Page:A Biographical Dictionary of the Celebrated Women of Every Age and Country (1804).djvu/568

554 conquest of them from the Spaniards. There are curious details of this journey in her memoirs. On her return, she stopped at Fere, in Picardy, which belonged to her, where she learnt that, for the sixth time, peace was made in 1577. The duke of Alençon came to Picardy, and was delighted with the pleasures that reigned in the little court of Margaret, compared with the cabal and unpleasantness of that of France. She soon returned to France, where love, religion, and treachery reigned in every political movement, and there lived with Henry at Pau, in Beam, where religious toleration was, on the part of the Protestants, almost denied her; and Henry shewed her little kindness; yet the care and tenderness with which she nursed him, during his illness, reestablished friendship between them from 1577 to 1580, when the war again broke out. She wished to effect another reconciliation; but was not listened to, and all she could obtain was the neutrality of the town of Nerac, where she resided.

After the war, Henry III. was determined to draw the king of Navarre, and Margaret's favourite brother the duke of Anjou, again to his court, and for this purpose wrote to his sister to come to him. Discontented with the conduct of her husband towards her, she gladly obeyed in 1582; yet so much was her brother irritated at her affection for the duke of Anjou, that he treated her very unkindly. Some time after a courier, whom he had sent to Rome with an important letter, being poignarded by four cavaliers, who took his dispatches from him, he suspected his sister of being concerned in the plot. And publickly reproached her with the irregularity of her conduct; saying everything that was bitter and taunting. Margaret all the while