t which France had to oppose the marriage of the
young Duchess with Archduke Maximilian, at the same time taking care not
to give occasion for thinking that Charles had any views on his own
account in that quarter. "The king my master," said the ambassador,
"doth propose to assert by arms his plain rights over the kingdom of
Naples, now occupied by some usurper or other, a bastard of the house of
Arragon. He doth consider, moreover, the conquest of Naples only as a
bridge thrown down before him for to take him into Greece; there he is
resolved to lavish his blood and his treasure, though he should have to
pawn his crown and drain his kingdom, for to overthrow the tyranny of the
Ottomans, and open to himself in this way the kingdom of Heaven." The
King of England gave a somewhat ironical reply to this chivalrous
address, merely asking whether the King of France would consent not to
dispose of the heiress of Brittany's hand, save on the condition of not
marrying her himself. The ambassadors shuffled out of the question by
saying that their master was so far from any such idea, that it had not
been foreseen in their instructions.

Whether it had or had not been foreseen and meditated upon, so soon as
the reunion of Brittany with France by the marriage of the young duchess,
Anne, with King Charles VIII. appeared on the horizon as a possible, and,
peradventure, probable fact, it became the common desire, aim, and labor
of all the French politicians who up to that time had been opposed,
persecuted, and proscribed. Since the battle of St. Aubin-du-Cormier,
Duke Louis of Orleans had been a prisoner in the Tower of Bourges, and so
strictly guarded that he was confined at night in an iron cage like
Cardinal Balue's for fear he should escape. In vain had his wife, Joan
of France, an unhappy and virtuous princess, ugly and deformed, who had
never been able to gain her husband's affections, implored her
all-powerful sister, Anne of Bourbon, to set him at liberty: "As I am
incessantly thinking," she wrote to her, "about my husband's release, I
have conceived the idea of setting down in writing the fashion in which
peace might be had, and my said husband be released. I am writing it out
for the king, and you will see it all. I pray you, sister, to look to it
that I may get a few words in answer; it has been a very sad thing for me
that I never see you now." There is no trace of any answer from Anne to
her sister. Charles VIII