docdar, a renowned chieftain, invaded Palestine, and changed the state of affairs. The reinforced Templars and the victorious Hospitallers forgot their quarrel, and united against the infidel, setting a noble example of heroism to their allies, and indulging in rivalry only to the extent of bravely competing for the honour of bearing the banner of the Cross triumphantly into the ranks of the warriors of the Crescent.

APOSTACY OR DEATH?

In one of the battles, ninety Templars fell by treachery into the hands of Bibar, the great Mameluke chief. They had capitulated in accordance with a promise of honourable treatment; but no sooner had they quitted their stronghold, than they were surrounded and secured. Bibar offered the Knights so treacherously captured the choice of Islamism or death. To a man they chose the latter, and were at once slaughtered, meeting death as brave men should. Flushed with victory, the Mamelukes besieged and took Antioch, putting to the sword many thousands of the Christian inhabitants of that large city, and capturing, it is said, as many as a hundred thousand more, to be sold into slavery.

SIEGE OF ACRE AND END OF THE
CRUSADES.

The eighth and last Crusade, under the leadership of Louis of France and Prince Edward of England, was undertaken in 1270. One of the most prominent events was the siege of Acre by the Mahometans. The city was the last refuge of the Christians, and was in a state of great internal confusion. Europeans of many nations were crowded there, and there were seventeen independent tribunals, and, of necessity, divided counsels among the leaders. When the besieging army appeared in sight, most of those who could contrive to escape fled from the city, which was left with a garrison of about twelve thousand men, nearly all belonging to the military Orders. The siege lasted thirty-three days, and then a breach was made, through which the Moslems poured into the city. Lusignan, who held the title of the King of Jerusalem, basely fled. The Hospitallers, led by their Grand Master, cut their way through the beleaguring host, and reached the coast. The Templars maintained the defence, Pierre de Beaujeau, the Grand Master, being killed by a poisoned arrow. The courage displayed by the Knights daunted the otherwise successful foe, and they were offered, and accepted, an honourable passage from the city. Directly they had quitted the fortress, however, they were attacked, and many were slain. The brave remnant cut their way through, and ultimately reached Cyprus.

That gallant band were the last of the

Crusaders, and theirs was the last effort for the defence of Palestine.

THE TEMPLARS IN ENGLAND.

In England, the Templars were at the summit of wealth and prosperity. In the reign of Henry III., Queen Berangeria, widow of Coeur-de-Lion, was unable to obtain payment of her annuity promised by King John, who had pleaded "the greatness of his adversity by reason of the wickedness of his magnates and barons," and who, indeed, would as soon have defrauded his sister-in-law as any other person. Berangeria appealed to the Pope to help her to obtain the amount due, £4,000. The Templars took up her cause, and became guarantees for the payment of the money. When Henry III. died, and was buried in the old coffin which had originally contained the corpse of Edward the Confessor, in Westminster Abbey, the Knights Templars, with the consent of the widowed Queen Eleanor, undertook the care and expense of the funeral, which was very magnificent, and raised a superb monument to his memory, inlaid with precious stones brought from the Holy Land by his son Edward.

soon

The wars in Palestine were ended; the special work of the Templars was no longer to be performed. The temple was in the hands of Mahometans, and Moslem eyes gazed irreverently on the Church of the Sepulchre. The Knights were in Europe potentates even amongst princes, lords of vast estates, masters of untold wealth. Their possessions excited the envy of kings; their power and military prestige aroused fear and jealousy. Kings wanted money, the Templars had it. These were two propositions in the great logic of events; the conclusion was supplied, and the syllogism completed. Edward I., who had fought by the side of the Knights in Palestine, began by seizing the funds which the Templars had collected for the use of their brethren in Cyprus, but, on the interposition of the Pope, refunded it. On his return from the campaign in Wales, being pressed for money, he sent to the Temple in London, and caused the coffers to be broken open, and £10,000 to be taken away. His son, Edward II., sent his too ready companion and favourite, Piers Gaveston, to repeat the act of spoliation, and £50,000, gold, jewels, and silver, were taken.

PERSECUTION IN FRANCE.

