Page:Margaret of Angoulême, Queen of Navarre (Robinson 1886).djvu/143

128 The little princess must not expect the privileges of a woman. Jeanne could not resign herself to this political necessity. Her father dared not, her mother would not help her. So, taking her case into her own defence, she appealed herself to the uncle whose favourite she was, and whom she knew more nearly than either parent. Having seen the Duke of Cleves, she felt she could never love him; she beseeched her kind uncle not to press the marriage. Francis was very wroth at this questioning of his decision. He imagined, perhaps, that the King of Navarre had urged his little daughter to revolt. His anger came to Margaret's ears. Alarmed and horrified at Jeanne's indiscretion, she wrote to intercede for her rash little daughter.

"But," says Margaret, in a later letter to the King, "if the said Duke of Cleves had been to you all that he ought and that I desired, I would never have spoken against him; we would rather have seen our daughter die, as she told us she should do, than we would have stayed her from going to the place where I deemed she could do you a service." This is no court parlance. Margaret considered that the noblest lot on earth was to live or to die for her brother, the King. Jeanne's revolt, her claims for independence, filled Margaret with something akin to disdain and indignation. She had no pity for the strange proud little girl who, forsaken by father and mother, beaten and coerced, still declared in her weak childish treble that she would never love the Duke of Cleves. Her brother was Margaret's religion; and Jeanne's determination seemed to her as, impious as it was disobedient. St. Felicitas might have felt the same had one of her children refused to die for the Cross. She