Lord Tony's Wife by Emma Orczy — Read

Had M. de Kernogan had his way and a free hand to mete out retributive justice in the proportion that he desired, there is no doubt that the hangman of Nantes would have been kept exceedingly busy. As it was a number of arrests were effected the following day -- half the manhood of the countryside was implicated in the aborted Jacquerie and the city prison was not large enough to hold it all.

A court of justice presided over by M. le duc, and composed of half a dozen men who were directly or indirectly in his employ, pronounced summary sentences on the rioters which were to have been carried out as soon as the necessary arrangements for such wholesale executions could be made. Nantes was turned into a city of wailing; peasant-women -- mothers, sisters, daughters, wives of the condemned, trooped from their villages into the city, loudly calling on M. le duc for mercy, besieging the improvised courthouse, the prison gates, the town residence of M. le duc, the palace of the bishop: they pushed their way into the courtyards and the very corridors of those buildings -- flunkeys could not cope with them -- they fought with fists and elbows for the right to make a direct appeal to the liege-lord who had power of life and death over their men.