the Guises for the deliverance of the King and the state, in view of the dubious conduct of his brother, concluded that it would be too perilous to the cause for him to be overtly compromised, in event of failure.[102] Montmorency was not possible as a leader, for his religious leanings were in no sense Calvinistic; he was not a prince of the blood, and therefore his contentions could not politically have the weight of Condé’s; and finally, his grievance was more a personal than a party one.[103] The conspirators found a leader in the person of a gentleman of Limousin or Périgord, one Godfrey de Barry, sieur de la Renaudie,[104] who had been imprisoned at Dijon, escaped and found refuge in Switzerland;[105] he had a special grievance against the Guises, who had lately (September 4, 1558) put his brother-in-law, Gaspard de Heu, sieur de Buy, to death.[106] The active participants were, in the main, recruited from the Breton border, Anjou, Saintonge, and Poitou, with individual captains from Picardy, Normandy, Guyenne, Provence, and Languedoc.[107] Their rendezvous was at Nantes, in a house owned, it is said, by D’Andelot.[108] But the author of the whole daring project was the famous François Hotman, a French refugee at Geneva, and the real inspiration of the movement came from Switzerland, for the unexpected death of Henry II seemed to the French exiles in Switzerland to open the door of the mother country again to them.[109] [Illustration: CONSPIRACY OF AMBOISE SURRENDER OF THE CHÂTEAU DE NOIZAY (Tortorel and Perissin)]