The following morning, (Tuesday, May 12,) in pursuance of this absurd and atrocious sentence, fifty-four Templars were handed over to the secular arm, and were led out to execution by the king's officers. They were conducted into the open country, in the environs of the Porte St. Antoine des Champs at Paris, and were burnt to death in a most cruel manner before a slow fire. All historians speak with admiration of the heroism and intrepidity with which they met their fate.[381] Many hundred other Templars were dragged from the dungeons of Paris before the archbishop of Sens and his council. Those whom neither the agony of the torture nor the fear of death could overcome, but who remained stedfast amid all their trials in the maintenance of the innocence of their order, were condemned to perpetual imprisonment as _unreconciled heretics_; whilst those who, having made the required confessions of guilt, continued to persevere in them, received absolution, were declared reconciled to the church, and were set at liberty. Notwithstanding the terror inspired by these executions, many of the Templars still persisted in the revocation of their confessions, which they stigmatized as the result of insufferable torture, and boldly maintained the innocence of their order. On the 18th of August, four other Templars were condemned as relapsed heretics by the council of Sens, and were likewise burned by the Porte St. Antoine; and it is stated that a hundred and thirteen Templars were from first to last burnt at the stake in Paris. Many others were burned in Lorraine; in Normandy; at Carcassone, and nine, or, according to some writers, twenty-nine, were burnt by the archbishop of Rheims at Senlis! King Philip's officers, indeed, not content with their inhuman cruelty towards the living, invaded the sanctity of the tomb; they dragged a dead Templar, who had been Treasurer of the Temple at Paris, from his grave, and burnt the mouldering corpse as a heretic.[382] In the midst of all these sanguinary atrocities, the examinations continued before the ecclesiastical tribunals. Many aged and illustrious warriors, who merited a better fate, appeared before their judges pale and trembling. At first they revoked their confessions, declared their innocence, and were remanded to prison; and then, panic-stricken, they demanded to be led back before the papal commissioners, when they abandoned their retractations, persisted in their previous avowals of _guilt_, humbly expressed their sorrow and repentance, and were then pardoned, absolved, and reconciled to the church! The torture still continued to be applied, and out of thirty-three Templars confined in the chateau d'Alaix, four died in prison, and the remaining twenty confessed, amongst other things, the following absurdities:--that in the provincial chapter of the order held at Montpelier, the Templars set up a head and worshipped it; that the devil often appeared there in the shape of a cat, and conversed with the