A.D. 1304. POPE BENEDICT DIES. suit offered to the particular person, as assert that Christ himself had been a second time stripped by the soldiers of Pilate, bewailing his fate as being again taken, condemned, and, as it were, put to death and consigned to the grave, and guarded for three days by soldiers ; not, as the apostle says, " Christ being raised from the dead dieth no more," but he is now in his glorified flesh ; and as the Lord Jesus Christ said to Peter when he asked him, " Lord, whither goest thou ?" he said, " I go to Rome to be crucified a second time." Then Peter understood that he was speaking of his own passion, inasmuch as our Lord, by the mercifulness of his pity, suffers in his saints. And as he says in another place, " What you have done to one of the least of these my children, whether it be honour or dishonour, know that I shall feel the same thing." When, therefore, he had said these and many other similar things concerning the disaster of pope Boniface, he laid his spoilers, and all who consented to them, and all who were in any respect privy to their deed, under a double anathema ; insisting and dwelling very much on this expression, " If they have done this in the green wood, what will they do in the dry ?" And as he asserted that lightnings and coruscations of divine vengeance often unexpectedly overwhelmed wicked men, and that he had been elected and placed in the seat of the Elders, to announce their wickedness to the people, and to warn them to repent, he now warned them to make atone . ment for their sins, otherwise he should necessarily and very speedily lay the axe of amputation and extirpation to the root of malediction and the accursed trunk ; therefore, these wicked men, being alarmed at such terrible threats, took counsel with another Caiaphas, that it was more desirable for one man to die than the whole nation, or the tribe of Colonna, to be extinguished, and accordingly, having corrupted the butler of the lord the pope with money, they poisoned him, and he died within a fortnight. And so, pope Benedict died in the city of Perugia, on the seventh day of the month of July, when he had ruled his see eight months and fifteen days. And after his death a violent dispute arose among the cardinals, so that for nine months they could not agree with one another about electing a pontiff. About the same time, it being the season for the warlike operations of kings, the most fortunate king of England, Edward, having traversed every part of Scotland, and trampled