truce was soon concluded on terms more advantageous than honorable to Louis.  He stipulated to pay Edward immediately seventy-five thousand crowns, on condition that he should withdraw his army from France, and promised to pay him fifty thousand crowns a year during their joint lives.  In order to ratify this treaty, the two monarchs agreed to have a personal interview.  Edward and Louis conferred privately together; and having confirmed their friendship, and interchanged many mutual civilities, they soon after parted.  As the two armies, after the conclusion of the truce, remained some time in the neighborhood of each other, the English were not only admitted freely into Amiens, where Louis resided, but had also their charges defrayed, and had wine and victuals furnished them in every inn without any payment being demanded.

This treaty did very little honor to either of these monarchs.  It discovered the imprudence of Edward, who had taken his measures so ill with his allies as to be obliged, after such an expensive armament, to return without making any acquisitions adequate to it.  It showed the want of dignity in Louis, who, rather than run the hazard of a battle, agreed to subject his kingdom to a tribunal, and thus acknowledge the superiority of a neighboring prince possessed of less power and territory than himself.  But Louis thought that all the advantages of the treaty were on his side, and that he had overreached Edward by sending him out of France on such easy terms.

The most honorable part of Louis’ treaty with Edward was the stipulation for the liberty of Queen Margaret, who, though after the death of her husband and son she could no longer be formidable to Government, was still detained in custody by Edward.  Louis paid fifty thousand crowns for her ransom; and that Princess, who had been so active on the stage of the world, and who had experienced such a variety of fortune, passed the remainder of her days in tranquillity and privacy till the year 1482, when she died; an admirable princess, but more illustrious by her undaunted spirit in adversity than by her moderation in prosperity.  She seems neither to have enjoyed the virtues nor been subject to the weaknesses of her sex, and was as much tainted with the ferocity as endowed with the courage of that barbarous age in which she lived.

The Duke of Clarence, by all his services in deserting Warwick, had never been able to regain the King’s friendship, which he had forfeited by his former confederacy with that nobleman.  He was still regarded at court as a man of a dangerous and a fickle character; and the imprudent openness and violence of his temper, though they rendered him much less dangerous, tended extremely to multiply his enemies and to incense them against him.  Among others, he had had the misfortune to give displeasure to the Queen herself, as well as to his brother, the Duke of Gloucester, a prince of the deepest policy, of the most unrelenting ambition,