Page:History of England (Froude) Vol 4.djvu/169

1545.] the shaft were snapped off by the violence of the blow. He sat firm in his saddle, and rode back unassisted to his tent; and when the surgeon thought he would die of pain, when the iron was extracted, 'he bore it as easily as if it had been but the plucking of a hair out of his head.' Francis of Lorraine bore the scar of that wound to his grave; but he lived to repay the stroke by waving the fleurs-de-lys on the battlements of Calais, whilst the remnants of the last English garrison were taking leave for ever of the soil of France.

His turn of victory was to come; but at another time, and in another reign. For the present Boulogne would not be taken; and the ally which had done the English so great a service at sea came again to their aid. The plague, introduced perhaps by the soldiers who had disembarked from the ships, burst out in the besieging army; whole companies were annihilated by its fury; and at length the men died so fast that they were not even buried. The corpses were flung out to putrify in heaps, and saturate the air with pestilence. A few weeks of suffering made the continuance of operations by land as impossible as in the fleet. Four thousand men were left in the fort, and at the end of September the siege was raised.

One exploit only the army accomplished before their dispersion. The Calais Pale was strongly defended on the French frontier. Towards the Netherlands, the friendly, or at least the neutral, territory of the