al,
representing him in person absent and present in this good town of
Amboise and other places of the realm, with full power, authority,
commission, and special mandate to assemble all the princes, lords, and
gentlemen, and generally to command, order, provide, and dispose of all
things requisite and necessary."

[Illustration: Death of La Renaudie----283]

The young king was, nevertheless, according to what appears, somewhat
troubled at all this uproar and at the language of the conspirators.
"I don't know how it is," said he sometimes to the Guises, "but I hear it
said that people are against you only. I wish you could be away from
here for a time, that we might see whether it is you or I that they are
against." But the Guises set about removing this idea by telling the
king that neither he nor his brothers would live one hour after their
departure, and "that the house of Bourbon were only seeking how to
exterminate the king's house." The caresses of the young queen Mary
Stuart were enlisted in support of these assertions of her uncles. They
made a cruel use of their easy victory "for a whole month," according to
contemporary chronicles, "there was nothing but hanging or drowning
folks. The Loire was covered with corpses strung, six, eight, ten, and
fifteen, to long poles. . . ." "What was strange to see," says
Regnier de la Planche, "and had never been wont under any form of
government, they were led out to execution without having any sentence
pronounced against them publicly, or having the cause of their death
declared, or having their names mentioned. They of the Guises reserved
the chief of them, after dinner, to make sport for the ladies; the two
sexes were ranged at the windows of the castle, as if it were a question
of seeing some mummery played. And what is worse, the king and his young
brothers were present at these spectacles, as if the desire were to
'blood' them; the sufferers were pointed out to them by the Cardinal of
Lorraine with all the signs of a man greatly rejoiced, and when the poor
wretches died with more than usual firmness, he would say, 'See, sir,
what brazenness and madness; the fear of death cannot abate their pride
and felonry. What would they do, then, if they had you in their
clutches?'"

It was too much vengeance to take and too much punishment to inflict for
a danger so short-lived and so strictly personal. So hideous was the
spectacle that the Duchess of Guise, Anne d