Simier’s departure with the draft agreement—The Queen suddenly cools towards the match—Her perplexity—Her efforts to temporise—Suggestions for an alliance with France—Simier’s letters pleading AlenÇon’s cause—AlenÇon’s plans in Flanders—Signature of the Peace of Fleix—Queen Margaret’s intrigues against the AlenÇon match—Simier’s disgrace—Catholic intrigues to gain AlenÇon—AlenÇon’s new envoys to England—Clausse de Marchaumont’s negotiations—His favour with the Queen—“La belle jarretiÈre.”

On the 9th of November, 1579, Simier came to the Queen and told her he could delay no longer going back to his master; and if a final decision was not at once adopted, he must return without it. He was closeted with her for several hours, and the next day she summoned the principal councillors to her chamber, and told them that she had made up her mind to marry, and they need say no more about it; their duty now was simply to devise the necessary means for carrying out her wishes. She then sent post-haste to bring back Stafford, who was on his way to AlenÇon, and for a day her councillors thought the matter was settled. But the next day a cool gust of prudence passed over her passion, and she again sent to the councillors ordering them to give her individually their opinions in writing. This did not suit Simier, and he rushed off to the Queen and told her it was now unwise and unnecessary, as she had made up her mind. She haughtily asked who told him that, to which he replied that it was Cecil; whereupon she flew into one of her violent rages against councillors who could not keep their mouths shut, and flung out of the room, leaving Simier to meditate upon the inconstancy of woman. She then ordered the councillors to send a joint letter begging AlenÇon to expedite his coming, but they refused to do so, and urged that before the Prince himself came a person of higher rank and more serious standing than Simier should come to settle the conditions. When Simier heard this he booted and spurred without more ado, and went in a huff to take leave of the Queen. She mollified him, however, with blandishments, and during the next few days the terms of settlement were hastily agreed upon and signed in draft, giving AlenÇon and his household the right to attend the Catholic service in his own chapel. But when the protocol was handed to Simier for conveyance to France the Queen characteristically insisted upon his giving an undertaking which always left her a loophole of escape. The original document in Simier’s handwriting is at Hatfield, and agrees that the articles shall remain in suspense for two months, “during which time her Majesty hopes to have brought her people to consent to the marriage.” If before that time she did not write to the King and AlenÇon consenting to receive ambassadors to sign the contract, the whole present conditions were to be absolutely null and void.

Simier left London on the 24th of November, loaded with presents, and from Gravesend wrote a long letter to the Queen, warning her against those who, for their own ends, were trying to persuade her to forego the match, and who had been publicly boasting in London that as soon as his back was turned they would easily change her mind. He finishes his letter by what comes perilously near a bit of love-making on his own account, and during his two days’ stay at Dover, and from Calais, letter followed letter from him to the Queen, in all of which the hope is fervently expressed that “le singe restera tousjours vostre, et que la distance des lyeus, ni la longeur du tanps, ni les fausses invantions des mes contrÈres, ne me pouront aporter aucun prÉjudisse en vos bonnes grasses ni enpecher le souleil de mes yeulx, qui ne peuvent Être contans que voyent vostre grenouille aupres de vostre MajestÉ et moy coume singe me voyr hordinere À vos piÉs,” and so on, page after page. Stafford accompanied him across, and brought back a letter with a great emerald embedded in the seal, from AlenÇon to the Queen, telling her of the efforts which were being made to bring him and Navarre again into good agreement with the King, to which the Queen replied, leaving for once the philandering strain, and writing a serious and statesmanlike warning against his being too pliant. There is no doubt that for a time after Simier left, the influence of Leicester, Hatton, and Walsingham somewhat cooled her towards the marriage. Stafford went first with Simier to Paris to lay the draft conditions before the King, and took the opportunity of demanding some further limitation with regard to the exercise of the Catholic religion. Henry III. would have nothing to say to this, but left it to his brother’s conscience, but he wrote to his ambassador in England pointing out that this was another of their tricks to break off the affair.

