servants passionately attached to the kingship.  They were Peter Flotte his chancellor, William of Nogaret, judge-major at Beaucaire, and William of Plasian, Lord of Vezenobre, the two latter belonging, as Bernard de Saisset belonged, to Southern France, and determined to withstand, in the south as well as the north, the domination of ecclesiastics.  They, in their turn, rose up against the doctrine and language of the Bishop of Pamiers.  He was arrested and committed to the keeping of the Archbishop of Narbonne; and Philip sent to Rome his chancellor Peter Flotte himself and William of Nogaret, with orders to demand of the pope “that he should avenge the wrongs of God, the king, and the whole kingdom, by depriving of his orders and every clerical privilege that man whose longer life would taint the places he inhabited; and this in order that the king might make of him a sacrifice to God in the way of justice, for there could be no hope of his amendment if he were suffered to live, seeing that, from his youth up, he had always lived ill, and that baseness and abandonment only became more and more confirmed in him by inveterate habit.”

To this violent and threatening language Boniface replied by changing the venue to his own personal tribunal in the case of the Bishop of Pamiers.  “We do bid thy majesty,” he wrote to the king, “to give this bishop free leave to depart and come to us, for we do desire his presence.  We do warn thee to have all his goods restored to him, not to stretch out for the future thy rapacious hands towards the like things, and not to offend the Divine Majesty or the dignity of the Apostolic See, lest we be forced to employ some other remedy; for thou must know that, unless thou canst allege some excuse founded on reason and truth, we do not see how thou shouldest escape the sentence of the holy canons for having laid rash hands on this bishop.”

“My power,—­the spiritual power,”—­said the pope to the Chancellor of France, “embraces the temporal, and includes it.”  “Be it so,” answered Peter Flotte; “but your power is nominal, the king’s real.”

Here was a coarse challenge hurled by the crown at the tiara:  and Boniface VIII. unhesitatingly accepted it.  But, instead of keeping the advantage of a defensive position by claiming, in the name of lawful right, the liberties and immunities of the Church, he assumed the offensive against the kingship by proclaiming the supremacy of the Holy See in things temporal as well as spiritual, and by calling upon Philip the Handsome to acknowledge it.  On the 5th of December, 1301, he addressed to the king, commencing with the words, “Hearken, most dear son” (Ausculta, carissime fili), a long bull, in which, with circumlocutions and expositions full of obscurity and subtlety, he laid down and affirmed, at bottom, the principle of the final sovereignty of the spiritual power, being of divine origin, over every temporal power, being of human creation.  “In