{1506}
In the summer the Queen set off for Bretagne to fulfil her vow about the pilgrimage, leaving the King at Blois with their child.
When once Anne was in Bretagne it was no easy matter to get her away again, although Louis was now left with Louise de Savoie, and all those who were anxious for the French instead of the Austrian marriage of the Princess Claude.
She took her ladies and a large suite of French nobles, and was joined by numbers of Bretons, her progress through her own dominions being one continual triumph. She visited many of the towns, which were richly decorated, and gave splendid joustes and other fêtes in her honour, and having made her neuvaine and offerings at Foll-Coat, she summoned the States, transacted a great deal of business, and went to Brest to see her favourite ship, Marie-la-Cordelière.
The King, however, got very tired of being without her, and sent her a message to come and join him at Angers. She was then at Morlaix suffering from inflammation in the eye, and sent for a relic supposed to be the finger of St. John Baptist, to cure her. It was kept in a church at Plougarnon, not far off, but she was presently told that it had disappeared on the way, and been found in the church again. Then Anne with all her suite went to Plougarnon, slept in the village, and attended mass at the dawn of day in the ancient church with massive square tower and quaint leaden steeple, standing in a green valley by a brook flowing down to the sea.[329] The Bishop of Nantes touched the Queen’s eye with the relic when she had received the Communion; she made her offerings, and the pilgrimage was finished.[330]
The King kept writing to her to come back, and began to get very angry at her delay. The Cardinal d’Amboise, who was very much in the confidence of them both, wrote three sensible and urgent letters,[331] assuring her that he had never seen the King so displeased, and begging her to return; saying what a pity it would be if any dissension should arise between them; also that the King was going back to Blois and thence by water to Amboise, taking Princess Claude and the Countess d’Angoulême with him. The Queen therefore brought her Breton tour to an end, and returned to Blois in September.
Her arrival dispelled the King’s vexation, but to her dismay she found him bent upon breaking off the Austrian engagement of their daughter, for many were murmuring against the Queen for allowing her dislike of Louise de Savoie to influence her to the detriment of France. Even the Bretons preferred the future King of France to the grandson of the Emperor, and although the prediction of Anne that François would not care about Claude, who was neither pretty, clever, nor attractive, was certainly verified, there seems no reason to suppose she would have been happier with the Duke of Luxemburg, afterwards Charles V. Louis said he was resolved “de n’allier ses souris qu’aux rats de son grenier;” and when Anne impatiently remarked, “To hear you one would think mothers conspired to injure their daughters,” he asked if she thought it was the same thing to rule Bretagne as to wear the crown of France, saying, “Voulez-vous préferer le bât d’un ane (Anne) à la selle d’un cheval?” and as she still seemed unconvinced, he told her that at the Creation God gave horns to hinds as well as stags, but finding they wanted to govern everybody, He took them away as a punishment.[332]
But not wishing to act in defiance of the Queen, Louis agreed that at the meeting of the States at Tours, in May, 1506, the deputies should implore him on their knees to consent to the marriage of the Princess Claude to François, Duc de Valois. As he had foreseen, the Queen could not then oppose it; and on Ascension Day the children were betrothed in the great hall of the Castle of Plessis les Tours, she being six and he twelve years old.[333]