“’Tis a goodly match as match can be,
               To marry the Church and the fleurs-de-lis: 
               Should either mate a-straying go,
               Then each—­too late—­will own ’twas so.”

Boniface VIII. did not seem fated to withdraw from this policy; he was old (sixty-six); his party-engagements were of long standing; his personal fortune was made; three years before his election he possessed twelve ecclesiastical benefices, of which seven were in France; by his accession to the Holy See his ambition was satisfied; and as legate in France in 1290 he had made the acquaintance there of the young king, Philip the Handsome, and had conceived a liking for him.  King Philip must have considered that he had ground for seeing in him a faithful and useful ally.

Neither of the two sovereigns took into account the changes that had come, during two centuries past, over the character of their power, and of the influence which these changes must exercise upon their posture and their relations one towards the other.  Louis the Fat in the first instance, and then in a special manner Philip Augustus and St. Louis, each with very different sentiments and by very different processes, had disentangled the kingship in France from the feudal system, and had acquired for it a sovereignty of its own, beyond and above the rights of the suzerain over his vassals.  The popes, for their part, Gregory VII. and Innocent III. amongst others, had raised the papacy to a region of intellectual and moral supremacy whence it looked down upon all the terrestrial powers.  Gregory VII., the most disinterested of all ambitious men in high places, had dedicated his stormy life to establishing the dominion of the Church over the world, kings as well as people, and also to reforming internally the Church herself, her morals and her discipline.  “I have loved justice and hated iniquity; and that is why I am dying in exile,” he had said on his death-bed:  but his works survived him, and a hundred years after him, in spite of the troubles which had disturbed the Church under eighteen mediocre and transitory popes, Innocent III., whilst maintaining, only with more moderation and prudence, the same principles as Gregory VII. had maintained, exercised peacefully, for a space of eighteen years, the powers of the right divine, whilst Philip Augustus was extending and confirming the kingly power in France.  This parallel progress of the kingship and the papacy had its critics and its supporters.  Learned lawyers, on the authority of the maxims and precedents of the Roman empire, proclaimed the king’s sovereignty in the State; and profound theologians, on the authority of the divine origin of Christianity, laid down as a principle the right divine of the papacy in the Church and in the dealings of the Church with the State.