The calling in of the hereditary enemy brought great odium upon the Huguenot leaders, nor did they derive from it the advantages upon which they had counted, since Elizabeth, desirous only of securing an equivalent for Calais, declined to allow her troops to pass beyond the lines of Le Havre and Dieppe. At the risk of incurring her anger, Sir Adrian Poynings, who commanded temporarily at Le Havre, pending the arrival of the Earl of Warwick, sent five hundred men to endeavour to make their way into Rouen, which was now closely invested by the royal troops. The majority succeeded in this desperate enterprise, but they were powerless to save the town, which was taken by assault, after a siege during which the King of Navarre received a wound from which he died a month later, “still flattering himself with the hopes raised by the King of Spain.” He left as his heir a boy nine years old, who was one day to succeed to the throne of France through the common ruin of the Valois and the Guises. The intervention of the English, if it had served no other purpose, had drawn off the Catholic army from its projected siege of Orléans, and Condé, ever sanguine, did not allow himself to be cast down by the reverses his cause had sustained. “We have lost our two castles (Bourges and Rouen),” said he, employing a chess metaphor, “but we shall take their knights”; and he was eager to stake the last chances of his party in a great battle. At the beginning of November, the news that a considerable force of German mercenaries, which Andelot had raised in the Rhineland, was on the march to join him, determined the prince to quit Orléans and advance upon Paris. At Pithiviers, on November 11, he affected his junction with the foreign levies, and, at the head of an army of some 15,000 men, more than one-third of whom were cavalry, he moved slowly towards the capital, taking and pillaging the towns on his line of march. Paris was very weakly defended, most of its regular garrison being in the field with the Triumvirs, and, had he acted with vigour, he might have made himself master of at least a part of the city. But he allowed himself to be drawn into negotiations by Catherine, and the delay which these entailed enabled Guise to arrive with the advance-guard of the army which had been besieging Rouen. After a skirmish beneath the walls, and two unsuccessful attempts to take the city by camisado, Condé drew off his troops and marched into Normandy, with the intention of getting into touch with the English at Le Havre. But, owing principally to the immense number of carts for the conveyance of past and future plunder which the Germans insisted on taking with them, his army made such slow progress that the Triumvirs were able to outmarch it, and on December 19 the prince found them barring his road near the town of Dreux.