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poribus ad eam usque diem particeps fuerat, spoliaverat."* Pagi says that Innocent II., already before the election of Celestine, had been elected by the cardinals alone, without the "assistance" of the clergy and people. Otto of Freisingen declares in his chronicle, that Eugenius III. (ob. 1153) was elected in 1445, "communi voto cleri et populi." And he says that in 1154 the "clerici et laici pariter conclamantes intronizarunt Hadrianum quartum," the English Pope. The fact is not only that apparently contradictory statements by the dozen may be found, but that the language of all these statements is so vague, uncertain, and plastic, that it is impossible to say what the precise meaning was which the writer intended to convey; or useless rather, as it might perhaps be better put, to attempt to extract from their words a precision of statement, which the subject they were treating of did not admit, and the necessity or desirability of which they had no conception of. This at least is clear, that during all that period of fluidity, as I have ventured to call it, the line of demarcation between de jure and de facto was oscillating, changeable, and vacillating; but that the general tendency was always advancing towards the recognition of an exclusive right to elect the Popes, in the College of Cardinals.

So far, however, was the matter from being definitively settled by the Bull of Nicholas II., or by the practice that had prevailed during the next hundred and twenty years, that the first attempt made to effect an election, that of Alexander III. (ob. 1181), without

* Breviar., tom. i. p. 669.

the participation of the clergy and people, led to a schism among the cardinals, and the election of an Antipope, who called himself Victor IV. Four Antipopes in succession sprung from and supported the schism, and contested the election and the sovereignty of Alexander III. He lived, however, to overcome his enemies, and heal the wounds of the Church in the course of a papacy of all but twenty-two years. And before his death, he assembled the third Lateran Council, which among other matters decreed that no future election to the Papal Throne should be deemed valid without the votes of two-thirds of the College of Cardinals, a regulation which has been observed ever since, and is the law which regulates the proceedings of the Conclaves to the present day.

Nevertheless we have not yet by any means reached the latest case of an altogether abnormal election, though we have made considerable progress towards ascertaining what the norma was to be. As late as 1417, Martin V. (ob. 1431) was elected for the closing of the schism, which had so deeply wounded the Church, not only by the members of the Sacred College, created by Gregory XII. (renounced, 1415), and those of the deposed John XXIII. (deposed, 1415), and those created (or rather professed to be created) by the Antipope Benedict XIII.; but also by thirty other prelates, six for each of the five nations which contributed to the Council.

As far, however, as regards the final attribution of the power of electing the Pontiff to the College of Cardinals exclusively, we may consider that the practice of the Church was fixed, as it has ever since remained, by the

constitutions of Alexander III. (ob. 1181). It remains to be shown that the practice thus ordained did not succeed in getting itself carried out with satisfactory regularity till a yet later epoch. Nothing had yet been established, as a matter of rule, as to the mode in which the cardinals were to elect, save that, as has been seen, it needed two-thirds of the votes to make a valid election. We find early instances of the shutting up of the cardinals, for the purpose of the election; but in most of these cases the imprisonment seems to have been involuntary, and imposed on them by force ab extra. Thus Honorius III. (ob. 1227) was elected on the 18th of July, at Perugia, by nineteen cardinals, whom the Perugians constrained to enter into Conclave, on the day after the death of Innocent III., who died in that city, keeping them imprisoned till the election should be completed. Such a case very clearly indicated that by that time the idea, that the body of cardinals and they alone could create a Pope, had entirely entered into the popular mind, and been recognised and accepted. The people of Perugia, in their anxiety to avoid the terrible evils of an interregnum, are determined to have a Pope elected with the least possible delay. But they consider that the only possible means of accomplishing this is to catch the cardinals and compel them to do their work.

His successor Gregory IX. (ob. 1241) was elected under somewhat similar circumstances, the Romans apparently thinking that the experiment made at Perugia had answered so well as to deserve imitation. The chronicler Rainaldi relates, on the authority of

Riccardo di San Germano, that the cardinals, who had assembled in Rome for the election of a Pope, were shut up at the Septisolium (the hill on which the Church of St. Gregory stands, near the Coliseum) by the Senator of Rome and the people, that they might against their will proceed to the creation of a Pope,* which expedient, says Cancellieri,† was perhaps adopted to avoid the invasions of the Emperor Frederick, who, encamped at Grotta Ferrata, was devasting all the neighbourhood of Rome.

Gregory IX. died in 1241. Celestine IV., who succeeded him, reigned seventeen days only. Innocent IV., who came next, reigned eleven years and nearly a half. The papacy of his successor Alexander IV. lasted six years and nearly a half. The next in the list, Urban IV., reigned three years and a month. Clement IV. succeeded him, and, after a reign of three years and nine months, died in 1269. These twentyeight years, from the death of Gregory to that of Clement, had been disastrous and stormy ones for Italy, mainly by reason of the contests between different pretenders to the crown of Sicily, and by the pretension of the Popes to have the nomination of the sovereign in their hands. Clement IV. introduced a new and fatal element into the troubled skein of Italian politics by

Cardinales qui in Urbe ad Papæ electionem convenerant, per Senatorem et Romanos apud Septisolium includuntur, ut at creandum Papam inviti procedant.

Notizie Istoriche delle Stagioni e de' Siti diversi in cui sono stati tenuti i Conclavi nella Città di Roma, &c. Raccolta da Francesco Cancellieri. Roma, 1823. A very rare tract, as are many of the great number of gossiping and amusing tracts on very various subjects, written by the same author.

conferring this crown on Charles of Anjou, thus bringing a French dynasty into Italy, and, what is more to our immediate purpose, causing thus a profound and irreconcilable division in the College of Cardinals, some of whom attached themselves to the French interest, and some feeling the most bitter resentment against the French prince, and against the policy which had called him into Italy. At the death of Clement IV. in Viterbo, just a month after the last of the. Hohenstauffens, the hapless Conradin, had lost his head on a scaffold at Naples -(he had never once during his pontificate of three years and nine months been at Rome)—the discrepancy of opinion between the cardinals led to a most bitterly and obstinately contested struggle for the election of the next Pope, which resulted in an interregnum, the longest on record in the annals of the Church, of two years and nine months. Seventeen* cardinals went into Conclave in Viterbo, which small town, as Mr. Cartwright truly says, "became the point on which remained the fixed and anxious gaze of Christendom." Seven of the cardinals in Conclave were in the French interest, and seven as entirely opposed to it. Moroni remarks that perhaps the length of the interregnum was due to the division of parties!-the "perhaps" being introduced in deference to the theory and claim that let what may be the motives and intentions of the electors, the result is due to the

• Mr. Cartwright says that they were eighteen; but I cannot find that more than seventeen are recorded as being present. Moroni says fifteen, or seventeen. Perhaps the circumstance of the Cardinal Henry of Ostia having quitted the Conclave on account of illness, may account for the discrepancy, one reckoning having been of those who went into Conclave, and the other of those who participated finally in the election.

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