Netherlands and prey on Spanish commerce, and she could not afford to fall away from the English friendship. So, discontented though she was with Elizabeth’s persistence, both she and the King made the best of it, and affected to believe that all was going well. But they reckoned without Anjou. Neither his mother’s tears nor his brother’s threats could move him, for Cardinal Lorraine now had him in the hollow of his hand. The Guises, the Nuncio, and the Spaniards were untiring. They had surrounded Anjou with their friends, who could lead him as they liked, and Catharine said she suspected that “Villequier, Lignerolles, and Sarret were the authors of all these fancies. It we were only certain, I can assure you they should repent it.” One of them, Lignerolles, at all events, was soon after put out of the world by murder. The King came to high words more than once with Anjou himself. He had insulted the Queen of England, he told him, by his foolishness. Conscience, he was sure, had nothing to do with it, and Anjou was only moved by greed through a pension given to him by the Catholic clergy to be their champion. “I will let you know,” cried the young King, “that I will have no champions here but myself.” Anjou shut himself up in his rooms all day bathed in tears, but he would not yield. The Queen-mother herself sometimes pretended to take Anjou’s part, and made a show of standing out about religion, but on this occasion no one was deceived by her, and Walsingham writes to Cecil, July 30, 1571, that she and the King are most anxious to be friendly with Elizabeth, and are sending de Foix to London with all sorts of offers and protestations to secure an alliance, even if the match fall through. They are growing, he says, daily more suspicious of Spain; and the King will not have Anjou here. Even Walsingham pitied poor abject Anjou, torn, as he says, from one side to the other. De Foix left for London on August 1st, but although a pretence of marriage negotiation was still kept up, it was acknowledged by all those who were interested that the affair was at an end, and that de Foix’s real mission was to sound Elizabeth as to a new offensive and defensive alliance against Spain.