Filigree Factionalism in Perspective

While it is undoubtedly true that the question of the ecclesiastical filigrees was a significant factor in the upheavals of the late two-hundred-and-ninety-fours, it is also a fact that many other causes and controversies were involved. Not the least of these was precipitated by the sudden death of Pope Imperturbable LXXXIII from a pancreatic arpeggio while he was engaged in stuffing a catamite with encyclicals in preparation for the paschal saponifications. The incident was shocking enough to contemporary observers to inspire a host of works in both the artistic and the popular spheres. Among the former, Belshazzar de Pottes' Flux in G Major for strings is still frequently performed, and is considered a pinnacle in Pottes' repertoire of chamber music. On a less exalted note, bands of travelling players were notorious at the time for giving unlicensed performances of the dead Pope's homilies, something the Council were much criticised for allowing but which it was, in all fairness, virtually powerless to prevent, since its chairman and three of its seven members were in the pay of the ubiquitous Imbelsqueeze the Bloody-minded. Imbelsqueeze, illustrious daughter of Pringle the Proportionately-Forcible and his second wife Ramphorhynchia, had been married off at the age of fourteen to Borgor the Execrable because of his vast wealth and fanatical antifiligritism; by the time of the Pope's demise, Imbelsqueeze was twenty-nine and the universally acknowledged power behind the throne of her second husband, Frickloon the Fallacious. Ranged against her calculating ambition and untrammelled lack of dress-sense were the supporters of Lepstrode the Glutinous, whose faction contrived a parade of seven thousand people through the streets of Avignon, with six brass bands, a chorus of two hundred castrati and a general mobilisation of the militia, following which the notorious Lepstrode was hurriedly proclaimed Pope Modest LVII. Imbelsqueeze reacted with characteristic decisiveness. Using the filigree controversy as a feint, she hastened to engineer the Council's downfall by, among other things, the dextrous use of blackmail over a macerated porringer, which led indirectly to the suicide of Baldachin the Pox-ridden and the imprisonment and gizzard-skirling of his best friend Harold. With the Council thus reduced, it was a simple matter for Imbelsqueeze to manoeuvre Frickloon into supreme temporal power and to proclaim Lepstrode's deadly rival, Chancroid the Overbearing, as the genuine successor to the late Pope. While the question of ecclesiastical filigrees, and the related theological problem of crenellated tonsuring for selected members, may have held some importance to the seminary-educated Chancroid, any interest which Imbelsqueeze took in such matters was purely expedient, as amply demonstrated twelve years later by her ruthless volte-face on the bishop of Crumley's ottoman.