aster; this assembly is founded (seated) on the fleur-de-lis;
being established by the king, it can act only for his service. We will
all lose our lives to a man rather than give way a whit to the contrary."
"I have been in many battles," said Guise, as he went out, "in assaults
and encounters the most dangerous in the world; and I have never been so
overcome as at my reception by this personage." At the same time that he
was trying to exercise authority and restore order, unbridled violence
and anarchy were making head around him; the Sixteen and their friends
discharged from the smallest offices, civil or religious, whoever was not
devoted to them; they changed all the captains and district-officers of
the city militia; they deposed all the incumbents, all the ecclesiastics
whom they termed Huguenots and policists; the pulpits of Christians
became the platforms of demagogues; the preachers Guiticestre, Boucher,
Rose, John Prevost, Aubry, Pigenat, Cueilly, Pelletier, and a host of
others whose names have fallen into complete obscurity, were the popular
apostles, the real firebrands of the troubles of the League, says
Pasquier; there was scarcely a chapel where there were not several
sermons a day. "You know not your strength," they kept repeating to
their auditors: "Paris knows not what she is worth; she has wealth enough
to make war upon four kings. France is sick, and she will never recover
from that sickness till she has a draught of French blood given her.
. . . If you receive Henry de Valois into your towns, make up your
minds to see your preachers massacred, your sheriffs hanged, your women
violated, and the gibbets garnished with your members." One of these
raving orators, Claude Trahy, provincial of the Cordeliers, devoted
himself to hounding on the populace of Auxerre against their bishop,
James Amyot, the translator of Plutarch, whom he reproached with "having
communicated with Henry III. and administered to him the eucharist;"
brother John Moresin, one of Trahy's subalterns, went about brandishing a
halberd in the public place at Auxerre, and shouting, "Courage, lads!
messire Amyot is a wicked man, worse than Henry de Valois; he has
threatened to have our master Trahy hanged, but he will repent it;" and,
"at the voice of this madman, there hurried up vine-dressers, boatmen,
and marchandeaux (costermongers), a whole angry mob, who were for having
Amyot's throat cut, and Trahy made bishop in his stead."