That Burghley did not flinch in the case of a man with so many friends, is a proof of his rectitude and his courage. Though Norfolk himself must have known what his attitude was, his esteem for him was evidently not lessened. In the first letter he wrote to the Queen after his condemnation, 21st January 1572, he prays for “her Majesty’s forgiveness for his manifold offences, that he may leave this vale of misery with a lighter heart and quieter conscience. He desires that Lord Burghley should act as guardian to his poor orphans,” and he signs his letter, “Written by the woeful hand of a dead man, your Majesty’s unworthy subject, Thomas Howard”;[348] and when this prayer was granted, he again wrote to the Queen expressing “his comfort at hearing of her Majesty’s intended goodness to his unfortunate brats, and that she had christened them with such an adopted father as Lord Burghley.”[349] At length, when Parliament had added its pressure to that of her minister’s, the Queen’s real or pretended reluctance to execute her near kinsman was overcome, and the Duke’s head fell on Tower Hill, 2nd June, before the lamentations of a great populace, who loved him above any subject of the Queen. Less than a week afterwards Marshal Montmorenci, Paul de Foix, and a splendid embassy arrived in England for the purpose of formally ratifying the treaty of alliance between England and France, a corresponding embassy from England under Lord Lincoln being in France for a similar purpose. The courts vied with each other in their splendid entertainments. The Frenchmen with forty followers were lodged in Somerset House. At Whitehall, at Windsor (where Montmorenci received the Garter), at Leicester House, and at Cecil House, sumptuous banquets were given, followed by masques, balls, and tourneys. There was much talk about the Duke of Alençon, but no decided answer given by Elizabeth to the hints of marriage, which, indeed, was not now so pressing a matter for her as it had been. When the Frenchmen had taken leave, Burghley sent to Walsingham an interesting letter giving some account of the embassy, by which it is clear that the Queen still desired to keep up the talk of the marriage, in view of a possible need to draw still closer to the French. “I am willed,” he writes, “to require you to use all good means to understand what you can of the Duke of Alençon, his age in certainty, of his stature, his conditions, his inclination in religion, his devotion this way, his followers and servitors: hereof her Majesty seeketh speedily to be advertised, that she may resolve before the month.” He says, that for his part, he can see no great dislike of the idea, except in the matter of age, and hints at getting Calais as the young Prince’s dower. “If somewhat be not advised to recompense the opinion that her Majesty conceiveth, as that she should be misliked to make choice of so young a prince, I doubt the end.”[350] When, however, Lincoln came