Henry M. Baird · 229 of 379

CHAPTER X · The queen mother consults La Planche.

The political ferment was not less active than the religious. The pamphlets and the representations made by the emissaries of the Guises to foreign powers, in which the movement at Amboise was branded as a conspiracy directed against the king and the royal authority, called forth a host of replies vindicating the political Huguenots, and setting their project in its true light, as an effort to overthrow the intolerable usurpation of the Guises. The tyrants were no match for the patriots in the use of the pen; but it fared ill with the author or printer of these libels, when the strenuous efforts made to discover them proved successful. The politic Catharine de' Medici, fearing a new and more dreadful outburst of the popular discontent, renewed her hollow advances to the Protestant churches, held a long consultation with Louis Regnier de la Planche (the eminent historian, whose profoundly philosophical and exact chronicle of this short reign leaves us only disappointed that he confined his masterly investigations to so limited a field) respecting the grounds of the existing dissatisfaction, and despatched Coligny to Normandy for the purpose of finding a cure for the evil.