Trade suffered not less than agriculture, for commerce can not thrive without the security of peace and law. Intercourse between town and town was almost entirely cut off, for the highways were no longer safe except to strong bodies of armed men. Tradesmen and mechanics, therefore, quitted their counters and workshops for the camp; and members of the inferior clergy, whose revenues had been extinguished by the troubled state of affairs, flung aside the frock and assumed the cuirass. And as if to make the confusion more complete, justice could not be administered, so much were the tribunals overawed everywhere. In Paris the anarchy seems to have been complete, each man being a law to himself. Not even in the terrible revolution that closed the eighteenth century were the bonds of society more thoroughly relaxed. The royal edict which carried out the provisions of the treaty of Amboise met with considerable opposition from the Catholics. At first, all the parliaments of the kingdom refused to register it, and their resistance was only to be overcome by the direct intervention of the crown. The Parliament of Paris yielded under protest; that of Dijon would not give way. The Duke of Aumale, brother to the murdered Francis of Guise, and governor of Burgundy, supported the parliament in their resistance, and declared, “There shall sooner be two suns in heaven than two religions in my government.” When the municipality of Amiens was in due course instructed to act in conformity with the edict, they pleaded that the instructions were insufficient, and put them aside until the king wrote to them in a tone that was not to be trifled with. The disappointment of the fanatic Catholics is manifest from a plot formed by a “fraternal association” to massacre all the Huguenots in the capital. All not of the Guise faction, and such as were moderate either in religion or politics, were termed “suspects,” and as such condemned to be sacrificed. L’Hopital, “the traitor chancellor,” and Montmorency, “le mauvais riche,” were to be the first victims. The plot was discovered and frustrated by Joan of Navarre, and some of the most violent of the civic conspirators were hanged at their own windows without any form of trial.[336]