they were masters of it before the people could think of defending themselves.  The ringleaders of the rebellion were drawn and quartered, and about a hundred persons were beheaded or hanged.  At Angers, at Alencon, and at Aurillac, there were similar outbursts similarly punished.”  From that moment it was easy to prognosticate that with the new king familiarity would not prevent severity, or even cruelty.  According to the requirements of the crisis Louis had no more hesitation about violating than about making promises; and, all the while that he was seeking after popularity, he intended to make his power felt at any price.

How could he have done without heavy imposts and submission on the part of the tax-payers?  For it was not only at home in his own kingdom that he desired to be chief actor and master.  He pushed his ambition and his activity abroad into divers European states.  In Italy he had his own claimant to the throne of Naples in opposition to the King of Arragon’s.  In Spain the Kings of Arragon and of Castile were in a state of rivalry and war.  A sedition broke out in Catalonia.  Louis XI. lent the King of Arragon three hundred and fifty thousand golden crowns to help him in raising eleven hundred lances, and reducing the rebels.  Civil war was devastating England.  The houses of York and Lancaster were disputing the crown.  Louis XI. kept up relations with both sides; and without embroiling himself with the Duke of York, who became Edward IV., he received at Chinon the heroic Margaret of Anjou, wife of Henry VI., and lent twenty thousand pounds sterling to that prince, then disthroned, who undertook either to repay them within a year or to hand over Calais, when he was re-established upon his throne, to the King of France.  In the same way John II., King of Arragon, had put Roussillon and Cerdagne into the hands of Louis XI., as a security for the loan of three hundred and fifty thousand crowns he had borrowed.  Amidst all the plans and enterprises of his personal ambition Louis was seriously concerned for the greatness of France; but he drew upon her resources, and compromised her far beyond what was compatible with her real interests, by mixing himself up, at every opportunity and by every sort of intrigue, with the affairs and quarrels of the kings and peoples around him.

In France itself he had quite enough of questions to be solved and perils to be surmounted to absorb and satisfy the most vigilant and most active of men.  Four princes of very unequal power, but all eager for independence and preponderance, viz., Charles, Duke of Berry, his brother; Francis II., Duke of Brittany; Philip the Good, Duke of Burgundy, his uncle; and John, Duke of Bourbon, his brother-in-law, were vassals whom he found very troublesome, and ever on the point of becoming dangerous.  It was not long before he had a proof of it.  In 1463, two years after Louis’s accession, the Duke of Burgundy sent one of his most trusty servants, John of Croy, Sire