The King of France, Philip, was also in want of money-a common want of kings in those times. He began by confiscating the property of the Jews-an action rather meritorious than otherwise, according to the prevailing code of morals; but on attempting to extend the operation to his Christian

subjects, and to pay his debts in base coin, while exacting good money in all payments of taxes by his subjects, there was a cry about "cruel injustice," and a riot broke out in Paris; the King himself being threatened by a mob which gathered around his palace. He believed, or affected to believe, that the Templars had fermented the outbreak, and he made that supposition the excuse for a course of action, which perhaps he would not have had the courage to adopt more openly, for among the Templars (who then numbered about fifteen thousand) were members of some of the most powerful families of France.

HORRIBLE CHARGES AND TORTURE. Philip had acquired almost unbounded influence at Rome. The Pope was a French cardinal, and many of the cardinals were also of French birth. In 1307, the King summoned the Grand Master from Cyprus, and he arrived in Paris, in company with sixty Knights. Philip secretly sent letters to all the governors of the provinces in France, accusing the Templars of profanity, infidelity, and the most horrible crimes which a depraved imagination could conceive. The only authority he adduced was the statement of an apostate Templar named De Florestan. On the night of the 13th of October, every Templar in France was arrested. Monks were appointed to preach against them in the public places, exciting the popular anger by accusing the Knights of worshipping idols; burning the bodies of their dead brethren, making a powder from their ashes and administering it to the young Knights; of roasting infants and anointing the idols with the fat; of celebrating hidden rites and mysteries, and perpetrating abominable debaucheries.

A

After suffering an imprisonment of twelve days, the Knights were delivered over to the tender mercies of the Dominican monks, the most accomplished torturers of the time. hundred and forty Templars were put to the torture, their feet roasted before slow fires till the flesh dropped off, and submitted to other cruelties too horrible and disgusting to be described in detail. In their agony many made so-called confessions, really dictated by the Dominicans-confessions afterwards retracted by some of the braver spirits.

EDWARD II. AND THE POPE. Edward of England was not unwilling to avail himself of the Templars' wealth, but felt or feigned indignation at the cruelties perpetrated by his brother of France. He addressed letters to the Kings of Portugal, Castile, Aragon, and Sicily, asking them not to punish the Templars unless their guilt was legally proved; and also to the Pope, expressing his disbelief in the horrible accusations. The Pope, however, had anticipated

him by forwarding a bull requiring the King to seize the persons of all the Templars in his dominions. Edward II. was one of the weakest of men, and abjectly complied.

On the 8th of January, 1308, the English Templars were suddenly arrested in all parts of the Kingdom. William de la More, the Master of the Temple in London, and all his Knights, were committed to close custody in Canterbury Castle, but, on the intervention of the Bishop of Durham, admitted to bail. The King began with great promptitude to apply the property of the Order to his own use; but the Pope (who held very decided views of his own on the matter) wrote to him to the effect that his conduct in doing so "affords us no slight cause of affliction," and that fit and proper persons would be sent to England to take possession of the property and to make an inquisition concerning "the execrable excesses" the members of the Order were said to have committed.

THE CHARGES AGAINST THE ENGLISH
TEMPLARS.

In September 1309, the Pope's inquisitors arrived; they were Dieudonné, abbot of Lagny, and Sicard de Vaury, canon of Narbonne and chaplain to the Pope. The Archbishop of Canterbury, in obedience to Papal instructions, made public a bull, in which the Pope declared himself perfectly convinced of the guilt of the Templars, and threatening with excommunication all persons who should give "assistance, counsel, or kindness," to the members of the Order. That being the decision arrived at, of course the so-called trial of the accused was a mere absurdity. The tribunal, consisting of the Pope's inquisitors and the Bishop of London, assembled in the episcopal palace on the 20th of October, a year and eight months after the Templars had been arrested. Torture had been applied, and confessions, as they were called, extorted. The Master and some of his associates were brought from the Tower, and eighty-seven articles of indictment were exhibited. Among other charges were those of spitting on the cross, and offering even greater indignities to the sacred symbol; of denying that Christ was very God; of worshipping a cat; of claiming for the Master the power of forgiving sins; of worshipping an, idol with three faces; and of habitually practising abominations which cannot be described. Sittings of the inquisitors were also held at Lincoln and York.

