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In this confused state of things Louis sent Berwick back, having first conferred upon him the rank of Marshal of France so that Philip might treat him with more respect. Inferior in force he was obliged to resort to the same defensive tactics which had succeeded before. At the same time he implored Louis to send him more troops, pleading that any unforeseen accident might be the loss of Spain. The king, hard pressed as he was by Marlborough and Eugene, contrived to send him a few more regiments, and now for the first time he found himself equal to the enemy.

The decisive encounter took place at Almanza. This battle is unique among battles in that a Frenchman commanded the English, and an Englishman the French. The general of the English was the ex-count of Ruvigny a Huguenot who had been driven from France by the revocation of the edict of Nantes. He had been created Earl of Galway in Ireland. He was a good soldier and was now fighting with bitter animosity against the king who had persecuted him.

But to the battle. Berwick led his own right wing. He threw into some disorder the English left; then instead of following up his advantage in that direction, he wheeled suddenly to the left, fell upon the enemy's centre and crushed it. The victory was complete. An English account says that out of the thirty thousand men which Galway led into the field, seventeen thousand either fell or were taken prisoner; and that they lost all their artillery and baggage.

The English landed another army in Spain under General Stanhope, and the Emperor one under Count Staremberg. Philip called loudly for Berwick, but Louis could not spare him: he was holding the wolf by the ears and it would not do to call him off.

Villa-Viciosa was Vend?me's last fight: the sober fit proved fatal; he died in Spain soon after the battle. Philip who was his cousin one degree further removed than Berwick, caused his remains to be laid in the royal sepulchre of the Escurial, and they repose there still.

A change of ministry at this time in England, led to one of those acts that have purchased for her the name of Perfidious Albion. Legend says a glass of water did it. Sarah duchess of Marlborough was mistress of the household of Queen Anne. The two ladies were so affectionate that they gave each other pet names: Anne was Mrs. Morley, Sarah was Mrs. Freeman, and the more affectionate they grew the more they quarrelled. One day during a skirmish, Mrs. Morley asked Mrs. Freeman to bring her a glass of water. She obeyed, but instead of presenting it with proper grace, she pushed the salver into the queen's face and upset the glass in her lap. The queen ordered her to quit her presence, and directly sent and demanded of her the gold key which was her emblem of office.

Now this is all true except perhaps the glass of water. It is true that a quarrel with the duchess did determine Anne to abandon Marlborough and the Whigs and go over to Bolingbroke and the Tories. Marlborough was recalled from his command, and the allies left to shift for themselves, with the aid however of the English and Dutch contingents which remained to them under the Duke of Albemarle who, in the absence of Eugene, was in chief command. Albemarle was an Englishman that William had made out of a Dutchman named Yost Van Keppel. William himself had taught him the art of war and he was a bad general; Villars who commanded the French, was a good one, and the battle of Denain ended in accordance with those conditions.

It was the last of the war. The peace of Utrecht was signed to which England acceded, abandoning all she had fought for.

The queen of Spain died, and as there was no fighting for Berwick to do, Louis sent him with a message of condolence for Philip. But peaceful embassies were not for the like of him: he never reached Madrid. An envoy from Philip stopped him on the way and informed him that Barcelona had revolted, and that it was for him to go there and restore order. He flew thither and laid siege to the town. Discovering that the citizens were receiving aid from Majorca he ordered the Spanish fleet to blockade the port, and having made a breach with his cannon he led his men to the assault. They had fought their way to the middle of the town when the garrison offered to surrender. The point then was to save the town from pillage and from those awful scenes which occur when a city is taken by storm. He directed the commander of the garrison not to let his surrender be known, and still to man the barricades. He then ordered a retreat, on the pretence that it was night-fall, and that they must prepare for a more vigorous attack on the morrow. The next morning Barcelona was peacefully theirs. He says it was the first town taken by assault that ever escaped pillage, and in his pious way he attributes it to the grace of God, and says that human skill alone could not have compassed it.

During the siege Philip to lose no time, had wooed and won another bride, Elizabeth Farnese daughter of the duke of Parma; and Berwick received one day an order from the king to send the fleet to Genoa to fetch the new queen. He replied that the blockade of the port was essential to the capture of the place, and that not a ship could be spared. The great, lank devil of an Englishman had not improved, and Philip and Elizabeth had to wait.

It was the princess of Orsini herself who had chosen a scion of that famous race for Philip's second wife; and the princess did not fail to repent of it. She had been deceived by one of the greatest scamps in Europe, the Cardinal Alberoni who had assured her that Elizabeth Farnese was a placid little maiden who would show her all the deference the late queen had shown.

Philip and Elizabeth managed to live together; but whenever he desired to say his soul was his own, he took care to say it privately to his confessor. Alberoni was rewarded by being made prime minister of Spain.

