The plot was laid to seize the crowned boy while the Court thus still sat in Blois, for the town was open and without walls. A mob could carry it. The leaders still professed that to this boy they wished no harm. It was his counsellors they would be rid of, and all their hatred was for the Guises--especially for the duke, their head, the real ruler. But before the appointed day the young king, restless, must be moving down river. He would hunt, and he was tired of the woods to the west and to the south. The Court set out. It was through this chance whim that the rising was postponed and lost its vigour. It was through this chance whim that the threatened Court found itself safe in the little stronghold of Amboise. As it there sat it felt in the air a menace all around. They had summoned and held hostage in the castle one or two of the greatest among those whom they knew to be their secret enemies. But the populace also was astir. Not all looks were kind, and there were strange men on market days. Some order misunderstood, some rashness, provoked a misfire. A crowd of men made for the castle, not all of them unarmed, professing that they must see the king. They were rejected; contemptuously enough young Francis II. even scattered coins among them, as being of the poor and common people. That was only the grumbling of something distant. It was on Saturday, the 16th of March, that the storm broke; but even then, ill-led. Men came swarming out from the woods on the south of the town. It was an armed attack. It has been called “The Tumult of Amboise.” The leaders were few, ill-chosen and worse followed. Not enough of the gentry were there. Horsemen and armour were lacking. It could but fail. The gates were shut in time, the ramparts armed, the wave of attack broke against impregnable walls; it was shot down under the trained aim of the archers; it was pursued, dispersed, driven to its woods again, and, on the way, whole dozens were rounded up and bound, and beaten, and thrust back into the castle as prisoners. For days the hanging of them went on, from the gibbet of the town itself, from the beams of the main gateway of the castle, from the iron crooks on its walls. The thing was over, and it had seemed small. The young queen had laughed at it. But it was the beginning of that tremendous business which was to fill all France with death and the destruction of lovely stone; to sow a permanent division, to leave, much later, the Bourbons supreme, and not even to end when the thirteenth Louis should have ridden out to strike the last blow at La Rochelle--how many years to come! THE FRONTIER (_September 9, 1642_) Richelieu, the Cardinal, was growing old, his work was nearly accomplished. It was the recovery of the frontiers, and on the south those limits were the Pyrenees.