ty, had a right, he said, to choose his
own advisers; no doubt it was a deplorable thing to see foreigners at the
head of affairs, but the country must not, for the sake of removing them,
be rashly exposed to the scourge of civil war; perhaps it would be enough
if the queen-mother were made acquainted with the general discontent.
The constable's secretary coincided with Coligny, whose opinion was
carried. It was agreed that the Prince of Conde should restrain his
ardor, and let himself be vaguely regarded as the possible leader of the
enterprise if it were to take place, but without giving it, until further
notice, his name and co-operation. He was called the mute captain.

There was need of a less conspicuous and more pronounced leader for that
which was becoming a conspiracy. And one soon presented himself in the
person of Godfrey de Barri, Lord of La Renaudie, a nobleman of an ancient
family of Perigord, well known to Duke Francis of Guise, under whose
orders he had served valiantly at Metz in 1552, and who had for some time
protected him against the consequences of a troublesome trial, at which
La Renaudie had been found guilty by the Parliament of Paris of forging
and uttering false titles. Being forced to leave France, he retired into
Switzerland, to Lausanne and Geneva, where it was not long before he
showed the most passionate devotion for the Reformation. "He was a man,"
says De Thou, "of quick and insinuating wits, ready to undertake
anything, and burning with desire to avenge himself, and wipe out,
by some brilliant deed, the infamy of a sentence which he had incurred
rather through another's than his own crime. He, then, readily offered
his services to those who were looking out for a second leader, and he
undertook to scour the kingdom in order to win over the men whose names
had been given him. He got from them all a promise to meet him at Nantes
in February, 1560, and he there made them a long and able speech against
the Guises, ending by saying, 'God bids us to obey kings even when they
ordain unjust things, and there is no doubt but that they who resist the
powers that God has set up do resist His will. We have this advantage,
that we, ever full of submission to the prince, are set against none but
traitors hostile to their king and their country, and so much the more
dangerous in that they nestle in the very bosom of the state, and, in the
name and clothed with the authority of a king who is a me