Her best days were done by the time of her second marriage. After the
King's return from Spain persecution broke out, and Margaret's influence
became more and more weak to stop it. As early as 1533 her own _Miroir
de l'Ame Pécheresse_, then in a second edition, provoked the fanaticism
of the Sorbonne, and the King had to interfere in person to protect
his sister's work and herself from gross insult. The Medici marriage
increased the persecuting tendency, and for a time there was even an
attempt to suppress printing, and with it all that new literature which
was the Queen's delight. She was herself in some danger, but Francis had
not sunk so low as to permit any actual attack to be made on her. Yet
all the last years of her life were unhappy, though she continued to
keep Court at Nérac in Pau, to accompany her brother in his progresses,
and, as we know from documents, to play Lady Bountiful over a wide area
of France. Her husband appears to have been rather at variance with
her; and her daughter, who married first, and in name only, the Duke
of Cleves in 1540, and later (1548) Anthony de Bourbon, was also not
on cordial terms with her mother. By the date of this second marriage
Francis was dead, and though he had for many years been anything but
wholly kind, Margaret's good days were now in truth done. Her nephew
Henry left her in possession of her revenues, but does not seem to have
been very affectionately disposed towards her; and even had she
been inclined to attempt any recovery of influence, his wife and his
mistress, Catherine de Medici and Diana of Poitiers, two women as
different from Margaret as they were from one another, would certainly
have prevented her from obtaining it. As a matter of fact, however, she
had long been in ill-health, and her brother's death seems to have dealt
her the final stroke. She survived it two years, even as she had been
born two years before him, and died on the 21 st December 1549, at the
Castle of Odos, near Tarbes, having lived in almost complete retirement