but lost,” made vain attempts to recover this important post under cover of night and of the high sea, which rendered impossible the prompt arrival of any aid for the French; but “they held their own inside the castle.”  The English requested the Duke of Aumale “to parley so as to come to some honorable and reasonable terms;” and Guise assented.  On the 8th of January, whilst he was conferring in his tent with the representatives of the governor, Coligny’s brother, D’Andelot, entered the town at the solicitation of the English themselves, who were afraid of being all put to the sword.  The capitulation was signed.  The inhabitants, with their wives and children, had their lives spared, and received permission to leave Calais freely and without any insult, and withdraw to England or Flanders.  Lord Wentworth and fifty other persons, to be chosen by the Duke of Guise, remained prisoners of war; with this exception, all the soldiers were to return to England, but with empty hands.  The place was left with all the cannons, arms, munitions, utensils, engines of war, flags and standards which happened to be in it.  The furniture, the gold and silver, coined or other, the merchandise, and the horses passed over to the disposal of the Duke of Guise.  Lastly the vanquished, when they quitted the town, were to leave it intact, having no power to pull down houses, unpave streets, throw up earth, displace a single stone, pull out a single nail.  The conqueror’s precautions were as deliberate as his audacity had been sudden.  On the 9th of January, 1558, after a week’s siege, Calais, which had been in the hands of the English for two hundred and ten years, once more became a French town, in spite of the inscription which was engraved on one of its gates, and which may be turned into the following distich:—­

              “A siege of Calais may seem good
               When lead and iron swim like wood.”

The joy was so much the greater in that it was accompanied by great surprise:  save a few members of the king’s council, nobody expected this conquest.  “I certainly thought that you must be occupied in preparing for some great exploit, and that you wished to wait until you could apprise me of the execution rather than the design,” wrote Marshal de Brissac to the Duke of Guise, on the 22d of January, from Italy.  Foreigners were not less surprised than the French themselves; they had supposed that France would remain for a long while under the effects of the reverse experienced at Saint-Quentin.  “The loss of Calais,” said Pope Paul IV., “will be the only dowry that the Queen of England will obtain from her marriage with Philip.  For France such a conquest is preferable to that of half the kingdom of England.”  When Mary Tudor, already seriously ill, heard the news, she exclaimed from her deathbed, on the 20th of January, “If my heart is opened, there will be found graven upon it the word Calais.”  And when the Grand Prior of France, on repairing to the court of his sister, Mary of Lorraine, in Scotland, went to visit Queen Elizabeth, who had succeeded Mary Tudor, she, after she had made him dance several times with her, said to him, “My dear prior, I like you very much, but not your brother, who robbed me of my town of Calais.”