hold firm, I can see them coming round to your wishes.  But they would very much like to keep me here doing nothing, in order to promote their own affairs, as you will be pleased to understand.”  Charles V., in fact, signified to the king his desire that the negotiations should be proceeded with at Madrid or Toledo, never ceasing to make protestations of his pacific intentions.  Francis I. replied that, for his part, “he would not lay any countermand on the duchess, that he would willingly hear what the emperor’s ambassadors had to say, but that, if they did not come to any conclusion as to a peace and his own liberation, he would not keep his own ambassadors any longer, and would send them away.”  Marguerite set out at the end of November; she at first travelled slowly, waiting for good news to reach her and stop her on the road; but, suddenly, she received notice from Madrid to quicken her steps; according to some historians, it was the Duke of Bourbon who, either under the influence of an old flame or in order to do a service to the king he had betrayed, sent word to the princess that Charles V., uneasy about what she was taking with her to France, had an idea of having her arrested the moment her safe-conduct had expired.  According to a more probable version, it was Francis I. himself who, learning that three days after Marguerite’s departure Charles V. had received a copy of the royal act of abdication, at once informed his sister, begging her to make all haste.  And she did so to such purpose that, “making four days’ journey in one,” she arrived at Salces, in the Eastern Pyrenees, an hour before the expiry of her safe-conduct.  She no doubt took to her mother, the regent, the details of the king’s resolutions and instructions; but the act itself containing them, the letters patent of Francis I., had not been intrusted to her; it was Marshal de Montmorency who, at the end of December, 15225, was the first bearer of them to France.

Did Francis I. flatter himself that his order to have his son the dauphin declared and crowned king, and the departure of his sister Marguerite, who was going, if not to carry the actual text of the resolution, at any rate to announce it to the regent and to France, would embarrass Charles V. so far as to make him relax in his pretensions to the duchy of Burgundy and its dependencies?  There is nothing to show that he was allured by such a hope; any how, if it may have for a moment arisen in his mind, it soon vanished.  Charles V. insisted peremptorily upon his requirements; and Francis I. at once gave up his attitude of firmness, and granted, instead, the concession demanded of him, that is, the relinquishment of Burgundy and its dependencies to Charles V., “to hold and enjoy with every right of supremacy until it hath been judged, decided, and determined, by arbiters elected on the emperor’s part and our own, to whom the said duchy, countships, and other territories belong. . . .  And for