Invested with his new dignities, whose importance his sagacity fully appreciated, Guise, with the least possible delay, set out for Compiègne, which, since the recent disasters of the French arms, was a frontier town. Those disasters, he felt, could be effectually repaired only by a brilliant feat of arms, at once useful to the state, and flattering to the national pride. Upon such a one he resolved. Calais, now upwards of two centuries in possession of the English, to the great humiliation of France, was the object of destined attack. Skilled in the stratagems of war, the Duke contrived, by a series of able manoeuvres, to avert suspicion of his real design, until, on the 1st January 1558, he suddenly appeared before the ramparts of Calais. The siege that ensued has been often narrated. It terminated, after an obstinate resistance, in the capitulation of the garrison, which had scarcely been executed, when an English fleet appeared off the port, bearing succours that came too late. The triumph excited indescribable astonishment and joy throughout France. It was a splendid revenge for the defeat of St Quintin, and produced a marked change in the sentiments of several foreign potentates, who believed that reverse to have prostrated the French power for some time to come. The Grand Signior offered the co-operation of his fleet, and the German princes hastened, with redoubled good-will, the levies that had been demanded of them. Pope Paul IV., when congratulating the French ambassador, pronounced the highest eulogiums on Guise, and declared the conquest of Calais preferable to that of half England. At court, the partisans of the Constable were in dismay, and tried to lessen the merit of the victor by attributing its success to the adoption of a plan sketched by Coligny. But even if this were true, the merit of the execution was all the Duke's own. Upon the heels of this triumph, quickly followed the capture of Guines and the evacuation by the English of the castle of Hames, their last possession in the county of Oye. "In less than a month," says M. de Bouillé, "Francis of Lorraine had accomplished the patriotic but difficult enterprise so often and fruitlessly attempted during two centuries, and had cancelled the old proverb applied in France, in those days, to generals of slight merit, of whom it was derisively said, 'He will never drive the English out of France.'"