Philip was in truth nearing the end of his sinister career. The last year of his reign will be seen to be the most bloody. France was horrified by more hideous scenes than any she had hitherto witnessed, more hideous even than the murder of the Templars, and this time the tragedy was enacted at the foot of the throne among the royal family. Philip’s three sons, Louis Hutin, king of Navarre, and count of Champagne and of Brie, Philip, count of Poitiers, and Charles, count of La Marche, had married--the first Marguerite, sister of Hugh V, duke of Burgundy; and the other two Joan and Blanche, daughters of Otto or Othelin, count of Burgundy or of Franche-Comté. In the spring of 1314 the young wives of the king’s three sons were suddenly arrested on a charge of scandalous conduct. Marguerite, queen of Navarre, and Blanche, countess of La Marche, were accused of frequent acts of adultery, “even on the most holy days,” with Philip and Walter d’Aulnai, young Norman knights in their service. The Aulnai brothers were not allowed to challenge to a duel in defence of their innocence and that of their mistresses; confession of guilt was wrung from them by torture, and the princesses, “stripped,” says the continuator of Nangis,[g] “of all temporal honours, after receiving the tonsure, were imprisoned, Marguerite in Château Gaillard d’Andely, and Blanche in the abbey of Maubuisson, where, after strict seclusion, and deprived of all human consolation, they ended their days in despair.” The fate of their lovers was even more terrible. They were conducted to the place du Martroi St. Jean, in Paris, and there flayed alive and mutilated; they were not beheaded until every means had been exhausted that an infernal science could devise to prolong the victim’s sufferings without actually killing him. Joan of Burgundy, countess of Poitiers, more fortunate than her sisters Blanche and Marguerite of Navarre, was declared chaste and not guilty by a parliament in which sat the king’s brothers and the great nobles: she was “reconciled to her husband.” Joan of Burgundy was heiress to Franche-Comté: it was not possible to condemn her as an adulteress and annul her marriage without renouncing the wealth she had brought to the royal house; perhaps her riches had something to say as to her innocence.[c] The general oppression nearly caused an insurrection when Philip ordered a new tax on the sale of all merchandise. There was, from the first, a union between the nobles and the bourgeoisie similar to the league which in England laid the foundations of the people’s liberty and imposed the Magna Charta on John Lackland. Philip, this time, withdrew, and cancelling the obnoxious tax he summoned representatives of forty of the largest towns to a conference at Paris at which he promised to coin henceforth nothing but honest money.