difficult to keep than to make.” Wolsey himself was cooled towards Charles V., who, instead of writing to him as of old, and signing with his own hand, “your son and cousin,” now merely put his name, Charles. The regent, Louise of Savoy, profited ably by these feelings and circumstances in England; a negotiation was opened between the two courts; Henry VIII. gained by it two millions of crowns payable by annual instalments of fifty thousand crowns each, and Wolsey received a pension of a hundred thousand crowns. At first a truce for four months, and then an alliance, offensive and defensive, were concluded on the 30th of August, 1525, between France and England; and the regent, Louise of Savoy, had no longer to trouble herself about anything except the captivity of the king her son and the departure of her daughter Margaret to go and negotiate for the liberation of the prisoner. The negotiation had been commenced, as early as the 20th of July, at Toledo, between the ambassadors of Francis I. and the advisers of Charles V., but without any symptom of progress. Francis I., since his arrival in Spain, had been taken from strong castle to strong castle, and then removed to Madrid, everywhere strictly guarded, and leading a sad life, without Charles V.’s coming to visit him or appointing him any meeting-place. In vain did the emperor’s confessor, the Bishop of Osma, advise him to treat Francis I. generously, and so lay upon him either the obligation of thankfulness or the burden of ingratitude; the majority of his servants gave him contrary counsel. “I know not what you mean to do,” wrote his brother, the Archduke Ferdinand; “but, if I were wise enough to know how to give you good counsel, it seems to me that such an opportunity should not be lost, but that you should follow up your good fortune and act in such wise that neither the King of France nor his successors should have power hereafter to do harm to you or yours.” That, too, was Charles V.’s own way of thinking; but, slow and patient as he was by nature, he relied upon the discomforts and the wearisomeness of prolonged captivity and indecision for tiring out Francis I. and overcoming his resistance to the harsh conditions he would impose upon him. The regent, Louise, made him an offer to go herself and treat with him, at Perpignan, for the king’s liberation; but he did not accept that overture. The Duke of Alencon, son-in-law of Louise, had died at Lyons, unable to survive the shame of his flight at the battle of Pavia; and the regent hinted that her daughter Marguerite, three months a widow, “would be happy if she could be agreeable to his Imperial Majesty,” but Charles let the hint drop without a reply. However, at the end of August, 1525, he heard that Francis I. was ill: “from great melancholy he had fallen into a violent fever.” The population of Madrid was in commotion; Francis I. had become popular there; many people went to pray for him in