The Duke of Guise, who, so long as there appeared to be any danger, had treated his prisoners with no undue severity, soon felt himself strong enough to wreak a ferocious vengeance on his enemies. He and his brother the cardinal, in the intoxication of their triumph, indulged in excesses of murder that can hardly find a parallel except in the massacre of St. Bartholomew, or the horrors of the French Revolution. The streets of Amboise ran with blood; and when the public executioners were wearied with decapitating so many victims, the remainder were bound hand and foot and thrown into the river, thus anticipating the frightful Noyades of 1793.[122] Throckmorton writes: “This heat caused upon a sudden a sharp determination to minister justice. The two men taken were the same forenoon hanged, and two others for company; and afterward the same day divers were taken, and in the evening nine more were hanged: all which died very assuredly and constantly for religion, in singing of psalms. Divers were drowned in sacks, and some appointed to die upon the wheel.... The 17th there were twenty-two of these rebels drowned in sacks, and the 18th at night twenty-five more. Among all these which be taken there be eighteen of the bravest captains of France.” Twelve hundred persons are computed to have perished in this massacre. The Baron of Castelnau-Chalosse, and Bricquemaut, Count of Villemangis, a Genevese refugee, had with others surrendered to the Duke of Nemours on condition that their lives should be spared; but the Guises were not the men to be bound by such a condition, when even Olivier the chancellor, not altogether a bad man, declared that “a prince was not required to keep his word to a rebel subject.” The Duke of Nemours had given a written pledge of safety, which, says Vieilleville, “vexed him greatly, who was concerned only about his signature; for if it had been his mere word, he would have been able to give the lie at any time to any one who might reproach him with it, and that without any exception, for the prince was brave and generous.” Pretty morality for a gentleman! When Castelnau was under examination he hesitated in some of his answers, upon which the Duke of Guise bade him “Speak out; one would think you are afraid.” “Afraid!” retorted the baron, “and where is the man so confident as not to be afraid, on seeing himself encompassed by mortal enemies as I am, when he has neither teeth nor nails with which to defend himself? In my place you would be afraid too.” On being condemned for high treason he remonstrated against the charge, not against the sentence, on the ground that he had undertaken nothing against the king; that he had merely leagued with a large portion of the nobility against the Guises, and that “these must be made kings before he could be guilty of lèze-majesté.”