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C H A P T E R 5 Philadelphia Story William of Paris must surely have communicated the canonists’ decision to Marguerite and Guiard and spelled out—if this was necessary— what the possibility of relaxation to the secular arm implied. There is no indication that the opinions of 3 April had any effect on Marguerite ’s conduct. Guiard, however, was not immune to this threat of impending execution. Within days he decided to answer the inquisitor’s questions. But William may have been under significant pressure himself in the first week of April if he was paying attention to the growing momentum of the Templar defense. Between 31 March and 7 April, Archbishop Gilles Aycelin’s papal commission dispatched at least seven notaries to gather testimony from the Templars imprisoned in Paris who wished to defend the order.1 Over the course of fifty-nine visits to thirty different places of detention, they recorded statements from 537 Templars , who defended the order’s innocence with near unanimity.2 In a sense, every brother who joined the chorus of voices claiming that their crimes had been fabricated and their confessions coerced was offering an indictment of William and his role in the royal attack on the order. This cannot have been an easy week for Philip IV’s confessor. Cressonessart Redux Interestingly enough, among the most prominent leaders of the Templar defense was one Matthew of Cressonessart. Considering his place 105 of origin, his story offers an appropriate window on the dramatic developments of the first week of April. According to his later deposition, Matthew was from the Diocese of Beauvais, and so certainly from the same village as Guiard. Matthew was born about 1275, entered the order in Paris around 1293, and eventually became the preceptor of the house of Bellinval in the Diocese of Amiens.3 As early as 17 February 1310 he was among those coming forward to defend the order, and on 28 March he was part of the crowd of Templars gathered in the gardens of the bishop of Paris.4 This Matthew had been held, along with ten of his brothers, under the guard of one Colart of Evreux. These eleven men were interviewed by the notaries on Wednesday, 1 April, and protested that their order was “good and holy and legal.”5 They refused to suggest procurators but asked to be able to consult with the order’s leaders. Two days later, on the same 3 April on which the canon lawyers were issuing their opinions on Guiard of Cressonessart and Marguerite Porete, these eleven Templars sent a statement of defense, written in French, which Colart of Evreux carried to the commission for them. This statement again asked to consult with specific leaders of the order and requested that the eleven be allowed to come before the commission personally—or, if this were not feasible for the whole group, that Brothers Matthew of Cressonessart and André le Mortoier be allowed to represent them.6 Evidently Matthew was a respected senior brother within this group (in both these documents he is listed second after the priest John Penet). More dramatically, his status within the order as a whole is shown by the fact that when nine brothers were chosen to represent all those Templars incarcerated in Paris, one of these men who finally stood in front of the commission in the episcopal chapel on 7 April was Matthew of Cressonessart. These brothers presented a vigorous defense, arguing that previous confessions had been obtained by torture, that the accusations against them were lies, that outside France no Templars had confessed, and that their order had always been holy and honest.7 Although evidence from his later testimony shows that Matthew was a sergeant rather than a knight in the order, his title as preceptor, his respected role as a leader chosen among all the nearly six hundred Templars in Paris, and his knowledge of Latin all suggest the possibility that he came from a branch of the noble family of Cressonessart.8 Since 106 THE BEGUINE, THE ANGEL, AND THE INQUISITOR it is not certain that Guiard also really was a member of this family, the question of whether or how these two men were related must remain open. Nevertheless, it is a striking fact that the very week when Guiard finally confessed, another man from his tiny hamlet was taking the lead in fighting the charges of heresy in the Templar case. These two...

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