Philip IV., of France, acting under authority of the Pope, ordered the arrest and trial of the Templars and the confiscation of their goods and property. Hundreds were put to the rack and when tortured by pain, confessed the most unreasonable charges which were lodged against them and this only heightened the popular clamor and the persecution against them, as a body. Fifty-nine Templars were burned alive, by a slow fire, in a field adjoining the city of Paris, after they had been convicted of witchcraft and sorcery, and other instances of their persecutions, upon this charge, occurred in the different provinces, until the year 1313, when the Grand Master of the Order Jacques de Molay was burned to death, a fitting climax to this reign of terror, inaugurated by the Pope and Monarch, to rid themselves of an odious order—a lasting stigma to the memory of the Pope and Monarch responsible for such conditions and an ever increasing source of pity to the millions possessing the divine gift of a tender fellow-feeling for their own kind. In 1429 the poor Joan of Arc fell a victim to the charge of witchcraft and sorcery and like dual criminals, proceeding hand in hand to accomplish the crime, religion and law, not only failed to raise a hand to prevent the conflagration that consumed and tortured the sainted body of this patriotic victim, but actually consummated the crime, in the name of holy order and legal procedure, which will remain eternally as one of the saddest and most pitiable spectacles of the weakness and criminal blunderings of the Church and State. In 1459 a devoted congregation of the Waldenses, at Arras, fell victims to a charge of witchcraft and sorcery. Many of them, when placed upon the rack, admitted their guilt, to escape the torture; prominent rulers and people of wealth were involved and many were burned, while others were thrown in prison, or paid large fines to escape a worse fate, at the hands of the ignorant and intolerant courts, that reflected the hatred and persecution of the enraged populace.[16] In 1487 two old women were arrested for witchcraft, in Switzerland, for having caused a tempest. They were placed upon the rack, where people, enforc’d do speak anything, and after severe torture they admitted that they were in collusion with the devil and were condemned to die, and if the criminal register at Constance is to be believed, they were burned at the stake, for after the name of each, appears the significant epitaph: “_convicta et combusta_.”[17] Speaking of the great prevalency of this accusation, about this period, Florimond, in his work concerning the Anti-Christ, observes: