n, and bourgeois for the
first time met in a Council of State.

A king who was the impersonation of absolutism had created the
_States-General_ (1302); had forged the instrument which would
eventually effect for France a deliverance from monarchy itself!

The cause of the king was sustained by the council; the claims of the
pope were rejected. Still not satisfied, Philip then audaciously
proposed a general ecclesiastical council to determine whether Boniface
legitimately wore the triple crown. When the old man died, as is said
from the shock of this attempt, the king was master of the situation.
Gifts had already been distributed among corrupt cardinals in the
conclave. The papacy was at his feet, and might be in his hand. The
most dissolute of his own archbishops was selected as his tool, and, as
Clement V., succeeded to the chair of St. Peter. The centre of the
ecclesiastical world was then removed from Rome to Avignon, where it
could be under Philip's immediate direction, and the astonishing period
in the history of the papacy, known as the _Babylonian Captivity_,
which was to last for seventy years, under seven popes, had commenced.

The Knights Templar, those appointed guardians of the Holy Sepulchre
and defenders of Jerusalem, it is to be supposed were not in sympathy
with these things. Whatever the cause, their extermination was
decreed. Accused of impossible crimes, the whole brotherhood was
arrested in one day, and, at a summary trial, condemned, Philip
himself, in that old palace on the island in the Seine, giving orders
for the fagots to be laid, and the immediate execution of the grand
master and many others.

Philip's death, occurring as it did soon after this sacrilege, was
popularly believed to be a manifestation of God's wrath; and the death
of his three sons, Louis, Philip, and Charles, who successively reigned
during a period of only fourteen years, leaving the family extinct,
seemed a further proof that a curse rested upon the house.

The question of the succession, for the first time since Hugh Capet,
was in doubt. By the existing Salic Law only male descendants were
eligible to the throne of France. The three sons of Philip IV. had
died, leaving each a daughter, so the son of Charles of Valois, only
brother of Philip IV., was the nearest in descent from Hugh Capet; and
thus the crown passed to the _Valois_ branch of the family in the
person of Philip VI. (1328).

CHAPTER IX.