Last words of Jacob de Molay

“I think it’s only right that, at so solemn moment, when my life has so little time to run, I should reveal the deception which has been practised and speak up for the truth. Before heaven and earth, and with all of you here, as my witnesses, I admit that I am guilty of the grossest iniquity - but this iniquity is that I have lied by admitting the disgusting charges laid against the Order. I declare, and I must declare, that the order is innocent. Its purity and saintliness is beyond question. I have indeed, confessed that the order is guilty, but I have done so only to save myself from terrible tortures by saying whatever my enemies wished me to say. Other knights who have retracted their confessions have been led to the stake. Yet the thought of dying is not so awful that I shall confess to offences which I have never been committed. Life is offered to me, but at the price of infamy. That’s a price that life is not worth having. I do not grieve that I must die if life can be bought only by piling one lie upon another.

It is just that, on so terrible a day, and in the last moments of my life, I should discover all the iniquity of falsehood and I make the truth triumph at last. I declare, in the face of heaven on earth, and acknowledge, to my eternal shame, that I have committed the greatest of crimes in acknowledging of those accusations foully charged against the Order. I attest,  and truth obliges me to an attest, that the Order is innocent. I made the contrary declaration only to suspend the excessive pains of torture and to mollify those who made me endure them. I know the punishments which have been inflicted on all the Knights who had the courage to evoke a similar confession, but the dreadful spectacle which is presented to me is not able to make me confirm one lie by another. The life offered me on such infamous terms, I abandoned without regret.”

“Jacques (James) De Molay and Geoffrey De Charny, with their last breaths amid the searing and roasting flames, with black faces and tongues swelled until they could no longer speak, uttered the innocence of the Order, and the injustice of the charges.”