common designs, and most ready to execute the commands of their
superiors."[539]

[Sidenote: Murder runs riot throughout France.]

With such associations as "the Confraternities of the Holy Ghost," and
"the Christian and Royal League" springing up in various parts of France,
under the express sanction of the provincial governors, and publishing as
their chief aim the extirpation of heresy from the realm; with priests and
monks, especially those of the new order of Jesus, inflaming the passions
of the people by seditious preaching, and persuading their hearers that
any toleration of heretics was a compact with Satan, it is not strange
that murder held high carnival wherever the Protestants were not so
numerous as to be able to stand on the defensive. The victims were of
every rank and station, from the obscure peasant to the distinguished
Cipierre, son of the Count de Tende and a relative of the Duke of Savoy,
the orders for whose assassination were confidently believed to have
issued from the court.[540] At Auxerre, which had been given up by the
Huguenots in accordance with the provisions of the peace, one hundred and
fifty Protestants paid with their lives the price of their good faith.
Their bodies were thrown into the public sewers. In the city of Amiens one
hundred and fifty persons were slaughtered at one time. Instead of
punishment, the rioters obtained their object: the reformed worship was
forbidden in Amiens, or within three leagues of the city.[541] At Clermont
the assassins, after plundering the wares of a wealthy merchant, who had
refused to hang tapestry before his house at the time of the procession on
Corpus Christi Day--La Fete-Dieu--buried him in a fire made of furniture
taken from his own house.[542] At Ligny, in Champagne, a Huguenot was
pursued into the very bedchamber of a royal officer, and there killed.
Troyes, Bourges, Rouen, and a host of other places, witnessed the
commission of atrocities which it would be rather sickening than
profitable to narrate.[543] In Paris itself the murders of Huguenots were
frequent. "On Sunday last," wrote Norris, the English envoy, to his royal
mistress, "the Prince of Conde sent a gentleman to the king, to beseech
his Majesty to administer justice against such as murder them of the
religion, and as he entered into the city there were five slain in St.
Anthony's street, not far from my lodging."[544] The aggregate of
homicides committed within the brief compass o