But the most remarkable event of the pontificate of Innocent was, the opposition he presumed to make to the treaties of Munster and Osnabruck.—Long rivalries and bloody wars harrassed, and almost exhausted, Europe; these treaties were at length to terminate those disasters. But a bull arrives, in which the vicar of the lamb of God protests against the peace of the world, and in which he annuls, as far as in him lies, the concord of the Christian republic. They have, he said, given up ecclesiastical property to the reformed; they have permitted to the reprobate the exercise of civil employments; they have, without the permission of the Holy See, encreased the number of electors; they have preserved privileges in the states to those who have ceased to have them in the church; the church abrogates these odious articles, these rash concessions, these heretical conventions. Innocent, no doubt, suspected, that war would afford more chances to the court of Rome, and that the ecclesiastical power had nothing to gain by a peace which would restore to the secular governments more stability, activity, and interior prosperity: but he was too little acquainted with the period at which he published such a bull; he did not perceive, that the pontifical ambition, before detested, was now only ridiculed; and he compromised by a silly step, which they scarcely deigned to notice, the weak remains of the authority of his predecessors.
Not having undertaken a detailed history of all the pontifical intrigues, we shall take leave to be silent on the five propositions of Jansenius, condemned by Innocent X. and his successor Alexander VII. who ordered the signature of a formulary, long famous. These quarrels, already deplorable at the end of the seventeenth century, became so contemptible in the course of the eighteenth, that success or defeat was equally attended with dishonour. In dividing the clergy into two parties, almost equally disregarded, these wretched controversies weakened the influence of the priesthood, and consequently that of the first pontiff. From 1659, Alexander might have perceived the decline of his credit in Europe, when, after having attempted to mingle in the negociations between France and Spain, he found they had treated without him. Nevertheless he ventured three years after to displease the most powerful monarch of the age. Crequi, the ambassador of Louis XIV. at Rome, was insulted by the pontifical guard, which killed one of his pages and fired on the carriage of his lady. Obtaining no satisfaction of the pope or of his ministers, Crequi retired to the Florentine territories. Louis demanded a solemn reparation: and, not considering that adequate which he had been made wait four months for, he marched some troops against Rome, and took possession of the city and county of Avignon, which a decree of the parliament re-united to the crown the 26th of July 1663. Alexander did not let slip this opportunity of displaying against a great prince the spiritual and temporal arms, only until he had solicited in vain the support and concurrence of all the catholic states rivals of France. Then the Holy See prudently humbled itself, and the cardinal Chigi, nephew of the pope, came to make to Louis all the reparation which this monarch required. In Europe no high idea existed of the veracity of Alexander: “We have a pope,” writes Renaldi, the ambassador of Florence at Rome, “we have a pope who never speaks a word of truth.”³²¹