Stafford found AlenÇon no more yielding than his brother, and for a time matters looked unpromising, the “monkey” continuing to write gushing letters to the Queen, begging her not to be influenced by the “mile faulx bruis” of Walsingham and others, who are trying to render the affair abortive. At this juncture, doubtless, the Queen wrote the long letter without date to the Duke,115 pointing out to him the unpopularity of the match and the many difficulties of carrying it through, unless the terms taken by Simier, particularly with regard to religion and the pension, were relaxed. If this is impossible, she says, and the affair falls through, let us not worry any more about it, but remain faithful friends for ever. This did not at all please the Prince, who plainly told her (January 28, 1580, Hatfield Papers) that some people believed that she was only making use of the religious question as an excuse to break off the match, and that he is not at all astonished that she has requested that the departure of commissioners for the ratification should be stayed. He was probably right in his conjecture, for only a few days before (January 17, 1580, Hatfield Papers) the Queen tried to pick a quarrel about the rank of the ambassadors to be sent. She had roundly told the King, she said, that she did not think France was so short of princes that he must needs send her a child or a low-born person. A person of the very highest lineage must come or none at all: she would never have the chronicles record that any slight was offered to her honour on so great an occasion. The poor “monkey” might write his inflated letters to the Queen, deploring, and denouncing the enemies who were impeding the match, and pleading in heartbroken accents the cause of his lovelorn “frog”; but there can be no doubt that at the end of January, 1580, in London, the affair was looked upon as at an end. A long and instructive State paper exists at Hatfield in the writing of Sir Thomas Cecil, dated the 28th of January, addressed to the Queen, and setting forth that the AlenÇon marriage, having fallen through, the Prince would probably seek revenge for his disappointment, and ally himself to the King of Spain, with the object of aiding a general Catholic assault on England and Ireland. Sir Thomas then lays down a certain course of action necessary to meet this danger. AlenÇon is to be encouraged to push his ambitious projects in Flanders in order to keep him at issue with Spain; the Queen’s forces by sea and land are to be put on a war footing, and German mercenaries are to be hired; English trade, as far as possible, is to be carried in foreign bottoms; the Irish are to be conciliated by large concessions to their national traditions; the Queen of Scots is to be more strictly held and her son subsidised; and the Netherlanders and the Huguenots are to be vigorously helped. This was a bold programme indeed, but was fully warranted by the circumstances as we now know them. The Guises were moving heaven and earth to prevent an understanding between AlenÇon and the Huguenots; the Queen of Scots was in active negotiation with Philip, through Beaton and Guise, for a Spanish invasion of England in her interest; and the Spanish troops, under the Papal banner, were backing up the insurgent Irish.116

The reason for AlenÇon’s tardy resistance to further surrender about his religion must be sought in the fact that the Catholic Flemings were still in active negotiations with him for his assuming the sovereignty of the States, and any wavering on his part in religion would at once have made him an impossible candidate for them. The fact of the Prince of Orange and the Huguenots being in his favour was already rather against his chances with the Walloons, and it was necessary for him to assume a devotion to Catholicism, the sincerity of which may well be doubted. It will thus be seen that the position was full of danger and uncertainty to Elizabeth, as she could never allow a Frenchman to be dominant in the Netherlands unless he was her humble servant. This, of course, was obvious to AlenÇon as it was to her, and it was necessary for him to know upon which side he would have to depend for the promotion of his ambition, either the Queen of England and the Huguenots, or the Catholic Flemings and his brother. On the very day, therefore, that the two months stipulated with Simier expired, namely, the 24th of February, 1580, Castelnau, the French ambassador, went to the Queen and asked for a definite answer as to whether she would marry the Prince on the terms arranged or not. She replied that it was not a matter which could be settled in such a hurry, and she must consult her Council and her people. After a good deal of bickering the ambassador unmasked his batteries, and told her that if she did not carry out her agreement to marry him, the Prince, in his own justification and to show people that he had not come to England out of mere flightiness, would be obliged to publish all her letters. She replied, in her usual vein, that she was surprised that AlenÇon should think of treating any lady in this way, much less a Queen, and with this she closed the colloquy in great anger and indignation.

