Suddenly, towards the middle of August, 1581, Alençon crossed the frontier into Spanish Flanders with a fine army of 12,000 infantry and 5,000 Cavalry, in which were enrolled half the young nobility of France as volunteers, notwithstanding the King’s anathemas. Parma at once raised the siege of Cambrai and stood on the defensive, and the whole position was changed in a moment. The King of France felt, or at least expressed, the utmost alarm at his brother’s action, lest he should be drawn into the quarrel. Elizabeth, on the other hand, was no less apprehensive that the King, the Guises, and the Catholics might be after all behind the movement. She, however, was soon tranquillised on this score, and wrote a loving letter of congratulation.[138] No sooner was Alençon in Cambrai than he found himself without money. If the States will not aid me, he wrote to the Prince of Orange, I can go no further. But the attempt had been made without the open patronage of the Queen of England, and the Protestant States would do nothing. De Bex was sent off post-haste by Alençon to take her the news, and to beg for 300,000 crowns, “as he had spent all his own money in the relief, and neither the States nor his brother would give him a penny. If she did not provide him with money he should be obliged to return with his army to France without going any further.”[139] Marchaumont continued to urge his master’s need for money, and besides the £22,000 which had been taken by Walsingham a further sum of £20,000 in gold was secretly sent from Drake’s plunder to Alençon. But Elizabeth herself was somewhat short of money, and still not without suspicion, besides which she had no intention whatever of defraying the whole expense of Alençon’s army, and would send him no more money. Things went from bad to worse. The French troops deserted in bodies and fell to pillage; the young noblemen slipped back over the frontier by hundreds. By the first week in September Alençon had retired to Chatelet, leaving a garrison in Cambrai; only 3,000 of his men remained with him, and he sent again de Bex to the Queen to beg for more help before they were all gone. His victory at Cambrai he attributes all to the “belle jartière,” which he says he will never surrender whilst he lives, nor the desire to see again “vostre belle Majesté a la quelle pour la hate de ce porteur je me contenteré de bayzer les belles mins et les belles greves qui ont porté la belle jartière.” But the Queen was not to be wheedled out of her money by talk about the beautiful garter, and Marchaumont began to hint that his master’s only course would be to once more cross the Channel and press his own suit.