he left his daughter, the Princess Anne, barely eighteen years old, exposed to all the difficulties attendant upon the government of her inheritance, and to all the intrigues of the claimants to her hand.  In the summer of 1489, Charles VIII. and his advisers learned that the Count of Nassau, having arrived in Brittany with the proxy of Archduke Maximilian, had by a mock ceremony espoused the Breton princess in his master’s name.  This strange mode of celebration could not give the marriage a real and indissoluble character; but the concern in the court of France was profound.  In Brittany there was no mystery any longer made about the young duchess’s engagement; she already took the title of Queen of the Romans.  Charles VIII. loudly protested against this pretended marriage; and to give still more weight to his protest he sent to Henry VII., King of England, who was much mixed up with the affairs of Brittany, ambassadors charged to explain to him the right which France had to oppose the marriage of the young Duchess with Archduke Maximilian, at the same time taking care not to give occasion for thinking that Charles had any views on his own account in that quarter.  “The king my master,” said the ambassador, “doth propose to assert by arms his plain rights over the kingdom of Naples, now occupied by some usurper or other, a bastard of the house of Arragon.  He doth consider, moreover, the conquest of Naples only as a bridge thrown down before him for to take him into Greece; there he is resolved to lavish his blood and his treasure, though he should have to pawn his crown and drain his kingdom, for to overthrow the tyranny of the Ottomans, and open to himself in this way the kingdom of Heaven.”  The King of England gave a somewhat ironical reply to this chivalrous address, merely asking whether the King of France would consent not to dispose of the heiress of Brittany’s hand, save on the condition of not marrying her himself.  The ambassadors shuffled out of the question by saying that their master was so far from any such idea, that it had not been foreseen in their instructions.

Whether it had or had not been foreseen and meditated upon, so soon as the reunion of Brittany with France by the marriage of the young duchess, Anne, with King Charles VIII. appeared on the horizon as a possible, and, peradventure, probable fact, it became the common desire, aim, and labor of all the French politicians who up to that time had been opposed, persecuted, and proscribed.  Since the battle of St. Aubin-du-Cormier, Duke Louis of Orleans had been a prisoner in the Tower of Bourges, and so strictly guarded that he was confined at night in an iron cage like Cardinal Balue’s for fear he should escape.  In vain had his wife, Joan of France, an unhappy and virtuous princess, ugly and deformed, who had never been able to gain her husband’s affections, implored her all-powerful sister, Anne of Bourbon, to set him at liberty:  “As I am incessantly thinking,” she wrote