He, therefore, urged Catherine to make a final endeavour to effect a peaceful settlement. Very reluctantly, she consented, and, towards the end of May, the Sieur d’Alluye was despatched to London with fresh propositions. D’Alluye was a young man of thirty, ignorant, conceited, and presumptuous; in fact, if it had been Catherine’s intention--which it probably was--to wound the pride of Elizabeth and provoke a new and humiliating refusal, she could not have made a better choice. Condé having requested that his confidant La Haye should be joined to d’Alluye, the Regent readily consented, well aware that a refusal transmitted through him would only have the more weight. Everything fell out precisely as might have been foreseen. After several acrimonious conferences with the English Ministers, in which d’Alluye “showed nothing but pride and ignorance,”[35] that gentleman haughtily informed the Queen, that “he had no commission to treat of Calais; his charge was only to demand Newhaven [Le Havre].”[36] Elizabeth lost her temper, and, red with anger, replied that, in occupying Le Havre, she had had no other purpose than to avenge the honour of England, which had been compromised by the loss of Calais. This frank avowal stung the national pride of the French to the quick; from the Channel to the Pyrenees the universal cry was “_Vive la France_,” and Catholics and Huguenots, moved by a common impulse, pressed into the army which was being mobilized to wrest Le Havre from the grip of the English. Catherine adroitly seized the occasion to renew, through Isabelle de Limeuil, her importunities; the last scruples of Condé were overcome, and on 19 June the English envoy Middlemore, who, on the pretext of facilitating communications between Condé and Elizabeth, had been charged by the latter to attend the prince everywhere, writes to Cecil: “The inconstancy and miserableness of this Prince of Condé is so great, having both forgotten God and his own honour, as that he hath suffered himself to be won by the Q.[ueen] mother to go against her Majesty at Newhaven [Le Havre], and for the present is the person that, above all others, doth most solicit them of the Religion to serve in these wars against her Majesty.” And he adds that the prince, “specially desiring now to have every man to show himself as wicked as he, hath sent for the Admiral and M. Andelot, his brother, to come to the Court out of hand, where, being once arrived, they think to prevail with them as to win them to like and take in hand the said enterprise.”[37] Isabelle de Limeuil had served Catherine well.