Should the emperor refuse to approve the duke's nomination as King of the Romans, the ambassadors are instructed to say that they are not empowered to proceed with the marriage negotiations without first referring to their chief. They must ask leave to return with their report. If Sigismund should take it on himself to sound the emperor again about his sentiments, the envoys might await the result of his investigations. He was to be assured that while Charles was resolved to hold back until he was fully satisfied on this point, if it were once ceded, he would interpose no further delay in the celebration of the nuptials. He must know, however, just what power and revenue the emperor would attach to the proposed title. He was not willing to accept it without emoluments. His present financial burdens were already heavy, etc. The concluding items of the instructions had reference to the marriage settlements.
A kingdom of his own was not the duke's dream at this stage of Burgundo-Austrian negotiations. The title that Charles desired primarily was King of the Romans, one empty of substantial sovereign power, but rich with promise of the all-embracing imperial dignity. Significant is the intimation that after this preliminary title was conferred, its wearer would be glad to have Frederic step aside voluntarily. A resignation would be as efficient as death in making room for his appointed successor.
Frederic III. had, indeed, intimated occasionally that a life of meditation would suit his tastes better than the imperial throne, but he seems in no wise to have been tempted by the offer made by Charles to relieve him of his onerous duties, and then to pass on the office to his son. At any rate, the emperor rejected the opportunity to enjoy an irresponsible ease. His answer to the duke was that he did not exercise sufficient influence over his electors to ensure their accepting his nominee as successor to the imperium.
There was, however, one honour that lay wholly within his gift. If Charles desired higher rank, the emperor would be quite willing to erect his territories into a realm and to create him monarch of his own agglomerated possessions, welded into a new unity. This proposition wounded Charles keenly. He assured Sigismund[8] (January 15, 1471) that his nomination as King of the Romans would never have occurred to him spontaneously. He had been assured that it was a darling project of the emperor, and he had simply been willing to please him, etc. As to a kingdom of his own, he refused the proposition with actual disdain.
Then various suitors for the hand of Mary of Burgundy appeared on the scene successively. To Nicholas of Calabria, Duke of Lorraine, grandson of old King René of Anjou, she was formally betrothed.[9]
"My cousin, since it is the pleasure of my very redoubtable seigneur and father, I promise you that, you being alive, I will take none other than you and I promise to take you when God permits it." So wrote Mary with her own hand on June 13, 1472, at Mons. On December 3d, she declared all such pledges revoked as though they never had been made, and Nicholas, too, formally renounced his pretensions to her hand.
There were several moments when Charles of France had appeared to be very near acceptance as Mary's husband, and several other princes seemed eligible suitors. Doubtless her father found his daughter very valuable as a means of attracting friendship. Doubtless, too, as Commines says, he was not anxious to introduce any son-in-law into his family. His fortieth year was only completed in 1473, and he was by no means ready to range himself as an ancestor.
At successive times the negotiations between Charles and Frederic were ruptured only to be renewed on some slightly different basis. Threaded together they made a story fraught with interest for Louis XI., and one that, very probably, he had an opportunity to hear. Up to August, 1472, it is a safe inference that Philip de Commines was fully cognisant of the propositions and counter-propositions, the understandings and misunderstandings, the private letters of, as well as the interviews with, the accredited Austrian envoys that appeared at one Burgundian camp after another. Probably there was nothing more valuable in the store of learning carried by the astute historian from his first patron to his second than all this fund of confidential miscellany.
It seems a fair surmise that Louis XI. enjoyed immensely the delightful private view into his rival's dreams, the disappointments and rehabilitation of his shattered visions. The relation would have made him not only fully aware of the reasons why Charles was diverted from his hot pursuit of the Somme towns, but thoroughly informed as to the great obstacles lying in the path which the duke hoped to travel. Naturally, the king was quite willing to rest assured that ruin was inevitable. If his rival were disposed to wreck himself rashly on German shoals, the king was equally disposed to be an acquiescent onlooker and to spare his own powder.
On his part, Charles was wholly unconscious of the extent of his loss of prestige within the French realm in 1472. There had been other periods when the king had appeared triumphant over his aspiring nobles only to be again checked by their alliance. In the radical change undergone by the feudatories after Guienne's death and Brittany's reconciliation, there was, however, no opening left for the Duke of Burgundy's re-entry as a French political leader. It was this definitive cessation of his importance that Charles failed to recognise. Confident that his star was rising in the east he did not note the significance of its setting in the west. Thereupon the situation was,—Charles, believing that his plans were his own secret, versus Louis, fully advised of those plans and alert to all incidents of the past, present, and future in a fashion impossible to the duke in his absorbed contemplation of his own prospects, blocking the scope of his view.