es were crushed by his valor;
his friends were multiplied by his liberality; his father had been the
savior of Christendom; and the claims of personal merit were repeated
and ennobled in a descent of four generations. The name and image of
royalty was still preserved in the last descendant of Clovis, the feeble
Childeric; but his obsolete right could only be used as an instrument
of sedition: the nation was desirous of restoring the simplicity of
the constitution; and Pepin, a subject and a prince, was ambitious to
ascertain his own rank and the fortune of his family. The mayor and the
nobles were bound, by an oath of fidelity, to the royal phantom: the
blood of Clovis was pure and sacred in their eyes; and their common
ambassadors addressed the Roman pontiff, to dispel their scruples, or
to absolve their promise. The interest of Pope Zachary, the successor of
the two Gregories, prompted him to decide, and to decide in their favor:
he pronounced that the nation might lawfully unite in the same person
the title and authority of king; and that the unfortunate Childeric, a
victim of the public safety, should be degraded, shaved, and confined
in a monastery for the remainder of his days. An answer so agreeable to
their wishes was accepted by the Franks as the opinion of a casuist, the
sentence of a judge, or the oracle of a prophet: the Merovingian race
disappeared from the earth; and Pepin was exalted on a buckler by the
suffrage of a free people, accustomed to obey his laws and to march
under his standard. His coronation was twice performed, with the
sanction of the popes, by their most faithful servant St. Boniface, the
apostle of Germany, and by the grateful hands of Stephen the Third,
who, in the monastery of St. Denys placed the diadem on the head of his
benefactor. The royal unction of the kings of Israel was dexterously
applied: [56] the successor of St. Peter assumed the character of a
divine ambassador: a German chieftain was transformed into the Lord's
anointed; and this Jewish rite has been diffused and maintained by the
superstition and vanity of modern Europe. The Franks were absolved from
their ancient oath; but a dire anathema was thundered against them
and their posterity, if they should dare to renew the same freedom of
choice, or to elect a king, except in the holy and meritorious race of
the Carlovingian princes. Without apprehending the future danger, these
princes gloried in their present security: the s