ion
from the irregularity he had thereby incurred.

But the greatest excesses of the Inquisition were due to the
political schemes of sovereigns. Such instances were by no means
rare. Hardly had the Inquisition been established, when Frederic II
tried to use it for political purposes. He was anxious to put the
prosecution for heresy in the hands of his royal officers, rather
than in the hands of the bishops and the monks. When, therefore, in
1233, he boasted in a letter to Gregory IX that he had put to death a
great number of heretics in his kingdom, the Pope answered that he
was not at all deceived by this pretended zeal. He knew full well
that the Emperor wished simply to get rid of his personal enemies,
and that he had put to death many who were not heretics at all.

The personal interests of Philip the Fair were chiefly responsible
for the trial and condemnation of the Templars. Clement V himself and
the ecclesiastical judges were both unfortunately guilty of truckling
in the whole affair. But their unjust condemnation was due chiefly to
the king's desire to confiscate their great possessions.[1]

[1] The tribunals of the Inquisition were perhaps never more cruel
than in the case of the Templars. At Paris, according to the
testimony of Ponsard de Gisiac, thirty-six Templars perished under
torture. At Sens, Jacques de Saciac said that twenty-five had died of
torment and suffering. (Lea, op. cit., vol. iii, p. 262.) The Grand
Master, Jacques Molay, owed his life to the vigor of his
constitution. Confessions extorted by such means were altogether
valueless. Despite all his efforts, Philip the Fair never succeeded
in obtaining a formal condemnation of the Order.

Joan of Arc was also a victim demanded by the political interests of
the day. If the Bishop of Beauvais, Pierre Cauchon, had not been such
a bitter English partisan, it is very probable that the tribunal over
which he presided would not have brought in the verdict of guilty,
which sent her to the stake;[1] she would never have been considered
a heretic at all, much less a relapsed one.

[1] The greatest crime of the trial was the substitution, in the
documents, of a different form of abjuration from the one Joan read
near the church of Saint-Ouen.

It would be easy to cite many instances of the same kind, especially
in Spain. If there was any place in the world where the State
interfered unjustly in the trials of the Inquisition, it was in the
kingdom o