Rise and Establishment of Protestantism at Geneva - James Aitken Wylie

Licentiousness and tumult ran riot now that Calvin
was gone.[1] The year 1539 passed in the most
outrageous saturnalia.[2] The Council, helpless in
the face of these disorders, began to repent of what
they had done. The four syndics who had been
mainly active in the banishment of Calvin were
now out of the way. One had perished on the
scaffold, charged with the crime of surrendering
Genevese territory; another, accused of sedition,
had attempted to escape by his window, but, falling
headlong, broke his neck.
His fellow-citizens, on learning his tragic end,
called to mind that he had said tauntingly to
Calvin, "Surely the city-gate was wide enough to
let him go out."[3] The two remaining syndics,
implicated in the same charges, had betaken
themselves to flight. All this happened in the same
year and the same month.
It was now 1540. The city registers show the
daily rise in the tide of popular feeling for Calvin's
recall. September 21st: the Council charged Amy
Perrin, one of its members, "to find means, if he
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