The witnesses were nearly all monks, Carmelites, Augustinians, and Minorites, aided by a few serving-men and apostates who had been expelled from the Order for misconduct. There was scarcely any direct evidence; but the readiness with which the witnesses deposed to matters they had "heard of," or

"suspected" to have occurred, was remarkable. It is quite possible that the Templars had secret rites of initiation, some vague knowledge of which had reached the outer world, and so made a shadowy basis for the charges. Indeed, M. Michelet, the French historian, ventures to say, "The forms of reception into the Order were borrowed from the whimsical dramatic rites, the mysteries which the ancient Church did not dread to connect with the most sacred doctrines and objects. The candidate for admission was presented in the character of a sinner, a bad Christian, a renegade. In imitation of St. Peter, he denied Christ; the denial was pantomimically represented by spitting on the cross. The Order undertook to restore this renegadeto lift him to a height as great as the depth to which he had fallen." Worn out by torture, many of the Templars confessed all kinds of crimes, and some were permitted to make public recantation of their offences in St. Paul's and at York, and then reconciled to the Church. The Master, William de la More, died of a broken heart in a dungeon of the Tower of London, and others died in prison, where they languished loaded with chains.

On the suppression of the Order, many of the Knights who had confessed the error of their ways were received into different monasteries, living on small pensions doled out to them. The first Knights of the Order had made a vow of poverty; their successors now gradually realised it.

HORRIBLE CRUELTIES IN FRANCE, AND ABOLITION of the Order.

While these events were transpiring in England, the proceedings against the Templars in France were of a most sanguinary character. Edward of England, instigated by the Pope, was contented with a moderate amount of torture and robbery; Philip of France, whose creature Pope Clement V. was, determined that the Knights should be extirpated. Fiftyfour members of the Order were burned in an open place at Paris, and many others at various places; and so revolting in its cruelty was the persecution, that the corpse of a dead Templar of renown was dragged from its grave and burned.

The Pope abolished the Order by a bull drawn up in a private consistory, and the survivors of the famous Templars were left to the mercies of the King. Edward of England offered no protection. He had joined in the spoliation, and had, moreover, married Isabella the Fair, the daughter of Philip, who was gifted with a fine dowry from the wealth of the Templars.

HEROIC CONDUCT OF THE GRAND MASTER. On the 18th of March, 1313, Jacques de

Molay, the Grand Master, and others who had been prisoners for more than five years, appeared, loaded with chains, on a public scaffold, erected before the great church of Notre Dame, in Paris, and the citizens were summoned to hear their confessions. The papal legate called upon them to renew in the hearing of the people the avowals they had previously made of their guilt. De Molay, raising his fettered arms, advanced to the edge of the scaffold, and in a loud voice declared that to say that which was untrue was a crime in the sight of God and man. He added, "I do confess my guilt, which consists in having, to my shame and dishonour, suffered myself, through the pain of torture and the fear of death, to give utterance to falsehoods, imputing scandalous sins and iniquities to an illustrious Order which hath nobly served the cause of Christianity. I disdain to seek a wretched and disgraceful existence by engrafting another lie on the original falsehood."

He was forcibly interrupted, and taken back to prison, whence he and the Grand Preceptor, who also declared his innocence, were taken that same day, by the order of the King, and slowly burned to death over a charcoal fire on a little island of the Seine, near the spot where now stands the statue of Henry IV. A legend, long believed, asserts that De Molay, with his last breath, cited the Pope to appear within forty days, and the King within a year, before the judgmentseat of God. It is a fact that the Pope died within the period mentioned of an attack of dysentery, and that the church in which the coffin was deposited was burnt down, and the body of Clement almost entirely consumed; and that shortly afterwards Philip died of a lingering and painful disease.

A SCRAMBLE FOR THE POSSESSIONS. In England, the King quarrelled with the Pope about the property of the Order, which was eagerly scrambled for by the Court favourites; but ultimately, yielding to papal pressure, conferred it upon the Knights of St. John, who, however, did not obtain it for some time, and then only on payment of exorbitant fees. The great house, with its church, by the river-side was afterwards granted to students of law; and when Henry VIII. abolished the Order of the Hospitallers, the lawyers became tenants of the Crown. The nine cross-legged effigies in the round church do not represent KnightsTemplars, but distinguished Crusaders buried there. There is good reason to suppose that only one monumental effigy of a Templar exists, and that represents John, Count de Dreux, buried in the church of St. Yvod de Braine, near Soissons, in France.

