When, at length, in June, the truce of Nice was signed, and soon afterwards the fraternal meeting and close community between Francis and Charles was effected at Aigues Mortes, Henry began to get seriously alarmed. His matrimonial offers, to his surprise, were treated very coolly; all his attempts to breed dissension between the imperial and French ambassadors, who were now hand and glove, were laughed at;[185] and the intimate confidence and friendship between his two Catholic rivals seemed at last to bring disaster to Henry's very doors; for it was not concealed that the first blow to be struck by the Catholic confederacy was to be upon the schismatic heretic who ruled England. With Francis there was no more to be done; for Henry and Brian, by their want of delicacy, had between them deeply wounded all the possible French brides and their families. But, at least, Henry hoped that sufficient show of friendship with Charles might be simulated to arouse Francis' jealousy of his new ally. Henry therefore began to sneer at the patched-up friendship, as he called it.[186] "And how about Milan?" he asked the French ambassador, knowing that that was the still rankling sore; and soon he began to boast more openly that he himself might have Milan by the cession of it as a dower to Dom Luiz of Portugal, on his marriage with the Princess Mary; whilst Henry himself married the young widowed Duchess of Milan, Charles' niece, Christina of Denmark, that clever, quick-witted woman, whose humorous face lives for ever on the canvas of Holbein in the English National Gallery.[187] There had been a Spanish ambassador, Diego Hurtado de Mendoza, in England since the spring of 1537, to negotiate the Portuguese marriage of the Princess Mary; but the eternal questions of dowry, security, and the legitimacy of the Princess had made all negotiations so far abortive. Now they were taken up more strongly, by means of Wyatt at Madrid, and by special envoys to Mary of Hungary in Flanders. But it was all "buckler play," as the imperial agents and Charles himself soon found out. Henry and Cromwell knew perfectly well that no stable alliance with the Emperor was possible then unless their religious policy was changed; and they had gone too far to change it without humiliation, if not destruction, to Henry; the real object of the negotiations being simply to obtain some sort of promise about the cession of Milan, by which Francis might be detached from the imperial alliance. But it was unsuccessful; and, for once, the two great antagonists held together for a time against all Lutheranism and heresy.