In the meanwhile Alençon’s position was getting more and more unpleasant. He had succeeded in alienating his Protestant subjects, the backbone of resistance to Spain; Orange was disgusted with and tired of him, and was praying Elizabeth and her councillors to have him back in England, or anything to rid him, Orange, of a profitless burden. The Dutchmen hated the French more than ever, and Alençon himself was chafing in impotent fury at his lack of means, his failure, and the undignified figure he cut before the world. By the aid of his mother, a number of Frenchmen flocked over the frontier during the winter of 1582–3, and at length Marshal de Biron himself joined the Prince, and the plot that had long been hatching was attempted. This was nothing less than by a coup-de-main to seize and garrison all the strong places in Flanders with Frenchmen. If this succeeded, Alençon might demand his own terms, either from Philip or Elizabeth, and the combined attempt was made on the 16th of January, 1583. Alençon himself took charge of the affair at Antwerp, wherein one thousand additional Frenchmen had secretly entered. This being noticed by the burghers aroused suspicion, and certain despatches from Alençon to Marchaumont in England having been intercepted and read by Orange, the latter gave timely warning to the Antwerpers. A large body of Frenchmen arrived suddenly before the town, and an excuse was made that Alençon was to review them outside the Burgerhout gate. As he sallied from the gate of the town with his Swiss and French Guard of four hundred men, he was joined by three hundred French horsemen, and turning towards the gate he cried to his countrymen, “Courage, comrades, Antwerp is yours!” This was the signal, and the Flemings at the gate were massacred. The slight resistance overcome, the main force of the French, with banners flying, entered the town with cries of “The Duke and the mass.” The burghers, unaware at first what the tumult meant, were taken by surprise, and sought refuge in their houses. But soon pillage and murder began to remind them of the “Spanish fury” of six years before. Alençon and Biron, however, were very different men from Sancho de Avila and Julian Romero; and the stout Antwerpers turned upon their false friends, blocked the streets, mustered their companies, and fought like the heroes they were in defence of their homes. Fire-eating Fervaques was taken prisoner, as were du Fargis, le Rieux, and Bodin. Biron’s son, the nephew of Cardinal Rambouillet, the Duke of St. Aignan, and his son, and two hundred and fifty other gentlemen were killed; the French loss altogether reaching two thousand men, one-half of their entire force, whilst the burghers lost only about one hundred. Alençon, from afar, outside the town, watched with sinking heart the failure of his treachery, and when he saw that all was lost, fled with difficulty, by the swollen rivers hotly pursued until he arrived at Vilvorde, where the French had succeeded in gaining the upper hand, as they also had at Ostend, Dixmunde, Alost, and Dunkirk, whilst they had failed at Antwerp, Ghent and Bruges.

The news came to England confusedly and in fragments at first, and the Queen was inclined to bring her suitor over to England for safety; but when full accounts came from the Prince of Orange, and the treason was thoroughly understood, all England growled at the falseness of Frenchmen in general and Alençon in particular. Orange sought to fasten some of the responsibility upon Elizabeth, because, in answer to all remonstrances as to his action and the increased number of Frenchmen with him, Alençon had invariably said that he was there as the Queen of England’s lieutenant, and was acting with her full connivance. She was, moreover, he said, already his wife before God and man, and on this plea had obtained large sums of money from her adherents for his own purposes. Orange was strongly of opinion that Alençon was acting in concert with the Spaniards, with the ultimate object of avenging himself upon the English Queen; and entreated her to help the States in the trouble that had befallen them mainly through their attachment to her, which had led them to trust Alençon. On the other hand, Marchaumont tried his best to stem the torrent that was setting in against his master, and to persuade the Queen that he was forced to take the step he did; and Elizabeth, who could not yet entirely turn against him, sent Captain the Honourable John Russell to inquire into the real facts of the case, and, if necessary, to offer Alençon a refuge in England. But the Prince’s power, such as it was, had fled, and with it his spirit and his health. Biron kept command of the French garrisons in the conquered towns, whilst Alençon wandered from Vilvorde to Dendremond and thence to Dunkirk, disavowed by his brother, and cursed even by his mother for his perversity.

Whilst Alençon was at Dendremond, in March, the Queen made an attempt through Darcy, whom she sent, to patch up a reconciliation between him and the States. She made an elaborate pretence of disavowing and threatening Sir John Norris and the Englishmen who had abandoned him when he attempted to assail the Flemings; but when he asked her to withdraw them all and leave him to deal with the States alone, she thought better of it, and the attempts at reconciliation fell through. But all this time not a word of the marriage. Letter after letter came from the Prince reproaching the Queen for leaving him unsuccoured in his misery, and complaining of Norris, who disregarded his authority; but even he apparently was undeceived now.

By the time he arrived at Dunkirk he was humble indeed. The very sight of the coast ruled by his “belle Majesté” revives him, and he beseeches her favour: “a mins jointes avecques les petits dois.” He feels a sweet and gracious air from her proximity, which he has not experienced since his sad parting from her; and finally, on the 30th of May, when the dreaded Farnese was already approaching his refuge, he ventures to remind her of her “promise and contract with him, and throws himself on her favour.”[166] But all to no purpose; he had served her turn, and was now useless to her. A month later he was forced to fly to Calais, and from thence went to Chaulnes, where his mother saw him for the first time since his adventure. She had gone with anger on her lips, but found her son with death in his heart, and had nothing but loving words for him and consolation for his disappointment. Once more for a short time an attempt was made by Catharine to maintain an appearance of keeping up the idea of marriage with Elizabeth, to prevent a closer approach between England and Spain; but it was only momentary and meant nothing. A cold, almost severe letter was written by the Queen to Alençon on the 10th of September, 1583, which really sounds the death-knell of the marriage.[167] She has not, she says, been favoured with his letters for a very long time, but now M. de Reaux had visited her from him. She is much surprised at his message asking what help she will give him to hold the Netherlands. “My God, Monsieur!” she says, “is this the way to keep our friends—to be always draining them? Is the King your brother so weak that he cannot defend his own blood without the help of his neighbours?” ... It is not her fault, she says, that things have turned out as they have, and she will not bear the blame; and she ends the cruel letter with: “God save you from painted counsels, and enable you to follow those who respect you more than you respect yourself.”

