Page:Margaret of Angoulême, Queen of Navarre (Robinson 1886).djvu/126

Rh treaty with the Turk, the Queen of Navarre was as busily employed in seeking to bring England into a French alliance. She herself interviewed the English Ambassadors, and in our collection of Foreign State-papers her name is at least as frequently quoted as the King's. "The Queen of Navarre is a right English woman," said Francis to Sir William Paget. "She is always a member of the King's Secret Council," writes Matteo Dandolo, Venetian Ambassador in France, "and, therefore, is obliged to follow the King wherever he goes, though narrow and inconvenient be her lodgings."

It was a hard life; but Margaret was happy in this career of active and beneficent devotion. In these years of work and counsel her letters are brilliant and contented—letters of how different a sort to those inspired by the quietism of her youth (1520–24), the unrest and superstition of her age (1547–48). In this year 1536, while the question of the Turco-Huguenot alliance was filling the secret counsels of France, war fell out again with the Emperor on the old question of the Milanese. The Queen of Navarre was now, perhaps, the busiest woman in France. Her letters are full of the details of the campaign. She encourages her husband and his kinsmen to raise experienced regiments for the war; she inspects the troops with her cousin, De Carman; she goes to suppress a rising of the disaffected Basques; she and Montpezat discover and interrogate a spy. And all the time she is investigating the ruined fortunes of Isabeau de Rohan; she is securing the advancement of her old play-mate, Anne de Montmorency; she is assisting her husband, and sounding his trumpet in the ears of Francis.