This honourable declaration embarrassed the duke all the more that he had other anxieties on his mind. The news from Piedmont was bad: every day he received letters urging him to return. ‘The Marquis of Montferrat.’ they told him, ‘is committing serious depredations.’ But the headstrong prince was ready to lose his own states, if he could but get Geneva--and lose them he did not long after. Finding himself on the point of discovering a conspiracy, calculated to satisfy the cardinals, he resolved not to yield. His creatures and those of the prelate held conference after conference; at last they found a means--a diabolical means--of putting Pécolat to death. Seeing that lay judges were not to be persuaded to condemn an innocent man, they resolved that he should be tried by priests. To put this plan into execution, it was necessary to change the layman--the ex-hosier, the merry fellow who was at every banquet and every masquerade--into a churchman. They succeeded. ‘To gratify their appetite,’ said Bonivard, ‘they produced a forged letter, to the effect that Pécolat was an _ordained clerk_ ... and therefore his case belonged not to the secular, but to the ecclesiastical judge.’ The fraud found, or seemed to find belief in the official world. ‘Accordingly,’ goes on the chronicle, ‘they transferred him from the Château de l’Ile, which was the lay prison, to the bishop’s palace which was the Church court, and he was placed once more in the hands of the Pharisees.’ This was a stroke worthy of a celebrated religious order not yet in existence, but which was about to be founded to combat the Reformation. Henceforth we shall see none of that silly consideration, of that delicate circumspection, which the laymen had employed. The bishop, now become judge and party, ‘deliberated how to handle him well.’ Some persons having asserted that Pécolat could not endure the rack, the doctors again examined his poor body: some said yes and others no, so the judges decided that the first were right, and the instrument of torture was prepared. It was not only heroic men like the Bertheliers and Lévriers, who, by their daring opposition to arbitrary power, were then raising the edifice of liberty; but it was also these wicked judges, these tyrannical princes, these cruel executioners, who by their wheel and rack were preparing the new and more equitable times of modern society.[130]