The prosecution of the prince of Condé and the vidame of Chartres was pushed during the month of November in order to overcome any Huguenot activity in the coming States-General.[263] The Guises assured both the Pope and Spain that their intention was, after the execution of the prince, to send soldiery into the provinces under the command of the marshals St. André, Termes, Brissac, and Sipierre, whose Catholicism was of a notoriously militant type, and thus either to crush the Huguenots, or drive them out of the country.[264] Condé claimed, upon the advice of his counsel, the advocates Claudius Robert and Francis Marillac, that as a prince of the blood he had to give account to the King alone and to judges suitable to his condition, as peers of France, denying the jurisdiction of the ordinary judges.[265] This the latter refused to allow, on the ground that there was no appeal from the King in council (which at least had been the practice of the crown since Francis I) because the judgment so given was an absolute declaration of the king’s pleasure; whereupon Condé, after the example of Marchetas, when condemned by Philip of Macedon, appealed from the King in bad council to the King in good council. The prince, however, adhered to his claim, until by a subterfuge he was made, in a way, to commit himself; for at last he signed an answer _to his counsel_, Robert, whereby the prosecution gained a point prejudicial to him, although good lawyers affirmed that a defendant’s counsel could not be made his judge. Thereupon the government organized a court in which there was a sprinkling of peers, in order to seem to comply with the law.[266] Under such practices the judgment was a foregone conclusion, although even after being declared guilty, the general opinion was that the prince would not be put to death, but that the worst that could befall him would be imprisonment in the dungeons of Loches, where Ludovic Sforza died in the reign of Louis XII; or that he would be kept in confinement elsewhere pending greater age on the part of the king and new developments.[267]