[A Popular History of France From The Earliest Times by Francois Pierre Guillaume Guizot]@TWC D-Link book
A Popular History of France From The Earliest Times

CHAPTER XXXI
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"Away, away," said he, "with your boat and your keys; I will have nought to do with them; I have others here with me which will make me other kind of opening than yours.

I will have you all hanged; I will teach you to rebel against your king and murder his governor and his lieutenant." And he did, in fact, enter Bordeaux on the 9th of October, 1548, by a breach which he had opened in the walls, and, after having traversed the city between two lines of soldiers and with his guns bearing on the suspected points, he ordered the inhabitants to bring all their arms to the citadel.

Executions followed immediately after this moral as well as material victory.

"More than a hundred and forty persons were put to death by various kinds of punishments," says Vieilleville; "and, by a most equitable sentence, when the executioner had in his hands the three insurgents who had beaten to death and thrown into the river the two collectors of the Babel at Angouleme, he cast them all three into a fire which was ready at the spot, and said to them aloud, in conformity with the judgment against them, 'Go, rabid hounds, and grill the fish of the Charente, which ye salted with the bodies of the officers of your king and sovereign lord.' As to civil death (loss of civil rights)," adds Vieilleville, "nearly all the inhabitants made honorable amends in open street, on their knees, before the said my lords at the window, crying mercy and asking pardon; and more than a hundred, because of their youth, were simply whipped.

Astounding fines and interdictions were laid as well upon the body composing the court of Parliament as upon the town-council and on a great number of private individuals.


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