Epistola Ioannis Monlucii, episcopi Valentini regis Gallorum legati ad Poloni[a]e Ordines de Illustrissimo Andium duce in Regnum Polonicum allegendo

to seize whatever cities they could, to crush the Catholics in the cities while they were unprepared, and to cast them into prisons, and to extort the King's revenues from the treasurers by force. All the churches obeyed the command: from that, a great part of Gaul was invaded, captured, and oppressed by them. Certainly, there is no one of sound mind who would not easily concede that all these things were accomplished by a conspiracy instituted and composed for this matter many months before. But they, having nothing they could offer as a pretext, confessed that they had been led to act because of certain suspicions. But if it is permissible for suspicious men to disturb the Republic, to attack and besiege the King, what place will there be, in the end, for peace, or quiet, or leisure? And as for how light or mendacious that suspicion was, the outcome itself later indicated, when the King could barely gather an army in two months. They add, furthermore, that twelve hundred nobles were killed in Paris. But let them consult, if they wish, the catalog of the dead, in which those nobles who were killed are named, and they will admit that no more than forty can be found by all those who have cared to read the booklets sent from Gaul to Germany. They subsequently submit that the King had for a long time dissembled that this slaughter was deliberate and decided upon, but that it never happened that they could all be intercepted gathered in one place.