Beyond Saumur, the royal army encountered no serious resistance until it arrived before the gates of Saint Jean d’Angély, commanded by the Duke de Soubise. The siege began on the 30th of May, 1621, and lasted twenty-six days. Among the number of volunteers was the Cardinal de Guise, who acquitted himself in the soldier’s calling better than he had done in that of the priest. He embarked in it with so much ardour that he died of fatigue, a few days after, in the town of Saintes. The king thence betook himself to Basse-Guienne, all the towns hastening to throw open their gates to him, except the little place of Clairac, which styled itself “_a town without a king, defended by soldiers without fear_.” It was taken after twelve days’ siege. A pastor named La Fargue, together with his father and son-in-law, was condemned to death. On the 18th of August, the royal army commenced an attack upon Montauban. This siege is celebrated in the annals of the French Reformation. The town of Montauban enjoyed municipal franchises, which had inspired its inhabitants with a great spirit of independence. Its councillors were men of head and action, and the firmness of their faith redoubled their energy. The Marquis de la Force had the command. The Duke de Rohan held his head-quarters at a little distance, and supplied it with succours of men and ammunition. Louis XIII. presented himself before the walls of Montauban with the Constable, the dukes de Mayenne, d’Angoulême, de Montmorency, the Count de Bassompierre, and the _élite_ of the nobility of the kingdom. He also, during the siege, enlisted an auxiliary of a very different kind. This was a Spanish Carmelite, the Father Domenique de Jesu-Maria, who had performed, it was said, miracle upon miracle, in the preceding year, during the war of the emperor of Germany against Bohemia. He passed for a great prophet: the soldiers called him the _Blessed Father_. As he was returning to his monastery in Spain, he visited the camp of the king, who asked him for his advice. The monk directed that four hundred discharges of artillery should be played against the town, after which it would infallibly surrender. The four hundred shots were fired, but the town did not yield. The siege lasted two months and a half, and the royal army tried, at repeated intervals, to take it by assault, but without success. At length, after considerable loss, the king, on the setting in of the adverse season, was, with tears in his eyes, compelled to retire. He raised the siege on the 2nd of November. “The people of Montauban,” says an historian, “were advertised of the approaching withdrawal of the army by a soldier of the religion, who the evening before the raising of the siege, betook himself to playing on the flute the sixty-eighth Psalm. The beleaguered inhabitants took this for the sign of their deliverance, and they were not deceived.”[76]