Lady Purbeck was not to be left in peace in Paris.  As Garrard had said, a writ was issued commanding her to return to England upon her allegiance, and it was sent to Paris by a special messenger who was ordered to serve it upon her, if he could find her.  The matter was placed in the hands of the English Ambassador, and he describes what followed in a letter[95] from Paris to the Secretary of State in England:—­

“Rt.  Honble.

“Your honours letters dated the 7th March—­I received the 21 the same style by the Courrier sent to serve his Majesties writt upon the Lady Viscountesse Purbecke.  They came to me about 11 of the clock in the Morning.  Upon the instant of his coming to me I sent a servant of myne own to show him the house, where the Lady lived publiquely, and in my neighbourhood.”

The business in hand, it will be observed, was not to arrest Lady Purbeck, but simply to serve the writ upon her:  a duty which proved not quite so simple as might be supposed.  On arriving at the house in which Lady Purbeck was living, “the Courrier taking off his Messengers Badge knocked at the doore to gett in.  There came a Mayd to the doore that would not open it, but peeped through a grating and asked his businesse.  He sayd, he was not in such hast but he could come againe to-morrow.  But the Mayd and the rest of the household having charge not to open the doore, but to suche as were well knowne, the Messenger could not gett in.”

This first failure would not in itself have much alarmed the Ambassador; but he says:  “In the afternoone, I understood that the Lady had received notice 15 days before, that a privy seale was to come for her, which had caused her ever since to keep her house close.”

This made him nervous, and he tried to push the matter with greater speed.

“We endeavoured by severall ways,” he wrote, “to have gotten the Messenger into the house.  But having considered and tryed till the next day in the afternoone, we grew very doubtfull that the Messenger might be suspected and that the Lady might slip away from that place of her residence that night.”

Unless the writ could be properly served upon her, proceedings against her could not be carried out in England, and, once out of the house in which she now was known, or at least believed, to be, so slippery a lady, as she had already proved herself, would be very difficult to find.  To effect an entrance into the house and to serve the writ upon her personally was evidently impossible, and the only alternative was to make sure that she was in the house and then to put the writ into it in such a way that she could not avoid learning of its presence.  Therefore, says the Ambassador, “I directed this Bearer to put the Box with the Privy Seale in it through some pane of a lower window into the house and leaving it there to putt on his Badge, and knocking at the doore of the house, if they would not suffer him to enter, then to tell that party, whoe should speak