This change of rulers worked no prejudice to Berwick. The Regent Philip offered him the government of Guienne one of the finest of the provinces; and he accepted it. When the patent was made out, he was surprised to find it made to Du Maine under whom he was to act as lieutenant. He refused to do so. The Regent sent for him and explained to him how necessary he found it to flatter and conciliate his brother Du Maine. My Lord Duke, said Berwick, nobody knows better than I the difference between a genuine prince of the blood like you, and a spurious one like myself and like Du Maine; and I will not take civil service under one of the latter sort. Philip knew what an obstinate fellow he was dealing with, and he yielded. The patent was made out direct to Berwick.

In 1716 Marlborough died. The British idea seems to be that his career of victory did not end at that sad event. In the Tower of London some years ago, I was shown a cannon which the warden who spoke by the authority of the three kingdoms, declared was taken by Marlborough at the battle of Dettingen. When I let fall a timid doubt, he repeated the statement with an indignant emphasis which silenced cavil. History does indeed record one other case of the sort. You remember at Rome, near the Cloaca Maxima, a spring where women were washing. It is there that Castor and Pollux watered their horses after the battle of Lake Regillus. Those two warriors had already been dead many years, and placed in the firmament where we still behold them.

One day there was a knock at the door; a stately official entered and bowing to the floor, gave Stanislas a letter. It was a portentous missive, a foot square and sealed with half a pound of wax. What was it? Were they troublesome at Wissenbourg? Was it a mandate to quit? Where should they go? Mother and daughter gathered at the side of the father as he opened it. It was a despatch from the duke of Bourbon prime minister of France, asking the hand of Maria for the young king.

Peace was not the normal state of things between France and the Empire; and Villars and Berwick were not long permitted to be idle. In 1734 as Berwick was reconnoitring the enemy's position at Philipsbourg, he was struck by a cannon ball and instantly killed. This was that second wound which he does not mention in his autobiography. His death was similar to that of Turenne who had fallen sixty years before at Salsbach.

Berwick was in his sixty-fifth year. Villars who was eighty-two, only lived long enough to learn the death of his brother in arms. Berwick said he, has always been lucky; and now he has died as a soldier would wish to die.

He was twice married. Both of his wives were Irish: the first was the daughter of the earl of Clanricarde; the second the daughter of a gentleman who had married one of the maids of honor of Queen Mary Beatrice. In his memoirs Berwick despatches his two wives in just ten lines, five to each. He does not even tell us their christian names. He was too busy fighting to think of the women.

The devil fell sick; the devil a saint would be. The devil got well, the devil a saint was he.

The king recovered and recalled Madame de Chateauroux.

So it seems the Berwick branch of the Churchills was extant twenty years ago, and we hope is extant still, though its existence may not be known to Lord Alfred.

The Captivity of Babylon

Petrarch who lived in the fourteenth century, gave the name of the Captivity of Babylon to the condition of the Church of Rome which was then in exile. No longer on the banks of the Tiber she held her seat, but on the banks of the Rhone; and Avignon not Rome was the assumed mistress of the world. Petrarch did not live to see the end, but in one respect the appellation was a prophecy: the Captivity lasted seventy-two years; and the name is often applied to that period, especially by Roman Catholic historians.

I shall endeavor to trace some of the causes of that singular revolution, and some of its results.

The Church at that time interfered with all the affairs of life. If a man had to sustain the validity of his father's will or of his own marriage, he had to do it before ecclesiastical tribunals. If he died intestate the Church administered on his property. Even the calendar was ecclesiastical, and the year began not on the first of January or the first of any other month, but at Easter; so that portions of March and April belonged now to the old year and now to the new. In fine, canon, that is church law was the only law.

In contrast to this, was the trifling physical force the pontiffs could exercise. The States of the Church were small in extent; the battallions they could put in the field were few in number; and from time to time some impious prince instigated by the devil, would snap his fingers at this ghostly puissance; and then the world would be startled at the disparity between the real and the pretended power of Rome. But it was like a glimpse of the landscape a dark night by a flash of lightning: it hardly served as a land-mark; pope and prince would come to an understanding, and the spell remain unbroken.

Boniface who was perhaps the haughtiest of the successors of Saint Peter, was soon made to feel this instability. Albert son of Rudolph of Hapsburg, was elected to succeed his father on the imperial throne. Boniface was not satisfied. What did he know about these Hapsburgs? They were new, parvenu, and one was enough. He put forth a bull commanding Albert on pain of excommunication, to deliver up the imperial crown to Adolfus of Nassau.

Boniface after some bitter moments of reflection, did the wisest thing possible. He rescinded the bull and received Albert back into the bosom of the church. Indeed the return of the prodigal son was so welcome that some years later Boniface issued another bull giving to Albert the kingdom of France, without however showing him how he was to get it.