Mendoza tells the story,117 and adds that after the ambassador had left, “she being alone in her chamber with Cecil and the Archbishop of York, whom she considers a very clever man, she said, My lord, here am I between Scylla and Charybdis. AlenÇon has agreed to all the terms I sent him, and he is asking me to tell him when I wish him to come and marry me. If I do not marry him I know not whether he will remain friendly with me; and if I do I shall not be able to govern my country with the freedom and security I have hitherto enjoyed. What shall I do?” The answer of the Archbishop was that every one would be glad with whatever she decided upon. She then turned to Cecil and asked him what he thought, as he had been absent from the Council for three days past. He said that if she wished to marry she should do so, as no harm could come to the country now that AlenÇon had agreed to their terms; but, he added, if she did not mean to marry him she ought to undeceive him at once. She sharply told him that the rest of the councillors were not of his opinion, but that the Duke should be kept in hand by correspondence. How could she tell, she asked, the feeling of the King of Spain towards her, and whether it would be safe for her to let go her hold on France? Cecil, not relishing the snub, replied that those who tried to trick princes were themselves generally tricked in the end. The Spanish ambassador thought, and he was no doubt right, that AlenÇon’s pressure and covert threats were for the purpose of forcing the Queen to help him in his designs in Flanders as some solatium for the slight she had put upon him and his family by throwing him over in the marriage negotiations; and colour is given to this view by the fact that envoys arrived simultaneously from La Noue, the Huguenot chief, who was now in the service of the States, from Orange, and the Prince of CondÉ, to beg the Queen to send help to establish AlenÇon in the Netherlands. This appeared to the Queen a good way out of her difficulty, and she seems to have seized it with avidity, though always with a pretence that the marriage negotiations were still pending, in order to save appearances and disarm the French Government. On the receipt, therefore, of a letter from AlenÇon by Captain Bourg, on the 7th of March, announcing that he only awaited her permission to send Marshal de CossÉ, to settle the conditions, the Queen took what was for her a very unusual step, namely, to pay a ceremonious visit by water to the French ambassador, to promise him shortly to fix a date for the coming of the commissioners. How hollow the pretence was, however, is seen by a letter written at the same time by Simier to the Queen, headed by a true lovers’ knot, in which “her faithful monkey” deplores that she has broken off the match which he ascribes to the machinations of his enemies, and says that he would rather have given his right arm and ten years of his life than it should have happened, or if she had decided to break it off that she had not done so ten months before. Elizabeth continued her great show of cordiality to the French ambassador, and when the Prince of CondÉ himself came in June to complain to her of the treatment suffered by the Protestants in France, and to beg her aid, she went to the length of refusing to receive him excepting in the presence of Castelnau, and by every means in her power sought to bring about an understanding with the French Government before she pledged herself single-handed too deeply in the troubled affairs of Flanders. But this did not at all suit AlenÇon, who had his own game to play and knew full well that if a cordial alliance were arranged between his brother and the Queen of England there would be no need for the latter to marry him, or for either party to risk an open rupture with Spain for the sake of his personal aggrandisement; particularly at the present moment, when Elizabeth was in great alarm at a powerful Spanish fleet which had just put to sea. So the faithful “frog” and his attendant monkey began to get ardent again. De Vray was sent to smooth down misunderstandings and to mollify Leicester, who, after grumbling that the French were not giving him enough presents, had gone whining to the Spanish ambassador to offer his services to impede the understanding with the French—for a consideration. Simier writes on the 18th of April:118 “As for your frog, his flame is immortal, and his love towards you can never end either in this world or the next. By God, Madame, lose no more time! Take counsel with yourself and those whose faithful attachment is known to you for your own sake rather than their advancement ... let Monseigneur soon approach your charms. This is the daily prayer of your monkey who, with all humility, kisses the shadow of your footsteps.” AlenÇon’s letters, although somewhat less hyperbolical, are yet very loving, and press the Queen urgently to allow commissioners to come to finally settle the marriage conditions, and in this request he was seconded by his mother and brother. To all these letters answers were sent after much delay, “containing many sweet words but no decision;” and the Spanish ambassador writing an account of matters to his master on the 21st of May,119 says that the French were threatening the Queen with AlenÇon’s resentment if she did not marry him now the matter was so far advanced. “In this way both parties are weaving a Penelope’s web simply to cover the designs which I have already explained to your Majesty.” These designs were, on AlenÇon’s part, to force Elizabeth into a marriage, or into supporting him in Flanders as the price of throwing him over; on Elizabeth’s part that if he went into Flanders at all he should do so only as her tool and that of the Huguenots; or otherwise to bring about a close alliance