was the result of commands given from without.  It was at the repeated request of Philip of France and Clement V. that Edward reluctantly ordered the apprehension of all the Templars within England, Scotland, and Ireland on January 8, 1308.  Their property was taken into the king’s hands, and their persons were confined in the royal prisons under the custody of the sheriffs.  For their trial, Clement appointed a mixed commission including Winchelsea, Archbishop Greenfield of York, several English bishops, one French bishop, and certain papal inquisitors specially assigned for the purpose, the chief of whom were the Abbot of Lagny and Sicard de Lavaur, Canon of Narbonne, who came to England in 1309.  At last the victims were collected at London and York, where the trials were to be conducted for the southern and northern provinces.  There was much hesitation among the English bishops.  The foes of the Templars lamented the prelates’ lack of zeal and their scruples in collecting evidence, and suggested that the torture, which had so freely been used in France, would soon extract confessions.  But the northern bishops declared that torture was unknown in England, and asked, if it were to be adopted, whether it was to be applied by clerks or laymen, and whether torturers should be imported from beyond sea.  In the end, torture was used, but not to any great extent.

A great mass of depositions, mostly vague and worthless, or derived from the suspicious confessions of apostates and weaklings, was gathered together, and in 1311 laid before provincial councils, but neither province came to any fixed decision.  “Inasmuch,” says Hemingburgh, “as the Templars were not found altogether guilty or altogether innocent, they referred the dubious matter to the pope.”  They sent the evidence they had collected to swell the mass of testimony from all Christendom, which was laid before the council of Vienne.  When the pope suppressed the order in April, 1312, and transferred its lands to the Knights of St. John, the papal decrees were quietly carried out in England.  One or two Templars died in prison, but none were executed; and the majority were dismissed with pensions or secluded in monasteries.  Edward and his nobles took good care to make a large profit out of the transaction.  The resources of the Temple alone kept the king from destitution during the period between the death of Gaveston and his reconciliation with the earls.  Many barons laid violent hands on estates belonging to the order, and long held on to them despite papal expostulation.  The Hospitallers found that the lands of their rivals came to them so slowly, and encumbered with so many charges, that their new property became burdensome rather than helpful to their society.  Thus it was that they never made any use of the New Temple in London, and, before long, let it out to the common-lawyers.  In the fall of the Templars, the pope and the Church set the first great example of the suppression of a religious order to kings,