He applied to the pope for a divorce so that he might marry Agnes. Innocent refused. Philip then took the matter into his own hands and decreed his own divorce. Innocent excommunicated him and laid his kingdom under interdict.

A dreadful word that of Interdict! No churches open, no bells rung, no mass, no confession, no marriages, no funerals, no religious rites whatever except baptism and extreme unction--the ushering in and the ushering out of life.

The States-General were the general estates, that is all the estates of the nation. They consisted of four elements: the crown, the nobility, the clergy and the common people. It is customary however to name only the last three. To Philip is also due the reorganisation of the French parliaments into the form they retained down to the revolution. The parliaments were at first the occasional conferences of the sovereign with his nobles; then they grew into some degree of permanence, and combined judicial functions with political. When Philip introduced the States-General, he deprived the parliaments of their legislative functions, and constituted them courts of law civil and criminal. To them however, and especially to the parliament of Paris, was left the prerogative of registering the royal edicts. This registry at first was solely to publish them; but it grew into a usage indispensable to their validity, and thus became a check upon the executive; so that the monarchy of the old r?gime was not quite an absolute one.

These first States-General met in the Church of Notre Dame; and the third estate, that is the common people, filled nearly half the building. The towns only were represented: they had become too wealthy to be longer overlooked. The country people came in at a later day.

Philip laid before this assembly two documents: one that the pope had discharged at him; the other a copy of the one he had flung back at the pope. They are so short and spirited that I venture to insert them: "Boniface, bishop, servant of the servants of God, to Philip king of the Franks. Fear God and keep his commandments. Know that thou art subject to us as well in the temporal as in the spiritual; that the collation of benefices and prebends belongs not to thee; that if thou guardest the vacant benefices, it is to reserve the fruits for the successors; that if thou conferrest them upon any body, we declare the collation void; and we revoke it if executed, pronouncing all those who think otherwise heretics."

To him the King:--"Philip by the grace of God, king of the French, to Boniface who calls himself Pope, little or no salutation. May thy great fatuity know that we are subject to nobody for the temporal; that the collation of churches and prebends belongs to us by our royal right; that the fruits thereof are ours; that the collations made by us are valid; that we will maintain their possessors with all our power; and that we pronounce those who think otherwise fools and madmen."

It is just to say that the authenticity of the missive of Boniface, is disputed, though Hallam considers it genuine. It set forth nothing more than the pope had already avowed. At all events it put the case clearly before the assembly. A committee of the Third Estate, after much pondering, came and knelt before the throne in the middle of the church, and rendered the following verdict in which you will observe they had caught the tone of their master:--"It is an abomination that Boniface like the blackguard that he is should interpret so ill the words of Scripture: what thou shall bind on earth, shall be bound in Heaven; as if it meant that if he put a man in prison in this world, God would put him in prison in the next." Philip had this profound state paper turned into latin, and sent to the pope; and this document as well as Philip's missive, is still in the archives of the Vatican.

The clergy alone hesitated to stand by the king. They asked time to deliberate. Philip would allow them not an hour. You are Frenchmen, cried he; from whom do you hold your benefices, from me your king, or from the Neapolitan Benedetto. They answered: from the king. They then begged leave to send a deputation to Rome to explain matters; and Philip refused. As for the excommunication and interdict, the king ordered them burnt by the common hangman; and woe to the priest who dared shut his church, or tie up his bell-rope, or stop marrying or confessing or saying mass! The days of Philip-the-handsome were not the days of Philip-the-august.

This triumph at home might well have satisfied Philip; but he still followed up Boniface in his own domain with pitiless energy. He accused him not only of having defrauded Celestin of his throne, but of having poisoned him, and what was still worse, of heresy; and he sent orders to his agent in Italy, William of Nogaret, to seize his sacred person.

Nogaret in conjunction with Sciarra Colonna the chief of the Ghibbeline faction, gathered together a few soldiers and surprised Boniface at his residence at Agnani. The pontiff supposed they intended to kill him. He put the dalmatica on his shoulders and the crown on his head, and sat like Papirius awaiting the blow. Colonna cried out to him to abdicate, as he had driven Celestin to abdicate. Betrayed like Jesus Christ, replied the old man, I will die his vicar!

But it was not their purpose to put him to death: no such merciful end was to be his. They held him three days a prisoner, treating him with a mockery of respect; and then the populace of Agnani, perceiving that the Ghibbelines were but a handful, rose and delivered him from his captors. But the unexampled outrage had overthrown his reason, and he died a maniac. The terrible Philip had hounded his enemy into his grave; but even there he did not leave him in peace, as we shall see.

There was a secret bargain between Clement and Philip by which the former was to pay the price of his elevation. There is discussion whether it related to the removal of the Holy See or to the destruction of the Templars. As Philip needed the pope's aid in both these enormities which have cast such a lurid glory or glare on his reign, perhaps he bargained for both.