G. R. E.

the same month attended a seditious meeting, and there made use of highly seditious language, evincing a traitorous disposition towards the Government, tending to promote rebellion against the State, and to subvert the authority of the British Government, the said Syed Hoossein and Mungul Guddrea are to suffer death by being blown away from the muzzle of a cannon.

As the time for the terrible spectacle approaches, hundreds of Europeans are seen wending their way to the parade ground; while from the alleys and lanes of the Black town thousands upon thousands of the darkskinned population come pouring forth. The stranger is at once struck by the feature that impresses every new-comer in India, the immense contrast between the swarming masses of natives and the mere handful of the resolute, inflexible, dominant race by whom they are held in subjection. The neighbouring city, whose inhabitants are pouring forth to the esplanade, numbers eight hundred thousand inhabitants; and the proportion of Europeans is exceedingly small, for the sway of the East India Company is not yet a thing of the past on this October afternoon in 1857; and the system which discourages by every means the establishment of " uncovenanted" Europeans and interlopers is, with various other extraordinary rules and customs of "Company Bahadoor," still in full operation. The prevailing expression on the dark faces is one of apathy and indifference; but who shall tell what volcanic fires of rage and hatred may be smouldering in the bosoms of those undemonstrative men, and how suddenly the flames may burst forth, and the stolid mask may be rent and blown away into atoms, like the bodies of the unhappy traitors, the hour of whose doom has come suddenly upon them?

And now the troops in garrison come marching out to take up the positions marked out for them on the parade ground. They are drawn up on the parade so as to form three sides of a hollow square; but the component parts of these sides are very different. The base consists of about five hundred men of the 95th Regiment, and the same number of sailors in the Company's service; while at the sides are drawn up three Sepoy regiments, the 10th Native Infantry, to which the condemned culprit, Mungul Guddrea belonged, being one of them.

All this was regular enough, and according to routine, that the whole garrison should be summoned to witness so important an act as a military execution. But now came a startling and unusual detail. Besides the two guns pointed forward from the base line, and intended for the execution of the two criminals, six others were accurately planted in

the square, three being turned against each of the two opposite sides. These were served by men of the Royal Artillery, who stood by them, lighted match in hand. They were loaded to the muzzle with grape and canister, and pointed full against the Sepoy regiments. At the same time the 95th Queen's Regiment and the Company's sailors loaded their Enfields, ready at a moment's notice to fire into the Sepoy ranks; and then, amid a death-like silence, the two culprits were marched forward. The artillery men stripped them of their regimental jackets, bound them to the guns. Then, after an instant of terrible suspense, the word "fire" was given. A thunderous explosion shook the ground; and, amid thick wreaths of smoke, a horrible shower of crimson morsels came down like a red hail, the remnants of the two unhappy culprits blown out of the world.

And all this while the Sepoys stood in their ranks, and moved not hand or foot. In silence they looked on while their comrades were blown to fragments; in silence they marched back to their quarters when the sweepers had collected, with brooms and baskets, the relics of the two culprits, and the tragedy was played out. And yet there was not an European present who did not breathe more freely, and feel that a crisis of supreme danger was past, when the dusky, sullen forces disappeared under the archways leading to the barracks, and the grim order of the day had been successfully carried out.

For the crime for which such swift and exemplary punishment had descended upon those two guilty men had been nothing less than an organised conspiracy, the fourth within a few months, to seize the island of Bombay, and murder every European, without distinction of age or sex; and this diabolical scheme was planned at the time when India was passing through the great agony of the mutiny that was destined to mark on the page of history, in letters of blood, the centenary of British rule in the peninsula of India.

The story of that mutiny, of the tremendous struggle it entailed, and of the manner in which British valour and endurance at last triumphed over the enormous perils and difficulties of "India's agony," we here purpose briefly to tell.

THE COMPANY'S INDIA; CONQUEST AND MISRULE.

The whole history of our Anglo-Indian Empire is full of surprises, and in many respects reads like a wild romance rather than like sober reality. The unexampled spectacle of a company of merchants, a trading corporation, converted within a few years into the rulers of a hundred millions of human beings, with almost irresponsible power, to