes the month in which the first meeting occurred, he overstates the number of prelates at it, and affirms that the canonization of St. Louis, archbishop of Toulouse, was there agreed upon, whereas this is proved to have taken place long after under the pontificate of John XXII. The acts of the Council of Vienne are lost: among the constitutions and bulls of Clement V. there published, and which still remain, not one word occurs about Boniface. Had he been acquitted it could not have been otherwise, for the reasons before stated, nor would this be of the least weight in rehabilitating his memory; but when there is every reason to believe that the subject was not even entertained, what shall we think of the boast that the cause of Boniface was solemnly examined and judged by the Council of Vienne? What confidence shall we put in such assertions, when we find it said that the Council was in a great measure convoked for that especial purpose, whilst the bull of convocation does not say one word of it? There is no trace of any decision, and yet we are told that the decision was entirely in Boniface's favour! The memory of Boniface must be very low, when it is hoped that such means may serve the purpose of restoring him to the station which a pontiff ought to occupy in history.

We must not conclude without saying a few words on the merits of the work placed at the head of this article. We have read only what concerns Boniface and his times, and never were we more surprised than at seeing the misstatements which, owing we suppose to ignorance, are committed by this historian, "chef de la section historique aux archives du royaume." Instead of having recourse to the works of writers who were near Anagni when Nogaret seized the Pope, M. Michelet does not even refer to them, but rests his romantic narrative of that transaction on Walsingham! On such, and

* This is however said in a very cursory manner, and, it seems, without due consideration. At all events, it is positively stated not to have been one of the principal causes of the meeting. Raynal. An. 1311. 54.

worse authorities he relies for an account of the death of Boniface, altogether devoid of truth. And as when speaking of the Jubilee M. Michelet refers (p. 54, note 2) to the cardinal of St. George (that is, Jacopo Stefaneschi) as nephew of Boniface, we are inclined to think that he does not even know that an account of Boniface's life exists by that prelate.

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Having no space for pointing out either the groundless assertions or the important omissions of this historian, we shall limit ourselves to one single instance to show the correct information which he possesses, and how conversant he is with the documents of the time of which he writes. The following are his words: "Clément V. s'efforça de couvrir l'honneur de l'Église. Il falsifia secrètement les régistres de Boniface, " mais il ne révoqua par devant le concile qu'une seule de "ses bulles (Clericis laicos)" p. 199. In the bull Ad certitudinem præsentium, dated the 27th of April 1311, it is stated that all further prosecution against the memory of Boniface was suspended, and the decision of the cause left to the then Pope, who, in order to bury in oblivion all that had happened, orders that all the constitutions, etc. relating to the controversy between Boniface and the French king should be taken out and erased from the registers of the Curia. Appended to that bull, in the French Archives, is a minute specification of all the bulls of Popes Boniface and Benedict XI. which were considered offensive to the king of France, and which Clement V., according to the bull of the 27th of April, as solemn and as public a document as can be imagined, directs to be destroyed and erased from the pontifical registers. So much for the secrecy of the proceeding; as to the falsification, it is a calumny for which there is no foundation whatever. And with respect to the bull Clericis laicos, it was repealed by Clement V. at the very beginning of his pontificate in 1306. M. Michelet is totally unwarranted in putting it off till the Council of Vienne, which opened towards the end of 1311. The writer in the Dublin Review is occasionally mistaken, but he does not fall into such stupid mistakes as these, which are worth noticing only to prevent any one from taking the trouble of seriously attempting to discuss the merit of the work in which they occur.

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