While this was in process, the heads of the Neri held a meeting by night in the church of the Holy Trinity, at which a plan was suggested to induce pope Boniface VIII. to constitute Charles of Valois, (who was brother to Philip the Fair, king of France, and then commanded an army under his holiness against the emperor,) mediator of differences and reformer-general of abuses in the state. The Bianchi, having received information of this clandestine assembly, and the unpatriotic project which had been devised at it, took grievous umbrage, and went in a body, with arms in their hands, to the chief prior, with whom they remonstrated sharply upon what they deemed a privy conspiracy hatched for the purpose of expelling themselves and their friends from the city; at the same time demanding summary punishment on the offenders. The Neri, alarmed in their turn, flew likewise to arms, and assailed the prior with the same complaint and demand reversed,--namely, that their adversaries had plotted to drive them (the Neri) into exile under false pretences; and requiring that they (the Bianchi) should be sent into banishment, to preserve the public tranquillity. The danger was imminent, and prompt decision to avert it indispensable. The prior and magistrates, therefore, by the advice of Dante their chief, who was the Cicero in this double conspiracy, though neither so politic nor so fortunate as his eloquent archetype, appealed to the people at large to support the executive government; and, having conciliated their favour, banished the principal instigators of tumult on both sides, including Corso Donati (Dante's wife's kinsman) of the Neri party, who, with his accomplices, was confined in the castle of Pieve in Perugia; while Guido Cavalcanti (Dante's own particular friend) and others of the Bianchi faction were sent to Serrazana. This disturbance, and the severe remedy necessary to be adopted, painfully tried the best feelings of Dante, who seems to have acted on truly independent principles in the affair, though suspected at the time of favouring the Bianchi. That, indeed, was probable; for though as chief magistrate he knew no man by his colours, yet, being a genuine Florentine,--and such he remained when Florence had banished and proscribed him,--he could not but he opposed to so preposterous a scheme as that of bringing in a stranger to lord it over his native city, under pretence of assuaging the animosities of malecontents, who cared for nothing but their own personal, family, or party aggrandisement, at the expense of the common weal.