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So they prayed for her survival. While she personally believed in and felt his loyalty, others in power remained extremely doubtful. The English people, too, held bad memories of “protectorship” at the hands of Dudley’s father, Northumberland. They, too, prayed loudly for the queen’s full recovery. For the English, it was their act of faith and prayer that allowed Elizabeth to survive unscathed.
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    By the time the queen had recovered, relations between the allies were near breaking point. The Huguenots had finally lost Rouen during her illness, and they blamed Elizabeth personally for her impossible order to keep her forces within Newhaven’s city walls. Both Condé and Coligny turned against the garrison. They looked to Catherine de’ Medici to sue for peace. Abandoned by their untrustworthy allies, the English were left to face an exceptionally harsh winter under constant threat of attack from disgruntled Huguenot forces or the French, both funded by the king of Spain.
    Then the Battle of Dreux took place. The Prince of Condé was taken prisoner along with the former ambassador Throckmorton. Command of the Huguenot forces fell to Admiral Coligny, who was a far superior soldier to his predecessor. He persuaded Elizabeth in short order to supply more money and men, and this time, Elizabeth agreed immediately. However, by the time the money to pay Coligny’s mercenaries arrived in February 1563, it was all over. The leader of the Catholic forces, Francis, Duke of Guise, had been assassinated by a Huguenot sympathizer named Poltrot de Mérey, who may well have been in the pay of Coligny. 12
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    The political, if not religious, landscape had changed. Catherine de’ Medici was doing all in her substantial power to woo the Huguenots back to the crown of France without the able command of Francis of Guise. On March 10, Condé, while still a prisoner of the French crown, came to terms with the queen mother, ignoring all that Coligny hoped to achieve, and leaving the English in charge of the fortress town of Newhaven, uncertain of their role.
    Elizabeth eventually ordered Ambrose Dudley to surrender, but only if England could regain Calais. By June, even that bluster was nothing but a hollow threat. Plague had struck the garrison, and the English were dying at a rate of seventy-five men a day. They were out of food, and their communications to the rest of France had been cut off. A rescue by sea had been hoped for but never came. Finally, on July 27, Elizabeth authorized Warwick’s surrender. The French allowed him and his surviving men to return home. Though abandoned by the Huguenots and decimated by plague, the English had held out, but their return would spread the plague along the south coast of England up to London as if by some divine retribution for the invasion of France.
    From London, Elizabeth composed her “Prayer Wisdom in the Administration of the Kingdom” in which she begged the Lord to “send therefore, O inexhaustible Fount of all wisdom, from Thy holy heaven and the most high throne of Thy majesty, Thy wisdom to be ever with me, that it may keep watch with me in governing the commonwealth, and that it may take pains, that it may teach me, Thy handmaid, and may train me that I may be able to distinguish between good and evil, equity and iniquity.” 13
    Elizabeth had learned the most valuable lesson of her reign. Wars were costly in men, money, and matériel and were to be avoided at all costs. Most importantly, their outcome could never be reliably predicted.

 
    EIGHT
    Mary Stuart, the Great Catholic Threat
    The Pope greatly deplores that the peace of the Queen, the Cardinal’s niece, and her realm should be thus broken, but he trusts in God that the authors of the mischief will pay the penalty of their rashness.
    â€”Pope Pius IV to Charles, cardinal of Lorraine, October 1565
    Within the