In January, 1584, Catharine sought her son at Chateau-Thierry, and at last persuaded him to a reconciliation with his brother, and took him to Paris with her. There, with tears and repentance on both sides, the brothers embraced each other, and the King promised his help towards another expedition to Flanders. Alençon returned to Chateau-Thierry to make his preparations, and there fell gravely ill. Guise, the Spaniards, and the Archbishop of Glasgow in Paris, were busy at the time planning the invasion of England and the liberation of Mary Stuart; and Catharine, in April, hastened to Alençon with a new project—that he should share in the plot and marry his sister-in-law, the Scottish Queen. But his health was broken. For the next two months he was battling with approaching death, though still actively preparing for his new expedition. But Elizabeth could not afford to allow the French to go alone to Flanders, and when she saw that Henry III. was helping his brother, she suddenly proposed to Castelnau to join her aid with that of the King. By the time the offer reached Paris Alençon was dying, and shortly afterwards, on the 11th of June, 1584, he breathed his last. Catharine cursed the Spaniards, and swore to be revenged upon them for her dead son, though how they were to blame for his death is not very clear; but the messages, both from the King and his mother to Elizabeth, kept up to the last the fiction of the love and marriage negotiations between her and the dead Prince. Catharine, indeed, sent to the English Queen the mourning which she wore for her so-called affianced husband; and the letter in which Elizabeth sent her condolence to Catharine is carefully conceived in the same strain. “Your sorrow,” she says, “cannot exceed mine, although you were his mother. You have another son, but I can find no other consolation than death, which I hope will soon enable me to rejoin him. If you could see a picture of my heart, you would see a body without a soul; but I will not trouble you with my grief, as you have enough of your own.”[168]

In very truth the farce of marriage by this time had been played out to the bitter end. Elizabeth was now fifty years of age and there were no princes left in Europe marriage with whom would have given her any advantage. From the far-off Ivan the Terrible, who had been dismissed with a gibe, to the youngest of the Valois, with whom she had played for years, every marriageable prince in Christendom had, in his turn, been suggested as a suitor for Elizabeth’s hand. The long juggle she had carried on had resulted in so much advantage to her country that she was in any case strong enough now to discard the pretence. Her old enemy, Philip, was a sad and broken recluse, sorely pressed even to hold his own, unable to avenge his ruined commerce, swept from the seas by the ubiquitous Drake, whilst his destined successor was too young to be feared, and he had no man of his house to second him. One more despairing effort was he to make in which he was to risk his all and lose it on the hazard of regaining the paramount position from which he had allowed himself to be ousted by the bold chicanery of the English Queen. But the armada was beaten by anticipation years before it was launched amid so much pompous mummery; for the English seamen knew full well that fast, well-handled ships that would sail close to the wind could harass the cumbrous galleons of Philip as they pleased, and the victory for England was a foregone conclusion. The King of France was a childless cipher, incapable of great designs or important action; his mother, whose busy brain had for so long been the dominant factor in France, was rapidly sinking to her rest. Protestantism was now firmly rooted in England, and had nothing to fear from within during the life of the great Queen, whose popularity was unbounded amongst all sections of her subjects, whilst in the rest of Europe it was evidently a waxing rather than a waning power. The Huguenot Henry of Navarre was next heir to the French crown, and could be trusted to give a good account of the Pope, the Guises, and the league; the strong Protestant princes of Germany rendered the Emperor harmless as a Catholic force, whilst the stubborn determination of the brave Dutchmen to hold to their faith at all costs, gave to their sympathetic English neighbours the certainty of a guiding voice in their affairs.

Elizabeth had, in fact, begun her long marriage juggle in 1559 in hourly danger of being overwhelmed and crushed by her own Catholic subjects, in union with one or the other of her great Continental neighbours; she ended it in 1583, triumphant all along the line, with both her rivals crippled and distracted, whilst she really held the balance of peace and war in Europe in her hands.

So at length the elaborate pretence of marriage negotiations, which for many years had been her great card, always ready to be played in the interests of England, could safely be abandoned. But it was too much to expect an elderly woman of Elizabeth’s temperament, who for the whole of her adult lifetime had fed her colossal vanity with the tradition of her irresistible beauty, who had gained great ends and derived the keenest enjoyment from the comedy of love-making, to give up entirely what for so long had brought her pleasure, profit, and power.

It was no longer a question of marriage, of course, but many gallant gentlemen, Raleigh, Essex, Blount, Harrington, and the rest of them, were yet to keep her hand in at the courtly old game, and bow their handsome heads before the perennial beauty which had now become an article of the national faith. With these one-sided courtships, the vain amusements of the Queen in her declining age, we have nought to do in these pages. The death of François de Valois, Duke of Anjou, and Alençon, removed from the scene the last serious suitor for the Queen’s hand in marriage; and his passing bell rang down the curtain upon the longest and most eventful comedy in the history of England.

THE END.