All the hopes of the house of Lancaster seemed now to be utterly extinguished.  Every legitimate prince of that family was dead; almost every great leader of the party had perished in battle or on the scaffold; the Earl of Pembroke, who was levying forces in Wales, disbanded his army when he received intelligence of the battle of Tewkesbury, and he fled into Brittany with his nephew, the young Earl of Richmond.  The bastard of Falconberg, who had levied some forces, and had advanced to London during Edward’s absence, was repulsed; his men deserted him; he was taken prisoner and immediately executed; and peace being now fully restored to the nation, a parliament was summoned, which ratified, as usual, all the acts of the victor, and recognized his legal authority.

This Prince, who had been so firm and active and intrepid during the course of adversity, was still unable to resist the allurements of a prosperous fortune; and he devoted himself, as before, to pleasure and amusement, after he became entirely master of his kingdom.  But while he was thus indulging himself in pleasure, he was roused from his lethargy by a prospect of foreign conquests.  He passed over to Calais, 1475, with an army of one thousand five hundred men-at-arms and fifteen thousand archers, attended by all the chief nobility of England, who, prognosticating future successes from the past, were eager to appear on this great theatre of honor.  But all their sanguine hopes were damped when they found, on entering the French territories, that neither did the constable open his gates to them nor the Duke of Burgundy bring them the smallest assistance.  That Prince, transported by his ardent temper, had carried all his armies to a great distance, and had employed them in wars on the frontiers of Germany and against the Duke of Lorraine; and though he came in person to Edward, and endeavored to apologize for this breach of treaty, there was no prospect that they would be able this campaign to make a conjunction with the English.  This circumstance gave great disgust to the King, and inclined him to hearken to those advances which Louis continually made him for an accommodation.

Louis was sensible that the warlike genius of the people would soon render them excellent soldiers, and, far from despising them for their present want of experience, he employed all his art to detach them from the alliance of Burgundy.  When Edward sent him a herald to claim the crown of France, and to carry him a defiance in case of refusal, so far from answering to this bravado in like haughty terms, he replied with great temper, and even made the herald a considerable present.  He took afterward an opportunity of sending a herald to the English camp, and having given him directions to apply to Lords Stanley and Howard, who, he heard, were friends to peace, he desired the good offices of these noblemen in promoting an accommodation with their master.  As Edward was now fallen into like dispositions, a