Page:A history of the Inquisition of the Middle Ages, volume 3.djvu/278

 262 POLITICAL HERESY.— THE STATE. the Inquisition was set busily at work. From October 19 to No- vember 24 Frere Guillaume and his assistants were employed in recording the confessions of a hundred and thirty-eight prison- ers captured in the Temple, and so efficacious were the means employed that but three refused to admit at least some of the charges. What these methods were the records of course fail to show, for, as we have seen, the official confession was alwa} r s made after removal from the torture -chamber, and the victim was re- quired to swear that it was free and unconstrained, without fear or force, though he knew that if he retracted what he had uttered or promised to utter on the rack he would be liable to fresh tort- ure, or to the stake as a relapsed heretic. The same scenes were enacting all over France, where the commissioners of Frere Guil- laume, and sometimes Frere Guillaume himself, with the assistance of the royal officials, were engaged in the same work. In fact, the complaisant Guillaume, in default of proper material for labor so extensive, seems occasionally to have commissioned the royal deputies to act. A few of the reports of these examinations have been preserved, from Champagne, Xormandy, Querci, Bigorre, Beaucaire, and Languedoc, and in these the occasional allusions to torture show that it was employed whenever necessary. In all cases, of course, it was not required, for the promise of pardon and the threat of burning would frequently suffice, in conjunction with starvation and the harshness of the prison. The rigor of the ap- plication of the inquisitorial process is shown by the numerous deaths and the occasional suicides prompted by despair to which the records bear testimony. In Paris alone, according to the tes- timony 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, and the mortality elsewhere was noto- rious. When a number of the Templars subsequently repeated their confessions before the pope and cardinals in consistory, they dwelt upon the excessive tortures which they had endured, al- though Clement in reporting the result was careful to specify that their confessions were free and unconstrained. De Molay, of coarse, was not spared. He was speedily brought into a comply- ing state of mind. Although his confession, October 24, is exceed- ingly brief, and only admits a portion of the errors charged, yet he was induced to sign a letter addressed to the brethren stating