The treaty of Cateau-Cambresis had left a number of soldiers of every rank without employment and without resources. There was a public debt of forty-eight million livres, the interest of which was paid with difficulty; the treasury was empty, and there were no ready means of filling it. Perhaps the persecution of the heretics, which was always attended with confiscation of property, may not have been entirely unconnected with the financial difficulties of the royal household. But there certainly was no money, and when the disbanded soldiers applied to the Cardinal of Lorraine for their arrears of pay, he not only threatened to hang them, but erected two gibbets before the gate of the palace of St. Germains, or, as others say, of Fontainebleau. It was a threat as unwise as it was cruel, and nearly cost the Guises very dear. The malcontent soldiery joined the persecuted Huguenots--each party feeling a common hatred against the “Lorrainers,” and resolved to get rid of their common enemy. It has been asserted, but without any solid grounds, that Catherine looked favorably on this coalition, she being equally desirous of freeing herself from both duke and cardinal. But, whatever she may have suspected, she certainly knew nothing of what was actually preparing. In these humaner and more civilized days, obnoxious ministers and administrators are got rid of by dismissal, or by a vote in Parliament: in ruder times they were removed by revolt or assassination. In the middle of the sixteenth century the government of France was a despotism moderated by the dagger. Even within a month of the death of Henry II. a union of the malcontents was meditated, the Reformed only holding back until they should be assured of its lawfulness. They consulted Calvin, who declared that “it would be better they should all perish a hundred times over rather than expose the name of Christianity and of the Gospel to the disgrace of rebellion and bloodshed.” They were more successful with some German divines, who thought “they might lawfully oppose the usurpation of the Guises, even with arms, if the princes of the blood, their lawful magistrates by birth, or even one of them, should be at their head.”