In the mean time the French were not idle.  The army of the Constable had been destroyed but the Duke de Guise, who had come post-haste from Italy after hearing the news of Saint Quentin, was very willing to organize another.  He was burning with impatience both to retrieve his own reputation, which had suffered some little damage by his recent Italian campaign, and to profit by the captivity of his fallen rival the Constable.  During the time occupied by the languid and dilatory proceedings of Philip in the autumn, the Duke had accordingly recruited in France and Germany a considerable army.  In January (1558) he was ready to take the field.  It had been determined in the French cabinet, however, not to attempt to win back the places which they had lost in Picardy, but to carry the war into the territory of the ally.  It was fated that England should bear all the losses, and Philip appropriate all the gain and glory, which resulted from their united exertions.  It was the war of the Queen’s husband, with which the Queen’s people had no concern, but in which the last trophies of the Black Prince were to be forfeited.  On the first January, 1558, the Duc de Guise appeared before Calais.  The Marshal Strozzi had previously made an expedition, in disguise, to examine the place.  The result of his examination was that the garrison was weak, and that it relied too much upon the citadel.  After a tremendous cannonade, which lasted a week, and was heard in Antwerp, the city was taken by assault.  Thus the key to the great Norman portal of France, the time-honored key which England had worn at her girdle since the eventful day of Crecy, was at last taken from her.  Calais had been originally won after a siege which had lasted a twelvemonth, had been held two hundred and ten years, and was now lost in seven days.  Seven days more, and ten thousand discharges from thirty-five great guns sufficed for the reduction of Guines.  Thus the last vestige of English dominion, the last substantial pretext of the English sovereign to wear the title and the lilies of France, was lost forever.  King Henry visited Calais, which after two centuries of estrangement had now become a French town again, appointed Paul de Thermes governor of the place, and then returned to Paris to celebrate soon afterwards the marriage of the Dauphin with the niece of the Guises, Mary, Queen of Scots.

These events, together with the brief winter campaign of the Duke, which had raised for an instant the drooping head of France, were destined before long to give a new face to affairs, while it secured the ascendancy of the Catholic party in the kingdom.  Disastrous eclipse had come over the house of Montmorency and Coligny, while the star of Guise, brilliant with the conquest of Calais, now culminated to the zenith.