his chief confidant, George of Amboise, Bishop of Montauban, and Count Dunois, son of Charles VII.’s hero, persistently supported the duke’s rights to the regency; and Madame (the title Anne de Beaujeu had assumed) made Duke Louis governor of Ile-de-France and of Champagne, and sent Dunois as governor to Dauphiny.  She kept those of Louis XI.’s advisers for whom the public had not conceived a perfect hatred like that felt for their master; and Commynes alone was set aside, as having received from the late king too many personal favors, and as having too much inclination towards independent criticism of the new regency.  Two of Louis XI.’s subordinate and detested servants, Oliver de Daim and John Doyac, were prosecuted, and one was hanged and the other banished; and his doctor, James Cattier, was condemned to disgorge fifty thousand crowns out of the enormous presents he had received from his patient.  At the same time that she thus gave some satisfaction to the cravings of popular wrath, Anne de Beaujeu threw open the prisons, recalled exiles, forgave the people a quarter of the talliage, cut down expenses by dismissing six thousand Swiss whom the late king had taken into his pay, re-established some sort of order in the administration of the domains of the crown, and, in fine, whether in general measures or in respect of persons, displayed impartiality without paying court, and firmness without using severity.  Here was, in fact, a young and gracious woman who gloried solely in signing herself simply Anne of France, whilst respectfully following out the policy of her father, a veteran king, able, mistrustful, and pitiless.

Anne’s discretion was soon put to a great trial.  A general cry was raised for the convocation of the states-general.  The ambitious hoped thus to open a road to power; the public looked forward to it for a return to legalized government.  No doubt Anne would have preferred to remain more free and less responsible in the exercise of her authority; for it was still very far from the time when national assemblies could be considered as a permanent power and a regular means of government.  But Anne and her advisers did not waver; they were too wise and too weak to oppose a great public wish.  The states-general were convoked at Tours for the 5th of January, 1484.  On the 15th they met in the great hall of the arch-bishop’s palace.  Around the king’s throne sat two hundred and fifty deputies, whom the successive arrivals of absentees raised to two hundred and eighty-four.  “France in all its entirety,” says M. Picot, “found itself, for the first time, represented; Flanders alone sent no deputies until the end of the session; but Provence, Roussillon, Burgundy, and Dauphiny were eager to join their commissioners to the delegates from the provinces united from the oldest times to the crown.” [Histoire des Etats Generaux from 1355 to 1614, by George Picot, t. i. p. 360.]