Philip the Handsome and his councillors did not misconceive the tendency of such language, however involved and full of specious reservations it might be. The final supremacy of the pope in the body politic, and over all sovereigns, meant the absorption of the laic community in the religious, and the abolition of the State’s independence, not in favor of the national Church, but to the advantage of the foreign head of the universal Church. The defenders of the French kingship formed a better estimate than was formed at Rome of the effect which would be produced by such doctrine on France, in the existing condition of the French mind; they entered upon no theological and abstract polemics; they confined themselves entirely to setting in a vivid light the pope’s pretensions and their consequences, feeling sure that, by confining themselves to this question, they would enlist in their opposition not only all laymen, nobles, and commoners, but the greater part of the French ecclesiastics themselves, who were no strangers to the feeling of national patriotism, and to whom the pope’s absolute power in the body politic was scarcely more agreeable than the king’s. In order to make a strong impression upon the public mind, there was published at Paris, as the actual text of the pope’s bull, a very short summary of his long bull, “Hearken, most dear Son,” in the following terms: “Boniface, bishop, servant of the servants of God, to Philip, King of the French. Fear thou God, and keep His commandments. We would have thee to know that thou art subject unto us in things spiritual and temporal. The presentation to benefices and prebends appertaineth to thee in no wise. If thou have the keeping of certain vacancies, thou art bound to reserve the revenues of them for the successors to them. If thou have made any presentations, we declare them void, and revoke them. We consider as heretics all those who believe otherwise.” Together with this document there was put in circulation the king’s answer to the pope, in the following terms: “Philip, by the grace of God, King of the French, to Boniface, who giveth himself out for sovereign pontiff, little or no greeting. Let thy Extreme Fatuity know that we be subject to none in things temporal, that the presentation to churches and prebends that be vacant belongeth to us of kingly right, that the revenues therefrom be ours, that presentations already made or to be made be valid both now and hereafter, that we will firmly support the possessors of them to thy face and in thy teeth, and that we do hold as senseless and insolent those who think otherwise.” The pope disavowed, as a falsification, the summary of his long bull; and there is nothing to prove that the unseemly and insulting letter of Philip the Handsome was sent to Rome. But, at bottom, the situation of affairs remained the same; indeed, it did not stop where it was. On the 11th of February, 1302, the bull, Hearken, most dear Son, was solemnly burned at Paris in presence of the king and a numerous multitude. Philip convoked, for the 8th of April following, an assembly of the barons, bishops, and chief ecclesiastics, and of deputies from the communes to the number of two or three for each city, all being summoned “to deliberate on certain affairs which in the highest degree concern the king, the kingdom, the churches, and all and sundry.” This assembly, which really met on the 10th of April, at Paris, in the church of Notre-Dame, is reckoned in French history as the first “states-general.” The three estates wrote separately to Rome; the clergy to the pope himself, the nobility and the deputies of the communes to the cardinals, all, however, protesting against the pope’s pretensions in matters temporal, the two laic orders writing in a rough and threatening tone, the clergy making an appeal “to the wisdom and paternal clemency of the Holy Father, with tearful accents, and sobs mingled with their tears.” The king evidently had on his side the general feeling of the nation: and the news from Rome was not of a kind to pacify him. In spite of the king’s formal prohibition, forty-five French bishops had repaired to the council summoned by the pope for All Saints’ day, 1302, and, after this meeting, a papal decree of November 18 had declared, “There be two swords, the temporal and the spiritual; both are in the power of the Church, but one is held by the Church herself, the other by kings only with the assent and by sufferance of the sovereign pontiff. Every human being is subject to the Roman pontiff; and to believe this is necessary to salvation.” Philip made a seizure of the temporalities of such bishops as had been present at that council, and renewed his prohibition forbidding them to leave the kingdom.