Page:Margaret of Angoulême, Queen of Navarre (Robinson 1886).djvu/96

Rh wished to reward the devoted sister who had dared so much for him. For some reason, Francis withdrew his opposition to the marriage of the Duchess Margaret with the King of Navarre. He showered presents and royal promises on his sister and her lover, assuring them that he would reconquer the lost province of Navarre from Spain for Henry d'Albret. The other pretenders to Margaret's hand had all withdrawn. A chill enmity separated Charles from France; Henry of England, preferring the maid to the mistress, had set his lustful heart upon Anne Boleyn; Constable Bourbon, in this very year, was killed while leading his victorious armies on to the sack of Rome; and on the 24th of January 1527, Margaret was married to the young King of Navarre.

It was a strange, impoverished, beautiful kingdom to which Henry d'Albret took his bride, in the autumn of the year, when they were weary of the festivals of France—a new and almost a foreign country. "I have been here five days," says Margaret, writing in October from Béarn, "and I scarce begin to understand the language." In the north, all round the capital of Nérac, stretched the dreary Landes, wastes of ash-coloured sand, purpled here and there with heather, streaked with dark lines of pinewood and forests of cork-oak, ended only by the horizon of the sea; miles of undulating, desolate heath, with here and there, cropping the scanty herbage, a flock of sheep, guarded by a shepherd rudely clad in skins—a strange figure against the sky as he strode over the sand and over the bushes on the enormous stilts the peasants use there. And Pau, the southern capital, was no less different to the placid and splendid courts of France—a high-lying,