Page:Margaret of Angoulême, Queen of Navarre (Robinson 1886).djvu/140

Rh Margaret at Easter-time in 1540, "I fear the Legate Farnese is trying to draw him from King Henry to the Emperor."

Margaret made as brave resistance as she could. "Never think," she cries to Wallup, "my brother will so lightly lose so faithful and assured a friend!" But in her heart she feels herself powerless to turn the current of her brother's thoughts from Milan. In February she tells Norfolk, "If you would have anything of importance done, seek to win over Madame d'Étampes, who can do more with the King than all the rest. Only she," went on Margaret, "can impress a thing in his head against the Constable; and I myself, when Montmorency had turned the King against me, I had to seek the help of Madame d'Étampes."

"This good Quene is a faythfull frende to your Highness," writes Wallup to Henry VIII. But with the cowardice of her tremulous adoration, Margaret did not dare boldly to oppose the folly of the King. She worked on him vaguely and indirectly, by chance speeches, by the faint contagion of her own convictions, and through the influence of Madame d'Étampes. Even for that she so firmly thought the right and the best, Margaret could not openly remonstrate with her brother's weakness. "These things can only be wrought by Madame d'Étampes," she declares to Wallup. "I will not speak myself. I should be noted partial, and also suspected." And, miserable at her own lack of influence, she cries, with a pathetic denseness, "My brother is of this sort, that a thing being fixed in his head it is half impossible to be plucked away." Poor Queen Margaret!

She could not believe her brother fickle, much less