great sums locked up in the hands of the guilds in much the same way that the church had come to possess enormous sums in mortmain. This legislation, if it had really been effective, would have destroyed the guilds. The guilds thus put upon the defensive, owing to the reforming policy of the crown and the political Huguenots, sought to save themselves by pleading that they were religious associations. By this adroit movement they gained the support of the Catholic party. But the crown refused to yield, and we find the _Confréries de métiers_ directly supervised in letters-patent of February 5, 1562, and December 14, 1565. Coupled with these measures, we find others forbidding banquets, festivals, and like celebrations (edicts of December 11, 1566, and of February 4, 1567) which by this time had become centers of religious agitation among the Catholics. But the government could not maintain its course. The identification of the guilds and confraternities with the Catholic party gave them great and unexpected support. Under the new order of things they became the nuclei of local and provincial Catholic leagues.[787] In other words, the labor party became identified with the Huguenots, while the upper bourgeoisie, controlling the guilds, adhered to the Catholic cause—at Rouen in 1560 the merchants actually declared a lock-out against workmen who attended preachings[788]—and became the nuclei of the provincial leagues, exactly as in France in 1793 every Jacobin club became an arm of the Terror government. It was said at the time, and has often been asserted since, that these local Catholic leagues were but protective associations in the beginning and formed to repel Huguenot violence.[789] The Huguenots practiced as violent methods as their religious opponents and their offenses were as numerous; but with the exception of the Huguenot association in Dauphiné, there is no early example of a Protestant association similar to the leagues of the Catholics in the provinces. The Protestant local organizations were not so highly developed, in a military sense, as early as this, nor were they of the same form as those of the Catholics. Montluc himself, than whom there is no better judge, testifies that in the war in Guyenne in 1562 “they showed themselves to be novices, and indeed they were guided by their ministers.” The Protestants had a sort of triumvirate, it is true, in the two Châtillon brothers, and the prince of Condé, but their work only remotely partakes of the policy of the real Triumvirate; even their appeal to Elizabeth did not contemplate such radical conduct as the Triumvirate displayed.[790]