y castle of Montargis, belonging to the Duchess of Ferrara, to
which reference will shortly be made, afforded a welcome refuge.[161]

[Sidenote: Help from Queen Elizabeth.]

The necessity of obtaining immediate reinforcements had at length brought
Conde and the other great Huguenot lords to acquiesce in the offer of the
only terms upon which Elizabeth of England could be persuaded to grant
them actual support. As the indispensable condition to her interference,
she demanded that the cities of Havre and Dieppe should be placed in her
hands. These would be a pledge for the restoration of Calais, that old
English stronghold which had fallen into the power of the French during
the last war, and for whose restoration within eight years there had been
an express stipulation in the treaties Cateau-Cambresis. This humiliating
concession the Huguenots reluctantly agreed to make. Elizabeth in turn
promised to send six thousand English troops (three thousand to guard each
of the cities), who should serve under the command of Conde as the royal
lieutenant, and pledged her word to lend the prince and his associates one
hundred and forty thousand crowns toward defraying the expenses of the
war.[162] On the twentieth of September the Queen of England published to
the world a declaration of the motives that led her to interfere, alleging
in particular the usurpation of the royal authority by the Guises, and the
consequent danger impending over the Protestants of Normandy through the
violence of the Duke of Aumale.[163]

The tidings of the alliance and of some of its conditions had already
reached France, and they rather damaged than furthered the Protestant
cause. As the English queen's selfish determination to confine her
assistance to the protection of the three cities became known, it alarmed
even her warmest friends among the French Protestants. Conde and Coligny
earnestly begged the queen's ambassador to tell his mistress that "in case
her Majesty were introduced by their means into Havre, Dieppe, and Rouen
with six thousand men, only to keep those places, it would be unto them a
great note of infamy." They would seem wantonly to have exposed to a
foreign prince the very flower of Normandy, in giving into her hands
cities which they felt themselves quite able to defend without assistance.
So clearly did Throkmorton foresee the disastrous consequences of this
course, that, even at the risk of offending the queen by his presumption,