No sooner had Louis left the bridge of Picquigny than he repented of the invitation he had given Edward to visit the French capital. "Certes," said the crafty monarch to Comines, as they rode toward Amiens, "our brother of England is a fine king, and a warm admirer of the ladies. At Paris he might chance to find some dame so much to his taste as to tempt him to return. His predecessors have been too often both in Paris and Normandy already, and I have no great affection for his company on this side of the Channel."
At Amiens, on the same evening, when Louis was sitting down to supper, an amusing scene occurred. Sir John Howard, now a baron, and Sir John Cheyney, Edward's Master of the Horse, had been appointed to accompany Louis to Paris; and Howard, whose vanity made him, as usual, ridiculous, whispered to the French king that it would go hard but he would persuade Edward to come to Paris a while and be merry. Louis allowed this to pass without returning any direct answer; but afterward he took occasion to say that the war with Burgundy would render his presence absolutely necessary in another part of France.
But, whatever his apprehensions, Louis was not doomed to have his formidable contemporary as a foe or a guest on the banks of the Seine. Edward, doubtless delighted with the prospect of indulging in hunting, carousing, and love-making at Shene or Windsor, recalled, without delay, his soldiers from Peronne, Abbeville, and other places, and, escorted by the Bishop of Evreux, marched back to Calais. Thence he embarked for England, but not without being unpleasantly reminded that he hardly came off with royal honors. In fact, the Constable of St. Pol, apparently enraged that events had taken such a turn as to profit him nothing, wrote Edward a furious letter, calling him "a coward, a pitiful and poor sovereign, for having made a treaty with a king who would not keep one of his promises."[15]
The Plantagenet sent St. Pol's epistle to the King of France, and digested the affront; and while Louis, who had already been suspected of poisoning his brother, Charles de Valois, got rid of another enemy by beheading the constable, Edward returned to England to expend the money he had received as a bribe on those pleasures destined to destroy his health and obscure his intellect. Nor did his nobles come home empty-handed. Dorset, Hastings, and Howard, Sir John Cheyney and Sir Thomas St. Leger, had become pensioners of the French king; and the people were left to complain that the expedition for which they had paid so dearly had ended in infamy. Perhaps, under such circumstances, they did drop a tear over the grave of "The Stout Earl," who, had he been alive, would not have stood quietly by while a king of England extracted taxes from English subjects to commence an unnecessary war, and took bribes from a French monarch to conclude a humiliating peace.
[CHAPTER XXXIX.]
A DOMESTIC TRAGEDY.
At the opening of the year 1477, Charles the Rash, Duke of Burgundy, fell at Nanci, before the two-handed swords of the Swiss mountaineers, leaving, by his first wife, Isabel of Bourbon, a daughter, Mary, the heiress of his dominions. About the same time, George, Duke of Clarence, and Anthony Woodville, Earl Rivers, happened to become widowers. The duke and the earl, in other days rivals for the hand of the heiress of Lord Scales, immediately entered the arena as candidates for that of Mary of Burgundy, and their rivalry produced one of the darkest domestic tragedies recorded in the Plantagenet annals.
Clarence appears to have been the first to urge his claims. Almost ere the dust had time to gather on the coffin of his departed wife in the Abbey of Tewkesbury, the bereaved husband of Isabel Neville applied to his sister, the widow of Burgundy, to forward his suit with her step-daughter. The widowed duchess was the reverse of unfavorable to a matrimonial project so likely to advance the fortunes of her family, and the heart of Clarence for a moment glowed with anticipations of a great matrimonial success.
But the hopes which Clarence cherished of a marriage with the heiress of Burgundy were rudely dispelled. The duke, whose shallow brain was muddled with Malmsey, soon found that he was no match for veteran courtiers. Experienced intriguers, the Woodvilles were prompt in their measures to defeat any project that jarred with their interests; and Elizabeth instilled into her husband's mind such suspicions as to Clarence's intentions, that Edward not only refused to hear of an alliance that "might enable Clarence to employ the power of Burgundy to win the crown," but even let down his dignity so far as to propose a marriage between Anthony, Earl Rivers, and the daughter of Charles the Rash. The court of Burgundy, treating the proposal with the disdain it deserved, gave the heiress to the Emperor Maximilian; and the Woodvilles, finding their presumption checked, and resolved to console themselves by making Clarence a victim, bent all their energies to effect his ruin.