Gonzales, the monk, is despatched by the Queen to Bourbon in prison.  At the door he meets Margaret, who had bribed her way to her lover, and was returning after ineffectual attempts to soothe him into submission, shame-struck at the exposure of her mother’s guilt.  The Queen intrusts Gonzales with a signet ring as the means of liberating him and conducting him to the royal chamber.  Bourbon is immovable; and in revenge upon the Court, he falls in with a private scheme of Gonzales, which is to accept of his liberty, and set off to the Court of Spain.  The undisguising of the treacherous monk is in these powerful lines: 

GONZALES.

  Now,
  That day is come, ay, and that very hour: 
  Now shout your war-cry; now unsheath your sword;
  I’ll join the din, and make these tottering walls
  Tremble and nod to hear our fierce defiance. 
  Nay, never start, and look upon my cowl—­
  You love not priests, De Bourbon, more than I.
  Off, vile denial of my manhood’s pride;
  Off, off to hell! where thou wast first invented,
  Now once again I stand and breathe a knight. 
  Nay, stay not gazing thus:  it is Garcia,
  Whose name hath reach’d thee long ere now, I trow;
  Whom thou hast met in deadly fight full oft,
  When France and Spain join’d in the battle field. 
  Beyond the Pyrenean boundary
  That guards thy land, are forty thousand men: 
  Their unfurl’d pennons flout fair France’s sun,
  And wanton in the breezes of her sky: 
  Impatient halt they there; their foaming steeds,
  Pawing the huge and rock-built barrier,
  That bars their further course—­they wait for thee: 
  For thee whom France hath injur’d and cast off;
  For thee, whose blood it pays with shameful chains,
  More shameful death; for thee, whom Charles of Spain
  Summons to head his host, and lead them on
  To conquest and to glory.

The interest now reverts to the fate of Francoise, and Bourbon is lost sight of; a transition which, both in acting and reading, endangers the drama.[1] News arrives of the flight of Lautrec from his government; of his arrest, his imprisonment, and capital condemnation.[2] He enjoins his sister to intercede in his behalf with Francis; she complies, but it is at the expense of her honour; broken-hearted, she sinks beneath her shame at the crime into which she has been betrayed, and returns home.  Francis pursues her, and the Queen, now aware of his passion for her, dispatches the monk Gonzales on a secret mission to poison Francoise, who, she fears, may supplant her in her ascendancy over the King.  A fine passage occurs in the scene wherein the Queen proposes her scheme to Gonzales.

QUEEN.

  Didst ever look upon the dead?

GONZALES.