Finding in the press their best weapon the Protestants produced a flood of pamphlets attacking the Cardinal of Lorraine as "the tiger of France." A more definite plan to rid the country of the hated tyranny was that known as the Conspiracy of Amboise.

Godfrey de Barry, Sieur de la Renaudie, pledged several hundred Protestants to go in a body to present a petition to the king at Blois.

How much further their intentions went is not known, and perhaps was not definitely formulated by themselves.

The Venetian ambassador spoke in a contemporary dispatch of a plot to kill the cardinal and also the king if he would not assent to their counsels, and said that the conspirators relied, to justify this course, on the {211} declaration of Calvin that it was lawful to slay those who hindered the preaching of the gospel.

Hearing of the conspiracy, Guise and his brother were ready.