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