Almost from her very birth, Louis had used her in his intrigues, proposing her marriage now with this prince, now with that, according as the needs of the moment suggested. When the chief of his enemies, Charles le Téméraire, lost his first wife, Louis proposed that he marry the princess Anne, at that time a child of two years, and offered as her dowry Champagne, if Charles would agree that Normandy should revert to the Crown without question. Yet, a year later, 1466, when Louis had obtained possession of Normandy and had no further immediate need of Charles, he offered Anne to the son of the Duke of Calabria. Neither bargain was meant to be kept; but Charles, partly out of anger at the king's bad faith, married Margaret of York. Seven years later, when Louis had made up his mind to conciliate the house of Bourbon, Anne was betrothed to Pierre de Bourbon, Sire de Beaujeu; and as no new alliance presented itself as desirable, Anne de France became Anne de Beaujeu.
Anne was enough like her father in the hardness and crafty resoluteness of her character to win his confidence. We see her intrusted with the care of one of the most important of those noble wards whom Louis loved to bring to his court and keep under tutelage, Marguerite, the little daughter of Maximilian and Marie de Bourgogne. When the fear of assassination had driven the king to immure himself in Plessis-lez-Tours, and to hedge himself about with such fantastic and intricate defences that none but his favored lowborn servants could enter with ease and hope of return, he would sometimes admit this favored daughter. And when, in the imminence of death, he determined that the silly dauphin, jealously guarded at Amboise, should learn something and should know that the power of the sceptre was soon to pass to him, it was Anne de Beaujeu again on whom he relied. He enjoined the dauphin Charles to keep about him the faithful servants who had made France; especially did he recommend "Master Oliver," without whom, he said, "I should have been nothing." But, before all others, the dauphin was to honor and obey his wise sister, Anne de Beaujeu, the least foolish woman in the world.
In spite of astrologers; in spite of liberal doses of that expensive panacea, potable gold, administered by his insolent physician, Jacques Coictier; in spite of a second anointing from the sacred ampulla, brought from Rheims for that special purpose; in spite of all the silver saints stuck on the rim of his cap the spirit went out of the body of Louis XI, and France welcomed his death as a deliverance. In his zeal for the destruction of feudalism and the upbuilding of a national government, he had become a tyrant. But the work he had begun must go on, if France was not to step back fifty or a hundred years in progress. The new king, Charles VIII, was but a boy of fourteen, and deplorably immature. He could hardly read and write, nor did natural intelligence supply the defects of education; for he was weak in mind, weak in body, and easily influenced for good or for ill. With such a tool ready for the hand of any ambitious noble who would destroy France, the outlook was not cheering. But it was the good fortune of France to find a ruler who could and did control the king till such time as the fruits of the wise despotism of Louis could be safely gathered; and this ruler was a woman.
As Charles had already attained the legal majority prescribed for the heir to the throne, there could be no regency. But Anne de Beaujeu and her husband had been named by the late king as the tutors of Charles, to the exclusion of Louis d'Orléans, who, as first prince of the blood royal, had a prescriptive right to the guardianship. And just as Blanche de Castille, under different conditions and by different means, had managed to displace Philippe Hurepel, so Anne now managed to outwit and supplant Louis d'Orléans.
She had already laid the foundations of her influence by making friends of the best counsellors and captains of the late king. And her brother, to whom she was a divinity to be worshipped and feared, was already so accustomed to submission to her will that it did not occur to him to resist her authority now. In default of a regent, there was a royal council, and in this council Anne managed to assure herself of a powerful following. To be sure, at first there was nothing to fear, since Louis d' Orléans, young and fond of pleasure, was engaged in satisfying his tastes after the long and irksome restraint to which he had been subjected by Louis XI; and so, in place of politics, he took pleasure, availing himself of every distraction that could help him to forget the terrible days of the old king, or the ugly face and crooked body of the king's daughter, who was his wife. Nevertheless, Louis d'Orléans was the natural leader of the opposition to the control of Anne de Beaujeu, and the latter lost no time in securing for herself, through her husband, a majority in the council, a body composed of such diverse elements, and so uncertain of its own mind, that it was easy for a determined leader to carry her policies through its divided and hesitating ranks.
