A few months, and hardly so much, after the accession of Francis II., a serious matter brought into violent collision the three parties whose characteristics and dispositions have just been described.  The supremacy of the Guises was insupportable to the Reformers, and irksome to many lukewarm or wavering members of the Catholic nobility.  An edict of the king’s had revoked all the graces and alienations of domains granted by his father.  The crown refused to pay its most lawful debts, and duns were flocking to the court.  To get rid of them, the Cardinal of Lorraine had a proclamation issued by the king, warning all persons, of whatever condition, who had come to dun for payment of debts, for compensations, or for graces, to take themselves off within twenty-four hours on pain of being hanged; and, that it might appear how seriously meant the threat was, a very conspicuous gibbet was erected at Fontainebleau close to the palace.  It was a shocking affront.  The malcontents at once made up to the Reformers.  Independently of the general oppression and perils under which these latter labored, they were liable to meet everywhere, at the corners of the streets, men posted on the lookout, who insulted them and denounced them to the magistrates if they did not uncover themselves before the madonnas set up in their way, or if they did not join in the litanies chanted before them.  A repetition of petty requisitions soon becomes an odious tyranny.  An understanding was established between very different sorts of malcontents; they all said and spread abroad that the Guises were the authors of these oppressive and unjustifiable acts.  They made common cause in seeking for means of delivering themselves, at the same time drawing an open distinction between the Guises and the king, the latter of whom there was no idea of attacking.  The inviolability of kings and the responsibility of ministers, those two fundamental maxims of a free monarchy, had already become fixed ideas; but how were they to be taken advantage of and put in practice when the institutions whereby political liberty exerts its powers and keeps itself secure were not in force?  The malcontents, whether Reformers or Catholics, all cried out for the states-general.  Those of Tours, in 1484, under Charles VIII., had left behind them a momentous and an honored memory.  But the Guises and their partisans energetically rejected this cry.  “They told the king that whoever spoke of convoking the states-general was his personal enemy and guilty of high treason; for his people would fain impose law upon him from whom they ought to take it, in such sort that there would be left to him nothing of a king but the bare title.  The queen-mother, though all the while giving fair words to the malcontents, whether Reformers or others, was also disquieted at their demands, and she wrote to her son-in-law, Philip II., King of Spain, ’that they wanted, by means of the said states, to reduce her to the condition of a maid-of-all-work.’  Whereupon Philip replied ’that he would willingly employ all his forces to uphold the authority of the king his brother-in-law and of his ministers, and that he had forty thousand men all ready in case anybody should be bold enough to attempt to violate it.’”