In their perplexity, the malcontents, amongst whom the Reformers were becoming day by day the most numerous and the most urgent, determined to take the advice of the greatest lawyers and most celebrated theologians of France and Germany.  They asked whether it would be permissible, with a good conscience and without falling into the crime of high treason, to take up arms for the purpose of securing the persons of the Duke of Guise and the Cardinal of Lorraine, and forcing them to render an account of their administration.  The doctors, on being consulted, answered that it would be allowable to oppose by force the far from legitimate supremacy of the Guises, provided that it were done under the authority of princes of the blood, born administrators of the realm in such cases, and with the consent of the orders composing the state, or the greatest and soundest portion of those orders.  A meeting of the princes who were hostile to the Guises were held at Vendome to deliberate as to the conduct to be adopted in this condition of opinions and parties; the King of Navarre and his brother the Prince of Conde, Coligny, D’Andelot, and some of their most intimate friends took part in it; and D’Ardres, confidential secretary to the Constable de Montmorency, was present.  The Prince of Conde was for taking up arms at once and swoop down upon the Guises, taking them by surprise.  Coligny formally opposed this plan; the king, at his majority, 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