all sent out of the country; sometimes the
grievance alleged was that they were exempted from paying taxes and
other levies, civil and ecclesiastical. Sometimes open acts of
spoliation were committed upon their property, and that even by royal
hands.

But it was in France that the final attack was made. Philip the Fair was
king at this time, a man of bad character and unscrupulous as to the
means by which he attained his ends. The country was exhausted and the
treasury empty, and the idea seems to have occurred to him, as it did
later to Henry VIII of England under similar circumstances, that an easy
way to fill his own purse was to put his hand into the purses of others.
But even kings cannot appropriate the property of a religious order
without offering some apology or justification to the world. And so it
began to be whispered that the Holy Land would never have been lost to
Christendom if its sworn defenders had not failed in their Christian
character. The whole blame of the defeat of the crusades was laid upon
the Templars. It was said they had treacherously betrayed the Christian
cause, that they had treated with the enemy, and by their personal sins,
especially by secret, unhallowed rites, had provoked the just wrath of
God, and so brought about the ruin of the dominion of the Cross in the
East.

When Ahab has determined to put Naboth to death, that he may seize his
coveted vineyard, it is not difficult to find witness that he is a
blasphemer of God and a traitor to the King; and so Philip found his
first tool in a man guilty of a multitude of crimes, who secured his own
pardon by a denunciation of the Templars.

But even a king could not ruin a great religious order without the aid
of the ecclesiastical authorities. The Templars had always been favored
and protected by the popes, and nothing was in itself so likely to evoke
that protection again as an attack upon the order by the secular powers.
But Philip was prepared for this. The Pope of the day, Clement V, had
been a subject of his own. As bishop of Bordeaux, he owed his election
to the pontificate to Philip's own intrigues, and had been easily
induced to quit Rome and live in France, so as to be more completely
under the dictation of the King. Moreover, the majority of the cardinals
were also French and entirely devoted to the King's interests.

Clement V was one of the worst of those miserable men who have from time
to time disgraced the papal chair,