between England and France, or a rupture between the latter and Spain: and on the part of Henry III. and his mother, to get rid of their “enfant terrible,” by marrying him in England, and to drive Elizabeth single-handed into a contest with Spain. The States envoys from Ghent meanwhile were pressing upon AlenÇon the sovereignty of the Netherlands, and the matter could not brook long delay for Alexander Farnese, who was no sluggard, had just routed La Noue, and was pressing them hard. AlenÇon therefore thought that affairs must be precipitated or he would slip to the ground between his brother and the Queen of England, between Protestant and Catholic support; and the pressure put upon Elizabeth was now so strong, and the danger that AlenÇon would enter Flanders independent of her so great, that a Council was held on the 5th of June, and unanimously decided that a request should be sent to France for commissioners to be despatched to England. Sir Edward Stafford at the same time was despatched to AlenÇon, to negotiate with him and obtain his co-operation with the embassy. But Stafford found the Duke in the sulks. He knew full well that the sending of a formal embassy by his brother to England would be more likely to lead to an alliance than a marriage, or that if a marriage was brought about by these means it would be on such terms as would hamper rather than help his ambition; so he stood out, and at last only gave his concurrence with the embassy on condition that it should solely be empowered to negotiate a marriage and not a national alliance.120 Shortly after this, on the 12th of August, a formal deputation of the States offered AlenÇon the sovereignty of the Netherlands, which he nominally accepted. He was, however, powerless to move or assume his sovereignty until peace was made between his brother and Henry of Navarre and his Huguenots, who were now at open warfare. No French troops of either party were available for AlenÇon until he had persuaded the Bearnais to come to terms, and had raised the siege of La FÈre. The Duke’s first care, therefore, was to patch up some sort of settlement between the two factions in France, not a very easy matter, particularly when the King, learning of the vast Spanish plunder brought by Drake from America, and concluded that Elizabeth’s fear of reprisals would render her powerless to back up the Huguenots. At last, however, the peace of Fleix was signed in November, 1580, and the horizon for AlenÇon began to brighten somewhat. Amongst those in the French Court who most strongly opposed his marriage was his sister Margaret, Queen of Navarre, for reasons which the scandalmongers of the time had much to say; and in the correct belief that Simier was largely instrumental in bringing about the match, she prompted her great friend Fervaques and his ally Balagny to pick a quarrel with the “monkey,” and if possible kill him. Thereupon ensued a bitter feud in AlenÇon’s household, which ended in the flight of Simier to his abbey of Bourgueil, whence he wrote a series of interesting letters to Elizabeth in his usual strain, giving her a full account of all that had happened. She, for her part, kept up the correspondence actively, and zealously endeavoured to induce his master to restore him to favour. AlenÇon seems to have treated his servitor very badly. Simier tells the Queen that only a few days before his disgrace he lent the Duke 90,000 crowns, and that suddenly he had been deprived of all he possessed, “and turned out in his shirt.” He ascribes his trouble mostly to Margaret, and his letters—particularly that of the 18th of October121—are so full of scandal that one can well understand his fervent prayers that the Queen will burn his letters and not let a soul but herself read them. It is almost impossible to read these letters and believe in the innocence of the Queen’s relations with Simier, as witness the final words in the aforesaid long letter of the 18th of October: “I pray you, madame, that no living soul shall know of my letters. I place my life in your hands, and only wish to preserve it to do you service. For I am your ape, and you are my creator, my defender, my stay, and my saviour. You are my god, my all, my life, my hope, my faith, and my consolation. I supplicate you then, and pray you with all my power to deign in your grace to bring my affairs to a happy issue. You will thus still further pledge the ape who in all humility will render you complete obedience to death, as willingly as he now humbly kisses and rekisses a hundred million times your beautiful and loving hands.” All this is mighty fine, but he gives the Queen in a postscript a piece of news which must have interested her still more, and certainly influenced her attitude towards AlenÇon. “Saturn” (i.e., the King of Spain), he says, “has informed the King and Queen-mother that if they can dissuade Monsieur from his plans in the Netherlands, he (the King of Spain) will grant him the territory of Cambresis, and will put him into possession of all the rest (i.e., of Catholic Flanders). The Pope and the Dukes of Savoy, Florence, Urbino, and Ferrara will guarantee this grant; and the Queen-mother has undertaken to make these overtures to Monsieur, who knows nothing of the matter yet. For God’s sake burn this letter and let no soul see it.” The effect of this was that loving letters were at once sent to AlenÇon, all difficulties were smoothed over, the commissioners should be cordially welcomed as soon as they liked to come, and what was of far more importance still, the Queen promised the French ambassador that when they arrived she would give AlenÇon 200,000 crowns of Drake’s plunder to help him in the Netherlands enterprise and subsidise Duke Casimir’s mercenary army of Germans to cross the frontier and co-operate with him.

