The Lorraine princes and their intimate associates met at Nancy in January, 1588, and decided that a petition should be presented to the king; that he should be called upon to join himself more openly and in good earnest to the League, and to remove from offices of consequence all the persons that should be pointed out to him; that the Holy Inquisition should be established, at any rate in the good towns; that important places should be put into the hands of specified chiefs, who should have the power of constructing fortifications there; that heretics should be taxed a third, or at the least, a fourth of their property as long as the war lasted; and, lastly, that the life should be spared of no enemy taken prisoner, unless upon his swearing and finding good surety to live as a Catholic, and upon paying in ready money the worth of his property if it had not already been sold.

These monstrous proposals, drawn up in eleven articles, were immediately carried to the king.

He did not reject them, but he demanded and took time to discuss them with the authors.

The negotiation was prolonged; the ferment in Paris was redoubled; the king, it was said, meant to withdraw; his person must be secured; the Committee of Sixteen took measures to that end; one of its members got into his hands the keys of the gate of St.Denis.

From Soissons, where he was staying, the Duke of Guise sent to Paris the Count of Brissac, with four other captains of the League, to hold themselves in readiness for any event, and he ordered his brother the Duke of Aumale to stoutly maintain his garrisons in the places of Picardy, which the king, it was said, meant to take from him.
"If the king leaves Paris," the duke wrote to Bernard de Mendoza, Philip II.'s ambassador in France, "I will make him think about returning thither before he has gone a day's march towards the Picards." Philip II.