The Count de Montfort was summoned before the king and peers of France to answer to the charge of having already done homage to the English king, as suzerain of a French province—a charge, by the way, which he absolutely denied—and to prove his title to the duchy before Parliament. To their decision he expressed his willingness to defer, and offered to abide by their judgment, but the same night, suspecting ill faith on the part of his rival and the French king, and fearing treachery, he withdrew secretly into his own duchy, of which he had already gained absolute possession, holding all its strong places with the free consent of the lords, the burgesses, the clergy and the commonalty of the chief towns, and being every where addressed as Duke of Brittany. After the departure of the count from Paris, the Parliament, almost as a matter of course, decided against him—firstly, _par contumace_, or as we should now say, _by default_—secondly, for treason, as having done homage to a foreign liege lord—and thirdly, because the Countess of Blois was the daughter of the next brother of the late duke, while the Count John de Montfort was the youngest of the family. I may observe here, that it is more than doubtful whether the alleged homage to Edward was at this time rendered; that the fact was positively denied by Montfort himself, and by his other historians; and furthermore, that the descent to the female line is very questionable in any French province or principality, the _Salique_ law, adverse to the succession of females, prevailing in that country. Be this, however, as it may, the princes and peers of France considering that the dispute between the rival claimants had resolved itself into a question between the rival crowns of France and England, which it virtually had, espoused to a man the party of Charles of Blois. Thereupon, the dukes of Normandy, of Alençon, of Burgundy, of Bourbon, the Lord Lewis of Spain, the Constable of France, the Count de Blois, and the Viscount de Rohan, with all the princes and barons present, undertook to maintain the rights of Charles; entered Brittany with powerful forces; and, after some sharp fighting, shot the Count of Montfort up in Nantes, where he was shortly after delivered to the enemy, not without suspicion of treachery on the part of Sir Hervè de Léon, his late chief adviser, whom he had blamed severely for retreating too readily into the city, before the troops of Charles de Blois.