seal with a smile

The Queen had lent Marchaumont a small house attached to her own palace at Richmond, to which entrance could be gained through it by means of a connecting gallery. Two chambers were refurnished and warmed in this house for the Prince’s use, the Earl of Arundel (son of the attainted and executed Duke of Norfolk) and his uncle, Lord Harry Howard, were charged by the Queen to make all arrangements for his comfort; and her Majesty herself superintended the installation in one of the rooms of a crimson bed, which she told Marchaumont archly that his master would recognise.  was expected Marchaumont wrote to de Bex, who was with his master on his journey hither, that he learnt by a message the Queen had sent him “that every hour seemed a month to her so anxious was she to see her lover, for whose reception great preparations had been made, although the Queen will pretend that nothing special had been done.”142

When Walsingham had seen the Prince in France the latter had expressed a desire to rest a day and a night in Walsingham’s house in London before264 going to see the Queen at Richmond, but when the time approached for the visit Walsingham managed to avoid the trouble of entertaining the guest by saying that the plague was raging round the house a police shieldcould hold me upside down and drainmy gutschange your mind, and it was settled that he should be lodged for the night in the house of Sir Edward Stafford, the son of Elizabeth’s friend and Mistress of the Robes. “But I need not tell you,” says Marchaumont to de Bex, “to keep strict secrecy as to the Prince’s movements, for if Lady Stafford knows anything it will be easier to stem a torrent than to stop the woman’s tongue.”

Alen?on embarked from Calais at the end of October, 1581, having met the Portuguese pretender, Don Antonio, before going on board, and promised him to plead his cause with the English Queen. The heavy weather necessitated his anchoring in the Downs instead of entering Dover, and it was only at the cost of some risk and trouble that he landed. Leaving the Prince Dauphin and most of his suite of gentlemen to follow him, he pressed on in disguise with de Bex to London, where he arrived and slept at Stafford’s house on the night of the 1st of November. The next morning he started off to see the Queen privately at Richmond, the first public reception being fixed for the 3rd of November, when the Prince Dauphin and the rest of the suite were fetched from London in the Queen’s state coaches. It was, in truth, high time the Prince came, for the Queen was very much out of temper with him and every one else. She complained to Castelnau that the Prince had acted in Flanders without her permission, that the King of France was intriguing with Spain for her ruin, that265 the States were a lot of drunkards, who only thought of borrowing money and not paying it back. She was too old, she said, to be played with, and would let them all see it. But when her young lover came she was full of smiles and blandishments. Fortunately he had plenty of money with him—money, however, brought to him by St.