king in perfect security: they did not so much as know that La Renaudie was in the kingdom. They had heard rumors of plots, and warning letters had been sent them from Spain, Italy, Germany, and Savoy; but nothing reached them in a definite form until some days after their arrival at Amboise, when one of La Renaudie’s friends[120] betrayed him to the Cardinal of Lorraine. “The duke and the cardinal have discovered a conspiracy _against themselves_, which they have bruited (to make the matter more odious) to be meant only against the king; whereupon they are in such fear as themselves do wear privy-coats [of mail], and are in the night guarded with pistoliers and men in arms. ... On the 6th they watched all night long in the court, and the gates of the town were kept shut.”[121] The cardinal was indeed thoroughly frightened; but the duke, acting with great promptitude, strengthened the garrison by troops hastily drawn together from every quarter. Still the Guises were by no means free from apprehension, and Throckmorton describes the condition of the little town in the middle of March: “The 17th, in the morning, about four of the clock, there arrived a company of 150 horsemen well appointed, who approached the court gates and shot off their pistolets at the church of the Bonhommes. Whereupon there was such an alarm and running up and down in the court, as if the enemies being encamped about them had sought to make an entry into the castle; and there was crying ‘To horse! to horse!’ and a watch-word given by shooting a harquebus that all men should be in readiness, and the drum was striking. And this continued an hour and a half.” Sixty gentlemen had bound themselves by a solemn oath to penetrate into Amboise during the night, thirty of whom were to slip into the castle, and open one of the gates to the other conspirators. But the duke was on the watch, and had that gate walled up. Detachments of troops were stationed on the roads leading to the town and along the banks of the Loire, by which the various bands, coming up and ignorant of what had happened, were captured or cut to pieces. In one of these encounters La Renaudie was killed; his body was quartered and exposed at the four corners of the bridge.