de' Medici for a passport to leave the kingdom, the queen
persistently refused, telling him that such a document was unnecessary in
his case. But she significantly volunteered the information that "some of
his nation had lately entered France without asking for passports, who she
hoped would speedily return without leave-taking!"[167]

[Sidenote: Siege of Rouen, October.]

Meanwhile the English movement rather accelerated than retarded the
operations of the royal army. After the fall of Bourges, there had been a
difference of opinion in the council whether Orleans or Rouen ought first
to be attacked. Orleans was the centre of Huguenot activity, the heart
from which the currents of life flowed to the farthest extremities of
Gascony and Languedoc; but it was strongly fortified, and would be
defended by a large and intrepid garrison. A siege was more likely to
terminate disastrously to the assailants than to the citizens and
Protestant troops. The admiral laughed at the attempt to attack a city
which could throw three thousand men into the breach.[168] Rouen, on the
contrary, was weak, and, if attacked before reinforcements were received
from England, but feebly garrisoned. Yet it was the key of the valley of
the Seine, and its possession by the Huguenots was a perpetual menace of
the capital.[169] So long as it was in their hands, the door to the heart
of the kingdom lay wide open to the united army of French and English
Protestants. Very wisely, therefore, the Roman Catholic generals abandoned
their original design[170] of reducing Orleans so soon as Bourges should
fall, and resolved first to lay siege to Rouen. Great reason, indeed, had
the captors of such strongholds as Marienbourg, Calais, and Thionville, to
anticipate that a place so badly protected, so easily commanded, and
destitute of any fortification deserving the name, would yield on the
first alarm.[171] It was true that a series of attacks made by the Duke of
Aumale upon Fort St. Catharine, the citadel of Rouen, had been signally
repulsed, and that, after two weeks of fighting, on the twelfth of July he
had abandoned the undertaking.[172] But, with the more abundant resources
at their command, a better result might now be expected. Siege was,
therefore, a second time laid, on the twenty-ninth of September, by the
King of Navarre.

The forces on the two sides were disproportionate. Navarre, Montmorency,
and Guise were at the head of sixteen thousand foot and