Permanent ill will was fostered only against the syndic Trembley, commander of the garrison and conductor of the defensive preparations of the council. Whatever this person had done by the instructions of the council was laid to his individual account, and added to the mass of dark imputations which were heaped on him, as the head of an already obnoxious family. He plumed himself on the favour of the confederate ambassadors, and forfeited thus the last chance of retrieving himself in the public opinion. The remembrance of the armed intervention of Zurich and Bern, in 1707, was too recent to admit of their ambassadors doing any good to Trembley’s cause through the medium of pacific intercession. The departure of these embassies removed the only screen of the syndic: he demanded his dismission, which was refused him, in order to deprive him of his functions more ignominiously. No resistance or artifice of a powerful connection could save him: the tumults were renewed with increased fury; and the question soon ceased to regard the person or party of Trembley, and became that of the triumph of the aristocratic or democratic principle at Geneva. In 1737, the council ventured several arrests, and the consequence was that the whole body of burghers rushed to arms, and the council was defeated, not without bloodshed. A garrison from Bern and Zurich was thrown into the town: the ambassadors of these cantons, in concert with the French ambassadors, undertook the office of mediators, and in 1738 framed a constitution which set limits to the assumptions of the council and the principal families, and was gratefully and all but unanimously accepted as a fundamental law by the burghers. [Sidenote: [1762-1768 A.D.]]