But it was not a very easy task to settle with the King of France the preliminaries of the embassy, the extent of its powers, and the choice of its members. Cobham, in Paris, tried to pledge Henry III. to break first with Spain on account of his mother’s claim to the Portuguese crown, which Philip had usurped, but the King said he would make no move until Elizabeth did so. Whilst these discussions were going on in Paris, AlenÇon sent an embassy of his own to London (in February, 1581) to pave the way, in his interest, for the coming of the commissioners. The principal envoy was Clausse de Marchaumont, Count de Beaumont, who was accompanied by Jean Bodin, the famous writer, and others; and his principal task for many months to come was to beg for money aid for his master’s enterprise. He was received with apparent cordiality by the Queen, who was closeted with him for hours every day, and especially recommended him to the French ambassador as a great favourite of AlenÇon; but withal she must have watched him closely at first, for in one of his most secret letters her “faithful monkey” assures her that Marchaumont was entirely dependent upon the Guises, and recommends her to have a little secretary of his named Obterre “untrussed,” when she will find some news about Scotland. The Duke of Guise, it seems, had dropped a hint about it in the hearing of one of Simier’s friends. Whatever was the result of the Queen’s secret conferences with Marchaumont, not even her own councillors knew it, and she wrote a private letter, which no one saw, for one of the envoys, a cousin of Marchaumont’s, M. de Mery, to take to the Duke, and with it she sent a wedding-ring as a token. Mendoza says that “she also said publicly that she was now so anxious for the commissioners to come that every hour’s delay seemed like a thousand years to her, with other tender speeches of the same sort, which make most people who hear them believe that the marriage will take place. The three ministers (i.e., Sussex, Cecil, and Crofts) for whom Marchaumont brought letters only replied to him that they could say nothing further, but that the Queen seemed very desirous that the wedding should be effected.” The tone of this last remark is sufficient to prove that the Queen, at this time, was not in earnest, and that her real design, as I have already pointed out, was to compass her ends without burdening herself with a husband. At a subsequent stage, as we shall see, her passion once more, and for the last time, nearly swept away her judgment, and drove her into a position from which it was difficult to extricate herself without matrimony or loss of prestige. Marchaumont brought with him a secretary of AlenÇon’s named de Bex, who kept up an extremely active correspondence during the whole of his stay in England, with a large circle of friends in France (Hatfield Papers), letters which are full of curious sidelights on the manners of the times, but which do not give us much fresh information on the marriage negotiations. Another confidential agent of AlenÇon was also constantly about the Queen’s person, and his letters at Hatfield prove that for many months the most secret instructions of the French ambassador and the special envoys were immediately conveyed to Elizabeth by this man, who is only known to us under the pseudonym of “Le Moyne,” with which he signed his letters to the Queen and to AlenÇon, with both of whom he seems to have been equally familiar. “Le Moyne” has, I believe, never hitherto been identified, but a careful comparison of his letters with certain known facts of Marchaumont’s life convinces me that the mysterious “monk” who was so deep in the confidence of the Queen was Marchaumont himself. How highly she favoured him is proved by her behaviour to him on the occasion of her famous visit to Drake’s ship, the Pelican, at Deptford early in April, 1581. When the great sailor approached his sovereign after the banquet to receive the honour of knighthood, she jokingly told him she had a gilded sword wherewith to strike off his head, but turning to Marchaumont she handed the sword to him and authorised him to give Drake the accolade, which he did.122 When she was crossing the gangway to go on board the Pelican, one of her purple and gold garters slipped down and trailed behind her, whereupon Marchaumont, who followed, seized it as a lawful prize to send to his master. The Queen besought him to return it to her, as she had nothing else to prevent her stocking from slipping down; but the gallant Frenchman refused to surrender it until she promised to restore it to him as soon as she returned to Westminster. She made no ado about putting the garter on before him, and the next day M. de Mery was started off hastily to the lovelorn “frog,” again bearing with him a letter of high-flown affection from the Queen and the precious garter from Marchaumont.123 For a long time afterwards AlenÇon, in his letters to the Queen, refers to her “belle jartiÈre” as a talisman which is the cause of all his good fortune. Garters and loving words were very well in their way, but AlenÇon was anxious to come to business. The embassy was waiting to go over to England, and affairs both in Flanders and France were reaching a point where it was necessary for the Duke to know upon whom he could depend. His answer, therefore, was most pressing. “He could have,” he said, “no rest until the Queen gave him a certain and definite answer as to the fulfilment of the marriage so long treated of. He earnestly beseeches her, in recompense for his faithful affection, to put aside all doubts, ambiguities, and irresolutions, and give expression to her final wishes on the matter. If she shall approve of the setting out of the embassy to conclude the marriage, as soon as her reply to the present despatch shall have been received, they shall be sent with instructions to obey and satisfy her rather by deeds than by words.”124