As we have seen, they took Lyons, and, after massacring priests and religious, abolished the Mass, and with the same breath declared that every one should be free in his religion. As the Catholics were unprepared, city after city fell into their hands, till no less than two hundred were swept by these devastating hordes, fiercer than Goth or Vandal. The history of every French city marks at this epoch the destruction of all that the past had revered. Orleans, Mans, Troyes, Tours, Bayeux, all repeat the same story. Everywhere priests, religious of both sexes, Catholic laity, were butchered and mutilated with every barbarity. The Baron des Adrets stands forth as the terrible butcher of this period, who made his barbarity a sport, and trained the mind of France to savage inhumanity. In the little town of Montbrison, in August, 1562, he slaughtered more than eight hundred men, women, and children. The recent French historian, Martin, whose work is in process of publication in this country, glosses over this period by merely alluding to the profanation and pillage of the Catholic churches and religious houses. {8} Every local history in France, however, attests the slaughter and mutilation of the clergy, the last infamy always popularly ascribed to the order of Coligny. Beza, writing in January, 1562, admits that the Protestants of Aquitaine, though enjoying full religious liberty, massacred priests and wished to exterminate their enemies. This sudden rebellion was the work of Coligny, who, with his army of religious enthusiasts, and "all the restless, factious, and discontented, who linked their fortunes to a party whose triumph would involve confiscation of the wealth of the church," with German mercenaries and English plunderers, swept through the land with prayer on his lips and treason in his heart.