at Avignon and elsewhere. A double incentive was now given to
the monarchs of Europe for setting bounds to the ambition of the Papacy.
For while the Popes, through the loss of a great part of their authority
and prestige, had become less formidable antagonists, their financial
extortions had waxed so intolerable as to suggest the strongest
arguments appealing to the self-interest of kings. Hence the frequency
with which the demand for "a reformation in the head and the members"
resounded from all parts of the Western Church. And hence, too, those
memorable councils of Pisa, Constance, and Basle, which, coming in rapid
succession at the commencement of the fifteenth century, bade fair to
prove the forerunners of a radical reformation. It does not belong here
to discuss the causes of their failure to answer this reasonable
expectation. Yet with one of these assemblages is closely connected a
very important incident in the history of the Gallican Church.

[Sidenote: The Council of Bourges.]

The Council of Basle had not yet concluded its protracted sessions when
Charles the Seventh summoned the clergy of France to meet him in the
city of Bourges. The times were troublous. The kingdom was rent with
intestine division. A war was still raging, during the progress of which
the victorious arms of the English had driven the king from his capital
and deprived him of more than one-half of his dominions. The work of
reinstating the royal authority, though well begun by the wonderful
interposition of the Maid of Orleans, was as yet by no means complete.
Undaunted, however, by the unsettled aspect of his affairs, Charles--the
"King of Bourges," as he was contemptuously styled by his
opponents--made his appearance in the national council convened in his
temporary capital. He was attended by the dauphin, the Dukes of Burgundy
and Brittany, the Count of Maine, and many other noblemen, as well as by
a goodly train of doctors of civil and canon law. Awaiting his arrival
were five archbishops, twenty-five bishops, and a host of abbots and
deputies of universities and chapters of cathedrals. In the presence of
this august convocation, in which all that was most prominent in church
and state was represented, Charles published, on the seventh of July,
1438, an ordinance which has become celebrated under the name of the
"Pragmatic Sanction of Bourges"--by far the more important of the two
documents of similar nature emanating from the French t