Henry M. Baird · 197 of 379

CHAPTER IX · His grounds for revenge.

An active and energetic man was needed to organize the movement and control it until the proper moment should come for Condé—the "mute" head, whose name was for the time to be kept secret—to declare himself. Such a leader was found in Godefroy de Barry, Seigneur de la Renaudie, a gentleman of ancient family in Périgord. The result justified the wisdom of the choice. Besides the discontent animating him in common with the better part of the kingdom, La Renaudie had private wrongs of his own to avenge. Less than a year before the accession of Francis, his brother-in-law, Gaspard de Heu, had been arrested as a pretended agent for bringing about an alliance between the King of Navarre and the Protestant princes of Germany. In the gloomy castle of the Bois de Vincennes a private trial had been held, in which none of the accustomed forms of law were observed. De Heu had been barbarously tortured and secretly despatched. That it was a judicial murder was proved by the extraordinary precautions taken to conceal the procedure from the knowledge of the public, and by the selection of the most lonely place about the castle for the grave into which his official assassins hastily thrust the body. La Renaudie held the Cardinal of Lorraine to be the author of the cowardly deed.