! May your
very great Fatuity know that we are subject to no one as regards
temporal power: that the collation of vacant churches and prebends
belongs to us by Royal Right; that the incomes belong to us; that the
collations made and to be made by us are valid in the past and in the
future, and that we will manfully protect their possessors toward and
against all. Those who think otherwise we take to be fools and insane."

This brutal letter was not destined to be sent to its address, but to
abase the pontifical dignity, or at least the person of the Pope, in the
eyes of the French public. The spirit of the people must have been
greatly changed if this end could be thus attained by a means which
formerly would have drawn universal indignation on the head of the
sacrilegious monarch.

The attack of Philip, on the contrary, was completely effectual. The
prelates arrived at the states-general timid, irresolute, neutralized by
the difficulties of their position between the King and the Pope; the
lords and the townsmen hastened thither irritated against the bull,
heated by the violence of the royal answer. The members of the assembly
were influenced each by the other according to their arrival; the
pungent and wily eloquence of Peter Flotte did the rest. The chancellor,
as the first of the great crown officers and the king's chief justice,
opened the states by a long harangue in which, speaking in the name of
Philip, he exposed with much force and ingenuity the enterprises of the
court of Rome and its wrongs toward the kingdom and the Church.

"The Pope confers the bishoprics and the rectories on strangers and
unknown individuals who never become residents. The prelates no longer
have benefices to give to nobles whose ancestors founded the churches,
and to other lettered persons; from which results also that gifts are no
longer given to the churches. The Pope imposes on the churches and
benefices pensions, subsidies, exactions of all kinds. The bishops are
kept from their ministry, being obliged to go to the holy see to carry
presents--always presents. All these abuses have done nothing but
increase under the actual pontificate, and increase every
day--conditions that can no longer be tolerated. That is why I command
you as your master and pray you as your friend to give me counsel and
help."

The Chancellor added that the King had resolved, on his own initiative,
to remedy the encroachments that his officers had made on