It was not until the fifteenth century that deputies from the peasantry sat with the Third Estate. In the five centuries between the calling of the first States General and the Revolution the Assembly was summoned only thirteen times. When Louis XVI ordered an election in the futile hope that something might be suggested that would help France in her trouble it had been one hundred and seventy-five years since a sitting had been held. The first States General found itself in something of a predicament. It was clear that it was expected to endorse Philip’s attitude toward the pope, yet such a course would place the clergy at variance with the head of the church. Of course they yielded. Boniface was a long way off; Philip was near at hand, and the dungeons of the Grand Châtelet and of the Louvre were always able to hold a few more prisoners. The pope was notified that the affairs of France were the concern of France and not of an outsider. The pope replied with excommunication. Philip retaliated with charges for which, he said, the pontiff should be tried. Boniface, justly enraged, threatened to depose Philip and make the German emperor king of France. Philip once more laid his case before his subjects, this time in the palace garden. Hot and heavy raged the quarrel after this. It resulted in the popes becoming for seventy years no more than dependents upon the will of the French crown, and practically its prisoners at Avignon on French soil. Having negotiated the election of a pope of French birth, Philip used him as a tool for the accomplishment of his mercenary and cruel plans against the Order of Knights Templar. This order, at once religious and military, had been founded to protect pilgrims to the Holy Sepulcher. Its duties over with the ending of the Crusades, idleness may, perhaps, have done its proverbial work. No one believes, however, that Philip’s charges of corruption in both religious practices and in manner of living were other than shamefully exaggerated excuses for seizing rich possessions which he had coveted ever since the time when, during a Paris riot caused by an unjust tax, he had taken refuge in the Temple to the north of the city. There he had seen the gathered treasures, and the fact that he owed his life to the Templars did not deter him from devising elaborate plans to rob them.