The Hague was the duke’s headquarters during two months, and there also he held open court and gave audience to many embassies in the midst of his administrative work pertaining to Holland and its nearest neighbours.  He took measures to recover what he claimed had been usurped by Utrecht, and he initiated proceedings to make good the title of Lord of Friesland, that will-o’-the wisp to successive Counts of Holland and never acknowledged by the Frisians.  In efforts to weld together the various provinces the months passed, until a new turn of foreign events began to absorb the duke’s whole attention.

The details of English politics with all the reasons for revolution and counter-revolution involved in the complicated civil disorders, the Wars of the Roses, affected Charles’s policy but they can only be suggested in his biography.  It must be remembered that the modern impression of English stability and French fickleness in political institutions, an impression casting reflections direct and indirect upon literature as well as history, is based on the changes in France from 1789 down to the fourth quarter of the nineteenth century.  Quite the reverse is the earlier tradition based on the kaleidoscopic shifts familiar to several generations of observers in the fifteenth century[2]; stable and firm felt the French as they heard the tidings of the brief triumphs of belligerent factions across the Channel.

Since 1461, Henry VI. of the House of Lancaster had been a passive prisoner, while Margaret of Anjou had exhausted herself in efforts to win adherents at home and abroad for her captive husband and her exiled son.[3] In 1463, she had received some aid, some encouragement from Philip of Burgundy, although he had recognised Edward IV. as king and although, too, his personal sympathies were Yorkish rather than Lancastrian.

It was Charles who escorted the errant lady into Lille, but later the duke himself entertained her munificently.  The poverty-stricken exile probably found the accompanying ducal gifts more to the immediate purpose than the ducal feasts.  Two thousand gold crowns were bestowed upon herself, a hundred upon each of her ladies, while various Lancastrian nobles were tided over hard times by useful sums of money.

Pleasant though the recognition was, however, the pecuniary assistance was quite insufficient to accomplish Margaret’s purpose.  For nine years Edward IV. sat on his throne and no serious efforts were made to dislodge him.  As he never forgot his mother’s lineage, the sympathies of Charles of Burgundy were with the exiles, and Queen Margaret may have counted confidently on that sympathy proving valuable for her son as soon as Charles himself had a free hand.  But when he came into his heritage, his marriage with Margaret of York put a definite end to those hopes.  The new duke thereby declared his acceptance of the king whom the Earl of Warwick had seated upon the English throne.  Then came clashing of wills between that king and his too powerful subject-adviser.[4] To punish his unruly royal protege, Warwick turned his attention to the Duke of Clarence, brother and heir presumptive to Edward IV.  A marriage was planned between this possible future monarch and the earl’s eldest daughter and then quickly celebrated at Calais without the king’s knowledge (July, 1469).