The Baron des Adrets, who led some of the Huguenot bands, showed himself no less barbarous than Montluc. He had embraced the new religion on account of an action, which he accused the duke of Guise of having caused him to lose. He spread terror in the Lyonnais, Dauphiné, Provence, and the county of Avignon. But the chiefs of the Calvinist party were soon ashamed of, and shocked at his crimes, and sent Soubise to Lyons to restrain him. They even made him prisoner at Valence, and he was only set at liberty at the conclusion of the peace, which he resented so much, that he returned to the Romish communion and died a Papist. IX. Catherine de Medicis did not, as she had promised, make the prince of Condé lieutenant-general of the kingdom. She caused her son to be declared to have attained his majority, in a _lit de justice_ held at the Parliament of Rouen, on the 17th of August, 1563. Charles IX. was then thirteen years and two months old. This prince was not deficient in natural intelligence; he was fond of literature, and, under better discipline, might have prepared himself to have worn the crown worthily. But his mother had early trained him to be treacherous, dissimulating, suspicious, and eager for bloody spectacles. She had given him for his preceptor a man from her town of Florence, Albert Gondi, afterwards named Marshal de Retz, who, according to Brantôme, was cunning, cautious, corrupt, lying, a great dissembler, swearing, and denying God like a porter. The Edict of Pacification was not executed. Several Parliaments would only consent to register it after long resistance. The governors of the provinces relaxed or tightened the clauses of the edict at their pleasure; and the states of Burgundy, directed by the Duke d’Aumale, even dared to declare that they could no more endure two religions, than heaven could bear two suns. In the districts where the (Roman) Catholics were the strongest, they represented themselves as defiled by the neighbourhood of heresy, and gave themselves up to shameful acts of violence against the faithful, who went to the assemblies. They violated even the sanctity of the domestic hearth, maltreating those who sung psalms, compelling the Huguenots to furnish bread for the parochial masses, and to give money to the church societies. When the oppressed appealed to the laws, they were answered by blows, sometimes by assassinations. More than three thousand of them perished by a violent death after the signing of the peace. Where, on the other hand, the Calvinists were in the majority, they did not obey the Edict of Amboise, nor could they have done so, had they wished; for this treaty had been made rather for the north, than for the south of France. Imagine fifty to a hundred thousand persons compelled to take a journey of several leagues to celebrate their worship in a privileged town!