As the year went on, the intrigue with Condé reached a point at which the Huguenot leader actually handed over Havre to the English, and promised the restitution of Calais; and before the autumn was far advanced, the town was garrisoned, and a troop of English--ignoring instructions from home--went to join Condé. The colour for Elizabeth's action was that the Guises had usurped the government, and that they palpably and avowedly directed their policy to the injury of England; also that she was entitled to take measures to ensure the restoration of Calais, promised by treaty. The fighting went steadily against the Huguenots, and Elizabeth made the mistake--in which the country supported her even with passion--of holding Condé to his promise as to Calais, instead of applying herself to the establishment of the Huguenots as a powerful Anglophil anti-Guise party. Throwing over the method which had so successfully cleared Scotland of the French, she staked everything on the recovery of Calais, forced half Condé's friends to look upon him as something very like a traitor, and alienated Huguenot sentiment completely. The battle of Dreux in December, followed early in the next year by the murder of Guise, led to the truce of Amboise, in April, between the warring factions; England was left in the lurch. A desperate effort was made to retain the grip on Havre, but an outbreak of the plague among the garrison ruined all chance of success. It fell, and with it the last hope of recovering Calais (July 1563). It was not till the spring of 1564 that the French war was formally terminated by the treaty of Troyes, when the English, after much vain haggling, found themselves obliged to accept the French terms. [Sidenote: The English Succession] Near the end of 1562 the Queen had been stricken with smallpox and her life all but despaired of; so that the grave problem of the Succession assumed a momentary prominence. Henry's Will had never been set aside; but no one would have viewed with favour the claims of the Greys. Mary of Scotland, the heir by inheritance, was an alien, and abhorrent to the Protestants. Darnley was the only remaining claimant of Tudor stock; [Footnote: Except the Clifford or Stanley branch, junior to the Greys. See _Front._] while the House of York had still representatives living, in two grandsons of the old Countess of Salisbury executed by Henry--the Earl of Huntingdon and Arthur Pole, the latter of whom did actually become the centre of a still-born plot. What would have happened had the Queen died at this juncture it is impossible to guess: happily for England, she recovered. But the interest attaching to Mary's course was intensified.