Meantime, during this five weeks’ siege, strange things had happened. One of the Carews had been to London to convince the Court of the reality of the peril, and with blunt directness had driven the conviction that the case was urgent, home to the minds of the Council. Troops were promised, Germans chiefly, and though their number was not great, they were used to discipline—war was their profession, not their pastime—their arrival soon made a difference. The citizens were cheered and depressed alternately, as news reached them from the villages, that Lord Russell and the Carews were coming. The darkest hour, it is said, is that before the daybreak. It was so in Exeter at the end of July and the beginning of August. The siege had lasted five weeks, when news reached the city that the relieving troops had been defeated. Sunday, the fourth of August, was the darkest day of the siege. While the citizens were at Church, and, in obedience to the law, were using the new order of Common Prayer and Administration of the Sacraments, news had reached the ill-affected in the city that the King’s troops had suffered defeat. A violent mob paraded the streets, hungry and angry, shouting: “Come out, these heretics and twopenny bookmen! Where be they? By God’s wounds and blood, we will not be pinned in to serve their turns. We will go out and have in our neighbours; they be honest, good, and godly men.” The Mayor drove them back to their dwellings, and then the most faithful of the defenders entered into a covenant of fidelity to each other, no matter what might befall the city. Bedford House should be their citadel, and if and when that ceased to be tenable, they would go out by the postern gate into Southernhay, and cut their way through or die together. That very day the reported defeat was turned into victory. The relieving army, after reverses all but fatal, finally won the field. Monday inside the city was strangely quiet; before midnight the invading Cornish, the besieging multitude, had melted away. When the morning of Tuesday broke, Exeter was free. Such is the bare outline of the last siege but one of the many which Exeter has sustained. “The barns of Crediton” raised the country side; the bridge of Clyst St. Mary pacified it. Between the place where the fighting began and the place where it ended stood, and still stands, the ancient city which so often in the past had been a place of defence to the interests of the country, but never in all the long roll of her achievements had borne herself more bravely, more nobly, and more successfully than when she disdained to surrender at the cry of hunger the _rôle_ of law-abiding fidelity which was the crown and glory of her mayor and municipality in the July and August of 1549.