couldn’t succor her,” said the mayor, “John Guiton, who was asked if he would not become an English subject.  “I know that you have always been malignants,” said the king at last, “and that you have done all you could to shake off the yoke of obedience to me; I forgive you, nevertheless, your rebellions, and will be a good prince to you, if your actions conform to your protestations.”  Thereupon he dismissed them, not without giving them a dinner, and sent victuals into the town; without which, all that remained would have been dead of hunger within two days.

The fighting men marched out, “the officers and gentlemen wearing their swords and the soldiery with bare (white) staff in hand,” according to the conventions; as they passed they were regarded with amazement, there not being more than sixty-four Frenchmen and ninety English:  all the rest had been killed in sorties or had died of want.  The cardinal at the same time entered this city, which he had subdued by sheer perseverance; Guiton came to meet him with six archers; he had not appeared during the negotiations, saying that his duty detained him in the town.  “Away with you!” said the cardinal, “and at once dismiss your archers, taking care not to style yourself mayor any more on pain of death.”  Guiton made no reply, and went his way quietly to his house, a magnificent dwelling till lately, but now lying desolate amidst the general ruin.  He was not destined to reside there long; the heroic defender of La Rochelle was obliged to leave the town and retire to Tournay-Boutonne.  He returned to La Rochelle to die, in 1656.

The king made his entry into the subjugated town on the 1st of November, 1628:  it was full of corpses in the chambers, the houses, the public thoroughfares; for those who still survived were so weak that they had not been able to bury the dead.  Madame de Rohan and her daughter, who had not been included in the treaty, were not admitted to the honor of seeing his Majesty.  “For having been the brand that had consumed this people,” they were sent to prison at Niort; “there kept captive, without exercise of their religion, and so strictly that they had but one domestic to wait upon them, all which, however, did not take from them their courage or wonted zeal for the good of their party.  The mother sent word to the Duke of Rohan, her son, that he was to put no faith in her letters, since she might be made to write them by force, and that no consideration of her pitiable condition should make her flinch to the prejudice of her party, whatever harm she might be made to suffer.” [Memoires du Duc de Rohan, t. i. p. 395.] Worn out by so much suffering, the old Duchess of Rohan died in 1631 at her castle Du Pare:  she had been released from captivity by the pacification of the South.

With La Rochelle fell the last bulwark of religious liberties.  Single-handed, Duke Henry of Rohan now resisted at the head of a handful of resolute men.  But he was about to be crushed in his turn.  The capture of La Rochelle had raised the cardinal’s power to its height; it had, simultaneously, been the death-blow to the Huguenot party and to the factions of the grandees.  “One of them was bold enough to say,” on seeing that La Rochelle was lost, “Now we may well say that we are all lost.” [Memoires de Richelieu]