Anne was only twenty-two, but already there was coming to be a special significance attached to her sobriquet, Madame la Grande; for the imperious will, the boldness and shrewdness combined, the restless energy, the constant watchfulness of the woman made itself felt throughout that government in which she had no legal standing. Her governing was done under constitutional forms, in the name of the king, in the name of the council; but people knew that she had dictated to the king what he should do, and had imposed her will upon the council. Until the States-General had met, voted supplies, been promised reforms, and then dissolved, Anne was very guarded, very conciliatory in her policy; the unjust acts of Louis XI were set right--where it did not cost too much to do so--and certain obnoxious persons, such as Olivier le Daim, were sacrificed to popular hatred. As soon as the States-General had been disposed of, however, the two parties in the council began to assume a more hostile attitude toward each other, and the charge that Madame la Grande was meddling in things that concerned her not was raised by the Duke of Orléans. His cousin, Dunois, and other persons anxious for the restriction of the royal power, persuaded Louis d'Orléans that it was an outrage that a woman should reduce him to the second place in the national council, and make herself virtually queen of France. Incited by these plotters, Louis determined to loosen the hold of Anne upon the young king.
Violating a solemn oath he had taken, under Louis XI, to abstain from compromising relations with the enemies of France, he began to seek allies against the Beaujeu faction, and turned first to Brittany. But a temporary eclipse of the Breton favorite, Landois, who had ruled his master almost as Olivier had ruled Louis, made the visit of Orléans a fruitless one, and he returned to Paris to resort to means more in conformity with his tastes. The young king was intensely fond of brilliant festivities; romantic love of the spectacular side of chivalry was his ruling passion; and therefore Louis sought to alienate him from Anne by providing him with amusements. Jousts and tourneys, balls, masquerades, all as brilliant and attractive as Louis could make them, filled the two months after Charles's royal entry into his "well beloved city of Paris" (July 5, 1484). Charles was beginning to think that his "fair cousin of Orléans" was a very delightful companion, and so much more obliging than that high tempered and dictatorial sister whom he had been obeying; besides, what right had she to dictate to him: was he not a king? Before the danger grew acute, before these vague questionings in the royal head assumed definite shape, Anne picked up her precious sovereign and carried him away from gay Paris and the temptations of the fascinating Louis. Then it was that Louis left the court, resolved not to return until he had overthrown the Beaujeu party.
The great nobles of the land were ready enough to unite in opposition to the arbitrary rule of a woman, and of a woman who had not the shadow of a constitutional right to rule. But though discontent was general among the nobles, they yet lacked energy and direction, while the commons took but little interest in a mere squabble among their rulers. Perhaps the general opinion was somewhat like that of the University of Paris, to which Louis had appealed, namely, that the power was in the hands best fitted to wield it. Undoubtedly, the Parliament of Paris was of this opinion; for when Louis presented a long petition reciting his grievances and protesting against the usurpation of Madame de Beaujeu, who held in unlawful subjection the person of the king, who intended to keep the said king in tutelage until his twenty-first year, who had unlawfully levied taxes, and who meditated the destruction of the petitioner,--when Louis presented these charges, and besought the Parliament to command that the king be brought back to Paris, the president very prudently gave answer that the court of Parliament was a court of law, and had nothing to do with administrative matters, and that no one had a right thus to appear before the court to remonstrate against the administrative acts of the sovereign. There was little comfort in all this for Louis; and while he was still hesitating in Paris, Anne sent a troop of men-at-arms to arrest him. A hasty flight alone saved him, and he at once repaired to Alencon, where the duke received him as a friend in distress; while Anne, hastening back to Paris, deprived Orléans and his accomplices of their honors and military commands.
The forces of the discontented princes would have been superior to those at the disposal of Anne, if they could have been brought together; but their domains were scattered, and they themselves were vacillating, jealous of each other, reluctant to resort at once to foreign aid. With her usual promptness, Anne intercepted their communications, seized and executed summarily their spies, and herself negotiated with Brittany and with the Flemish towns; while Dunois and Orléans were surprised and captured in Beaugency by La Trémoille, commanding for Anne. For the moment, the rebellion had been put down without serious loss. Dunois was exiled to Asti, and Louis of Orléans, who had not even been able to win the support of his own city, came back to court in October, 1485.
A new danger, however, threatened Anne's supremacy during the next spring, when Maximilian of Austria, now titular King of the Romans, invaded Artois. Jubilant at the prospect of securing such an ally against Madame la Grande, a new league of the great nobles signed a secret treaty with Maximilian in December. With the Dukes of Orléans, Brittany, Lorraine, and Bourbon, the Counts of Dunois, Nevers, Angoulème, and a host of others thus leagued against her, the situation of Madame de Beaujeu was most precarious. Besides actual warfare, she had to fear continual plots having for their object the capture of the young king. The great Philippe de Comines, along with Louis d'Orléans, was implicated in one of these plots, and was seized by the watchful Anne, while Louis fled to Brittany and urged its duke to invade France.