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.'" 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.