After this acquisition Charles conceived and had much at heart the design of becoming king, the first time that the Netherlands were considered sufficiently important and consolidated to entitle their possessor to that title.  To lead to this object he offered to the emperor of Germany the hand of his daughter Mary for his son Maximilian.  The emperor acceded to this proposition, and repaired to the city of Treves to meet Charles and countenance his coronation.  But the insolence and selfishness of the latter put an end to the project.  He humiliated the emperor, who was of a niggardly and mean-spirited disposition, by appearing with a train so numerous and sumptuous as totally to eclipse the imperial retinue; and deeply offended him by wishing to postpone the marriage, from his jealousy of creating for himself a rival in a son-in-law who might embitter his old age as he had done that of his own father.  The mortified emperor quitted the place in high dudgeon, and the projected kingdom was doomed to a delay of some centuries.

Charles, urged on by the double motive of thirst for aggrandizement and vexation at his late failure, attempted, under pretext of some internal dissensions, to gain possession of Cologne and its territory, which belonged to the empire; and at the same time planned the invasion of France, in concert with his brother-in-law Edward IV., who had recovered possession of England.  But the town of Nuys, in the archbishopric of Cologne, occupied him a full year before its walls.  The emperor, who came to its succor, actually besieged the besiegers in their camp; and the dispute was terminated by leaving it to the arbitration of the pope’s legate, and placing the contested town in his keeping.  This half triumph gained by Charles saved Louis wholly from destruction.  Edward, who had landed in France with a numerous force, seeing no appearance of his Burgundian allies, made peace with Louis; and Charles, who arrived in all haste, but not till after the treaty was signed, upbraided and abused the English king, and turned a warm friend into an inveterate enemy.

Louis, whose crooked policy had so far succeeded on all occasions, now seemed to favor Charles’s plans of aggrandizement, and to recognize his pretended right to Lorraine, which legitimately belonged to the empire, and the invasion of which by Charles would be sure to set him at variance with the whole of Germany.  The infatuated duke, blind to the ruin to which he was thus hurrying, abandoned to Louis, in return for this insidious support, the constable of St. Pol; a nobleman who had long maintained his independence in Picardy, where he had large possessions, and who was fitted to be a valuable friend or formidable enemy to either.  Charles now marched against, and soon overcame, Lorraine.  Thence he turned his army against the Swiss, who were allies to the conquered province, but who sent the most submissive dissuasions to the invader.  They begged for peace, assuring