Philip's old enemy had died demented, and in that collapse of intellect, the last rites of the Church either had not been administered or had proved fruitless. He had gone where Hamlet's father went, unhouseled unaneled, till his sins could be burned and purged away; and a smart anathema in due form from that Church which rules the dead and the living, might send him prone to the pit. Boniface had canonised Philip's grandfather, and that soul in purgatory had thus become a saint in Heaven; and now Philip was invoking a rescript of different import, to despatch his grandfather's benefactor in the other direction. Such are the possible vicissitudes of another life.

Philip instituted regular proceedings against the dead pope, accusing him of every manner of impiety and wickedness, and Clement was forced to give ear to it, but though Philip's creature, he remembered the throne he sat upon, and was loath to dishonor it by blasting the memory of one of his predecessors; so he gained time: he heard testimony and took counsel; and then he heard more testimony and took more counsel. He whispered to Philip that if Boniface was the unhallowed wretch they supposed, he was already damned, and they were losing their time; and Philip finally let the matter drop.

It were well for the memory of these two potentates if the attempt to dislodge Boniface from purgatory, were the greatest wrong they undertook. We now come to one of the foulest crimes in history: one in which the king was principal and the pope accessory.

The Church of Rome has always professed great horror of shedding human blood; so the Templars were sentenced not to the block and the axe, but to the stake, and fifty-nine of them were burned alive near the gate of Saint Antoine: the rest were banished.

It is said that as the flames gathered around the Grand Master he summoned the pope to meet him at the bar of God in forty days, and the king in one year. They both came to time.

There is a mystery about the death of Philip. Some say his horse ran away with him hunting, and crushed him against a tree; others that when the year had rolled round, the spirit of Jacques Molay beckoned to him, and he came.

In point of talents, Philip-the-fair was one of the greatest of monarchs: the reconstruction of the parliaments, the States-General, the removal of the Holy See, the destruction of the Templars, were the work, good or bad, of no common head or hand.

Like the rest, Clement played with his thunderbolts. He excommunicated Waldemar king of Denmark for having made a pilgrimage to the Holy Land without his permission, which shows how hazardous it was in those days, to be pious on mere impulse and without due license from the Church.

Petrarch then lived, and though he was a citizen of Avignon, he prayed night and morning for the rebuilding of the Roman pontificate. Listening to him, Urban went to Italy to recover if possible the patrimony of Saint Peter, or, if you insist, that of the Countess Matilda. He was confronted by that chronic enemy of the papacy, the Visconti. At that time the head of that house was one Bernabo who was if anything a little less bland in his way than his predecessors. After many high words, Urban lost his temper and let fly at Bernabo a major excommunication cursing him in eating and drinking and sleeping and in all the functions of life, and redoubling the anathema upon him wherever he might fetch up in the life to come. Bernabo seized the legate who brought the bull, and made him eat it--parchment, ribbon, leaden seal and all. What sauce was allowed him with this strange victual, and how he felt after supper, have not been handed down to us. Not content with that, the impious ruffian sent Urban word that it was he, Bernabo, who was pope in Italy, and emperor to boot; and that the Almighty himself dared do nothing there without his consent.

On Urban's return to Avignon, a fresh humiliation awaited him. Peter-the-cruel king of Castile had an illegitimate brother, Henry of Trastamara who undertook to dethrone him. Henry obtained the aid of the famous French knight, Bertrand du Guesclin, and also of a band of mercenary soldiers called Free Companions who were not always distinguishable from free-booters. In their march toward Spain, they encamped one night on the bank of the Rhone opposite Avignon, and sent to the Holy Father praying that he would pardon their sins, bless their enterprise and give them some money. Urban granted them absolution and benediction; but he told them he had no money for them, and bid them be gone. They demanded forty thousand crowns in gold as the price of their departure. Urban launched at them a thunder-bolt as pregnant with disaster as the one he had discharged at Bernabo. Du Guesclin himself then sought an interview with his Holiness, and told him that he had no control over those marauders except on the field of battle, and that they were threatening to sack the papal palace. Urban, thoroughly frightened, recalled his curses and renewed his benedictions; but as his conscience would not allow him to take money out of the sacred treasury to give to such miscreants, he laid a tax on the citizens of Avignon, and they had to pay the sum demanded.

The Church has never questioned the authority of the Avignon popes of the Captivity, but she has stigmatised those of the Schism as antipopes. At that time however, at least half of the Roman Catholic world cleaved to them. To the see of Avignon adhered France, Spain, Scotland, Poland and Sicily; to the see of Rome, England, Germany and Flanders. The Italians now acknowledged and now rejected the rule of the Roman incumbent, as faction and civil strife swayed them.

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