Page:Margaret of Angoulême, Queen of Navarre (Robinson 1886).djvu/89

74

1525–1530.

had Margaret returned with her mother to Lyons, on their slow progress from the frontier to the capital, when they were joined by another fugitive from the Emperor's prisons. Henry d'Albret, the young King of Navarre, had been taken captive with Francis; and since February he had been imprisoned in the fortress of Pavia. Despairing of any deliverance, one moonlit December night he dressed himself in his page's clothes and let himself down from his window into a dried—up moat, leaving his servant sleeping in his bed. The next morning a feeble voice behind the curtains answered the turnkey, whom a second page assured that the King was ill that day; nor till the night was the farce discovered, when the gaoler generously pardoned the two devoted pages. Meanwhile their master, a daring lad of two-and-twenty, escaped as best he might towards France, "intempeste noctis silentio, et lune claritatis favore proadjuvante," as a contemporary narrated to Wolsey. On Christmas-eve he reached St. Just-sur-Lyon. It