The facility and weakness of the son, not his violence, threw every thing into confusion: the laws and government were overturned: an attempt to reinstate them was an unpardonable crime: and no atonement but the deposition and tragical death of the king himself could give those barons contentment.

It is easy to see, that a constitution which depended so much on the personal character of the prince, must necessarily, in many of its parts, be a government of will, not of laws.
But always to throw, without distinction, the blame of all disorders upon the sovereign would introduce a fatal error in politics, and serve as a perpetual apology for treason and rebellion: as if the turbulence of the great, and madness of the people, were not, equally with the tyranny of princes, evils incident to human society, and no less carefully to be guarded against in every well-regulated constitution.
While these abominable scenes passed in England, the theatre of France was stained with a wickedness equally barbarous, and still more public and deliberate.

The order of knights templars had arisen during the first fervor of the crusades; and uniting the two qualities the most popular in that age, devotion and valor, and exercising both in the most popular of all enterprises, the defence of the Holy Land, they had made rapid advances in credit and authority, and had acquired, from the piety of the faithful, ample possessions in every country of Europe, especially in France.

Their great riches, joined to the course of time, had, by degrees, relaxed the severity of these virtues; and the templars had, in a great measure, lost that popularity which first raised them to honor and distinction.

Acquainted from experience with the fatigues and dangers of those fruitless expeditions to the East, they rather chose to enjoy in ease their opulent revenues in Europe: and being all men of birth, educated, according to the custom of that age, without any tincture of letters, they scorned the ignoble occupations of a monastic life, and passed their time wholly in the fashionable amusements of hunting, gallantry, and the pleasures of the table.