dilated upon in numerous pamphlets, imported dissension into the heart of
the League itself, which split up into two parties, the Spanish League
and the French League. The Committee of Sixteen labored incessantly for
the formation and triumph of the Spanish League; and its principal
leaders wrote, on the 2d of September, 1591, a letter to Philip II.,
offering him the crown of France, and pledging their allegiance to him as
his subjects. "We can positively assure your Majesty," they said, "that
the wishes of all Catholics are to see your Catholic Majesty holding the
sceptre of this kingdom and reigning over us, even as we do throw
ourselves right willingly into your arms as into those of our father, or
at any rate establishing one of your posterity upon the throne." These
ringleaders of the Spanish League had for their army the blindly
fanatical and demagogic populace of Paris, and were, further, supported
by four thousand Spanish troops whom Philip II. had succeeded in getting
almost surreptitiously into Paris. They created a council of ten, the
sixteenth century's committee of public safety; they proscribed the
policists; they, on the 15th of November, had the president, Brisson, and
two councillors of the Leaguer Parliament arrested, hanged them to a beam
and dragged the corpses to the Place de Grove, where they strung them up
to a gibbet with inscriptions setting forth that they were heretics,
traitors to the city and enemies of the Catholic princes. Whilst the
Spanish League was thus reigning at Paris, the Duke of Mayenne was at
Laon, preparing to lead his army, consisting partly of Spaniards, to the
relief of Rouen, the siege of which Henry IV. was commencing. Being
summoned to Paris by messengers who succeeded one another every hour, he
arrived there on the 28th of November, 1591, with two thousand French
troops; he armed the guard of Burgesses, seized and hanged, in a
ground-floor room of the Louvre, four of the chief leaders of the Sixteen,
suppressed their committee, re-established the Parliament in full
authority, and, finally, restored the security and preponderance of the