was at that time besieging.

He deferred his reply.
Two of the principal Protestant leaders, the Dukes of Bouillon and La Tremoille, suddenly took extreme measures; they left the king and his army, carrying off their troops with them, one to Auvergne and the other to Poitou.

The deputies from the assembly of Loudun started back again at the same time, as if for the purpose of giving the word to arm in their provinces.

Du Plessis-Mornay and his wife, the most zealous of the Protestants who were faithful at the same time to their cause and to the king, bear witness to this threatening crisis.

"The deputies," says Madame du Mornay in her Memoires, "returned each to his own province, with the intention of taking the cure of their evils into their own hands, whence would infallibly have ensued trouble enough to complete the ruin of this state had not the king, by the management of M.du Plessis, been warned of this imminent danger, and by him persuaded to send off and treat in good earnest with the said assembly." "These gentry, rebuffed at court," says Du Plessis-Mornay himself in a letter to the Duke of Bouillon, "have resolved to take the cure into their own hands; to that end they have been authorized, and by actions which do not seem to lead them directly thither they will find that they have passed the Rubicon right merrily." It was as it were a new and a Protestant League just coming to a head.