with him.”  Another day he said to Count Dunois, “Do take me away, uncle:  I’m longing to be out of this company.”  Dunois and George of Amboise, both of them partisans of the Duke of Orleans, carefully encouraged the king in sentiments so favorable to the fair regent’s rival.  Incidents of another sort occurred to still further embarrass the position for Anne de Beaujeu.  The eldest daughter of Francis II., Duke of Brittany, herself also named Anne, would inherit his duchy, and on this ground she was ardently wooed by many competitors.  She was born in 1477; and at four years of age, in 1481, she had been promised in marriage to Edward, Prince of Wales, son of Edward IV., King of England.  But two years afterwards, in 1483, this young prince was murdered, or, according to other accounts, imprisoned by his uncle Richard III., who seized the crown; and the Breton promise vanished with him.  The number of claimants to the hand of Anne of Brittany increased rapidly; and the policy of the duke her father consisted, it was said, in making for himself five or six sons-in-law by means of one daughter.  Towards the end of 1484, the Duke of Orleans, having embroiled himself with Anne de Beaujeu, sought refuge in Brittany; and many historians have said that he not only at that time aspired to the hand of Anne of Brittany, but that he paid her assiduous court and obtained from her marks of tender interest.  Count Darn, in his Histoire de Bretagne (t. iii. p. 82), has put the falsehood of this assertion beyond a doubt; the Breton princess was then only seven and the Duke of Orleans had been eight years married to Joan of France, younger daughter of Louis XI.  But in succeeding years and amidst the continual alternations of war and negotiation between the King of France and the Duke of Brittany, Anne de Beaujeu and the Duke of Orleans, competition and strife between the various claimants to the hand of Anne of Brittany became very active; Alan, Sire d’Albret, called the Great because of his reputation for being the richest lord of the realm, Viscount James de Rohan, and Archduke Maximilian of Austria, all three believed themselves to have hopes of success, and prosecuted them assiduously.  Sire d’Albret, a widower and the father of eight children already, was forty-five, with a pimply face, a hard eye, a hoarse voice, and a quarrelsome and gloomy temper; and Anne, being pressed to answer his suit, finally declared that she would turn nun rather than marry him.  James de Rohan, in spite of his powerful backers at the court of Rennes, was likewise dismissed; his father, Viscount John II., was in the service of the King of France.  Archduke Maximilian remained the only claimant with any pretensions.  He was nine and twenty, of gigantic stature, justly renowned for valor and ability in war, and of more literary culture than any of the princes his contemporaries, a trait he had in common with Princess Anne, whose education had been very carefully attended to.