e Duc d'Aumale and
other leaders seem to have endeavored conscientiously to execute the
stipulation; but their followers could not resist the temptation to attack
the Huguenots as they were traversing the suburbs. Nearly all were robbed,
and a considerable number--as many, according to Agrippa d'Aubigne, as
fell during the siege--were murdered. De Piles, on his arrival at
Angouleme, wrote to demand the punishment of those who had committed so
flagrant a breach of faith, and, when he could obtain no satisfaction,
sent a herald to the king to declare that he held himself and his
fellow-combatants absolved from all obligations, and that they would at
once resume their places in the Huguenot army.[740]

Nearly three months of precious time elapsed since the disastrous rout of
Moncontour before the royalists completed the reduction of the region
adjoining La Rochelle. Outside of that citadel of French Protestantism
only the little town of Tonnay, on the Charente, still held for the Prince
of Navarre. Yet so long as La Rochelle itself stood firm, the Duke of
Anjou had accomplished little; and La Rochelle had made good use of the
respite to strengthen its works. Every effort to gain a lodgement in its
neighborhood had signally failed. The end of December came, and with it
cold and discouragement. Anjou's army was dwindling away. The King of
Spain and the Pope recalled their troops, as if the battle of the third of
October had ended the war, and Santa Fiore, the pontifical general, sent
to Rome twenty-six standards, taken by the Italians at Moncontour--a
present from Charles the Ninth, which Pius accepted with great delight,
and dedicated as a trophy in the Basilica of St. John Lateran.[741] Henry
of Anjou himself was ill, or was unwilling any longer to endure separation
from a court of whose pleasures he was inordinately fond; and, resigning
the command of the army into the hands of the eldest son of the Duke of
Montpensier, Francois de Bourbon--generally known as the prince
dauphin--he hastened, at the beginning of the new year, to join Charles
and Catharine de' Medici at Angers. The French troops, meantime, were
either furloughed or scattered, and the generals condemned to inaction,
while the German reiters and lansquenets and the Swiss pikemen were
permitted to return to their own homes.[742] Such was the suicidal policy
of the Roman Catholic party--a policy which saved the Huguenots from
prostration; for it may with truth b