covered. Gathering new strength from day to day, it
reigned at length supreme in the fated city. Soon the daily crowd of
victims became too great to receive prompt sepulture, and the corpses
lying unburied in the streets furnished fresh fuel for the raging
pestilence. Seven thousand English troops were reduced in a short time to
three thousand, in a few days more to fifteen hundred men.[267] The hand
of death was upon the throat of every survivor. At length, too feeble to
man their works, despairing of timely succor, unable to sustain at the
same moment the assault of their opponents and the fearful visitation of
the Almighty, the English consented to surrender; and, on the
twenty-eighth of July, a capitulation was signed, in accordance with
which, on the next day, Havre, with all its fortifications and the ships
of war in its harbor, fell once more into the hands of the French.[268]

[Sidenote: How the peace was received.]

The pacification of Amboise, a contemporary chronicler tells us, was
received with greater or less cordiality in different localities of
France, very much according to the number of Protestants they had
contained before the war. "This edict of peace was very grievous to hear
published and to have executed in the case of the Catholics of the
peaceable cities and villages where there were very few Huguenots. But it
was a source of great comfort to the Catholics of the cities which were
oppressed by the Huguenots, as well as of the neighboring villages in
which the Catholic religion had been intermitted, mass and divine worship
not celebrated, and the holy sacraments left unadministered--as in the
cities of Lyons and Orleans, and their vicinity, and in many other cities
of Poitou and Languedoc, where the Huguenots were masters or superior in
numbers. As the peace was altogether advantageous to the Huguenots, they
labored hard to have it observed and published."[269]

[Sidenote: Vexatious delays in Normandy.]

But to secure publication and observance was not always possible.[270] Not
unfrequently the Huguenots were denied by the illiberality of their
enemies every privilege to which they were entitled by the terms of the
edict. At Troyes, the Roman Catholic party, hearing that peace had been
made, resolved to employ the brief interval before the edict should be
published, and the mayor of the city led the populace to the prisons,
where all the Huguenots that could be found were at once murdered.[271]