The fact is that Henry III. had shown his hand. Alençon’s levies had been attacked by the King’s troops, and it was evident that unless he consented to forego his ambition and again become the laughing-stock of the mignons he must cleave to the Queen of England, marriage or no marriage. This she knew better than any one, and it was this for which she had been playing. If the French under Alençon went to the Netherlands to weaken Spain, they would go in her interest and at her behest, and not in those of France. No words accordingly could be too sweet for her to greet her lover, no promises too brilliant which could pledge him to go in person to relieve Cambrai, notwithstanding the pressure to the contrary from his mother and brother. Leicester, Hatton, and Walsingham, who feared their mistress’s impressionable nature, were frightened when Alençon appeared, and began as usual to stir up discontent of the match. “If he came to marry the Queen,” said the people, “he ought to have come as the brother of a king should do and with proper means, whereas if he did not come to marry, they needed no poor Frenchmen in this country.” Money and support for Cambrai were liberally promised by the Queen if Alençon would only go back again as quickly as he came and undertake the relief in person. So after only two nights’ stay in London he dropped down the river, unseen by any of his countrymen except Marchaumont and de Bex, and went back to France. No sooner was he gone than the envoys came out of their hiding again and boldly averred, with the aid of Leicester and his friends, that he had not been in England at all; and the hollow negotiations to cover their retreat were once more resumed. The capitulations with the nullifying letter were signed, sealed, and delivered,[134] and the pompous embassy took its departure on the 12th of June, much less hopeful of the result of the mission than when it started. They were loaded with gifts, cloyed with fine words, and some of them even cajoled into the idea that Elizabeth was a Catholic at heart; but whatever the young figureheads may have thought, statesmen like Pinart, Brisson, and La Mothe, knew full well by this time that the marriage was all moonshine. Sussex of course threw all the blame on Leicester, and tried to arouse the indignation of the French against him, whilst Leicester boldly said the Queen had never intended to marry, and those who said she did only wished to bring about a quarrel between England and France. The Spanish ambassador, too, ever busy at mischief, was trying his best by means of willing tools to embitter French feeling at the way in which a great nation had been flouted, as he said, to magnify the Queen’s importance and feed her insatiable vanity.