For a time Leicester’s influence was gone, and Simier lived in the palace of Greenwich, to the open disgust of the English people. In August, Alençon rushed over to England in disguise. His coming was an open secret, but the Queen kept him hid in the palace of Greenwich.[424] She posed before him, showed off all her charms, dined and supped with him in private, fell desperately in love with him, or pretended to do so, and sent him off after a week’s stay as secretly as he came, with expressions of affection on both sides, even too fervid to be sincere, and long afterwards continued by correspondence. Whatever might be the final result of the marriage negotiations—and Burghley himself was as much in the dark as any one on that point—a close alliance between France and England was of growing importance to both countries. The English Council under Burghley sat at Greenwich almost continuously from the 2nd to the 8th October discussing, weighing, and reporting upon the whole question of alliance and marriage. The final result was that the marriage would be undesirable, Burghley and Sussex being the only Councillors who were not strongly opposed to it.[425] The message to the Queen was delivered by Burghley. It was ambiguous and moderate, begged the Queen to tell the Council her own mind, and so on; but there was no doubt of the meaning of it to the Queen. The Council was against the match, unless some guarantee could be found that the Protestant religion should not be imperilled. Burghley’s minute sets forth the Queen’s answer. “She shed many tears to find that her Councillors, by their long disputations, should make it doubtful whether it would be safe for her to marry and have a child.” She was a simpleton, she said, to have referred the question to them. She expected they would have unanimously begged her to marry, instead of raising doubts about it. When they saw her again later in the day she was more angry still. She railed at those who would think of “surety” before her happiness, “and that any should think so slenderly of her” as to doubt that she would take care that religion was properly safeguarded if she married. She managed, as usual, to reduce the Council to a state of confusion with her tears and reproaches; and a hasty meeting was called, at which a resolution was passed to the effect, that as the Queen seemed so much bent upon the marriage, the Councillors all offered their services to promote it. When this message was taken to her, Lord Burghley records that “her Majesty’s answers were very sharp in reprehending all such as she thought would make arguments against her marriage, and though she thought it not meet to declare to them whether she would marry with Monsieur or no, yet she looked from their hands that they should with one accord have made a special suit to her for the same.”[426]