At Orange, the capital of the little principality which gave a title to William III. of England, and to his still more illustrious predecessor, the liberator of Holland, the Huguenots had long enjoyed an unusual immunity from persecution; but the news of the massacre at Vassy, and the threatening language of their orthodox neighbors, made them arm in self-defense. This but accelerated the crisis; the Catholics attacked the city, which, after a stout resistance, was captured, and treated as a fortress taken by storm (6th May, 1562). Serbelloni, who commanded the pontifical auxiliaries, excited his followers to their bloody work. They spared neither age nor sex: all the sick in the hospital were killed, some being tossed from the windows on the spears of the soldiers below. Women were hanged to the balconies of houses, and made targets to be shot at. But this was the least of the atrocities they had to suffer at the hands of a licentious soldiery, who often took pleasure in destroying their victims by the most lingering tortures they could devise.[341] When Montbrun captured Mornas, where these butchers had taken refuge, he put them all to death, and threw their bodies into the river, having stuck on them a notice to the “toll-keepers of Avignon to permit the ruffians to pass, as they had paid the toll already.” On the 25th April, 1562, the Seigneur de la Motte-Gondrin, who was governor of Dauphiny in the absence of the Duke of Guise, seized the gates of Valence; but his force was not strong enough to hold the city, which the next day was retaken by the Huguenot citizens, aided by their brethren of Montelimart and other places. Gondrin himself was attacked at his lodging, and the rebels having set fire to it to drive him out, he and all his party were slain. Among them was the provost of the city, upon whom was found a missive from the Duke of Guise, ordering him to “massacre and put to death all followers of the Gospel without any regard to age or sex.”[342]