f Burgundy in a
struggle with Edward the Fourth.

[Sidenote: The Triple Alliance]

How vivid was his sense of these dangers was seen in the eagerness of
Lewis to get the truce with England renewed and extended. But his efforts
for a general peace broke down before the demands of the English council
for the restoration of Normandy and Guienne. Nor were his difficulties
from England alone. An English alliance was unpopular in France itself.
"Seek no friendship from the English, Sire!" said Pierre de Breze, the
Seneschal of Normandy, "for the more they love you, the more all Frenchmen
will hate you!" All Lewis could do was to fetter Edward's action by giving
him work at home. When Margaret appealed to him for aid after Towton he
refused any formal help, but her pledge to surrender Calais in case of
success drew from him some succour in money and men which enabled the
queen to renew the struggle in the north. Though her effort failed, the
hint so roughly given had been enough to change the mood of the English
statesmen; the truce with France was renewed, and a different reception
met the new proposals of alliance which followed it. Lewis indeed was now
busy with an even more pressing danger. In any struggle of the king with
England or the nobles what gave Burgundy its chief weight was the
possession of the towns on the Somme, and it was his consciousness of the
vital importance of these to his throne that spurred Lewis to a bold and
dexterous diplomacy by which Duke Philip the Good, under the influence of
counsellors who looked to the French king for protection against the
Duke's son, Charles of Charolais, was brought to surrender Picardy on
payment of the sum stipulated for its ransom in the Treaty of Arras. The
formal surrender of the towns on the Somme took place in October 1463, but
they were hardly his own when Lewis turned to press his alliance upon
England. From Picardy, where he was busy in securing his newly-won
possessions, he sought an interview with Warwick. His danger indeed was
still great; for the irritated nobles were already drawing together into a
League of the Public Weal, and Charles of Charolais, indignant at the
counsellors who severed him from his father and at the king who traded
through them on the Duke's dotage, was eager to place himself at its head.
But these counsellors, the Croys, saw their own ruin as well as the ruin
of Lewis in the success of a league of which Charles was the head; and at