The news of the English alliance, although not unexpected, produced a very natural irritation at the French court. When Throkmorton applied to Catharine de' Medici for a passport to leave the kingdom, the queen persistently refused, telling him that such a document was unnecessary in his case. But she significantly volunteered the information that "some of his nation had lately entered France without asking for passports, who she hoped would speedily return without leave-taking!"[167]
Meanwhile the English movement rather accelerated than retarded the operations of the royal army. After the fall of Bourges, there had been a difference of opinion in the council whether Orleans or Rouen ought first to be attacked. Orleans was the centre of Huguenot activity, the heart from which the currents of life flowed to the farthest extremities of Gascony and Languedoc; but it was strongly fortified, and would be defended by a large and intrepid garrison. A siege was more likely to terminate disastrously to the assailants than to the citizens and Protestant troops. The admiral laughed at the attempt to attack a city which could throw three thousand men into the breach.[168] Rouen, on the contrary, was weak, and, if attacked before reinforcements were received from England, but feebly garrisoned. Yet it was the key of the valley of the Seine, and its possession by the Huguenots was a perpetual menace of the capital.[169] So long as it was in their hands, the door to the heart of the kingdom lay wide open to the united army of French and English Protestants. Very wisely, therefore, the Roman Catholic generals abandoned their original design[170] of reducing Orleans so soon as Bourges should fall, and resolved first to lay siege to Rouen. Great reason, indeed, had the captors of such strongholds as Marienbourg, Calais, and Thionville, to anticipate that a place so badly protected, so easily commanded, and destitute of any fortification deserving the name, would yield on the first alarm.[171] It was true that a series of attacks made by the Duke of Aumale upon Fort St. Catharine, the citadel of Rouen, had been signally repulsed, and that, after two weeks of fighting, on the twelfth of July he had abandoned the undertaking.[172] But, with the more abundant resources at their command, a better result might now be expected. Siege was, therefore, a second time laid, on the twenty-ninth of September, by the King of Navarre.