In the meanwhile, the Princesse de Condé had been formally charged with complicity in the murder of her husband and summoned before the commission. She refused to appear, denying the competency of the tribunal and claiming the privileges of the peerage. The judges overruled the princess’s objections, whereupon she petitioned Henri III. that her case should be tried by the Grande Chambre of the Parlement of Paris. His Majesty having returned a favourable answer, she appealed to the Parlement, and obtained from that body a degree calling the affair before it, prohibiting “all judges and others whom it may concern from taking any further proceedings,” and ordering that all the documents relating to the case should be immediately forwarded to the registrar of the court, on the ground that the wives of the Princes of the Blood were no more able than their husbands to be tried save by the Parlement of Paris. At the same time, it appointed two celebrated advocates, François de Montholon and Simon Marion, to act as counsel for the princess. The commissioners at Saint-Jean-d’Angely appear to have paid no attention to these injunctions. The princess again appealed to the Parlement, which issued a second decree, confirming the first and ordering the commissioners to appear themselves before it, to answer for their disobedience. The King of Navarre, who had no intention of surrendering the conduct of an affair of such great consequence to himself to the royal judges, from whom he had everything to fear, replied by issuing a counter-decree, which rejected the pretensions of the princess, maintained the competency of the tribunal he had appointed, and ordered the commissioners to prosecute the affair, “in conformity with the procedure which they had followed hitherto.” In consequence, the sentence passed upon Brilland was confirmed, and on 11 July, 1588, the condemned man suffered his terrible fate. “He gave on this occasion,” writes de Thou, “several proofs of madness, although he confessed that he was guilty of several other crimes, and that he recognized the justice of the sentence that the commissioners chosen to try him had pronounced. He began, however, to blaspheme in a scandalous fashion, so that those who assisted at the execution had great difficulty in making him return to his right senses, which caused people to think that his mind was not very sound, and that, in consequence, much reliance ought not to be placed on his evidence.” On the same day, the fugitive page, Belcastel, was executed in effigy. As for Corbais, the _valet de chambre_, who had fled with the page and had been trapped so neatly outside the gates of Poitiers, we are not told what was decided upon in regard to him. He is not mentioned again in the proceedings.